Is 8GB of RAM Enough for MacBook Pro?

[Ctrlos]

You don't become the richest company in the world without overcharging for a few things.

Apple likely sells the majority of its base Macbook Pro models in bulk to businesses who will just automatically go for the lowest spec due to volume. An 8gb RAM chip costs $25 on crucial and factoring in the soldering requirements we will say $30 for 8gb of unified. By stripping out 8gb of RAM from the base model Apple is saving a lot of money on parts-per-unit. Its the same reason the base models all have a single 256gb SSD instead of twin 128gbs: they take up half the space in warehouses which means they can order twice as much for inventory.

At the same time Apple know that the sort of dedicated customers who buy a Macbook Pro for individual use will happily pony up the extra $200 for more memory because they need it. I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as calling it exploitation but, well people are obviously happy to swallow a 600% markup on a memory upgrade so more fool them I guess?

I recall a time my Macbook had clever levers inside so I could do the job myself but either the public or Apple's clever marketing has spoken and unified memory (which does have advantages) is here to stay.

 

[citysnaps]

You don't become the richest company in the world without overcharging for a few things.

Apple prices their products to hit their required 42% GPM target.

That's how Apple stays in business keeping their 160,000 employees employed, with good salaries and benefits. While dozens of other tech companies have had massive layoffs during the pandemic.

 

[randyhudson]

If 8GB were enough, they wouldn't offer an option that is 16 times that amount.

 

[ArkSingularity]

"PROfessional" is a mere moniker Apple uses to segment computer tiers by performance and price. Try not to get sucked in with marketing labels, and instead make purchases based on needs/requirements.

I'd wager to say there's a significant percentage of MacPro users who are not professionals.

If you mostly surf the web, email, need a calendar with reminders, etc. simply choose the base model. If your needs are more demanding, get more RAM - and PAY for it. Easy.

Choice is a good thing. Why get worked up about what makes sense for other people? Life is too short to get annoyed over mice-nuts issues.

It's not really the label, it's the starting price. $1600 is a lot to pay for 8GB in 2023.

 

[pshufd]

Oracle started buying MacBook Pros back around 2015 for their employees to replace desktops. The standard configuration was an i7 with an upgrade to 16 GB of RAM and this worked fairly well. Our son's workplace (oncogenomics) gave their employers 2015 MacBook Pro 15s. His workplace replaced the 2015s with the 2021 MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM.

My 2009 iMac has 16 GB of RAM. My 2008 Dell Studio XPS has 48 GB of RAM. My 2010 iMac has 32 GB of RAM. And none of those is "Pro". Those are just consumer PCs.

Apple seems to denote pro with ports and the number of monitors supported. Still not RAM nor storage. They could legitimately call the Studio Pro as it is but the name would be redundant as Studio already denotes Pro.

 

[pshufd]

It's not really the label, it's the starting price. $1600 is a lot to pay for 8GB in 2023.

If you look at Costco laptop offerings, you usually get 32 GB of RAM for that price.

 

[TVreporter]

Wow guys that was an extensive writeup … *cough*

How about getting two machines and doing some comparisons? Or share a site that has done that?

It would make some people angry but I wouldn't mind if all MBPs were built with a minimum 16GB but 8GB were locked in the base model, so you could pay $ to unlock the remaining 8GB if you felt you needed it after a period of time.

Tim, if you are reading this thread, ignore this idea!

 

[citysnaps]

It's not really the label, it's the starting price. $1600 is a lot to pay for 8GB in 2023.

Considering how inflation doesn't discriminate and affects everyone, I'm not surprised. As a result, Apple's GPM has increased from around 32% to 42%, a lot of which keeps Apple's 160,000+ employees employed with good salaries and benefits. While other tech companies instead chose to layoff many thousands.

 

[pshufd]

Considering how inflation doesn't discriminate and affects everyone, I'm not surprised. As a result, Apple's GPM has increased from around 32% to 42%, a lot of which keeps Apple's 160,000+ employees employed with good salaries and benefits. While other tech companies instead chose to layoff many thousands.

