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2024 MacBook Air still 8GB Unified Memory
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You are missing that people don't usually know what the future holds, and can no longer adapt after purchase.
Ten years ago I bought an iMac with 8 GB of ram, and within months it was clear that wasn't enough. So I put another 16 GB in, no problem. Today that would certainly be a problem. Web storage is cripplingly slow, intermittent, and can render many applications unusable. And Apple places nonsensical limitations on what can be placed on an external drive. For example you can only backup your iPhone to the internal drive. What happens if your phone and Mac both have 256 GB of storage? Train wreck.
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This. It’s your perfect average person config. From grandma to PowerPoint warrior.
FYI for anyone that actually does any procurement for IT departments, this is still the base config for just about anything. Just because deals pop up with other configs doesn’t negate that this is the base that is always available because it’s what most corporations give to their standard users.
I know this is MR, but try to pretend the rest of humanity isn’t tech nerds constantly monitoring their Task Manager or Activity Monitor.
And they are welcome to buy the spec they want / need. If it helps, you can imagine the 16 gb ram / 512gb storage option as the "true" MBA and ignore the existence of all the other variations before it.
At this point, this whole issue is a nothingburger aside from a few people complaining about how they aren't wiling to pay a few extra hundred dollars for more ram and storage which barely works out to what? A few dollars per month for the next 5 years they intend to hold on to it?
Not everyone finances their computers. I don't.
Me either.
Financing something that depreciates like this is to be avoided if possible, at least in my view..
I do of course recognize and appreciate that some folks may have no choice
It’s all about trade-off. Better screen/speakers/OS/build quality. Most of these features are subjective. That’s why you need to make your own purchasing decisions.
For example: I don’t consider the trade-offs worth it here for $4,000+ for my needs to justify 8GB/256GB.
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However. I would gladly choose an 8GB/256 GB Apple computer over this. Why? Because of everything I listed. I would gladly pay $500 alone to use macOS over Windows. I despise Windows these days.
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And what most people missed, due to bad communication, was that at the same wattage, the M chips did outperform Nvidia's comparable cards. They weren't just saying that the M beat the RTX flat out, it was at a ridiculous low wattage that the M was trouncing the RTX.
8gb more ram.
I corrected it. That may help to see where some of the problems lie.
The cost of an apple upgrade verses the cost of actual ram.
Well to me, anything less than 128GB is a no go now. So that leaves very few choices. I’m not going around claiming this is NOT PRO because it only has 64GB. Or 96 etc.
For the average user does 16/32gb RAM really make a significant difference? I have always bought laptops with 8gb and never found myself wanting for more.
And there is also the fact that the cost of these upgrades is ridiculously high compared to what Windows users pay. A TB of external storage from Scandisk costs $85. It's $400 from Apple. Plugging external storage wrecks the ergonomics of a laptop, and risks being accidentally unplugged during a write.
Side note: Apple's prices for iCloud are designed to make things difficult. 50 GB is not quite enough to back up your 64 GB iPhone. The 200 GB plan is just small enough that you can't back up your laptop. And the 2 TB plan costs 9.99 a month. You could buy a new 2 TB plater drive every seven months for that! And if you ever NEEDED those backups? How long does it take to download 2 TB?
Complaining about a Mac model you weren't going to buy in the first place is certainly questionable behavior. Lots of people have no problem with 8/256.
Very true! People also need to keep in mind that activity monitor isn’t the deciding factor of more RAM.
Example:
I ran into a reproducible bug in DaVinci Resolve. I was doing “basic” editing of a 5 hour 1080p video from a client. It completely maxed out my 128GB of RAM and I was in red memory pressure. My computer swapped a few hundred gigabytes while this was exporting. It was crazy. My system was also completely unresponsive. It took about three minutes to cancel and close DaVinci.
The issue never presented itself in Final Cut Pro. It only used 5 GB of my RAM.
I reported the bug to DaVinci and uninstalled it.
Nobody in their right mind will say you NEED more than 128GB for bare bones basic 1080p editing. But activity monitor would give that indication.
Lots of people THINK they will have no problem with 8/256, and will be very disappointed six months after purchase. Once they have a new mac, they will discover new use cases, and then discover that their new mac isn't up to the task.
Let's see how the AI push Apple is promising this year will work on all those 8GB RAM machines. Maybe they figured out a way to make their models less RAM hungry. There was a paper recently coming out of Apple that explored techniques to make LLMs work with less RAM. So maybe they have figured it out already. Or they will make it cloud only for iCloud subscribers.
What are some key MacBook Air consumer use cases that call for more than 8GB? Just curious, since mine only gets used as a travel/casual machine.
At a local restaurant, I pay $3 for a can of coke that probably cost them only 30 cents, and I am not allowed to bring in my own food and drink. It’s all part of the cost of eating out, and I am not going to try to scrimp and wave by say, making frequent trips to the toilet to gulp down water from the tap.
Either that or I just don’t eat out, if I am not willing to pay.
I know that the price of ram and storage upgrades is inflated (how could I not with a 85-page thread?) and honestly, it doesn’t really irritate me. Pay for what I need (the upgraded model is roughly 1/3 of my monthly salary?), and get on with using it for the things that really matter in my life.
I don’t either. And I bought three fully maxed out Mac Studios and two maxed out MacBook pros.
This is why you play long term. I upgraded all my NAS and networking to 25Gb. Got some external 25Gb devices that work over Thunderbolt. I also need access to my now 200+ TB. No external will help.
Really wish we could do device backups on other platforms. I love OneDrive’s photo backup tool, and it’s crazy cheap for 1 TB of storage for a year.
I get it. I can afford things too. But I don’t like being fleeced. 200 quid for 8gb of ram is being fleeced to the highest degree.
It’s just Apple taking your money and then slapping you in the face with it.
Yep
Sort of like how a human can beat a Ferrari in a super short sprint ... but after that...
(we did this example in high school -- not a Ferrari ... was a Porsche I think IIRC)