8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests

[ArkSingularity]

I knew someone was going to chime in about workload. Obviously. The question is, at what point is there a performance fall-off? Test all three machines with a 48-gb load.

Well, what do you mean by 48GB load? Do you mean an application that allocates 48GB of data?

In that case, it's honestly (and I know this isn't a simple answer) still going to depend, it won't really be entirely the same on each application. Some applications will allocate a lot of memory and will be actively hitting all of it frequently. These kinds of applications will see a fairly steep performance cutoff if the amount of RAM on the system is less than you have.

There are, however, a surprisingly large number of applications that might not take that big of a hit. Take virtualization, for example. Suppose you have 48GB worth of virtual machines on a 32GB Mac. The chances are slim that all of these virtual simultaneous machines will be frequently accessing 32GB worth of data constantly, so in all liklihood, you wouldn't have that much of a performance fall-off on just a 32GB Mac.

Max Tech (I know that name isn't especially well like around here) actually attempted to test something like this last year. They took 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB Macs and tried a whole series of different photo, video, audio, and productivity apps as well as various multitasking scenarios. They found that with with their specific tests, the difference between 8GB and 16GB was pretty noticeable, but the differences between 16GB and 32GB were much smaller (in the realm of 3-5%) even though swap was fairly heavily used on both. This was just on their specific tests, more scientific workflows that need giant amounts of RAM obviously would have had a very different result.

 

[spcopsmac21]

Depends on the "pro" task... 8GB in Apple Silicon (in any M1, 2 or 3 regular, max or pro combo) is more than enough in my experience and opinion if you'll do music recording/live performance/production, etc. on your own or with a regular 3 to 5 piece band, light to mid 4K video work, light to mid 3D tasks wether for CAD, concepts, animation or simulations, definitely overkill for business suites and project management, and some light coding/development stuff.
There are lots of pro jobs that would benefit from a mobile rig with 16GB plus, especially if those jobs are "bring your own rig" positions or on-field jobs like recording a local orchestra at an impromptu location with an audio interface that handles more than 16 I/O setups plus a dedicated SSD drive and mixing desk, integrating with a pre-viz, pre or post-production team for AV or 3D projects... basically collaborative tasks on mid to large size projects.
If you need more than 32GB or 64GB, you are talking about integrating with big teams, networks, you are into running several virtual machines for software development, testing, debugging, and all sorts of niche and specialized stuff for large/plus sized projects or productions whether you work remote or on-site. You decide if desktop or laptop is your required tool.
That's why many here say "Hey, if you need to spend 200 bucks more on SSDs or RAM, you know you need it or not, and whether it's the right/required platform or not." It's never about "Apple is the bad guy and is abusing me. I wish their machines were less expensive."
Bus speeds, longevity of components and stuff like that, a pro will already know which brand and product tier is the right tool or not, and if it's priced according to a budget.

Yea but so is a $399 asus laptop from Walmart. They can do all the lifestyle stuff just as well as the $1500 MacBook Pro.
Without loosing a kidney and getting the same results.
It’s just a shame Apple is diluting the pro branding.

Apple resellers use to make their bread and butter off hard drive and ram upgrades. But with everything being integrated on board they lost that revenue. And it’s literally put many resellers out of business. And other struggling.
Apple saw that and said “ we need that revenue stream “ and now they are literally the only ones who can selling you an upgraded machine.

 

[GTBuzz]

8GB is not enough for running applications like that. I think we all should know that by now. If you're doing FC, Blender, C4D or Adobe anything, you get as much RAM as you can afford. So no one is really going to buy an 8GB model for that. It's kind of miss-leading to even make a performance comparison using it. Other than to clearly state the obvious. Don't buy lowest end Mac pro for this kind of work. If you're not doing that kind of work. 8GB is fine for most basic tasks. Which is why it is an option. If you're in school, and need/want a Mac Book. This is clearly aimed at that group. Writers, or content consumption. NOT for creation, and heavy multitasking.

Apple stating that 8GB is like Windows with 16. Is factoring in features that exist on the Mac that can alleviate some of the memory limitations. But, it's always better to have real RAM available to the system over SSD swapping.

