8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple’s new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599…
For $1,599 you’d at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is…
I think Apple gets all their RAM from 2008, because they charge $50/GB for it.
Don’t they also solder it to the motherboard so you can’t upgrade your RAM as well?
It’s not so much soldered to the motherboard as much as part of the same package as the CPU. As in: there are no separate memory chips.
But they did indeed solder it in before that, on their old Intel laptops. I think they started doing that in 2013 or 2014 but I forget exactly.
That has more to do with faster traces; the ram is “closer” to the CPU so the signal is cleaner.
Not defending the move, I’d take upgradability in a laptop.
Only makes a difference at oc levels of manual tuning. Which apple isn’t doing at their factory I reckon.
I mean, when you’re the one manufacturing the board, I’m pretty sure you could eek out some more baseline performance without having to tweak each one for OC in the production line, my dude.
This is both great, and incredibly annoying because they selected 8gb as the base…
So wait- if you want to increase your RAM, you have to install a whole new CPU?
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That’s soldered as well! It’s theoretically possible but way too involved for most to bother with hiring a professional to get it done or what have you.
No, you just buy one with the amount of RAM you need.
Well yeah, if you were paying $50 a GB wouldn’t you too? Got to lock that shit down!
Lol, the ram is part of the m3 chip That’s a reason why it is so efficient. The storage in m3 is for RAM and videoRAM.
Wikipedia: The M3’s Unified Memory Architecture features up to 24 GB RAM, the M3 Pro up to 36 GB, and the M3 Max up to 128 GB. Like the M2 generation, the M3 SoCs use 6,400 MT/s LPDDR5 SDRAM. As with prior M series SoCs, this serves as both RAM and video RAM.
That’s literally how Intel integrated GPUs work too
The RAM being shared with the GPU, that is.
Yea but the RAM is not on the located within the chip design, is it?
With Apple’s chips the RAM is all on the CPU die so both CPU and GPU get the performance benefit. With Intel’s, none of it is.
"What Apple calls “unified memory” is RAM (random-access memory) used as “main memory” (not a CPU or GPU cache and not mass storage either).
The term “unified” refers to the fact that the memory is shared by the CPU cores and the GPU cores. That’s not novel: “integrated graphics” options in Intel x86 chips (like Iris Xe) do the same, as do just about all modern smartphones."
I’m not talking about the merits or otherwise of “unified memory”, I’m pointing out that because Apple’s RAM is physically integrated into the CPU, it can provide more memory bandwidth than regular DDR5 DIMMs.
How the fuck did Apple manage to be the largest company on the planet doing shit like this? Are Apple users really that fucking dumb?
Because they have an extremely consumer friendly UI/UX and a very stable OS.
And they’re much better at marketing than they are at making computers or phones. Apple is probably the most successful marketing company in the world.
Not sure “friendly” is quite the right word… you can argue it’s well designed or cultivated users but Apple is anything but a "friend"ly.
Their UI and UX is shit. You basically can’t use it for many basic tasks without installing a bunch of third party (proprietary and expensive) software.
Apple loves under ramming (to give a word a new meaning) and forcing everyone to pay for upgrades. The problem is there are always people that buy the base.
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I think the point is to squeeze out a couple extra hundred dollars from customers.
Apple has long done price anchoring with their products just like in this case.
At this point I’m pretty sure the ram costs more than the rest of the laptop.
Apple’s RAM isn’t as cheap as you might think, because it’s all built directly onto the CPU die. That’s part of what makes its computers so fast.
It’s iRAM!
The people to whom this discussion ought to matter (the prospective buyers of an 8GB RAM machine) are utterly oblivious to this discussion. They’ll continue to walk into an Apple Store and buy these machines. We are like body builders arguing about how obese people should stop eating shit.
Us power lifters over here looking around nervously while double fisting big macs lol.
You’re much better off double fisting big PCs.
or double fisting your mom
heh, wrecked.
This matters to the prospective buyers of 16gb machines too… Who want it for cheaper.
Maybe we should all start calling it the “MacBook Semi-Pro”.
8gb ram has been common for over a decade now. It’s what I would expect in a sub-$400 laptop.
Or a raspberry pi.
$75, 8gb, and this isn’t even the latest model. https://www.microcenter.com/product/622539/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb-ddr4
And Apple charges $200 for just an additional 8GB of RAM.
The LPDDR4X RAM in the Raspberry Pi isn’t QUITE the same as the on-die stuff in the M3 processor.
The MacBook amateur. They should be called out on a viral scale.
