M3 Macbook Pro Reviews. 8GB of RAM on a $1600 laptop is criticised heavily

[captain_to_fire]

The only reason I think off as to why the base 14" Pro has a paltry 8GB of memory is to push people to buy the 18GB version. But I disagree with Techcrunch's review. The 14" Pro with M3 is a better buy compared to a specced out M2 Air 15"

• More I/O (HDMI and SD card slot)
• Better sustained performance thanks to active cooling of the M3 Pro 14"
• Has Pro Motion display
• Better speakers

But I agree with the RAM criticism. Since Apple made up a weird configuration anyway they might as well shipped the base models with 12GB RAM. Not sure if there are companies that makes 6GB LPDDR5 modules.

[Obioban]

10 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

The only reason I think off as to why the base 14" Pro has a paltry 8GB of memory is to push people to buy the 18GB version. But I disagree with Techcrunch's review. The 14" Pro with M3 is a better buy compared to a specced out M2 Air 15"

• More I/O (HDMI and SD card slot)
• Better sustained performance thanks to active cooling of the M3 Pro 14"
• Has Pro Motion display
• Better speakers

But I agree with the RAM criticism. Since Apple made up a weird configuration anyway they might as well shipped the base models with 12GB RAM. Not sure if there are companies that makes 6GB LPDDR5 modules.

I think it depends on the person. Those first 3 are meaningless to a large group of people (especially the sustained performance). The extra thinness of the Air is meaningful to some. The bigger screen of the air is a non zero factor. The pro being 25% more expensive is a non zero factor.

 

To be clear, I’d get the pro— but that doesn’t mean everyone should. 

[Dracarris]

19 hours ago, Kisai said:

Poorly. When you can install 64GB in a Wintel laptop or even 128GB in a desktop.

 

That said, I have 96GB in my desktop, and it's rarely using less than 32GB.

That's an invalid conclusion to draw. Starting from the fact that you're comparing two completely different OS and HW stacks with each other.

 

Next, most OS will use more memory if you give them more, e.g., reserving more space more liberately, swapping less, caching more. Memory "demand" is not fixed for a given set of tasks/running processes/workloads whatever. Give an OS more RAM and it will typically use more, even though it could do with much less. OFC that's up to some bound like in your example. Once you're over 32GB of capacity and not doing any heavy workloads, a rather large part will sit empty.

[Forbidden Wafer]

21 hours ago, Zando_ said:

That said though, I do agree that 8GB on a $1600 machine is very silly. It's fine on a $999 Air that's meant for office work/web browsing, Pros are usually meant for beefier work so while it's technically fine, it certainly feels rather shit as a customer. 

8GB is fine on a $400 laptop.

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

8GB is fine on a $400 laptop.

Sure?

[filpo]

1 hour ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

8GB is fine on a $400 laptop.

Yes it is. Even more than fine. But this one’s 4 times the price

[RejZoR]

Anything from Apple should come with 16GB as minimum for the price they are charging. The premium they are charging on RAM and SSD is just outrageous and because it's soldered, you have to decide the moment you're buying it.

[Forbidden Wafer]

2 hours ago, filpo said:

Yes it is. Even more than fine. But this one’s 4 times the price

Exactly my point. Those macs should ship with at least 16GB, preferably 24 or 32GB of RAM for the price. 

[HenrySalayne]

12 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Anything from Apple should come with 16GB as minimum for the price they are charging. The premium they are charging on RAM and SSD is just outrageous and because it's soldered, you have to decide the moment you're buying it.

I said it before, I say it gain: The hypocrisy of Apple is despicable. They are marketing themselves as "green" company caring for the environment and at the very same time they are selling models with just barely enough RAM for today's use not to mention the very near future - just to upsell their overpriced RAM upgrades. Considering current RAM pricing, the costs associated with the additional 8GB SKU is most likely more expensive than to equip every model outright with 16 GB. Instead they are selling un-upgradeable e-waste.

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I said it before, I say it gain: The hypocrisy of Apple is despicable. They are marketing themselves as "green" company caring for the environment and at the very same time they are selling models with just barely enough RAM for today's use not to mention the very near future - just to upsell their overpriced RAM upgrades. Considering current RAM pricing, the costs associated with the additional 8GB SKU is most likely more expensive than to equip every model outright with 16 GB. Instead they are selling un-upgradeable e-waste.

