Great video covering issues with 8GB.
The title of this post is misleading. No one is claiming that 8GB is enough for professionals
It’s not even about professionals. There should not be a $1600 laptop that comes with 8 GB, and an upgrade to 16 GB is another $200.
Numerous people over the last year in this very sub have said 8GB is more than enough for professional, or students going who are going into a profession such as programming.
Valve is about to sell an entire computer with 16gbs of fast ram and 512 GBs of storage for $550. 8GBs of memory at $1600 with a cost of $200 to get 16gbs and another $200 to get 1 tb of storage is just insane. You can get a top end 2tb Samsung SSD that is better than what apple sells for $100, and apple wants to charge you an extra $600 to get that same amount of storage.
My 2014 Macbook Pro has 16GB RAM, come on.
Who is claiming 8GB is enough for professionals?
Or is it because the device is called MacBook Pro? We have an iPhone Pro, are only telephone using professionals allowed to buy them? Or is Pro just a name that means better than the other models?
I honestly don’t know why people keep complaining about this. If 8GB isn’t enough for you, then don’t buy this model.
If you don’t know whether or not you need more memory, then 8GB is probably all you need to be honest.
Would everyone stop complaining if prices started at 1800 and had 16GB? Why should the choice to have 8GB be taken away from the people that don’t need 16.
This is madness.
A professional would know better.
The biggest problem isn’t that 8gb of RAM isn’t enough…
It’s that you cannot change the RAM after buying it, so if you’re just under an 8gb RAM headroom now, you’ll be over it in a year’s time and you’ll never be able to change it for the next four years minimum of ownership.
‘Always buy as much RAM as you can afford and NEVER buy 8gb, if you can only afford 8gb, save until you can afford 16.’
Calling it a “pro” device isn’t the issue. It’s an arbitrary name that means different things to different people.
The issue is that it costs 1600 USD for 8gb of ram.
8gb of RAM isn’t a issue; it’s the fact they call it a “pro” machine and charge $1600 for 8gb of RAM.
Apple usually isn’t competitive in pricing when it comes to RAM of storage but charging $1600 for 8gb of RAM is insulting.
The Pro stands for “PRObably Enough?”
“PROven failure”
The pro moniker is just marketing.
This is basically an air with the 120hz screen, more ports, etc.
It will be popular
Call it whatever you want, $1600 for 8GB of RAM is an insult
It is. What is really pissing me off are the Apple apologists who are like “this is fine, Apple knows best”.
If you spec out a dell ultrabook and match it spec for spec, you’d get the same price. It’s what stuff costs now.
I get that. I was looking for a Thinkpad X1 to run Linux and they have similar prices, so I said screw that and I’m getting a Framework as my Linux laptop
I like one review yesterday that categorized Pro as consumer and Max or Ultra being what professionals should be using for video and photo work.
8 gb is not enough for chrome let alone anything else! Its 2023 ffs
Its not a pro chip so should not be called a Pro. The branding should be:
- Macbook Air
- Macbook
- Macbook Pro
For some reason Apple has lumped it in with the Pro models, and its created a lot of unnecessary fuss surrounding the limited 8GB RAM
Apple: FU, people will buy it
This video is silly. Showing that an 8gb machine is slower or not usable for blender or light room is both obvious and besides the point. The people buying the 8 gigabyte version not running those apps anyhow. Do a few tests just running a browser and basic office apps. That’s the audience for this model.
But that can be done with the MacBook Air line or a refurbished M1 MacBook Pro 14-inch at lower costs. The latter comes with 16GB of RAM as the base model.
For professionals?! 32 GB is the bare minimum now, what the fuck?
I had 64 GB in my previous PC, that was overkill, I admit, I only got as much because I ran into RAM issues on my previous PC which had only 16 GB (built in 2014) and had to upgrade to 32 GB later on, so I decided 64 is the way to go.
Now I have a corporate MacBook, a corporate ThinkPad and my own PC. All three have 32 GB, and while it’s enough for now, I definitely use more than 16.
16 GB is OK for a professional that only does light office work.
It also depends on the version and power of your RAM. DDR5 > DDR4 > DDR3.
Power levels in mhz: DDR5 5200 mhz
LPDDR5 6400 mhz
Not every workload needs fast RAM. I was absolutely fine at my previous job with 16 GB of DDR3-1600, and that’s for professional software development. The same PC had 8 GB before and was barely usable, so I had to upgrade.
And if you don’t have enough RAM, it doesn’t really matter how fast it is, as you’ll be bottlenecked by swapping, which is limited by SSD speed. If anything, a faster SSD could help, not faster RAM, though trying to compensate with SSD speed for lack of RAM is kind of crazy.
True, i remember m1 8gb vs 16gb had no difference in performance, but here with the m3, the gap is huge, most likely apple limited the swap speed to push people to buy high end models.
You remember incorrectly. The M1 review units were all 16GB. Apple has kept the real world benchmarks of their base models obfuscated for years. It’s as simple as this. Sonoma and a tab of Safari consume upward of 7GB of RAM. That means under light use, 8GB models will have to swap constantly, slowing them down, heating them up, and wearing the SSD out exponentially faster. All of that goes away on 16GB.
This is also why Windows 11 is more performant on 8gb Intel models, but not necessarily 16gb.