The bandwidth provided by unified memory is just unparalleled because of the tightly integrated components found on Apple Silicon.
"Unparalleled", huh? So I'm sure gamers have fully embraced Apple hardware because it's objectively better, correct? You surely have links to benchmarks of Apple devices beating the pants off PCs... Right??
Just upgrade the RAM yourself.
Oh wait, you can't because it's 2023 and it's become inexplicably acceptable to solder it to the motherboard.
Not even soldered, it's part of the CPU/GPU die now.
Ah yes, it's the SSD that's soldered.
Just 300 of your English pounds to upgrade from 512GB to 1TB.
Meanwhile, a 2TB drive at PS5 speeds is under £100.
For unupgradable kit, the pricing is grotesque.
Apple has put a lot of effort into (successfully) creating a customer-base that thinks overpriced goods and different colored texts make them in a special club, I'm not surprised that an exec thought this excuse would fly
It's a bit more complex than that (and you probably know it).
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board. Their UX is excellent. Their support is good. Things work well, applications are easy to use and pretty stable and well built. And if they violate your privacy like the others, at least they don't make the open-bar sale of your data their fucking business model (wink wink Google).
Of course you there's a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there's that one thing that doesn't work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It's a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad... I just don't have time to "manage" my hardware anymore. Nor the urge to do it. I need things to work out of the box in a predictable way. I don't want a digital mental load. Just a simple UX, consistency across my devices and good apps (and no Google, fuck Google). Something I wouldn't have with an Android + PC setup. :)
The whole "special club" argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it. Neither the Apple nor the Google/Microsoft environments are satisfactory. Not even speaking of Linux and FOSS. We must aim higher.
I'm gonna have to argue against a few of these points:
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board.
Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.
Things work well
Things work...okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that's because you're probably installing it with Homebrew, but that's the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so "bundled" together by default.
Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore.
I don't know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore "PC/Linux user," or what this means to you. I'm assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don't like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I'd immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It's the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that's not for you, totally fine.
The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it.
It's less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of "green bubble discrimination." It's a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they're status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they'll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, "yeah, but that's because of people, not because of Mac." But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn't a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn't know it actively profits from these perceptions.
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
You are right and make good points. But you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don't have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I'll probably just reinstall Mint.)
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
Wow. Talk about coincidences...
you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
I'm a dumbass and if I can do it anyone can. But, yes, technology is a daunting thing to most people. Intuition and experience go far. That said, it's literally easier today than it ever has been. You put in the installation usb, click next a whole bunch, reboot, and you have a working machine. Is it sometimes more complicated than that and you have to do BIOS/UEFI bullshit? Sure, but past that hurdle it's smooth sailing.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)
Ah, the joys of rolling release distros. Endeavor has been stable for me so far. I'm running it on an X1 Thinkpad. Generally works more reliably than my own vanilla arch installs and more low profile tiling window managers. I've found myself sticking to KDE Plasma for a DE because it's so consistent and has enough features to keep me happy without having to spend all my time fine tuning my own UX, which I just don't care about. My realization has been that arch distros are best suited for machines running integrated graphics and popular DEs, rather than ones with separate cards and more niche or highly customizable DEs. Prevents you from having to futs about with things like Optimus, with graphics drivers being the primary cause of headaches for that distro, per my experience. That said, I used to run an old Acer laptop with arch and a tiling window manager called qtile. Qtile was great, but every other update completely altered the logic and structure of how it read the config file for it, so the damn thing broke constantly. I'm like...just decide how you want the config to look and keep that. Or at least allow for backwards compatibility. But they didn't.
Yea sorry but I disagree with the vast majority of things you said. Consistent, coherent, and well thought out experiences are pretty par for the course at this point, regardless of what flagship phone company you're buying from. The UX is great for people who grow up with the UX, just like android UX is great for people who grow up with it. Android users who switch to Apple generally think Apple's UX is dogshit, and vice versa. The UX argument is trash and the reality of it is that people just think whatever UX they're used to is the more intuitive one. Support is pretty much the same in my experience between the two, and I have an android personal phone and an apple work phone. The major difference is the image that Apple support airs is better. The vast majority of popular Android applications are just as stable and usable as Apple apps, and the ones that aren't are often niche enough that similar apps aren't even on the apple appstore. So it's a question of basically the same service for most apps, and then either no service or degraded service for lesser apps.
The one thing they have over android is the security argument, which is fair to an extent, but not this bulwark that a lot of people like to pretend it is. The Fappening, for example, still got plenty of explicit images from Apple phones.
All in all, apple is an advertising company first, and a tech company second, with admittedly improved security, but also admittedly security that isn't good enough to justify the price hike.
I mean, the NAND chips can be replaced fairly effectively if you know what you’re doing
Actually no. There’s some pairing trickery going on on the SoC level, so if you change the NAND chips by higher capacity ones without apple’s special sauce, you’ll just get an unbootsble system
And paging in & out of RAM frequently is probably one of the quickest ways to wear out the NAND.
Put it all together and you have a system that breaks itself and can't be repaired. The less RAM you buy the quicker the NAND will break.
I was under the impression that had been solved by third parties? Or is chip cloning not enough?
Unbelievable ..
It's not "inexplicable".
DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.
It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that's fine. But it's definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.
In my entirely anecdotal experience, MacOS is significantly better at RAM management than Windows. But it's still a $1,600 USD computer, and 16GB of RAM costs nearly nothing, it's just classic Apple greed.
I'm also under the impression the M powered books are much better at thermo management and battery usage over PC versions?
ARM chips are generally better at that.
Really hoping Snapdragon Oryon can be the same boon for Windows/Linux that Apple's M CPUs were for Mac
How did you measure this?
The main metric has been with Adobe apps. 2017 Macs with 8GB of RAM are still able to run Premiere and a few others things smoothly simultaneously. Windows machines with the same config were crashing constantly and kept going.
But I'm still not defending Apple here. It's been 6 years, and their base level MacBook still ships with the same amount of RAM.
It’s not anecdotal in the least. It’s been widely tested. There’s a reason an M1 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM can load and fully support over 100 tracks in Logic Pro. The previous Intel machines would buckle with just a few.
ARM is not comparable to x86-64. The former is totally unified, the latter totally modular.
I can load even more tracks with 0 RAM on Windows.
Just one big page file.
8GB for this price in 2023 is a SCAM. All Apple devices are a SCAM. Many pay small fortunes for luxurious devices full of spyware and which they have absolutely no control over. It's insane. They like to be chained in their golden shackles.
That’s too simplistic. For example, the entry level M1 MacBook Air is hands down one of the best value laptops. It’s very hard to find anything nearly as good for the price.
On the high end, yeah you can save $250-400 buying a similarly specced HP Envy or Acer Swift or something. These are totally respectable with more ports, but they have 2/3rd the battery life, worse displays, and tons of bloatware. Does that make them “not a scam”?
(I’m actually not sure what “spyware” you’re referring to, especially compared to Windows and Chromebooks.)
When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).
That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.