It’s hard to take the Mac seriously. This is even more dumbfounding because they have an excellent processor. Then they pair it with anemic RAM and make demonstrably false statements about the system’s performance. I don’t get it.
soldering in an unusably low amount of memory or storage into the base model is classic bait and switch. they get to advertise a much lower price than what you will end up paying
And if people buy the low-end one, they’ll feel like they need to upgrade sooner.
Surely they’ll just get a rep for poor performance?
They won’t. Because Apple is the best and very customer friendly. /s
If that was really a danger for them, the original iMac would have killed the company. At least it had a nice colourful case to look at while waiting for it to do things or restart after its latest crash.
Ah it’s cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.
Right??
Sir, this is apple.
Gotta buy their apple 5 point screwdriver
Open back
Remove adhesive & battery
Dismount motherboard and keyboard
Find out it’s soldered ram
Kill self
With a hot air rework station anything is upgradable, laptops, phones, babies… ok not babies, but like lots of other stuff.
Maybe, in the future, lamps will be permanently wired into house walls. Who even needs outlets? Just buy a new house if you don’t like the lamp anymore.
Isn’t that what ceiling recessed lights are?
Yeah, I get OP’s joke, but “permanent” doesn’t really apply to anything about houses. “Wired into wall” just means you need a screwdriver and a circuit breaker flip to change it, or maybe cutting into wall panels.
I mean it doesn’t matter if the house around the wiring falls apart first. Most modern construction is like one step above paper mache.
It’s Apple so they probably do some kind of bullshit key pairing nonsense to prevent you being able to upgrade the RAM even with the soldering iron.
I really wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not actually possible
Oh it’s not even close to being user-upgradeable. As in, the RAM module is part of the silicon M3 chipset. You can’t upgrade it because it is literally part of the CPU die.
Of course, apple could address this by also offering expansion slots that users can install ram in, but that would mean being nice to consumers, which we all know apple is fundamentally opposed to.
Apple had to know these reviews were coming. A new iteration on their custom SOC is obviously going to make every tech site go bananas benchmarking and their claim that 8GB = 16GB is going to make them punish the machine even harder.
It’s like they decided a few bad reviews would cost them less than cutting their markup on RAM to make a 16GB entry level Pro machine for less than $2k.
What’s worse is that their “8GB = 16GB” claim has a tiny bit of truth in it: many apps that are GPU-accelerated usually load/generate stuff on host RAM and then transfer it to the GPU RAM to launch some shaders/kernels on it and they do this repeatedly. The idea with Apple (also AMD when you consider APUs) is that since the RAM is “unified” you just have one RAM and you probably don’t have that redundancy anymore if those apps are built with that in mind, so in a sense if previously you had a 1GB buffer that had to live on both CPU and GPU RAM, this time it will only live in as a single 1GB buffer on Apple’s “unified” RAM. That’s still very different from the “8GB = 16GB” deceptive marketing by Apple.
You don’t have to put unified in quotes, it’s the proper term for an SoC that shares the same memory between the CPU and GPU.
The major advantage of unified memory is that it doesn’t have the copy overhead. When using a discrete GPU you need to load data onto the host and then copy it over to the GPU. And then if data on the GPU needs to be processed separately by the CPU (saved to a file, sent over the network, etc) you incur more overhead again. And let’s ignore more specific technologies like Direct I/O and io_uring for this discussion.
On an SoC with unified memory you don’t have this overhead. The CPU can (in theory) access the same memory space as the GPU with zero overhead, and it makes the performance hit from shuttling the data back and forth non-existent.
But there’s a massive downside, and it’s that it drastically cuts down your available memory, because now the CPU and GPU have only a single 8GB pool to use for both. Whereas in a system without unified memory and a discreet GPU would have the 8GB for the CPU in addition to whatever the GPU has. They don’t step on each other’s toes.
For example, if I use a system with 8GB of host RAM and a GPU with 6GB of VRAM to run a model of some kind (let’s say stable diffusion), it will load the model into the VRAM and not clog up the host RAM. Yes, the host will initially use system RAM to load the file descriptors and then shuttle the data to the GPU, but once that’s done the model isn’t kept on the host.
On a Mac it would load it onto the only memory available and the CPU would not have the full 8GB available to it the way an x86 system would have.
The point I’m making is that because of the unified architecture the 8GB is effectively even less than 8GB in a discrete GPU system. It’s worse.
The worst part is that in many retail chains like Costco, you can only get the 8GB version. I suspect the review reading segment of the population is smaller than we’d expect for such an expensive purchase. Previously they’ve crippled M1 machines that have 256Gb storage, only including one controller instead of two as in the 512+ machines. It’s a shame for MacBook Air, but totally unacceptable for a computer marketed as “Pro”
Not a pro cpu, just a pro chassis.