RAM, flash, monitor prices are in deflation.

 

[ArkSingularity]

Considering how inflation doesn't discriminate and affects everyone, I'm not surprised. As a result, Apple's GPM has increased from around 32% to 42%, a lot of which keeps Apple's 160,000+ employees employed with good salaries and benefits. While other tech companies instead chose to layoff many thousands.

Apple has laid people off also. With regards to inflation, you're correct. However, despite inflation, this price point can get far more than 8GB in the PC market (16GB is commonplace on $800 machines).

 

[hagjohn]

Considering how inflation doesn't discriminate and affects everyone, I'm not surprised. As a result, Apple's GPM has increased from around 32% to 42%, a lot of which keeps Apple's 160,000+ employees employed with good salaries and benefits. While other tech companies instead chose to layoff many thousands.

Google really helps.

 

[bobcomer]

I'd say labelling a machine as Pro (professional) and pricing it as a high end device suggests it should be a high end device, where corners are not cut to save a couple of dollars. Unfortunately that isn't the case, as corners have been cut on RAM, storage, and the ability to repair and upgrade.

Your career choice example is flawed. A writer could write with a 10 cent biro and copy paper. If, however, he bought a $50 professional pen, marketed as such, there would be an assumption that such a device would be refillable, and not disposable. Suuuure, maybe another professional usually writes on a computer and the ink in the "professional" pen will last him 7 years, so you could argue his disposable pen is 'good enough', but marketing a pen as professional and charging a lot for it would still be disingenuous if they saved a few pennies and made it so it couldn't be refilled.

Pro items= haven't cut corners and are built to last. That's why they're more expensive than non-pro items.

Almost all writers use a computer these days, and some holdout typewriter people too. I only know of one writer that writes longhand. I can't imagine using longhand to write anything, the biggest thing I "write" on is a postit note, and my signature on documents!

As for the term Pro as Apple uses it. It's just a word in a name, nothing more.

It really doesn't even mean higher end, otherwise the Mac Studio would be called a Mac Studio Pro, as it's more pro oriented than a laptop. (higher end processor available, no cooling problems, base config is more capable.)

 

[citysnaps]

RAM, flash, monitor prices are in deflation.

That's COGS (cost of goods sold) and just one of a handful of factors that drives price.

I suspect the majority of Apple's 160,000+ employees with good salaries and benefits are an overhead expense, which also goes into pricing. Thus Apple's GPM (gross profit margin) climbing from 32% to 42%.

 

[citysnaps]

Apple has laid people off also. With regards to inflation, you're correct. However, despite inflation, this price point can get far more than 8GB in the PC market (16GB is commonplace on $800 machines).

Far from the thousands and tens of thousands of mass layoffs by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, IBM, 3M, Twitter, Oracle, Amazon, LinkedIn, General Motors, Netflix, Dell, Zillow, T-Mobile, Dish, Intel, Zoom, Disney, Facebook, and on and on.

"...this price point can get far more than 8GB in the PC market (16GB is commonplace on $800 machines)."

That's great! You should purchase a PC and find happiness.

 

[SebCohen]

You pay for what you get and 8GB is fine for my dad. Probably me as well. And I don’t believe much in conspiracy theories. But there is a greater than zero chance that 8GB won’t be sufficient, or at least not support all OS features, in 2-3 years time in a device that has been known to last 5-8 years.

 

[Fishrrman]

I've been saying it since the m-series first came out.
Repeat to yourself 3 times:
16 is "the new 8"...

 

[pshufd]

Far from the thousands and tens of thousands of mass layoffs by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, IBM, 3M, Twitter, Oracle, Amazon, LinkedIn, General Motors, Netflix, Dell, Zillow, T-Mobile, Dish, Intel, Zoom, Disney, Facebook, and on and on.

"...this price point can get far more than 8GB in the PC market (16GB is commonplace on $800 machines)."

That's great! You should purchase a PC and find happiness.