But it's fine, I'm happy to trade the endurance and lifespan of my also not upgradable SSD (that will die sooner) because 8GB works well enough 

[leadeater]

18 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Give an OS more RAM and it will typically use more, even though it could do with much less. OFC that's up to some bound like in your example.

 

 

Would be exactly the same if it were 32GB, 16GB and 8GB (maybe it might have swapped a few MB) instead of the 2TB it has

 

P.S All 256 threads are 100% utilized, the system is not idle

Spoiler

 

And Windows running the same thing

Spoiler

10.8GB cached

 

And Windows doing absolutely nothing

Spoiler

16.2GB cached

 

Almost everything in cached will never be in swap, the give OS more ram and it'll use more lacks far too much additional analysis and actually does not address the issue of if 8GB is enough or not and putting lots of pressure on swap is never a good thing no matter if it does or does not impact performance or system responsiveness. 

 

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, Dracarris said:

That's an invalid conclusion to draw. Starting from the fact that you're comparing two completely different OS and HW stacks with each other.

Irrelevant. We're not talking about an Iot Linux box or a Web server being compared to a laptop. We're comparing a BYO Desktop to a proprietary Apple laptop in the same use case.

 

 

4 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Next, most OS will use more memory if you give them more, e.g., reserving more space more liberately, swapping less, caching more.

That's not how it works. The OS doesn't go "I'm going to allocate 4GB to applications and reserve the rest for cache while ignoring the applications"

 

When a device only has 8GB of memory that is used by both the CPU and GPU, that puts it more in line with a game console, where applications have to be explicitly designed around being the only application running.

 

A desktop doesn't run "just one program", and does not have infinite capacity to run more by just chewing up disk space for virtual memory while ignoring the RAM in the system. 

 

There is also this annoying problem where developers started putting CEF webviews in everything, so what should be a small application or game suddenly has hundreds of MB's of overhead.

You know why Epic Games Launcher sucks so much? Because it sits there and uses 800MB of RAM, to do NOTHING. EA's launcher? 400MB to do NOTHING. 

Steam, still uses quite a bit.

 

You know what is really stupid though?

Why oh why is Notepad 73MB. It has 3 tabs open, Notepad++ has 37 tabs open.

 

This is not "oh you have more ram, so everything takes more memory", this is "applications keep trying to be OS-agnostic by using their own copies of webview frameworks."

 

This is the state of things on Windows. I can't imagine the  situation on OS X is much better. That 8GB of memory disappears pretty quickly.

 

[Forbidden Wafer]

10 minutes ago, Kisai said:

There is also this annoying problem where developers started putting CEF webviews in everything, so what should be a small application or game suddenly has hundreds of MB's of overhead.

You know why Epic Games Launcher sucks so much? Because it sits there and uses 800MB of RAM, to do NOTHING. EA's launcher? 400MB to do NOTHING. 

Steam, still uses quite a bit.

Webification of every single stupid app is a total cancer. They should at least use the default web browser for everything, just like on android. Would reduce that overhead quite a lot since most of it is shared state stuff for handling other processes.

[Kisai]

3 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Webification of every single stupid app is a total cancer. They should at least use the default web browser for everything, just like on android. Would reduce that overhead quite a lot since most of it is shared state stuff for handling other processes.

True, but this is largely done to security-sandbox applications from each other. Something that wouldn't have to be done in the first place if they just launched the OS browser instead of trying to embed the webview. What makes it super annoying is that this is also the means by which ads can hijack webviews. eg Spotify.

 

My spotify constantly looks like this:

I'm not sure why that ad unit is always broken. But it is ALWAYS broken.

 

Spotify has no reason to be using a CEF. It's a music player. It shouldn't need 500MB of memory when good ol Winamp only needed like 4MB.