They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad
Is that important for a professional laptop? I mean, if you use it for work every day, you probably want a screen that is at least 27 inches, preferably two. It should be capable of adjusting its height for better ergonomics.
If you work in something that involves graphic design or imaging absolutely
One of the features they highlighted is is the built in display has very similar specs to their 6K 32" professional display (which, by the way, costs more than this laptop). So when you're not working at your desk you'll still have a great display (and why are you buying a laptop unless you occasionally work away from your desk?)
Both have a peak brightness is 1600 nits (a Dell XPS will only do ~600 nits and that's brighter than most laptops).
Both have 100% P3 color gamut (Dell XPS only gets to 90% - so it just can't display some standard colors)
even though it's an LCD, black levels are better than a lot of OLED laptops
contrast is also excellent
120hz refresh rate, which is better than their desktop display (that only runs at 60Hz. Same as the Dell XPS)
245 dpi (again, slightly better than 218 dpi on the desktop display, although you sit further away from a desktop... Dell XPS is 169 dpi)
I love Dell displays, I've got two on my desk. But even the Dell displays that cost thousands of dollars are not as good as Apple displays.
I agree with that. I think there are cheaper laptops, where you can spend less to get less. Not everyone needs a metal body and all day battery life.
The bloatware really isn't an arguement because it takes all of 30 seconds to uninstall it all with a script that you get off GitHub. Yeah it's annoying and it shouldn't be there but it's not exactly going to alter my purchase decision.
The M1's ok value for money, but the problem is invariably you'll want to do more and more complex things over the lifetime of the device, (if only because basic software has become more demanding), while it might be fine at first it tends to get in the way 4 or 5 years down the line. You can pay ever so slightly more money and future proof your device.
But I suppose if you're buying Apple you're probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don't understand why because it's not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it's got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
But I suppose if you're buying Apple you're probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don't understand why because it's not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it's got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
I think you're basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn't ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.
Meanwhile, I've been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.
And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that's insane). It's a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.
It's a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later.
I think you missed my point.
You want to keep laptops for ages regardless of what OS it was it runs (really not sure how that would have any bearing on spec fall off), but the MacBook M1 is only competitive now, but it won't be competitive in 4 to 5 years. The chip is good for its power consumption but it isn't a particularly high performance chip in terms of raw numbers. But the laptop costs as if it is a high performance chip.
There's no such thing as a Windows laptop you just buy a laptop and that's the specs you get so not quite sure what you're comparing the MacBook too.
I 'm not refering to Windows or ChromeOS ( that are full of spyware too ) . The first generation of Mac M1 had a reasonably more "accessible" price precisely to encourage users to migrate to ARM technology and consequently also encourage developers to port their software, and not because Apple was generous. Far from it.Everything Apple does in the short or long term is to benefit itself.
And not to mention that it is known that Apple limits both hardware and software on its products to force consumers to pay the "Apple Idiot Tax". There is no freedom whatsoever in these products, true gilded cages. Thank you, but I don't need it. Software and hardware freedom are more important.
I didn’t claim that Apple is doing anything to be “generous”. That seems like it’s moving the goal posts. Say, are other PC manufacturers doing things out of generosity? Which ones?
Even the M2 and M3 Macs are a good value if you want the things they’re good at. For just a few hundred more, no other machine has the thermal management or battery life. Very few have the same build quality or displays. If you’re using it for real professional work, even just hours of typing and reading, paying a few extra hundred over the course of years for these features is hardly a “scam”.
You didn’t elaborate on your “spyware” claim. Was that a lie? And now you claim it’s “known” that Apple limits hardware and software. Can you elaborate?
MacBooks do have excellent screens, software integration and everything else, that's a fact and I don't take that away from Apple. But the problem is that it's not worth paying for this in exchange for a system that is completely linked to your Apple ID, tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides. Privacy and freedom are worth more. If you can't check the source code you can't trust what Apple says, they can lie for their own interests. Have you ever read Apple's privacy policy regarding Apple ID, for example? If not, I recommend it.
I think that decision makes sense.
What you said got me worried, so I looked into the claim that it is "tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides". That's a convincing concern, and you've changed my mind on this. I don't see any evidence that they're doing anything close to this level of tracking — the main thing they seem to track is your Mac App Store usage — but they may have the potential to do so in the enshittified future. That gives me pause.
Apple has repeatedly stressed that they're privacy focused in the past, while a major departure from that could happen absolutely it feels a bit like borrowing trouble to assume it will happen soon. Google is an advertising company first, microsoft is just a mess, but Apple is a luxury hardware producer, they have minimal reason to damange their reputation in a way that would make those sorts of consumers upset.
Please note that I'm not saying it's impossible just unlikely in the near future
That assessment sounds right. I think we just need to stay vigilant as consumers. We have defeasible reason to trust Apple right now. But we’ve seen, especially recently, what happens when we let corporations take advantage of that hard earned trust for short term gain.
I bought a PC the other day and it only had 6 gigabytes of RAM which is pathetic for what I paid for it but there you go. The thing is for a fraction of the price Apple are asking to upgrade it to 16, I upgraded it to 32 gig.
I honestly think I could upgrade it to 64 and still come in under the Apple price. They're charging something like a 300% markup on commercially available RAM, it's ridiculous.
On storage, the markup is about 2000%.
And on RAM if we compare to DDR5 (not totally fair because of how Apple's unified memory works), it's about 800% marked up.
All Apple devices are a SCAM.
True. Sometimes I look the specs and prices of Apple devices while visiting large electronic stores. I don't understand how people who aren't rich can rationalize buying an Apple device. While it's true that Windows has become increasingly plagued by invasive ads recently, and macOS seems like the only alternative for many, this issue is relatively recent. On the other hand, MacBooks have been overpriced for years.
Seems fair, you pay 1000 for the logo and 600 for the hardware.
It's a very nice logo. And it lights up. Hard to argue with their pricing, really.
It actually doesn't light up anymore...
For $375 you can get an iFlashlight to point at the logo
Ordered the iFleshlight. Looking forward to seeing the jealous looks I get at the coffee shop.
It's actually just the display backlight which is why I had to cover it with aluminium tape instead of just disconnecting the wire. Not only don't I want an ad on my computer I especially don't want an illuminated one.
Apple laptops and gaming headphones, keeping it classy
For the last time, PC means personal computer, not windows computer, if a mac isn't a personal computer then what is it?
I agree with you, but you know how Apple operates, slapping a shiny new name on an already existing concept and making it sound premium.
I think the history is such that a "PC" is a computer compatible with the "IBM PC" which Macs were historically not and modern ones aren't either.
But I still like "Windows computer", we can abbreviate that to "WC".
Another complication was that DOS-using machines weren't always running Windows at one point in time.
True by the letter but not really by practice. PC is synonymous with a computer running Windows, or Linux at a push. I don't know whether that's because of Microsoft's early market dominance or because Apple enjoys marketing itself as a totally different entity, or some combination of the two. But yeah, usage determines meaning more than what the individual words mean in a more literal sense.
