How can PC manufacturers sell any Windows machine with 8GB or even less in 2023? If you're going to call out Apple for selling machines with 8GB of RAM, then you should be doubling down on PC manufacturers selling models with less than that.
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How can Apple sell a Mac with 8GB of RAM in 2023 and call it "Pro"
- Thread starter parseckadet
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How can PC manufacturers sell any Windows machine with 8GB or even less in 2023? If you're going to call out Apple for selling machines with 8GB of RAM, then you should be doubling down on PC manufacturers selling models with less than that.
Why? We don’t care that PC users get stuck with horrible hardware. If they want to burden their users with machines that are going to struggle to scale in a few years that’s on them. We expect better of Apple.
1) Apple should not fall into this super low end stuff
2) these PCs are 130 dollars! lol: just the upgrade from 8 to 16GB in a mbp costs more. And this is your example?
notice how these computers are less than $200, while the MacBook Pro M3 is 8x that price.
There are many examples of $2,000 pro level only coming with 8GB and 256 GB SSD.
Care to link to one? I just checked out HP ZBooks to see if they might qualify. Nope - £1440 (£1300 currently on a BF deal) gets you a 15" model with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD - https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/product.aspx?id=869Z8EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB.
The 14" 'Firefly' ZBooks are even cheaper (and yes, come with 16-32GB RAM (as SODIMMs) and 0.5-1TB of SSD).
I am sure Apple has reasons with their product naming convention. Generally, one of them is the features their products offer. Pro version has more functionalities than non pro version as you see in iPhone. 8 GM of RAM and 512 GB SSD are fine for regular users who like Pro features per Apple’s consideration, but not for others. I understand your frustration. I hope by sharing your frustration and mind will make you feel better 😊 Keep calm and be happy. Life is too short for prolonging frustration and unhappiness. 😊 Wish the best always 😊
Selling a "Pro" machine with 8GB of RAM is very short sighted in my opinion. Once AI and LLM tech goes mainstream, those 2.000 EUR base model Macs will look very dated and lead to a lot of disappointed customers.
In my experience, we would work directly on the cloud instances, and have the infrastructure code that builds them (e.g. AWS CloudFormation, MS ARM/Bicep, Terraform, Ansible etc.) stored in Git repositories and run from simple shell scripts. You can develop on small (cheap) instances and start/stop/destroy/build them very easily when not in use. This approach only requires basic tools on the local machine - text editor, ssh terminal, Git client, web-browser
You can create machine images on the cloud-hosted development instance, to be used to create new images (or for adding to an image marketplace "catalogue"). On the client machine this only requires a web-browser or command line interface.
If you are developing a hosted VM that will be packaged and uploaded in its entirety to a hosting solution (e.g. AWS VMware Cloud, VMware Azure solution) or to your own data center, then yes, you would probably develop this locally, but your development VM could be much smaller than the production deployment. I've built plenty of VMs on 8GB machines, but I haven't done this for at least 6 years, because it ended up being much faster to build new instances directly on cloud providers like AWS - uploading 10-60GB VM images takes time even with very fast networks. Rather like building a house and transporting it on a large truck, instead of just building it at its final location.
The same could apply to creating apps inside Docker containers (or Kubernetes clusters). You could either build and deploy the whole thing on a cloud provider directly (just with your Dockerfile and code assets etc developed on your local machine), or build & test smaller containers locally, and then push your changes to deploy in your data center or public cloud.
The amount of RAM you need to locally develop VMs or Docker containers (or other container type) very much depends on what the images / containers need to run, but the VM will normally be much larger than a container which can share the runtime libraries with the host OS (or the minimalist VM required to run Docker). You could potentially run dozens of Docker containers in 8GB...but only if they are sharing some resources such as a Linux kernel.
If you are developing AI and LLMs, sure, you will need more than 8GB. But if you are consuming these services, which is what the vast majority of users will do, you probably won't.
A lot of posts in this and similar threads seemed to be predicated on the idea that "I do this...therefore everyone does", which is obviously not the case.