So another note to self. Don't buy the least powerful Mac and expect it to work miracles.
Know what type of work you're going to be doing with it, and purchase accordingly. All of my Mac's (ALL OF THEM) in the past 10 years have had 32GB or MORE of RAM. They don't need the highest end CPU (iMac Pro is an 8 Core with 32GB of RAM. nMac Pro has 64GB of RAM as it was upgradable). All of my MacBook Pro's have 32GB of ram. Even this M2 Max has 32. My M1 Max Studio has 32GB, and so on. I have not experienced any memory issues or speed issues or any issues (except heat on those intel mac's).

Should Apple sell ONLY 16GB as a base? You can argue that. But, having 8 as an option lowers the price of entry for those that really don't need more. And if it was taken away, others would complain that it's too expensive.
And others will complain that Apple should just eat the cost increase. And as a Shareholder I say NO to that.

I think you are correct. While apps will run, they will not run efficiently on a Mac with a low amount of Ram. Maybe Safari , Mail, etc work, but those Apps that Max out the Ram run slowly or perhaps not even at all.

I have what is over kill for me at this time, 64GB M1 Max 2TB. I don't need it, but I have it. Because at my age, time is worth more than money. Apple needs to put a minimum of 16 GB of Unified Ram in Macs and if the production yields allow, even more. I remember when I used Windows & other OS'es, excess Ram was good. Minimal Ram was not good. If you can load an entire database app with data into Ram , you can really do great things. As for Photo Apps, you can grind them to a stop with a minimal amount of Ram. So much for Unified Ram and large Drives.

 

[tshrimp]

The M3 Air with 8GB is fine, but any “pro” device should be 16GB minimum.

It is almost 2024. Any laptop near $1000 should have at least 16GB IMO.

 

[MowgliWolf]

Whoops…

 

[avz]

Because they can. Capitalism dictates that they make as much money as possible.

Especially right in time before the Great Depression.

 

[amartinez1660]

8GB is not enough for running applications like that. I think we all should know that by now. If you're doing FC, Blender, C4D or Adobe anything, you get as much RAM as you can afford. So no one is really going to buy an 8GB model for that. It's kind of miss-leading to even make a performance comparison using it. Other than to clearly state the obvious. Don't buy lowest end Mac pro for this kind of work. If you're not doing that kind of work. 8GB is fine for most basic tasks. Which is why it is an option. If you're in school, and need/want a Mac Book. This is clearly aimed at that group. Writers, or content consumption. NOT for creation, and heavy multitasking.

Apple stating that 8GB is like Windows with 16. Is factoring in features that exist on the Mac that can alleviate some of the memory limitations. But, it's always better to have real RAM available to the system over SSD swapping.

So another note to self. Don't buy the least powerful Mac and expect it to work miracles.
Know what type of work you're going to be doing with it, and purchase accordingly. All of my Mac's (ALL OF THEM) in the past 10 years have had 32GB or MORE of RAM. They don't need the highest end CPU (iMac Pro is an 8 Core with 32GB of RAM. nMac Pro has 64GB of RAM as it was upgradable). All of my MacBook Pro's have 32GB of ram. Even this M2 Max has 32. My M1 Max Studio has 32GB, and so on. I have not experienced any memory issues or speed issues or any issues (except heat on those intel mac's).

Should Apple sell ONLY 16GB as a base? You can argue that. But, having 8 as an option lowers the price of entry for those that really don't need more. And if it was taken away, others would complain that it's too expensive.
And others will complain that Apple should just eat the cost increase. And as a Shareholder I say NO to that.

Some people need a Toyota Camry. Some need a Toyota Supra. Apple sells both, pro branding aside.

Couldn’t agree more and I don’t understand the hate you get, myself my last couple of Mac desktops have had 64GB of RAM (iMac 2020 and M1 Ultra), that’s what I need for what I do comfortably, even maybe a bit overkill half of the time, but I wouldn’t want to force that on absolutely everybody because I say so.

But know what? Let’s do an exercise with what the complaints and whining over here actually means and apply my own version of it: “I want and I declare that the base models should be 64GB, because obviously 32GB and 16Gb and 8GB ARE NOT enough for what I do… therefore Apple should only sell models with 64GB of RAM and up. Oh and by the way, they are also 2TB, so I WANT them to be 2TB base storage too”. And no, nobody gets to say I’m exaggerating, from my point of view myself and everyone around me gets similarly spec’ed machines, therefore the whole world must be getting similarly too, right? Right.