It's funny to me becouse these days with all the remote software reinstallation and asking why you want to close one drive and things, windows isn't exactly very personal either
Originally "PC" was IBMPC or PC Compatible (as in compatible with IBM without using their trademark). An IBMPC could have run DOS, Windows or even OS/2
poop. it's poop.
I doubt it’s the last time.
also while “PC” means personal computer, it was a very specific brand name by IBM, not a general purpose term. their computers (and clones later) became synonymous with x86-windows machines.
Even apple themselves have always distanced themselves from the term (I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC…).
Instead I feel it's the opposite because that memory is shared with the GPU. So if you're gaming even with some old game, it's like having 4gb for the system and 4gb to the GPU. They might claim that their scheduler is magic and can predict memory usage with perfect accuracy but still, it would be like 6+2 GB. If a game has heavy textures they will steal memory from the system. Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That's another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.
Their pricing for the ram is ridiculous, they're charging $300 for just 8gb of additional memory! We're not in the 2010s anymore!
The most expensive 8GB DDR5 stick I can find on Amazon is about us$35. There are 64GB sets that are under us$200!
Apple should be ashamed.
Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That's another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.
Or five times that amount if you're running Chrome
Apple exec doesn't actually understand how computers work and think that that actually might be a reasonable arguement.
It doesn't matter how good your processor is if you can only bank 8 GB of something into memory it's going to be slow. The only way an 8 GB device would beat a 16 GB device would be if the 16 GB device had the world's slowest processor. Like something from 2005. Taking stuff out of RAM is the single slowest operation you can perform other than loading from a hard drive.
Apple exec doesn't actually understand how computers work and think that that actually might be a reasonable arguement
I think a lot of Apple users fit this bill too so it doesn't matte much if this is the messaging, a fair amount of people will believe it.
Tell that to Google Chrome
It makes it not feel like a premium device
Because it's not
Honestly I was considering getting one because I could use a nice laptop to do stuff on but 8GB is inexcusably bad so yeah pass
I felt getting ripped off by just reading the article. My recent PC build has 32 GB, is cheaper and the upgrade to 64 GB (meaning additional pair of 16 GB) only costs me around 100 Euros. It's nice that their devices are probably more effective and need less RAM, which the iPhones proved to be correct. But that does not mean the cost of the additional RAM units are more expensive. Apple chose to make them expensive.
Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn't.
Even if macOS was more lightweight than Windows - which might well be true will all the bs processes running in Windows 11 especially - third party multiplatform apps will use similar amounts of memory no matter the platform they run on. Even for simple use cases, 8 GB is on the limit (though it'll likely still be fine) as Electron apps tend to eat RAM for breakfast. Love it or hate it Apple, people often (need to) use these memory-hogging apps like Teams or even Spotify, they are not native Swift apps.
I love my M1 Max MacBook Pro, but fuck right off with that bullshit, it's straight up lying.
Pied Piper middle out compression for your RAM
But seriously it's so ridiculous especially since he said it in an interview with a machine learning guy. Exactly the type of guy who needs a lot of RAM for his own processes working on his own data using his own programs. Where the OS has no control over precision, access patterns or the data streaming architecture.
Apple executives haven't actually been computed guys for years now. They're all sales and have no idea how computers work. They constantly saying stupid things that make very little sense, but no one ever calls them on it because Apple.
Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn’t.
As a Mac programmer I can give you a real answer... there are three major differences... but before I go into those, almost all integers in native Mac apps are 64 bit. 128 bit is probably more common than 32.
First of all Mac software generally doesn't use garbage collection. It uses "Automatic Reference Counting" which is far more efficient. Back when computers had kilobytes of RAM, reference counting was the standard with programmer painstakingly writing code to clear things from memory the moment it wasn't needed anymore. The automatic version of that is the same, except the compiler writes the code for you... and it tends to do an even better job than a human, since it doesn't get sloppy.
Garbage collection, the norm on modern Windows and Linux code, frankly sucks. Code that, for example, reads a bunch of files on disk might store all of those files in RAM for for ten seconds even if it only needs one of them in RAM at a time. That burn be 20GB of memory and push all of your other apps out into swap. Yuck.
Second, swap, while it's used less (due to reference counting), still isn't a "last resort" on Macs. Rather it's a best practice to use swap deliberately for memory that you know doesn't need to be super fast. A toolbar icon for example... you map the file into swap and then allow the kernel to decide if it should be copied into RAM or not. Chances are the toolbar doesn't change for minutes at a time or it might not even be visible on the screen at all - so even if you have several gigabytes of RAM available there's a good chance the kernel will kick that icon out of RAM.
And before you say "toolbar icons are tiny" - they're not really. The tiny favicon for beehaw is 49kb as a compressed png... but to draw it quickly you might store it uncompressed in RAM. It's 192px square and 32 bit color so 192 x 192 x 32 = 1.1MB of RAM for just one favicon. Multiply that by enough browser tabs and... Ouch. Which is why Mac software would commonly have the favicon as a png on disk, map the file into swap, and decompress the png every time it needs to be drawn (the window manager will keep a cache of the window in GPU memory anyway, so it won't be redrawn often).
Third, modern Macs have really fast flash memory for swap. So fast it's hard to actually measure it, talking single digit microseconds, which means you can read several thousand files off disk in the time it takes the LCD to refresh. If an app needs to read a hundred images off swap in order to draw to the screen... the user is not going to notice. It will be just as fast as if those images were in RAM.
Sure, we all run a few apps that are poorly written - e.g. Microsoft Teams - but that doesn't matter if all your other software is efficient. Teams uses, what, 2GB? There will be plenty left for everything else.
Of course, some people need more than 8GB. But Apple does sell laptops with up to 128GB of RAM for those users.
Almost all programs use both 32bit and 64bit integers, sometimes even smaller ones, if possible. Being memory efficient is critical for performance, as L1 caches are still very small.
Garbage collection is a feature of programming languages, not an OS. Almost all native linux software is written in systems programming languages like C, Rust or C++, none of which have a garbage collector.
Swap is used the same way on both linux and windows, but kicking toolbar items out of ram is not actually a thing. It needs to be drawn to the screen every frame, so it (or a pixel buffer for the entire toolbar) will kick around in VRAM at the very least. A transfer from disk to VRAM can take hundreds of milliseconds, which would limit you to like 5 fps, no one retransfers images like that every frame.
Also your icon is 1.1Mbit not 1.1MB
I have a gentoo install that uses 50MB of ram for everything including its GUI. A webbrowser will still eat up gigabytes of ram, the OS has literally no say in this.
My 32/16 bit integer example was just that: an example where one was half the size as the other. Take 128/64 or whatever, doesn't matter as it doesn't work like that (which was my point).
Software written in non-GC based languages runs on other operating systems as well.
I used MS Teams as an example, but it's hardly an exception when it comes to Electron/WebView/CEF apps. You have Spotify running, maybe a password manager (even 1Password uses Electron for its GUI nowadays), and don't forget about all the web apps you have open in the browser, like maybe GMail and some Google Docs spreadsheet.
And sure, Macs have fast flash memory, but so do PC notebooks in this price range. A 990 Pro also doesn't set you back $400 per terabyte, but more like ... $80, if even that. A fifth. Not sure where you got that they are so fast it's hard to measure.