I would be really interested in seeing a breakdown of application usage across all Mac users. I would be surprised if more than 50% used anything other than web-browers and a dozen or so built-in or third party apps for light-duty use.
The percentage of people doing really intensive engineering, scientific or media-creation tasks is quite small I expect. I would suggest a Macrumors poll, but it would of course be completely unrepresentative of the total Mac user population.
Not necessarily, if Apple does an Apple and brings on device LLM or AI image generation support to Macs in some OS level application then users are going to want as much RAM as possible.
I have linked them in five of these threads, it literally takes 5 seconds of searching to find it. Its not some obscure difficult to find product.
Various reasons, but mostly because they can:
(1) Because MacOS and a few open applications will run quite happily on 8GB, so the user experience is good.
(2) Because quite of lot of other vendors do the same
(2) Because people want to buy a Mac computer but don't know anything about the specifications or what they mean.
One of the major consumer electronics stores in my country sells a lot of 8GB laptops. A quick search by RAM capacity for their user-segments shows:
"Everyday laptops" (up to about US$1600):
"Student laptops" (up to about US$1250):
"Business laptops" (up to about US$1900)
"Travel laptops" (up to about US$2300)
12 of the 22 machines listed have 8GB or less
"Gaming laptops" ($900-$6700)
It's only this last most expensive category that seems a general move to 16GB RAM. In the largest "everyday laptops" class, which includes MacBook Pros, only about half of the machines have more than 8GB RAM.
However, if I filter on "Windows computers" (which is the largest result set) and set the price brackets to cover the cost of 8GB Macs in my country (Australia), which go from AU$1799 up to AU$2999 for the 8GB M3 MBP with 1TB SSD (!), you can see the difference:
Only 5 of the 59 results have 8GB. They are all Microsoft Surfaces (5 and 9 Pro) , four of which are the same price as the entry level MBA.
That pretty much tells the story - one of Apple's direct competitors (Microsoft) also offers 8GB laptops at the same pricepoint - but only at the very bottom of Apple's price range. Apple definitely gets the prize as offering the most expensive computer I could find with 8GB (AU$2999).
Interestingly, LG offers some nice looking laptops that appear to aiming at Apple's market segment with their pricing, but these all start at 16GB RAM. Admittedly, the Ryzen 5 and 7 CPUs don't look great against the M2 & M3, but greater RAM is some compensation.
If *all* of Apple's serious competitors at this price point and below only offer 16GB RAM and above, I think Apple will shortly follow suit.
Yes, as I have kept saying this is an industry problem. But its just cool to hate on Apple.
Going back to our earlier conversation, there are many reasons current hardware may not support future features and RAM is generally not how Apple makes those distinctions (excepting your finding a computer made in 1997 that didn't run Tiger while its bigger RAM brethren would).
Future proofing just isn't easy to do. You can put a bunch of extra money into RAM you don't currently need hoping you'll have a use for it in 5 years only to find that your system doesn't support the version of Metal ML needed for whatever feature you're interested in.
But if you're someone who worries that much about RAM, buy more RAM and sleep better at night.
The base spec MBA in 2023 is essentially the same as the same model in 2015. It's not unreasonable to expect a bump more than once a decade...
I'm not reading any more of these threads lol. One is bad enough. I'd already looked at Dell, Lenovo and HP, providing links, and drew a blank. Skimming your post history, the only link I could see (at least within the most recent 5 pages) is for the $2000 Lenovo laptops your work ordered. Following that link:
- These are 16" laptops, so the equivalent Mac would be a 16" MBP for $2500, albeit with a Pro chip and 18GB RAM.
- On the page you linked, you can buy a standard configuration that costs $1800 and comes with 16GB / 512GB.
- The only reason to start with the $2000 config, which is otherwise identical but comes with 8/256, is because you can customise it. In which case, you can get 32GB for $250, or 64GB for twice that, or 96GB for $700.
- By comparison, Apple's $2500 offering goes up to just 36GB, for an extra $400. And of course is soldered in, whereas the Lenovo uses SODIMMs.
Obviously there's a lot of other pros and cons to both laptops besides RAM.