 

[Dracarris]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

Would be exactly the same if it were 32GB, 16GB and 8GB (maybe it might have swapped a few MB) instead of the 2TB it has

 

Sure, show some systems with absurd amounts of RAM to disprove my point. I really don't have the source at hand right now (I think it was an LTT video) so you have to take my word for it or don't believe me

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

Would be exactly the same if it were 32GB, 16GB and 8GB (maybe it might have swapped a few MB) instead of the 2TB it has

Aaand where's your proof/analysis for that bold statement? Also not sure what OS this is, I was mostly talking about modern Desktop OS like Windows and macOS.

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

And Windows running the same thing

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

And Windows doing absolutely nothing

Two different machines with two totall different memory capacities? What's your point here? The second machine with much higher cache usage might have seen a lot more uptime, a lot more processes being openend and closed before, just a totally different history since the last reboot. Cache usage is for sure nor only dependent on memory capacity, it's simply a factor is all I'm saying.

 

Modern desktop OS do allocate/reserve/manage RAM differently depending on how much spare capacity they have, which, in absence of hard proof, simply makes a ton of sense (to utilize available resources as much as possible). The more RAM you have, the more leniently you can manage it, the more you can pre-cache or keep in memory for longer, and memory mgmt in general is an absurdly complex topic that goes far beyond simply summing up all malloc() and free() calls of all processes.

 

Plenty of users here have reported that 8GB on modern Macs is plenty for many use cases. Take their word for it or don't.

[Dracarris]

5 hours ago, Kisai said:

Irrelevant. We're not talking about an Iot Linux box or a Web server being compared to a laptop. We're comparing a BYO Desktop to a proprietary Apple laptop in the same use case.

Very relevant. You compare two different OS architectures on top of different HW architectures. 8GB on Win10/11 and 8GB on M1/2/3 with macOS with the same workload/use case will be a different user experience. Believe it or not, or try it out yourself.

5 hours ago, Kisai said:

That's not how it works. The OS doesn't go "I'm going to allocate 4GB to applications and reserve the rest for cache while ignoring the applications"

Not at all what I said. Neither is memory mgmt as simply as you draw it to be, it's a lot more complicated with a lot more dynamic pre-caching and swapping depending on - the amount of available memory.

[leadeater]

8 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Sure, show some systems with absurd amounts of RAM to disprove my point. I really don't have the source at hand right now (I think it was an LTT video) so you have to take my word for it or don't believe me

I won't take your word for it. You are for sure correct a system will have more memory usage showing if it has more but literally the point of what I showed you is that extra is the "Cached" amount which is stuff that's just left in memory because the system can and there is no immediate need to either move it to swap or free it. Total memory usage is active memory plus cached memory, what you said does not and will never apply to active memory as that is the memory that is being used right "now" and if that amount is less than the usable system memory then the system will just sit there swapping memory in and out which is a really bad thing.

 

8 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Aaand where's your proof/analysis for that bold statement? Also not sure what OS this is, I was mostly talking about modern Desktop OS like Windows and macOS.

It doesn't matter what OS, that's how memory management works on all systems. All operating systems have a cached or buffer memory pool which is directly applicable to what you said and your assertion however like I said it lacks more detailed analysis because unless you are looking at the different memory pools any blanket statement like that will always either be wrong or flawed, flawed is probably more accurate.

 

Also I don't think I need to watch an LTT video to know this, whether you like it or not as a Senior Systems Engineer in both Windows and Linux I happen to know a thing or two about how memory is managed in operating systems. Any such video like that now days would be reviewed and corrections given by me anyway so it's a little redundant to tell me to watch an LTT video when I'm one of the people ensuring the technical details are correct.

 

8 hours ago, Dracarris said:

The second machine with much higher cache usage might have seen a lot more uptime

3 days, the other one with more memory was 261 days. It still has absolutely no relation at all to active memory since that won't change with system up time as only the active processes at the point in time influence how much of that there is.

 

So the long and the short of it what you said is essentially irrelevant to whether or not 8GB memory for a current generation Mac is enough. I'm not going to say it's always not enough but it's very easily the case and when the simple truth is the cost to Apple to baseline on 16GB wouldn't change the price at all or at worst $50 "because margin" that is a much greater service and consumer beneficial thing to do. If it were a much lower cost system I'd be less critical but the problem is that it's not cheap, not even slightly.

