Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it

Alternate title: Apple charges fortune for underspecced machines, morons still buy them

Please tell me, as someone who has not given Apple money in over a decade, how I am paying for this.

Apple fan here, and I love what they’ve done with hardware the last few years. That said…. I have to agree. Base RAM config is silly low, and higher RAM and SSD configs are stupid expensive. It’s a money maker for sure, I wish it wasn’t so obviously a cash grab. I’d be ok with a bit more padding in the base hardware price if the ram wasn’t so expensive to upgrade.

In the old days this was a moot point because you buy base config and immediately swap for after market big sticks- I did that for decades, but these days with soldered RAM and storage…. Eh, it’s a bit of a kick in the balls.

I am stoked for my new M3 next week though, good thing work pays for it!

The closing sentence of the article....

"as Apple customers, we shouldn’t stand for it"

Apple customers....

"Here's my $200"

"we're all paying for it"

Journalism these days is fucking awful

[...] we're all paying for it

How? How am I paying for Apple's shortcomings?

Memory is memory. Apple's attempt at branding these machines as "different" as if they were more efficient at using that memory, is absolutely fucking stupid. These Pro machines are used for large file operations like videos, and their response is simply "guess you need to pay more".

I feel like they're trying to get back to the PPC days where generally available parts are not cheap. I hope plenty of cheap alternatives show up on Newegg or wherever. Fuck this bullshit.

I absolutely love Apple Silicon—the performance to power ratio is wonderful, and the high-speed memory makes things like LLMs work great—but the RAM upcharge is insane, and shipping anything "Pro" with 8GB of RAM should be criminal in 2023.

I really hope that Qualcomm can make some noise with their new laptop/desktop processors. Anything to light a fire under Apple's ass and make them stop skimping on RAM.

Damn, even my phone got 8GB memory

It seemed obvious to me that they do this so that they can say the MBP costs “as low as X”, but in fact everyone needs to pay at least $200 more

I'm not paying for it, I just go to downloadmoreram.com, DUH

Stop paying then... Computer I built has 64GB of RAM, and cost less than Apple's "Pro" computers.

RAM is boring... THE FINISH IS TITANIUM!!!

THAT'S LITERALLY OUR ENTIRE MARKETING CAMPAIGN!

We are? Pretty sure I ain't.

I can't believe that Apple would do this. It's so not like them to cripple great machines with one horrendous bottleneck. Like could you imagine if they released an iMac in 2020 that they sold until the release of the M1 iMac that had a 1TB hard drive in it as a boot device? That'd be insane.

Yes. Unfortunately people who buy Apple don't care. This is what happens when you prioritise brand and design over functionality. You end up paying more for the brand (worse shit, but hey you can feel good about buying such a great product!).

It's even worse when you consider there's no dedicated video memory, so this is shared between graphics and the rest of the system.

*fan bois are paying for it

He's paying for it. Many of us don't buy Apple products.

I recently had to replace my Mac and was not at all happy with the ridiculous 8GB default. Ended up getting my first Windows machine in 10+ years. Same for my sis, she really wanted a Mac but work was only going to shell out $1500. You can get a helluva Windows machine for $1500 (64GB of RAM and 2TB HD). Sure it may not be “Retina” or have an insane color profile, but like great TVs, most people can’t tell unless they’re right next to a superior one.

I dont't understand how anyone is skimping on memory.... All the memory fabs (micron, samsung, etc)took huge hits this year because of low prices and low sales

Shouldn't companies be filling their devices to the brim with RAM? Is this just greed? What happened to the saying "cheap as chips"?

Damn. I wish there was some other alternative

Permanently Deleted

I doubt the average Apple customer even looks at specs. They just see the Apple badge and are sold.

Nah bro, we are all NOT. I would only touch a Apple product if it had tits.

laughing from my 64gig 1000 eur tuxedo :p

I'll never understand brand loyalty, for the price of a Mac you can get a machine that's 10x more powerful with the same software being available in Windows.

Exactly! I bought the last Mac Mini with upgradeable ram and got it from 8gb to 64gb for less than going to 16gb factory installed would cost me. After this one is done, I'm not sure I can justify buying another one.

I've always been interested in if there were a way to bake more RAM onto these boards. Presumably the pads are there and they're just not populated, so could you make a stencil for the solder balls with a cnc and buy another RAM chip and stick it in to one of those directed heat platforms. Would macos accept that, or would it throw a hissy fit because of miss matched licenses.

The person that can somehow manage to successfully fool Scrooge TimCook to download more RAM deserves my absolute respect.

I remember back in the 90's when some Macintosh computers came with resistors making them slower, so that Apple could sell "budget" models of their faster line of computers.

We were savvy and would remove them, but I bet 99% of buyers had no clue and just went along with it.

I'm not cos I don't pay a fuck to apple, in fact I buy cheap apple shit and resell it to dumb apple lovers Haha.

No, YOU are all paying for it 😏

There's something called "PC"s out there. They can even play games .

Apple fans that would buy this vs Taylor swift fans. Who would win?

Those charts pissed me off. And I'm someone people mistakenly would call a fanboi because I generally love the platforms. Fuck off, Apple.

Yeah MacOS has the best virtual memory system of any major OS (if you’re running Linux try https://github.com/Tookmund/Swapspace, it’s excellent!) so most people don’t care, because they never really run out of memory. But 8GB is inexcusable for a “Pro” product, and their upcharges for RAM are laughably priced.

Edit: I said that MacOS has the best virtual memory system of modern OS’s. I stand by that. I also criticized Apple for their asinine pricing, which I stand by.

I got downvoted for those statements

Let’s compare virtual memory systems

Windows uses a pagefile, similar to how MacOS handles virtual memory. However, when an application needs more memory on the fly, the Windows subsystem throws an out of memory error. You can for loop a try/catch until the pagefile size changes, but if someone has hardcoded the pagefile size in their prefs, or windows hasn’t finished generating a larger pagefile, it will continue to throw a memory error. All windows memory requests are the same, but windows only virtualizes the requests off hardware once the memory pressure is too high.

Linux uses swap. You either have swap partitions or swap files. Both are manually specified in size. If you exceed the size of the swap partition or swap file, out of memory error. That can be avoided by using the software I referenced above, which will generate a new swap file on the fly as your memory pressure builds. Again, Linux allows all memory requests to be on hardware until the RAM is full, and then begins storing memory to swap.

All of MacOS memory is virtualized. Applications requesting real hardware memory are always getting virtual memory pages. As memory pressure increases, so does the size of hyberfil.sys, the Mac pagefile, but applications can request more memory, and get it allocated, with no out of memory errors, it’s seamless. When you know your hardware is running on a fast SSD, you can do that because for most users it’s not noticeable in their day to day activities. But pro users need hardware memory for things like video editing. So MacOS let’s you request wired memory but is limited based on the total memory usage, after you request wired memory, your requests are granted but potentially granted and then returned on request as being passed through to virtual memory, if necessary when the memory pressure is too high.