Edit - for comparison, playing with the configurator for that $2000 Lenovo (P1 gen 6), speccing 96GB RAM, 8TB of NVMe SSDs in RAID 0, an RTX 2000 Ada and a 3840 x 2400 OLED panel comes to $3400.
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Apple is the focus of a lot of this; this thread being a prime example, although I suspect that quite a few Macrumors members are only here out of some kind religious fervour to convert the Apple-faithful to their own viewpoint
That said, in my quick market assessment there were precious few computers with 8GB at the price of even the very cheapest Mac laptop, which does firmly put Apple into bottom place in the price/RAM metric.
But I can guarantee for personal experience that the the M2 machines do run quite well with only 8GB for the kind of light duties that a lot of people want a computer for.
I can also state from experience that they get pretty crappy if you push them a bit. I had a 13" Intel i5 MBP as a work computer in late 2017 - I think it had a dual-core (!) i5-7360U, with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. That turned out to be inadequate for my role (cloud systems engineer) and it was often really frustrating. I used my personal late-2013 MBP 15" when I could, which at least had a quad-core i7 and 16GB RAM.
The bottom line is that Apple computers are expensive and nearly everyone wishes they were cheaper. Whether they represent reasonable *value* is entirely dependent of the owner's priorities. Lots of people seem to think it is just raw specifications or benchmark performance...it's not!
You're running Sonoma (MacOS 14) on a Mac with 5gb memory ?
I hope you have a magnetic disk.
You're going to wear out your SSD with that much swapping ! 😂
I know plenty of others replied, but just wanted to point out that these entire computers cost less than Apple's upgrade from 8gb to 16gb of RAM.
This absolutely isn't about wanting special treatment or specs for free. This is about Apple not keeping up in the industry and making the lowest end, which is what many people end up buying because that is what is kept in stock, a bad experience. If someone is buying a $200 laptop than fine they get what they pay for, that should never be the case with one at Apple price points though.
I'm not disagreeing with most of what you're saying, but to be fair, there are precious few 8GB Mac laptops also even if they're the only ones people want to spend hundreds of posts discussing. Out of all the various configurations of color, RAM, SSD, and SoC, there are 4 MBPs with 8GB: 2 each silver and black, and 2 each 512GB and 1TB.
Once you see those $100 Ideabooks posted earlier, it should be clear that price/RAM doesn't capture the value of a machine. I honestly don't know how they can offer those machines and include free shipping.
Sure it is. Otherwise there wouldn't be anything to talk about. You want 16GB, you can buy 16GB. The only reason it's being talked about is because people don't want to pay for 16GB, they want it for the price of the 8GB machine. They want the improved specs for free.
These conversations wouldn't go nearly this long if people just started with that: "I wish Macs were cheaper". No replies necessary, just a bunch of thumbs up. The reason these conversations keep going, and going, and going is because while we all agree we'd like more for less, the "facts" and reasoning being given to obscure that desire is generally broken-- like saying "it's not about wanting specs for free". Yes, yes it is. And the reason you're being argued with isn't because other people don't, it's because denying it is simply wrong.
No that's not the point though. The problem is that Apple isn't keeping up with current trends and where technology is. People keep bringing it up but if the argument against 8gb is always "well you just want extra specs for free" then we shouldn't be at 8gb either, the entry laptop should be starting with like 64mb of RAM with spinning disk drive.
I don't have a problem with where they are priced, I have a problem that the only other laptops on the market what share this spec are the absolute worst ones out there and the cost of increasing the spec is basically nothing.
The cost of increasing the spec is $200. Either Apple pays it or we do, but it doesn't magically disappear.
I don't understand how so many people who want to insist that they are "Pro" don't understand basic business principles like that.
If that's really true, then just buy the one that you want. It exists, and you're happy with the price, and Apple's happy with the price, all the conditions are satisfied to close the transaction.
Why would we care if they did? I simply don't care that something I don't want happens to exist. Let the market sort that out. Better to put our energy into the things we do want that don't exist rather than the things we don't want that do.