 

8 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Modern desktop OS do allocate/reserve/manage RAM differently depending on how much spare capacity they have, which, in absence of hard proof, simply makes a ton of sense (to utilize available resources as much as possible). The more RAM you have, the more leniently you can manage it, the more you can pre-cache or keep in memory for longer, and memory mgmt in general is an absurdly complex topic that goes far beyond simply summing up all malloc() and free() calls of all processes.

Which does exactly zero good to anyone with active memory requirement of 8GB or higher on a system with 8GB of memory.

 

8 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Plenty of users here have reported that 8GB on modern Macs is plenty for many use cases. Take their word for it or don't.

I'm not and never was disputing their experiences. It's just a really bad idea to just say something like you did and act like it's fine so easily when using 8GB of active memory isn't even that rare or demanding system usage anymore. While someone could also be fine a significant amount of time those times where it isn't and high swapping is occurring that is eating in to SSD write cycles and as good as NAND is now days memory swapping is by far more write demanding than anything a typical user would be doing on their system.

 

The main difference between Windows and Unix based systems is Windows will preference swapping out memory for running applications that isn't active while Unix will leave it in memory unless it actually needs swap space, like my images showed. There is no reason for Windows to have any swap usage with 384GB memory and only 18GB used but it swapped out 467MB anyway. The Linux system on the other hand has zero usage of swap because using any at all is completely unnecessary so why do it, this is a trait of Unix systems I like much better than Windows.

 

P.S. One of the reasons Mac OS does so well with so little memory is the memory compression is extremely good.

[Arika]

7 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Plenty of users here have reported that 8GB on modern Macs is plenty for many use cases. Take their word for it or don't.

I'm sure they do. They are also insane for accepting that 8GB of RAM on a $1600 laptop is not an absolute reaming regardless of whether or not they are using it all.

[Dracarris]

8 minutes ago, Arika said:

I'm sure they do. They are also insane for accepting that 8GB of RAM on a $1600 laptop is not an absolute reaming regardless of whether or not they are using it all.

Sure. Because in Windows-land, it is offensive to accept number on package=x for price=y even though the usage experience of that machine is appropriate for price=y. Because kids you have to remember: Bigger number always better, bigger number guuuud. Really can't wrap my head around this mindset.

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

lacks more detailed analysis because unless you are looking at the different memory pools any blanket statement like that will always either be wrong or flawed

You're (rightfully) calling me out for lack of analysis and blanket statements, yet in the same paragraph

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

that's how memory management works on all systems.

make incredibly generalized blanket statements without further analysis. Well, we both don't have to take the word from the other, I guess.

[leadeater]

33 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

You're (rightfully) calling me out for lack of analysis and blanket statements, yet in the same paragraph

 

33 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

make incredibly generalized blanket statements without further analysis. Well, we both don't have to take the word from the other, I guess.

I defy you to show me a current operating system that does not have active memory and cache/buffer memory pools. I said that because that is how it works on all systems. We would have to move out of "PC" computers to find these operating systems that don't treat memory this way.

 

You know sometimes when something is so true and is simple fact you don't need to do analysis on it. I don't need to proof my work on stating Earth's gravitational acceleration, it's been proofed well enough. All operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS, BSD) have "Active Memory" and "Cached" and/or "Buffered". All the lovely pictures posted by Mac users in this topic show exactly that. And just as a nice extra for you the "Compressed" amount in Mac OS is inactive memory that is compressed to reduce usage to allow for more active and cache memory usage rather than swapping it to disk, it's actually a really nice way of doing it since while Windows and Linux can also do it this is one the of tweaks Apple has done to Mac OS to reduce swap usage and increase system performance as decompressing memory is faster than reading disk.

 

My Windows system is barely doing any memory compression and just throwing out to swap/page file

 

Thing is I know you just don't like what I said, also don't particularly like me either which is fine but you let that get in the way of actually good information because it's coming from someone you just don't want to believe. Nothing I said was "blanket statement", take it or leave it 

[Dracarris]

17 minutes ago, leadeater said:

And just as a nice extra for you the "Compressed" amount in Mac OS is inactive memory that is compressed to reduce usage to allow for more active and cache memory usage rather than swapping it to disk, it's actually a really nice way of doing it since while Windows and Linux can also do it this is one the of tweaks Apple has done to Mac OS to reduce swap usage and increase system performance as decompressing memory is faster than reading disk.