There are tests out there that clearly show why 8 GB are a complete joke on a $1600 machine.
So no, I still don't buy it. I use a desktop Windows/Linux machine and a MacBook Pro (M1 Max) and the same workflows tend to use very similar amounts of memory (what a surprise /s).
16 gb optiplexes on sale for 85 dollars on eBay. Dont come with windows, but neither do macs :P
Install Linux and this is the way.
Yeah yeah, I do think even like windows 11 these days. I'm a debian with KDE guy.
I looked at a few Lenovo and MS laptops to see what they are charging to jumps from 8 to 16 GB.
They are very close to what Apple charges.
So, they are ALL ripping us off!
I just got a laptop with 64GB of DDR5 ram for $870 or so from HP, so I wouldn't take these specific examples you found as gospel.
I switched back to Apple recently, but used to sell them.
1 week before Bootcamp was released, I was selling Apple gear, and I showed a sales manager who was visiting how we got Windows running on the new Intel Mac Mini, and explained how this was great, because it was a great transition technology
In front of customers, as I was explaining, he basically called me an idiot, and said "why would anyone want to run windows on a mac".
A week or so later, bootcamp was released, and he was back.. He was now using the arguments I made a week early as a template for bragging about bootcamp to us and explaining the benefits. No apologies for any of the previous discussion.
They make decent products otherwise, and management doesn't even need to act like wankers or be deceptive either
I only now using Apple again because Microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge with windows (literally, when they started hijacking my chrome tabs EVERY bootup, and opening Edge automatically), and the fact my Xbox Series X wouldn't even play remote on Windows (their own OS)
Why did you decide to go back to Apple instead of giving Linux a try? It's free so it literally would have cost nothing to try, and you could keep your other OS(s).
I used to use Linux exclusively (I was actually the top poster on a few major Linux news sites, and my linux project once got published in LinuxWorld Magazine).
Whilst it has certainly gotten better, I still feel some parts of linux need refining. Also, one thing both Microsoft and Apple do have is available integration of mobile apps.. I thought Apple could do both via Parallels (android in windows, iPhone in MacOS), but turns out Android in Windows on parallels won't work.
For the type of development i do, windows and macos are still the best options unfortunately too. If Linux had more seamless mobile app integration, I probably would have highly considered it to be honest
By mobile app integration, do you mean a connection between your mobile phone and your computer? KDE Connect is pretty good from my experience. It has more features than the Windows alternative at least (and I think there's even a Windows version oddly enough).
If you mean running a mobile app in the system, I have no experience with that.
Running mobile apps on computer. It's really the one use case Apple does extremely well, and it's a pity because Linux could actually do it well if distros sorted themselves out
Good grief, I had a lady behind the counter try to berate me onto the store's rewards card and she wasn't as pushy as this comment.
It's pushy to ask why someone made a large purchase when there's a free alternative they might not have tried that they may or may not like better? Unlike buying an Apple product, it takes little effort and no cost to just boot up Linux and give it a shot. Some people won't like it and that's fine. It'd be pushy to say you will like it better, which is not what I said.
Lol. My personal iMac has 32GB, and I'm happy with it. My POS work MBP has only 8GB, and I wanna frisbee the fucken thing out the window pretty much every day.
My research disproves this clown's hypothesis.
If I wasn't so broke, my 8GB MBP would enter the frisbee competition...
Emulators disagree.
My 16GB XPS running Linux almost fills up entirely when running several docker containers, IDEA, Firefox, Teams, Postman and a few other, smaller apps, but it fits still, and I can work with it (tho I can't wait to get my 32GB framework laptop)
Now gimme a 8GB MBP and I'll show you that I wouldn't get shit done on that configuration. And at 1600 it's just crazy.
11 gigabytes of that is probably being used up by Teams, it's a memory hog.
Teams it's the absolute worst and it's the only app that can sometimes crash my Linux machine
It crashes on Apple too.
It sucks that better alternatives like slack went from the big player to a small player only because of Microsofts power over businesses. If teams would win because it was actually a better product I'd be fine with that. But teams is just a pile of shit we are forced to use.
The best part is people complaining to them for pointing out that 8gb is laughable little. Ah, the sweet fanboys.
Alright! Opens 20 Electron apps on my 32GB mac
16gb is always better, and I usually recommend it to people looking to buy a Mac, but they aren’t wrong about Macs handling RAM more efficiently. They still sound arrogant af when using that as their excuse, though.
they aren’t wrong about Macs handling RAM more efficiently.
More efficiently than what other system? How did you come to that conclusion? If you open tabs in your browser, do you think MacOS will allow you to open more tabs than other operating systems?
Just from my observations from owning a 2015 MBP with 8GB of memory, it is easy to be fooled into thinking memory management is much better on macOS because you can effectively have more open than you would on an equivalent Windows laptop with 8GB memory.
From what I understand though, the SSD is used to compensate as swap a lot more than Windows, and I believe this is causing a lot of ewaste with the M1 Macs in particular being effectively binned because the SSDs are worn out on them from swapping and they're soldered.
But it's $1600 Apple. Not the cheapest Mac book air.
Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM(c)(tm)!
Scammers!
I still hate that they killed the mid-range model. Your option is the lower end MacBook Air with no fan, or the higher-end MacBook Pro. There is no in between.
I absolutely love the snappiness of the m1 chip in my current 2020 MBP, and how much more efficient ARM is compared to x86, but it seems really hard to justify going an extra 300$ in the future.
I really just wish they would bring back the original MacBook (with no suffixes at the end)
I kind of want to go for the framework laptop, but I still do like ARM and given I want to do more stuff around machine learning in the future, which is already kind of difficult to run large language models with only 8 gigabytes of RAM, it at least kind of runs with ARM. On my basement PC, It will barely do anything
There are some external GPUs that can be USB-attached. Dunno about for the Mac. Latency hit, but probably not as significant for current LLM use than games, as you don't have a lot of data being pushed over the bus once the model is up.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
::: spoiler Click here to see the summary
With the launch of Apple's M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that's shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator.
In a show of Apple's typical modesty, the tech giant's veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine learning engineer and content creator Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal to 16GB on a PC – so we therefore ought to be happy with it.
With that said, macOS does make use of several tricks to optimize memory utilization, including caching as much data as it can in free RAM to avoid running to and from slower storage for stuff (there's no point in having unused physical RAM in a machine) and compressing information in memory, all of which other operating systems, including Windows and Linux, do too in their own ways.
Given a fast enough SSD, the degradation in performance associated with running low on RAM can be hidden to a degree, though it does come at the expense of additional wear on the NAND flash modules.
We'd hate to say that Apple has designed its computers so that they perform stunningly in the shop for a few minutes, and work differently after a few months at home or in the office.
His comment is also somewhat ironic in that much of the focus of YilYi's interview with Borchers centered around the use of Apple Silicon in machine-learning development, which you don't do in a store.
Saved 71% of original text.
