There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it. There’s a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it’s the closest thing we’ll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn’t really enough for a new Mac in 2024.
Wake me up when phones have enough ram to run good voice to text engines on the phone itself
How much do you need?
Last check about 10GB for the model. Anything less doesn’t translate my voice to text accurately
We already have that since iOS 15 if you have a phone that released after the iPhone X. It’s time to become woke, sheeple.
So 8gb?
3GB, actually. That was on iPhone XR, which is basically the only budge iPhone Apple has made.
12 aint enough?
Apple has said that 8gb was enough for “general use,” meaning if you use the out-of-the-box applications (Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc.) then 8gb is enough for general use to get basic things done. Apple is not going to say how much RAM is required for a third party application to run. That would be impossible. (Especially Chrome).
This article says that the limitation is occurring when running Xcode 16 with code completion. This is outside the definition of general use. Most people who are buying 8gb Macs are not going to be running Xcode at all.
The article and most of these comments are way, way outside the realm of common sense and simply looking for a reason to attack Apple.
If you don’t want to buy Apple, don’t buy it… and in the process, shut the fuck up.
Sorry, boo, everyone wants to hate Apple these days. It’s the Zeitgeist. Even if you say something reasonable or perhaps factual, the people are against you and will react violently.
Accurate.
I wonder what is the general use for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro? People generally seem to do all the lightweight stuff like social media consumption on their phones; and desktops/laptops are used for the more heavy-weight stuff. The only reason I’ve ever used a Mac was for IOS development.
I have a friend who is self-employed. He uses an iPhone and a MacBook Air. He only uses iMessage, Numbers, Safari and Apple Music for entertainment. He gets away with 8gb just fine and rarely has to reboot.
He probably could use a Chromebook or something even lighter, but the support and ecosystem were enough for him to pay the premium. His time is valuable to him so it was worth it to him.
If you don’t want to buy Apple, don’t buy it…
Okay, we won’t!
and in the process, shut the fuck up.
Kiss my ass and go fuck yourself. If your opinions are so fragile that you can’t handle people rightly pointing this out, sounds like you have the problem, not everyone else Mr Skinner.
The unreasonable escalation of your response really makes you come across as exceedingly insecure.
I was quite literally illustrating the absurdity by being similarly absurd. Telling people to shut the fuck up about an issue is funny as hell to respond with a similar statement.
See the OP’s ending sentence for reference.
If you choose to be a weak little quiet corporate Stan then that’s up to you. Apple is well aware that third party apps exist and they’re well aware that machines with less ram will need replaced far sooner than machines with more. RAM is cheap and Apples intigrated memory is no different in the regard. The only reason to use less is planned obsolescence. If you don’t believe that then you’re either Tim Cook or you’re an idiot.
What is the obsession with shitting on people’s choices? I don’t understand the irony of demanding choice in this industry, then shitting on people when they make a choice you don’t agree with.
What is the obsession with shitting on people’s choices?
As much as people want to act like they are better than they were, say, 100 years ago, it’s not really true. Humans are really just advanced monkeys running around and very few can actually surpass that nature.
This we can agree on.
No one is shitting on other people’s choices. They are criticizing a major corporations choices to skimp on specs while charging a premium price. Specs that can’t be upgraded and will absolutely lead to a shorter usable life. I find it odd that people get upset about criticism that isn’t aimed at them at all. The only thing I can think is maybe they realize they were ripped off after putting so much money into Apple products and they need to defend their financial decisions. Even then I don’t fully understand. I’ve purchased overpriced junk many times and don’t feel the need to defend the offending company. Maybe it’s because Apple has managed to make their customers feel like they’re in an exclusive club even though everyone uses Apple products these days. A publicly traded company is around to make money and nothing more. They should never be held in reverence.
They should do 4Gb. I hear M3 mac’s make it seem like 8Gb.
I think you mean gigabytes, not gigabits.
8 Gb = 1 GB
You mean they can even make 0.5GB appear as 8GB?! That’s 16x! That apple silicon is just something else!
Darn you broadband
That’s true. Data transmission is usually measured in bits, not bytes. Gigabit Ethernet can only transmit a maximum of ~128 MB/s.
If you allocate it right, you can add 200GB of swap space and then that 4GB of RAM will feel like 408GB!
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment. Heck my M1 Macbook Air is even good with basic Photoshop/Illustrator work and light AV editing. I certainly prefer my PC laptop with 32GB and a dedicated GPU but its power adapter weighs more than a Macbook Air.
8GB would be fine for basic use if it was upgradable. With soldered RAM the laptop becomes e-waste when 8GB is no longer enough.
Yeah, the soldering is outrageous. I miss the time when Apple was a (more) customer friendly company. I could open my Mac mini 2009 and just add more RAM, which I did.
When I bought my first MacBook in ‘07 I asked the guy in the store about upgrading the RAM. He told me that what Apple charged was outrageous and pointed me to a website where I’d get what I needed for much less.
I feel that if Apple could have soldered the RAM back then, they would have.
I feel that if Apple could have soldered the RAM back then, they would have.