My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭
Um actthually mac is so oPtimized so 1gb mac = 12.3gb windows 🤓
STFU it physically has less ram than a potato while costing the price of a nasa rocket
Also Apple™ RAM costs like 4 to 8 times as much. Being $200 for 8GB. So assuming fantasy land Apple™ iMagic™ means 8GB = 16GB it’s still a minimum of twice the cost per dollar
Apple ram actually is just more dense. They can fit more binary in each gigabyte.
Who mentioned Windows??
Did you watch the video? The 8GB model is like 1/4 the speed of the 16GB model.
It’s a bottleneck, clear as day. I just thought it was funny that Apple is so stingy that they’d even consider putting an offensive 8GB of ram on this laptop.
Darken was poking fun at the Mac fan boy trope.
LOL. That went over my head. 😂
Apple did https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/08/8gb-ram-m3-macbook-pro-like-16-gb-pc/
It’s not directly mentioned in this conversation, but the excuse as to why they put such a pathetic amount of RAM in the laptop is that “Macs use it more efficiently”
edit: The quote is “Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently.”
Apple being apple… marketing at it’s worst.
Sure, it’s “more efficient” than other operating systems if you want to look at how much space is being utilized, but other operating systems don’t seem to have the same catastrophic performance bottlenecks as this apple laptop apparently does.
The fact that going from 8gb to 16gb improves system performance by 4-5x is something you’d never see happen in a “less efficient” operating system, so what’s Apple’s excuse for using it?
so what’s Apple’s excuse for using it?
Money
✈️
🙄Normally I hate emojis, but I have to admit that they are a powerful and very concise language.
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Yeah, no your post went right over my head. LOL
“Pro”
Ahem. Yeah right
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Macbooks are both fit and pro at the same time
Bravo 👏🏼
The cpu is the M3, the same one they’ll put in the air. NOT a “pro” cpu, just a “pro” chassis.
With all the ports a pro needs, right. Right? 😅
I tell you what, i do love my lenovo x1 carbon. I used to have a real macbook pro from back in the day. Loved it. Upgradable, ports everywhere. Fast. Beautiful.
I had to move to Linux and a machine like the lenovo as i was not going to put up with 1 port and a fuck you very much.
However, they also have soldered in parts now, so next machine will be something else.
My 350€ three-year old phone has an SoC with 12GB of RAM.
With that kind of memory swapping, the soldered ssd gonna be toasts within 1 or 2 yrs. Its already a known problem in previous macbooks, where people runs memory intensive programs and find thier mac book dead after even 6 months to 1 yr
Does it swap to the SSD or does it use a compressed area of RAM?
From what i read the previous cases it uses the ssd. Thus the ssd write cycle maxed out after 6 months leaving the mac dead. And then Apple sent a replacement, the guy use it as he usually did, and in 6months dead again.
Pretty sure it just doesn’t do anything. I’m not going to get one and test it because I’m not insane but from the performance specs of people are putting out it looks like it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.
I was saying this when the M2 was first announced. It’s impressive for what it is, but what it is, is actually kind of crap.
“it just maxes out the ram and then does nothing.” is absolute nonsense. The programs need memory to operate.
If your RAM is maxed out and the programs seem to operate just as fine, the OS is doing something behind the scenes, it’s just a matter of what that something is. And memory swapping / virtual memory is a well-known method of alleviating RAM overuse, at the cost of murdering your SSD/HDD lifespan.
Yup this.
- It’s purely academic to me, as I have no intention of buying any Apple products or any desktop not assembled myself.
- interesting how I asked an honest question and am being downvoted without further comment. Have the Steve Jobs fuckbois already infested the fediverse?
I think selling an 8GB laptop with a Pro moniker is a terrible move. But you’ll need to cite examples (more than one, because sometimes components just fail under the best of circumstances).
And then wonder why Mac sales tanked 27% in their last financial report. Selling 8Gb laptops is an offence.
And seriously for their price, I would much prefer a laptop like Framework that I know I can easily swap components and make it workable even after a while.
They’ll still sell like hot cakes 😂
Apple is the proof Marketting >> Quality.
They sell the premium dream making the user think it’s the best.
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My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.
100 percent in agreement that apples ram pricing is lunacy
But my brother. Wtf do you need that much ram in a phone for lol. Mine has 6gb (12 pro lmao) and that causes me zero issues. Granted, I don’t game on my phone. But is phone gaming really eating that much ram these days?
I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.
Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.
This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.
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What level of greed are you comfortable with?
You should get that model