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Macrumors just released an article talking about how the 8gb is a bottleneck in the new M3 models lol
Even if it was like 16GB on a PC still not worth $1.6k
Especially when 16g is something like $50.
At consumer prices. There's no way Apple doesn't pay wholesale rates for memory.
they have the memory controllers built into their processors now. So adding memory is even cheaper, it just takes the modules themselves
With Apple's new iBits™ the 0s are so much rounder and the 1s are so smooth and shiny that they're worth at least twice as much as regular bits.
I can’t wait for my iBits. Also the fact that iBytes have ten iBits is revolutionary. 25% more computing power in each iByte!
It’s actually about the bandwidth: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/11/how-unified-memory-blows-the-socs-off-the-m1-macs/
The bandwidth provided by unified memory is just unparalleled because of the tightly integrated components found on Apple Silicon.
"Unparalleled", huh? So I'm sure gamers have fully embraced Apple hardware because it's objectively better, correct? You surely have links to benchmarks of Apple devices beating the pants off PCs... Right??
Just upgrade the RAM yourself.
Oh wait, you can't because it's 2023 and it's become inexplicably acceptable to solder it to the motherboard.
Not even soldered, it's part of the CPU/GPU die now.
Ah yes, it's the SSD that's soldered.
Just 300 of your English pounds to upgrade from 512GB to 1TB.
Meanwhile, a 2TB drive at PS5 speeds is under £100.
For unupgradable kit, the pricing is grotesque.
Apple has put a lot of effort into (successfully) creating a customer-base that thinks overpriced goods and different colored texts make them in a special club, I'm not surprised that an exec thought this excuse would fly
It's a bit more complex than that (and you probably know it).
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board. Their UX is excellent. Their support is good. Things work well, applications are easy to use and pretty stable and well built. And if they violate your privacy like the others, at least they don't make the open-bar sale of your data their fucking business model (wink wink Google).
Of course you there's a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there's that one thing that doesn't work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It's a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad... I just don't have time to "manage" my hardware anymore. Nor the urge to do it. I need things to work out of the box in a predictable way. I don't want a digital mental load. Just a simple UX, consistency across my devices and good apps (and no Google, fuck Google). Something I wouldn't have with an Android + PC setup. :)
The whole "special club" argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it. Neither the Apple nor the Google/Microsoft environments are satisfactory. Not even speaking of Linux and FOSS. We must aim higher.
I'm gonna have to argue against a few of these points:
Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.
Things work...okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that's because you're probably installing it with Homebrew, but that's the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so "bundled" together by default.
I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.
I don't know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore "PC/Linux user," or what this means to you. I'm assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don't like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I'd immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It's the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that's not for you, totally fine.
It's less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of "green bubble discrimination." It's a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they're status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they'll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, "yeah, but that's because of people, not because of Mac." But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn't a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn't know it actively profits from these perceptions.
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
You are right and make good points. But you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don't have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I'll probably just reinstall Mint.)
Wow. Talk about coincidences...
I'm a dumbass and if I can do it anyone can. But, yes, technology is a daunting thing to most people. Intuition and experience go far. That said, it's literally easier today than it ever has been. You put in the installation usb, click next a whole bunch, reboot, and you have a working machine. Is it sometimes more complicated than that and you have to do BIOS/UEFI bullshit? Sure, but past that hurdle it's smooth sailing.
Ah, the joys of rolling release distros. Endeavor has been stable for me so far. I'm running it on an X1 Thinkpad. Generally works more reliably than my own vanilla arch installs and more low profile tiling window managers. I've found myself sticking to KDE Plasma for a DE because it's so consistent and has enough features to keep me happy without having to spend all my time fine tuning my own UX, which I just don't care about. My realization has been that arch distros are best suited for machines running integrated graphics and popular DEs, rather than ones with separate cards and more niche or highly customizable DEs. Prevents you from having to futs about with things like Optimus, with graphics drivers being the primary cause of headaches for that distro, per my experience. That said, I used to run an old Acer laptop with arch and a tiling window manager called qtile. Qtile was great, but every other update completely altered the logic and structure of how it read the config file for it, so the damn thing broke constantly. I'm like...just decide how you want the config to look and keep that. Or at least allow for backwards compatibility. But they didn't.
Yea sorry but I disagree with the vast majority of things you said. Consistent, coherent, and well thought out experiences are pretty par for the course at this point, regardless of what flagship phone company you're buying from. The UX is great for people who grow up with the UX, just like android UX is great for people who grow up with it. Android users who switch to Apple generally think Apple's UX is dogshit, and vice versa. The UX argument is trash and the reality of it is that people just think whatever UX they're used to is the more intuitive one. Support is pretty much the same in my experience between the two, and I have an android personal phone and an apple work phone. The major difference is the image that Apple support airs is better. The vast majority of popular Android applications are just as stable and usable as Apple apps, and the ones that aren't are often niche enough that similar apps aren't even on the apple appstore. So it's a question of basically the same service for most apps, and then either no service or degraded service for lesser apps.
The one thing they have over android is the security argument, which is fair to an extent, but not this bulwark that a lot of people like to pretend it is. The Fappening, for example, still got plenty of explicit images from Apple phones.
All in all, apple is an advertising company first, and a tech company second, with admittedly improved security, but also admittedly security that isn't good enough to justify the price hike.
I mean, the NAND chips can be replaced fairly effectively if you know what you’re doing
Actually no. There’s some pairing trickery going on on the SoC level, so if you change the NAND chips by higher capacity ones without apple’s special sauce, you’ll just get an unbootsble system
And paging in & out of RAM frequently is probably one of the quickest ways to wear out the NAND.
Put it all together and you have a system that breaks itself and can't be repaired. The less RAM you buy the quicker the NAND will break.
I was under the impression that had been solved by third parties? Or is chip cloning not enough?
Unbelievable ..
It's not "inexplicable".
DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.
It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that's fine. But it's definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.
In my entirely anecdotal experience, MacOS is significantly better at RAM management than Windows. But it's still a $1,600 USD computer, and 16GB of RAM costs nearly nothing, it's just classic Apple greed.
I'm also under the impression the M powered books are much better at thermo management and battery usage over PC versions?
ARM chips are generally better at that.
Really hoping Snapdragon Oryon can be the same boon for Windows/Linux that Apple's M CPUs were for Mac
How did you measure this?
The main metric has been with Adobe apps. 2017 Macs with 8GB of RAM are still able to run Premiere and a few others things smoothly simultaneously. Windows machines with the same config were crashing constantly and kept going.
But I'm still not defending Apple here. It's been 6 years, and their base level MacBook still ships with the same amount of RAM.
It’s not anecdotal in the least. It’s been widely tested. There’s a reason an M1 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM can load and fully support over 100 tracks in Logic Pro. The previous Intel machines would buckle with just a few.
ARM is not comparable to x86-64. The former is totally unified, the latter totally modular.
I can load even more tracks with 0 RAM on Windows.
Just one big page file.
8GB for this price in 2023 is a SCAM. All Apple devices are a SCAM. Many pay small fortunes for luxurious devices full of spyware and which they have absolutely no control over. It's insane. They like to be chained in their golden shackles.