And this is EXACTLY one of the mechanisms I was referring to all this time: On a system with more RAM to spare, the OS simply does not have to compress inactive memory to make more room for active+cache memory, on a system with less RAM, it will (preemptively) or have to. However, since the compression happens fast, preemptively and in the background, the user probably won't notice it on both machines.

 

Since "used" memory is reported as active+inactive, both systems will show different memory utilizations with the same workload. Exactly my effing point this whole damn time. Now you can get pedantic on what we refer to as used/utilized memory, but again, this was exactly my point.

[Arika]

55 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Sure. Because in Windows-land, it is offensive to accept number on package=x for price=y even though the usage experience of that machine is appropriate for price=y. Because kids you have to remember: Bigger number always better, bigger number guuuud. Really can't wrap my head around this mindset.

Damn...Apple really has you by the balls.

[leadeater]

30 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

And this is EXACTLY one of the mechanisms I was referring to all this time: On a system with more RAM to spare, the OS simply does not have to compress inactive memory to make more room for active memory, on a system with less RAM, it will (preemptively) or have to. However, since the compression happens fast, preemptively and in the background, the user probably won't notice it on both machines.

 

Since "used" memory is reported as active+inactive, both systems will show different memory utilization with the same workload. Exactly my effing point this whole time. Now you can get pedantic on what we refer to as used/utilized memory, but again, this was exactly my point.

Err not really since if it's not active Mac OS will just compress it, it's just something it does and it won't not do it if it has lots of memory available and not used. And again does not in any way impact whether or not you need 8GB of active memory which is the underlying issue and the purpose of my conversation with you.

 

 

Mac OS vs Mac OS the behavior is the same. Lets take a 50% compression figure for above which would actually be quite good, that means 1.8GB more memory usage without compression or 7.75GB of 16GB. Compression is not "required" on the above system but Mac OS will always compress inactive memory.

 

Having more memory will not as you assert show different memory utilization, while every system even running the same applications will be slightly different there won't actually be a significant difference because Mac OS compresses inactive memory regardless if it needs to or not. The main difference is in how soon it must do it.

 

Call me pedantic as much as you want but it won't change that Mac OS with 8GB or 16GB running a few light applications will have extremely similar used memory, functionally identical active memory.

 

Another as well

 

Compressing also not actually necessary.

[Dracarris]

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Err not really since if it's not active Mac OS will just compress it, it's just something it does and it won't not do it if it has lots of memory available and not used.

Again you're showing me random screenshots of random different machines running random different workloads. What's your point here? Yes, macOS will always compress parts of unused memory. For gods sake I never said it won't do any compression at all if there's breathing room. Again, memory mgmt is much more complex these days. There's probably some heuristics under the hood, different tiers of "pressure" that will trigger more or less compression depending on all kinds of variables like time since last access of a specific section, access patterns (spatial and temporal) and so on.

 

Show me two machines that only differ in memory capacity but otherwise have identical uptime/run history and running processes and identical App/Wired/Compressed memory sections.

Showing a screenshot with breathing room but a good chunk of compressed memory is not what I was referring to. Pretty sure that if you'd throw the workload of the 32GB machine onto a 16GB machine, the division between the 3 sections of "Memory Used" would be significantly different and the total being ofc less than 16GB.

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

because Mac OS compresses inactive memory regardless if it needs to or not.

That makes little to no sense as compressing and decompressing requires CPU time and energy aka battery life, so compressing stuff that will realistically be used again soon is not very clever. Again, there's probably multi-tiered heuristics at play  that decide when to compress what and not as simple as you think it is. Something like a score/probability of "data being required soon again" that together with global memory pressure triggers compression or not, not meanign that without the latter no compression will take place at all.

 

23 minutes ago, Arika said:

Damn...Apple really has you by the balls.

Damn, big number=better simple-mindedness really has you by the balls.

[leadeater]

Just now, Dracarris said:

Yes, macOS will always compress parts of unused memory.

All unused memory*

 

If you would just look at the images and not immediately dismissed them you'd see that there is only "Cached files" and "Compressed". Mac OS land Compressed = Inactive. There is no inactive but not compressed.