Because let’s be clear, the whole thing here is “I want Apple to submit to what I want and have to say”, the rest just don’t bother and just buy what they want and need…

Do you know when Apple will stop offering lower tier models? The moment people stop buying them.

 

[bobjonesco]

So what happens when Apple takes away the 8GB models and starts at 16GB - and thus the new base models are now $200 USD more expensive?

Will we all be happy then?

 

[rukind2]

Real world use and tests will prove Apple’s claim to be a stretch goal. A goal, that sadly, was packaged by product marketing at the expense of Apple credibility. What a shame….

 

[kpluck]

So I suppose that 8GB on a Mac are not equal to 16GB on a PC.

It would have been nice if that was the test. Comparing an 8GB vs 16GB Mac on memory heavy workloads seems pointless. Of course the machine with more memory is going to perform better.

The question is, how does a Mac with 8GB of RAM perform when compared to a Windows box with 16GB of RAM in workloads that would be typically run on a machine with a low end memory configuration.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that Apple's memory configurations and memory upgrade prices are ridiculous. However, this video is pointless because it doesn't test the claim that a Mac with 8GB of memory performs as well, or better, than a similar Windows machine with 16GB of memory.

By the way, according to Blender's website, the minimum hardware requirements are 8GB of RAM and 2GB of VRAM. Since Apple Silicon Macs use unified memory, and 8GB machine doesn't seem to meet the minimum system requirements.

-kp

 

[Pblz]

Meanwhile, in 2013…

 

[ksj1]

Wouldn't a better test in terms of Mac to Mac be an Mx with 8GB and a late(r) model Intel Mac with 16GB?

 

[ikramerica]

This reminds me of the days where Apple was selling machines with 1MB of memory when their graphical OS could barely function with 1MB. And by the time their base config was 3MB, it was again outdated. They would always under spec to try to mark up their next config.

When Jobs came back, that stupidness mostly ended (though occasionally a new model might not live up to hype, like original Air).

Cook is bringing us back to the Sculley days of money first. it snowballs…

 

[jgdeschamps]

Yea but so is a $399 asus laptop from Walmart. They can do all the lifestyle stuff just as well as the $1500 MacBook Pro.
Without loosing a kidney and getting the same results.
It’s just a shame Apple is diluting the pro branding.

Apple resellers use to make their bread and butter off hard drive and ram upgrades. But with everything being integrated on board they lost that revenue. And it’s literally put many resellers out of business. And other struggling.
Apple saw that and said “ we need that revenue stream “ and now they are literally the only ones who can selling you an upgraded machine.

Your answer has nothing to do with my post.
And no. A $399 Asus does not have the same performance as any Apple Silicon Mac, or any $1,000 Windows PC. Don't skew reality to try and make a point.
And to top it all, you are trying to relate a made up Apple Silicon 8GB RAM "bottleneck" non-issue to Apple being "evil" to resellers. Enjoy your evening.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Doesn't take a self-proclaimed genius to know that 8 GB of universal memory would not be as good as 16 GB of RAM + an additional 8 GB VRAM like many PC laptops in this price range possess. The 8 GB MBP has 8 GB total for the pool.

I get it, you are too lazy to read up on UMA; your loss. And anyone who prefers PCs can just buy a PC, that is fine too.

 

[ArkSingularity]

I get it, you are too lazy to read up on UMA; your loss. And anyone who prefers PCs can just buy a PC, that is fine too.

He's actually right. Some VRAM-intensive applications refuse to even run on 8GB Macs because the memory that is dedicated to GPU processes gets allocated as wired memory, which can't be compressed or swapped out to disk.

 

[Galas]

If 8GB of RAM is fine, get the $799 MacBook Air M1. The fact that this machine costs twice as much is inexcusable.

There is no workload in which 8GB of RAM is acceptable but the M1 isn't.

Exactly this

 

[Allen_Wentz]

He's actually right. Some VRAM-intensive applications refuse to even run on 8GB Macs because the memory that is dedicated to GPU processes gets allocated as wired memory, which can't be compressed or swapped out to disk.