That’s too simplistic. For example, the entry level M1 MacBook Air is hands down one of the best value laptops. It’s very hard to find anything nearly as good for the price.
On the high end, yeah you can save $250-400 buying a similarly specced HP Envy or Acer Swift or something. These are totally respectable with more ports, but they have 2/3rd the battery life, worse displays, and tons of bloatware. Does that make them “not a scam”?
(I’m actually not sure what “spyware” you’re referring to, especially compared to Windows and Chromebooks.)
When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).
That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.
Is that important for a professional laptop? I mean, if you use it for work every day, you probably want a screen that is at least 27 inches, preferably two. It should be capable of adjusting its height for better ergonomics.
If you work in something that involves graphic design or imaging absolutely
One of the features they highlighted is is the built in display has very similar specs to their 6K 32" professional display (which, by the way, costs more than this laptop). So when you're not working at your desk you'll still have a great display (and why are you buying a laptop unless you occasionally work away from your desk?)
I love Dell displays, I've got two on my desk. But even the Dell displays that cost thousands of dollars are not as good as Apple displays.
I agree with that. I think there are cheaper laptops, where you can spend less to get less. Not everyone needs a metal body and all day battery life.
The bloatware really isn't an arguement because it takes all of 30 seconds to uninstall it all with a script that you get off GitHub. Yeah it's annoying and it shouldn't be there but it's not exactly going to alter my purchase decision.
The M1's ok value for money, but the problem is invariably you'll want to do more and more complex things over the lifetime of the device, (if only because basic software has become more demanding), while it might be fine at first it tends to get in the way 4 or 5 years down the line. You can pay ever so slightly more money and future proof your device.
But I suppose if you're buying Apple you're probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don't understand why because it's not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it's got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
I think you're basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn't ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.
Meanwhile, I've been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.
And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that's insane). It's a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.
I think you missed my point.
You want to keep laptops for ages regardless of what OS it was it runs (really not sure how that would have any bearing on spec fall off), but the MacBook M1 is only competitive now, but it won't be competitive in 4 to 5 years. The chip is good for its power consumption but it isn't a particularly high performance chip in terms of raw numbers. But the laptop costs as if it is a high performance chip.
There's no such thing as a Windows laptop you just buy a laptop and that's the specs you get so not quite sure what you're comparing the MacBook too.
I 'm not refering to Windows or ChromeOS ( that are full of spyware too ) . The first generation of Mac M1 had a reasonably more "accessible" price precisely to encourage users to migrate to ARM technology and consequently also encourage developers to port their software, and not because Apple was generous. Far from it.Everything Apple does in the short or long term is to benefit itself.
And not to mention that it is known that Apple limits both hardware and software on its products to force consumers to pay the "Apple Idiot Tax". There is no freedom whatsoever in these products, true gilded cages. Thank you, but I don't need it. Software and hardware freedom are more important.
I didn’t claim that Apple is doing anything to be “generous”. That seems like it’s moving the goal posts. Say, are other PC manufacturers doing things out of generosity? Which ones?
Even the M2 and M3 Macs are a good value if you want the things they’re good at. For just a few hundred more, no other machine has the thermal management or battery life. Very few have the same build quality or displays. If you’re using it for real professional work, even just hours of typing and reading, paying a few extra hundred over the course of years for these features is hardly a “scam”.
You didn’t elaborate on your “spyware” claim. Was that a lie? And now you claim it’s “known” that Apple limits hardware and software. Can you elaborate?
MacBooks do have excellent screens, software integration and everything else, that's a fact and I don't take that away from Apple. But the problem is that it's not worth paying for this in exchange for a system that is completely linked to your Apple ID, tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides. Privacy and freedom are worth more. If you can't check the source code you can't trust what Apple says, they can lie for their own interests. Have you ever read Apple's privacy policy regarding Apple ID, for example? If not, I recommend it.
I think that decision makes sense.
What you said got me worried, so I looked into the claim that it is "tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides". That's a convincing concern, and you've changed my mind on this. I don't see any evidence that they're doing anything close to this level of tracking — the main thing they seem to track is your Mac App Store usage — but they may have the potential to do so in the enshittified future. That gives me pause.
Apple has repeatedly stressed that they're privacy focused in the past, while a major departure from that could happen absolutely it feels a bit like borrowing trouble to assume it will happen soon. Google is an advertising company first, microsoft is just a mess, but Apple is a luxury hardware producer, they have minimal reason to damange their reputation in a way that would make those sorts of consumers upset.
Please note that I'm not saying it's impossible just unlikely in the near future
That assessment sounds right. I think we just need to stay vigilant as consumers. We have defeasible reason to trust Apple right now. But we’ve seen, especially recently, what happens when we let corporations take advantage of that hard earned trust for short term gain.
I bought a PC the other day and it only had 6 gigabytes of RAM which is pathetic for what I paid for it but there you go. The thing is for a fraction of the price Apple are asking to upgrade it to 16, I upgraded it to 32 gig.
I honestly think I could upgrade it to 64 and still come in under the Apple price. They're charging something like a 300% markup on commercially available RAM, it's ridiculous.
On storage, the markup is about 2000%.
And on RAM if we compare to DDR5 (not totally fair because of how Apple's unified memory works), it's about 800% marked up.
True. Sometimes I look the specs and prices of Apple devices while visiting large electronic stores. I don't understand how people who aren't rich can rationalize buying an Apple device. While it's true that Windows has become increasingly plagued by invasive ads recently, and macOS seems like the only alternative for many, this issue is relatively recent. On the other hand, MacBooks have been overpriced for years.
Pairing a chip this capable with just 8GB of shared memory is also just a waste of good silicon. Which makes the price all the more insulting to me.
Like, this is the equivalent of Usain Bolt losing one of his legs
Seems fair, you pay 1000 for the logo and 600 for the hardware.
It's a very nice logo. And it lights up. Hard to argue with their pricing, really.
It actually doesn't light up anymore...
For $375 you can get an iFlashlight to point at the logo
Ordered the iFleshlight. Looking forward to seeing the jealous looks I get at the coffee shop.
It's actually just the display backlight which is why I had to cover it with aluminium tape instead of just disconnecting the wire. Not only don't I want an ad on my computer I especially don't want an illuminated one.
Apple laptops and gaming headphones, keeping it classy
For the last time, PC means personal computer, not windows computer, if a mac isn't a personal computer then what is it?
I agree with you, but you know how Apple operates, slapping a shiny new name on an already existing concept and making it sound premium.
I think the history is such that a "PC" is a computer compatible with the "IBM PC" which Macs were historically not and modern ones aren't either.
But I still like "Windows computer", we can abbreviate that to "WC".
Another complication was that DOS-using machines weren't always running Windows at one point in time.
True by the letter but not really by practice. PC is synonymous with a computer running Windows, or Linux at a push. I don't know whether that's because of Microsoft's early market dominance or because Apple enjoys marketing itself as a totally different entity, or some combination of the two. But yeah, usage determines meaning more than what the individual words mean in a more literal sense.
