8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests

The sheer idea of selling a 8gb machine in 2023 is kinda wild

For $1,599 you'd at least expect 16GB+ RAM given how cheap RAM is...

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.

Maybe we should all start calling it the "MacBook Semi-Pro".

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.

Ah it's cool, you can just open the little door in the back and upgrade the RAM anytime you want.

Right??

My four year old phone has more RAM than an expensive macbook? LMFAO 🤭🤭🤭

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.

"Pro"

Ahem. Yeah right

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

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 😂

I got a dell laptop with touchscreen and 8gb ram from the recycle bin at work.

My current phone, and my last phone both had more ram. For significantly less money.

Perhaps with an SSD, memory swapping is less intrusive, hence you won't noticed any performance issues. This is referring to the vast majority of users. At least for a few years. They will have an intolerable machine later though, when the OS becomes more bloated, and they can't figure out how to upgrade those soldered RAM modules.

Vote with your wallet. Well, those buying this kind of mac are basic users (non-pejorative), so it will continue to be there.

I love when back in the day people said that mastering the hardware and software would help to drive cost down, well their cost. :)

Adobe Premiere & Aftereffects will choke so badly. This is a PRO, not an entry level Air. The fact that they are pushing this crap at the pro level just shows a greed I am uncomfortable with.

I don't have an Mac. How much RAM does it use just to turn it on? Windows 10 needs an astounding 4 GB just to see the desktop.

Money is the bottleneck.

I have a 2015 Macbook for work reasons and I have no problem with it other than the battery being mostly kaput and that's replaceable if I feel like paying someone to do it. When Apple stops supporting it, I'll install Linux on it. When I finally have to buy another machine, I'll probably just get a $300 Chromebook because I have another computer to run the work software and this Mac is now just a glorified web browser. But I'm sure as fuck not buying a Macbook.

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Ok but……who the hell runs blender and FFP in 8GB?

The vast majority of users are NOT running pro apps like that.

It’s just a name. If you’re actually running pro stuff, you’d be an idiot to run that on 8Gb no matter what machine.

Apple’s argument that it’s the same as 16gb is dumb, but anyone actually using pro apps on 8Gb is dumber. The majority of browser(with sane numbers of tabs)/iPhoto/office users really are probably not gonna notice.