I did. I bought a 2015 iMac 27 with 32 GB of RAM for $200.

 

[kk200]

It's marketing. I think it's helpful to distinguish marketing from actual quality. So no, pro doesn't mean good quality if looking at the absolute scale. It doesn't mean necessarily bad quality either.

summary: Pro means nothing to Apple

 

[amaze1499]

Dont forget to look at memory bandwidth. 8GB or 18GB Ram or even CPU cores alone don't really matter until you decide to remove the memory bandwidth bottleneck in Macs first or at least look at it as well when buying.

M3 - 100
M3 Pro - 150
M3 Max - 300

 

[polaris20]

I’m so tired of people trying to gatekeep the term “pro” when it comes to professional work on computers. Many people do professional work on 8GB MacBooks, not every professional workflow requires 16GB of RAM, and for many, 16GB is just excessive. Different professional workflows have different requirements, stop pretending that every professional workflow is the same. Those with more demanding workflows that require a higher spec shouldn’t be gatekeeping when many professionals use lower spec configurations. It would be like me arguing you can‘t be a professional and have less than a 4K monitor, because “real professionals” edit video and require 4K monitors…🤦🏼‍♂️ And this base spec with the M3 chip likely won’t appeal to that crowd (video editors, game devs, 3d artists, etc.) anyways, they’ll probably gravitate towards the M3 Pro chip configurations that are the same price as they were last year due to the greater graphics performance and cpu performance that will suite their use case better. This option is cheaper than the last two years base specs. I’m just so tired of all the “pro computer” gatekeeping from people who think their more demanding workflow is the only “real” professional workflow, and everyone else who doesn’t need that isn’t professional…🙄

This would be true......if it was still 2014.

 

[ric22]

It's marketing. I think it's helpful to distinguish marketing from actual quality. So no, pro doesn't mean good quality if looking at the absolute scale. It doesn't mean necessarily bad quality either.

What a pointless argument you make. It's an expensive laptop and it's their top tier range of laptops.

 

[Kal Madda]

This would be true......if it was still 2014.

It is true today, not every professional workflow requires 16GB of RAM, and for many, 16GB of RAM is excessive. And that doesn’t make those of us who don’t need 16GB of RAM for our professional workflows any less professional…. And Apple has been using aluminum to build their MacBooks for longer than since 2014, should they stop now just because of that? Or maybe, some things don’t change as rapidly. These 8GB RAM base-spec MacBooks sell quite well, so clearly most people are fine with 8GB of RAM and don’t need 16GB.

 

[ric22]

Almost all writers use a computer these days, and some holdout typewriter people too. I only know of one writer that writes longhand. I can't imagine using longhand to write anything, the biggest thing I "write" on is a postit note, and my signature on documents!

As for the term Pro as Apple uses it. It's just a word in a name, nothing more.

It really doesn't even mean higher end, otherwise the Mac Studio would be called a Mac Studio Pro, as it's more pro oriented than a laptop. (higher end processor available, no cooling problems, base config is more capable.)

My post makes more sense in relation to the string of posts before it.... I was trying to make a point in relation to silly comments about how we should expect very little from MacBook Pros simply because there are professional people out there who need very little in terms of compute power.

 

[pshufd]

My post makes more sense in relation to the string of posts before it.... I was trying to make a point in relation to silly comments about how we should expect very little from MacBook Pros simply because there are professional people out there who need very little in terms of compute power.

There are. But they could just call them MacBooks. Or the MacBook Pro Minus. Or MacBook Pro Light.

The last 3 Macs I bought came with 32 GB of RAM. I can upgrade 1 of them to 64 GB of RAM but I don't need it.

 

[ric22]

There are. But they could just call them MacBooks. Or the MacBook Pro Minus. Or MacBook Pro Light.

The last 3 Macs I bought came with 32 GB of RAM. I can upgrade 1 of them to 64 GB of RAM but I don't need it.

Let's ignore the name and focus on the price instead? Good God. No electronics company should be penny pinching on devices this expensive.