It's funny to me becouse these days with all the remote software reinstallation and asking why you want to close one drive and things, windows isn't exactly very personal either
Originally "PC" was IBMPC or PC Compatible (as in compatible with IBM without using their trademark). An IBMPC could have run DOS, Windows or even OS/2
poop. it's poop.
I doubt it’s the last time. also while “PC” means personal computer, it was a very specific brand name by IBM, not a general purpose term. their computers (and clones later) became synonymous with x86-windows machines.
Even apple themselves have always distanced themselves from the term (I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC…).
Instead I feel it's the opposite because that memory is shared with the GPU. So if you're gaming even with some old game, it's like having 4gb for the system and 4gb to the GPU. They might claim that their scheduler is magic and can predict memory usage with perfect accuracy but still, it would be like 6+2 GB. If a game has heavy textures they will steal memory from the system. Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That's another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.
Their pricing for the ram is ridiculous, they're charging $300 for just 8gb of additional memory! We're not in the 2010s anymore!
The most expensive 8GB DDR5 stick I can find on Amazon is about us$35. There are 64GB sets that are under us$200!
Apple should be ashamed.
Or five times that amount if you're running Chrome
Apple exec doesn't actually understand how computers work and think that that actually might be a reasonable arguement.
It doesn't matter how good your processor is if you can only bank 8 GB of something into memory it's going to be slow. The only way an 8 GB device would beat a 16 GB device would be if the 16 GB device had the world's slowest processor. Like something from 2005. Taking stuff out of RAM is the single slowest operation you can perform other than loading from a hard drive.
I think a lot of Apple users fit this bill too so it doesn't matte much if this is the messaging, a fair amount of people will believe it.
Tell that to Google Chrome
It makes it not feel like a premium device
Because it's not
Honestly I was considering getting one because I could use a nice laptop to do stuff on but 8GB is inexcusably bad so yeah pass
I felt getting ripped off by just reading the article. My recent PC build has 32 GB, is cheaper and the upgrade to 64 GB (meaning additional pair of 16 GB) only costs me around 100 Euros. It's nice that their devices are probably more effective and need less RAM, which the iPhones proved to be correct. But that does not mean the cost of the additional RAM units are more expensive. Apple chose to make them expensive.
Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn't.
Even if macOS was more lightweight than Windows - which might well be true will all the bs processes running in Windows 11 especially - third party multiplatform apps will use similar amounts of memory no matter the platform they run on. Even for simple use cases, 8 GB is on the limit (though it'll likely still be fine) as Electron apps tend to eat RAM for breakfast. Love it or hate it Apple, people often (need to) use these memory-hogging apps like Teams or even Spotify, they are not native Swift apps.
I love my M1 Max MacBook Pro, but fuck right off with that bullshit, it's straight up lying.
Pied Piper middle out compression for your RAM
But seriously it's so ridiculous especially since he said it in an interview with a machine learning guy. Exactly the type of guy who needs a lot of RAM for his own processes working on his own data using his own programs. Where the OS has no control over precision, access patterns or the data streaming architecture.
Apple executives haven't actually been computed guys for years now. They're all sales and have no idea how computers work. They constantly saying stupid things that make very little sense, but no one ever calls them on it because Apple.
As a Mac programmer I can give you a real answer... there are three major differences... but before I go into those, almost all integers in native Mac apps are 64 bit. 128 bit is probably more common than 32.
First of all Mac software generally doesn't use garbage collection. It uses "Automatic Reference Counting" which is far more efficient. Back when computers had kilobytes of RAM, reference counting was the standard with programmer painstakingly writing code to clear things from memory the moment it wasn't needed anymore. The automatic version of that is the same, except the compiler writes the code for you... and it tends to do an even better job than a human, since it doesn't get sloppy.
Garbage collection, the norm on modern Windows and Linux code, frankly sucks. Code that, for example, reads a bunch of files on disk might store all of those files in RAM for for ten seconds even if it only needs one of them in RAM at a time. That burn be 20GB of memory and push all of your other apps out into swap. Yuck.
Second, swap, while it's used less (due to reference counting), still isn't a "last resort" on Macs. Rather it's a best practice to use swap deliberately for memory that you know doesn't need to be super fast. A toolbar icon for example... you map the file into swap and then allow the kernel to decide if it should be copied into RAM or not. Chances are the toolbar doesn't change for minutes at a time or it might not even be visible on the screen at all - so even if you have several gigabytes of RAM available there's a good chance the kernel will kick that icon out of RAM.
And before you say "toolbar icons are tiny" - they're not really. The tiny favicon for beehaw is 49kb as a compressed png... but to draw it quickly you might store it uncompressed in RAM. It's 192px square and 32 bit color so 192 x 192 x 32 = 1.1MB of RAM for just one favicon. Multiply that by enough browser tabs and... Ouch. Which is why Mac software would commonly have the favicon as a png on disk, map the file into swap, and decompress the png every time it needs to be drawn (the window manager will keep a cache of the window in GPU memory anyway, so it won't be redrawn often).
Third, modern Macs have really fast flash memory for swap. So fast it's hard to actually measure it, talking single digit microseconds, which means you can read several thousand files off disk in the time it takes the LCD to refresh. If an app needs to read a hundred images off swap in order to draw to the screen... the user is not going to notice. It will be just as fast as if those images were in RAM.
Sure, we all run a few apps that are poorly written - e.g. Microsoft Teams - but that doesn't matter if all your other software is efficient. Teams uses, what, 2GB? There will be plenty left for everything else.
Of course, some people need more than 8GB. But Apple does sell laptops with up to 128GB of RAM for those users.
Almost all programs use both 32bit and 64bit integers, sometimes even smaller ones, if possible. Being memory efficient is critical for performance, as L1 caches are still very small.
Garbage collection is a feature of programming languages, not an OS. Almost all native linux software is written in systems programming languages like C, Rust or C++, none of which have a garbage collector.
Swap is used the same way on both linux and windows, but kicking toolbar items out of ram is not actually a thing. It needs to be drawn to the screen every frame, so it (or a pixel buffer for the entire toolbar) will kick around in VRAM at the very least. A transfer from disk to VRAM can take hundreds of milliseconds, which would limit you to like 5 fps, no one retransfers images like that every frame.
Also your icon is 1.1Mbit not 1.1MB
I have a gentoo install that uses 50MB of ram for everything including its GUI. A webbrowser will still eat up gigabytes of ram, the OS has literally no say in this.
My 32/16 bit integer example was just that: an example where one was half the size as the other. Take 128/64 or whatever, doesn't matter as it doesn't work like that (which was my point).
Software written in non-GC based languages runs on other operating systems as well.
I used MS Teams as an example, but it's hardly an exception when it comes to Electron/WebView/CEF apps. You have Spotify running, maybe a password manager (even 1Password uses Electron for its GUI nowadays), and don't forget about all the web apps you have open in the browser, like maybe GMail and some Google Docs spreadsheet.
And sure, Macs have fast flash memory, but so do PC notebooks in this price range. A 990 Pro also doesn't set you back $400 per terabyte, but more like ... $80, if even that. A fifth. Not sure where you got that they are so fast it's hard to measure.