I never doubted that, and I am a forever proponent of Apple providing RAM options, and for almost everyone here to be choosing more than 16 GB even though for a few 8 GB is fine. I bought 96 with my M2 MBP.

 

[ddhhddhh2]

So why are so many only talking about 16Gb being part of the base configuration? That means they're good even if Apple increases the price also.

Almost no ones says "Apple should increase the base configuration to include 16Gb of RAM without increasing the price".
They all say "Apple should increase the base configuration to include 16Gb of RAM".

So basically, this is a business tactic. If companies start with 16GB, it saves them money because it's cheaper than upgrading from 8GB. But around 2023 or 2024, if the standard is 8GB, it's got some clear perks for Cook, like lower costs. Of course, some folks might argue, "Hey, it's actually cheaper now," but I'm not getting into that. They're overlooking a couple of things:

1.If the standard is 8GB, customers end up having to pay an unreasonable price for more memory.
2.Since the standard models are mass-produced, Apple cuts costs and floods the market with these units. This could be good or bad, depending on whether schools or certain organizations end up using these Macs.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Exactly this

Agreed "There is no workload in which 8GB of RAM is acceptable but the M1 isn't." However that same logic does not extend MBP to MBA, so I disagree with the statement: "If 8GB of RAM is fine, get the $799 MacBook Air M1." Just because someone can function under 8 GB RAM does not mean they will not appreciate the better display and speakers of the MBP line.

Akso note that for some the ports, the Bluetooth 5.3 or the WiFi 6E may push them to an MBP or to a newer box.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

So basically, this is a business tactic. If companies start with 16GB, it saves them money because it's cheaper than upgrading from 8GB. But around 2023 or 2024, if the standard is 8GB, it's got some clear perks for Cook, like lower costs. Of course, some folks might argue, "Hey, it's actually cheaper now," but I'm not getting into that. They're overlooking a couple of things:

1.If the standard is 8GB, customers end up having to pay an unreasonable price for more memory.
2.Since the standard models are mass-produced, Apple cuts costs and floods the market with these units. This could be good or bad, depending on whether schools or certain organizations end up using these Macs.

#2 indeed. I am not a K-12 admin, but it would seem one would want absolute lowest possible price, and that it would be easy to manage running under 8 GB RAM. I see zero reason Apple should succumb to the whiners here wanting 16 GB. Instead Apple should continue to offer 8 GB with option to upgrade way up (now 128 with M3).

 

[davidespinosa]

DO NOT BUY a machine with 8 gb.
DO NOT LET YOUR FRIENDS BUY a machine with 8 gb.

In 2023, 8 gb is a reasonable amount of memory FOR A PHONE.

Unfortunately, many people will buy 8 gb machines because that's what's available in the store.
It's really sad -- the problem could have been avoided so easily.

 

[enb141]

I know it's not apples to apples, but I'd still be curious to see the same tests being done on a laptop PC with a very good processor and 8 and then 16 GB of RAM.

I'm also in the camp of : Why the hell is Apple still releasing 8GB RAM computers, we're almost in 2024 god dammit...

Agreed, 8GB RAM (Mac, Windows, Linux) is nuts.

The best way to test RAM in any operating system is by opening browser tabs.

 

[enb141]

…really? We are stunned that double the ram is faster? This has got to be the most pointless video I have ever seen. That’s the whole point behind upgrading, IT’S FASTER. Now compare an 8gb m2 to an 8gb m3 and see the benchmarks or an 8gb m3 vs a 16gb m2 and those would be interesting comparison. But ANY computer with double the ram IS GOING TO BE FASTER.

Wrong, at some point RAM won't get your computer to be faster, only from 8 to 16, from 16 to 32 the "faster" effect will be much minimal, and from 32 to 64 will be even less.

At some point getting more RAM won't get you any benefit.

 

[Krayflyfly]

I just can't believe they keep getting worse. They have their own Silicon now and they're charging more than the Intel chips? its over $7,000 for a fully loaded 14 inch, and you still have to pay the $300 Apple care fee. I like Apple, but the more I stay with them the more I feel like I am being fleeced for ubiquitous things like extra Ram and extra Hard drive space. Apple is just not very nice, and they don't give customers for decades any perks. They are just out of control lawless.