There are tests out there that clearly show why 8 GB are a complete joke on a $1600 machine.
So no, I still don't buy it. I use a desktop Windows/Linux machine and a MacBook Pro (M1 Max) and the same workflows tend to use very similar amounts of memory (what a surprise /s).
16 gb optiplexes on sale for 85 dollars on eBay. Dont come with windows, but neither do macs :P
Install Linux and this is the way.
Yeah yeah, I do think even like windows 11 these days. I'm a debian with KDE guy.
I looked at a few Lenovo and MS laptops to see what they are charging to jumps from 8 to 16 GB.
They are very close to what Apple charges.
So, they are ALL ripping us off!
I just got a laptop with 64GB of DDR5 ram for $870 or so from HP, so I wouldn't take these specific examples you found as gospel.
I switched back to Apple recently, but used to sell them.
1 week before Bootcamp was released, I was selling Apple gear, and I showed a sales manager who was visiting how we got Windows running on the new Intel Mac Mini, and explained how this was great, because it was a great transition technology
In front of customers, as I was explaining, he basically called me an idiot, and said "why would anyone want to run windows on a mac".
A week or so later, bootcamp was released, and he was back.. He was now using the arguments I made a week early as a template for bragging about bootcamp to us and explaining the benefits. No apologies for any of the previous discussion.
They make decent products otherwise, and management doesn't even need to act like wankers or be deceptive either
I only now using Apple again because Microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge with windows (literally, when they started hijacking my chrome tabs EVERY bootup, and opening Edge automatically), and the fact my Xbox Series X wouldn't even play remote on Windows (their own OS)
Why did you decide to go back to Apple instead of giving Linux a try? It's free so it literally would have cost nothing to try, and you could keep your other OS(s).
I used to use Linux exclusively (I was actually the top poster on a few major Linux news sites, and my linux project once got published in LinuxWorld Magazine).
Whilst it has certainly gotten better, I still feel some parts of linux need refining. Also, one thing both Microsoft and Apple do have is available integration of mobile apps.. I thought Apple could do both via Parallels (android in windows, iPhone in MacOS), but turns out Android in Windows on parallels won't work.
For the type of development i do, windows and macos are still the best options unfortunately too. If Linux had more seamless mobile app integration, I probably would have highly considered it to be honest
By mobile app integration, do you mean a connection between your mobile phone and your computer? KDE Connect is pretty good from my experience. It has more features than the Windows alternative at least (and I think there's even a Windows version oddly enough).
If you mean running a mobile app in the system, I have no experience with that.
Running mobile apps on computer. It's really the one use case Apple does extremely well, and it's a pity because Linux could actually do it well if distros sorted themselves out
Good grief, I had a lady behind the counter try to berate me onto the store's rewards card and she wasn't as pushy as this comment.
It's pushy to ask why someone made a large purchase when there's a free alternative they might not have tried that they may or may not like better? Unlike buying an Apple product, it takes little effort and no cost to just boot up Linux and give it a shot. Some people won't like it and that's fine. It'd be pushy to say you will like it better, which is not what I said.
Lol. My personal iMac has 32GB, and I'm happy with it. My POS work MBP has only 8GB, and I wanna frisbee the fucken thing out the window pretty much every day.
My research disproves this clown's hypothesis.
If I wasn't so broke, my 8GB MBP would enter the frisbee competition...
Emulators disagree.
My 16GB XPS running Linux almost fills up entirely when running several docker containers, IDEA, Firefox, Teams, Postman and a few other, smaller apps, but it fits still, and I can work with it (tho I can't wait to get my 32GB framework laptop)
Now gimme a 8GB MBP and I'll show you that I wouldn't get shit done on that configuration. And at 1600 it's just crazy.
11 gigabytes of that is probably being used up by Teams, it's a memory hog.
Teams it's the absolute worst and it's the only app that can sometimes crash my Linux machine
It crashes on Apple too.
It sucks that better alternatives like slack went from the big player to a small player only because of Microsofts power over businesses. If teams would win because it was actually a better product I'd be fine with that. But teams is just a pile of shit we are forced to use.
The best part is people complaining to them for pointing out that 8gb is laughable little. Ah, the sweet fanboys.
Alright! Opens 20 Electron apps on my 32GB mac
16gb is always better, and I usually recommend it to people looking to buy a Mac, but they aren’t wrong about Macs handling RAM more efficiently. They still sound arrogant af when using that as their excuse, though.
More efficiently than what other system? How did you come to that conclusion? If you open tabs in your browser, do you think MacOS will allow you to open more tabs than other operating systems?
Just from my observations from owning a 2015 MBP with 8GB of memory, it is easy to be fooled into thinking memory management is much better on macOS because you can effectively have more open than you would on an equivalent Windows laptop with 8GB memory.
From what I understand though, the SSD is used to compensate as swap a lot more than Windows, and I believe this is causing a lot of ewaste with the M1 Macs in particular being effectively binned because the SSDs are worn out on them from swapping and they're soldered.
But it's $1600 Apple. Not the cheapest Mac book air.
Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM(c)(tm)!
Scammers!
I still hate that they killed the mid-range model. Your option is the lower end MacBook Air with no fan, or the higher-end MacBook Pro. There is no in between.
I absolutely love the snappiness of the m1 chip in my current 2020 MBP, and how much more efficient ARM is compared to x86, but it seems really hard to justify going an extra 300$ in the future.
I really just wish they would bring back the original MacBook (with no suffixes at the end)
I kind of want to go for the framework laptop, but I still do like ARM and given I want to do more stuff around machine learning in the future, which is already kind of difficult to run large language models with only 8 gigabytes of RAM, it at least kind of runs with ARM. On my basement PC, It will barely do anything
There are some external GPUs that can be USB-attached. Dunno about for the Mac. Latency hit, but probably not as significant for current LLM use than games, as you don't have a lot of data being pushed over the bus once the model is up.
Those don't work on Apple silicon Macs. sadly
Ridiculous.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary With the launch of Apple's M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that's shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator.
In a show of Apple's typical modesty, the tech giant's veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine learning engineer and content creator Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal to 16GB on a PC – so we therefore ought to be happy with it.
With that said, macOS does make use of several tricks to optimize memory utilization, including caching as much data as it can in free RAM to avoid running to and from slower storage for stuff (there's no point in having unused physical RAM in a machine) and compressing information in memory, all of which other operating systems, including Windows and Linux, do too in their own ways.
Given a fast enough SSD, the degradation in performance associated with running low on RAM can be hidden to a degree, though it does come at the expense of additional wear on the NAND flash modules.
We'd hate to say that Apple has designed its computers so that they perform stunningly in the shop for a few minutes, and work differently after a few months at home or in the office.
His comment is also somewhat ironic in that much of the focus of YilYi's interview with Borchers centered around the use of Apple Silicon in machine-learning development, which you don't do in a store.
Saved 71% of original text. :::
Macrumors just released an article talking about how the 8gb is a bottleneck in the new M3 models lol
My GeoTIFFs do not agree.