Apple used to ship repair and upgrade kits with guides on how to apply them. Not sure they were as anti-repair then as they are now.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is an attitude for more than one company I guess.
8GB is definitely not enough for coding, gaming, or most creative work but it’s fine for basic office/school work or entertainment.
The thing is, basic office/school/work tasks can be done on any laptop that costs twice less than an 8GB MacBook.
This is true for part time or casual use but for all day work use including travel you get better build quality and far less problems with a pro grade machine. We spend the same on a macbook, thinkpad, surface or probook for our basic full time users.
While it may be a bit overkill for someone who spends their day in word, excel, chrome and zoom we save money in the long term due to reliability. There is far less downtime and IT time spent on each user over the life of the system (3-4 years). The same is true about higher quality computer accessories.
I mean I develop software on an 8GB laptop. Most of the time it’s fine, when I need more I have a desktop with 128GB ram available.
Really depends what type of software you’re making. If you’re using python a few TB might be required.
For the record, on Windows 10, I’m using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can’t forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.
Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.
Notice I haven’t even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.
8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.
Also for the record, I have experienced an 8GB Mac Mini run Firefox with at least 20 tabs, Jetbrains Rider with code open and editable, Jetbrains DataGrip with queries, somehow Microsoft Teams, MS Outlook and didn’t seem to have a problem. Was also able to share the screen on a Teams call and switch between the applications without lag.
Windows OS couldn’t handle your application load? Eat a penis, Microsoft. Fucking clown memory management.
MacOS’s memory scheduler is leaps and bounds better than what Windows uses. It’s more apt to compare the RAM on a machine running MacOS to one running a common Linux distro. Windows needs more RAM than the other two by two to three times because it’s fuckterrible at using it.
HP seems to think 4 GB is an acceptable amount of RAM to put in a modern notebook (although they don’t charge even close to what Apple charges).
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Micro-edge-Microsoft-14-dq0040nr-Snowflake/dp/B0947BJ67M
Sounds about right for HP.
I don’t even understand how HP still exists. Can anyone name a single product they’ve made in the last ~15 years that wasn’t a complete piece of junk?
I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D
And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…
HP printer ink, that is their main source of revenue
Shipping with Windows S. That’s Microsoft’s version of a Chromebook for some light web browsing for 188 dollars. I wouldn’t buy it but this doesn’t look like a rip off at this price point.
S mode does allow you to turn it off, so it’s more like a hobbled version of home.
The computer is as bad as one I saw several years ago with 64g emmc and “Quad core processor.” not a quad core, it was literally the name that showed in system. It did have 4 cores: at 400Mhz, boosting to 1.1Ghz. Buyer changed their mind and we couldn’t give it away.
Of course that notebook is bad but for the price point of shitty hardware, you get shitty hardware. Apple sells shitty hardware at the cost of premium hardware.
They could just raise the prize to $198 and slap another 4GB of RAM on it.
And if they raised the price to $250, they could go with a faster processor and better wifi!
And if they raised another 2000$, they could add an RTX 4090 graphics card
And worst part: they installed Windows on it.
At a $188 price point. An addition 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …
And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.
4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.
If they wanted it to be as cheap as possible, they could have installed Linux on it.
At that point you gotta wonder if it can keep up with an $80 Raspberry Pi, especially if HP tries to shoehorn Windows into that
In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comrmes with a:
- monitor
- keyboard/trackpad
- charger
- windows 11
- active cooling system
- enclosure
I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.
Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)
[0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).
Now let me present you the laptops with 2GB of RAM still being sold here in Brazil: https://www.zoom.com.br/notebook/notebook-multilaser-legacy-cloud-pc132-intel-atom-x5-z8350-14-2gb-windows-10-bluetooth
And it’s not on Linux! Wow. Sounds so horrible.
4gb is acceptable. Some people just want a phone with a keyboard and bugger screen. Depends on the use case tho.
I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.
Miniaturization is amazing. The limiting factor to how powerful we can make phones is not space to put in computational units (processors,ram,etc). It is the ability to deal with the heat they generate (and the related issue of rationing a limited amount of battery power)
Opens chrome on a 8GB Mac. Sees lifespan of SSD being reduced by 50%. After 2-3 years of heavy usage SSD starts to get errors. Apple solution: buy a new one. No wonder they are 2nd/3rd wealthiest company on the planet.
buy a new one.
Buy a new SSD and swap out the old one?
…but a new SSD, right??
I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.
The Mac Studio uses a standard NVMe SSD but if you replace it with anything that you didn’t buy from Apple with a 500%+ markup, the new drive simply won’t work.
Oh, my sweet summer child…
You don’t get the most valuable company by selling an SSD. So, yeah a new Mac of course.
Well they do charge particularly hard for SSDs as well. They’ve found a way to eat the cake twice.
Nah ur nat doin that with apple. Cmon just buy a new PC! Wa don car abt the env! Who cares anyway! Cmon not that expensive
SSD is soldered to the board. With only 8GB you’ll be using the swap partiton a lot so for anything exceeding 8GB of RAM you will be using the SSD as a slower “RAM” which will wear it’s lifespan down by constantly writing/reading into it’ s swap partition.
The only people more cultish than Apple fans are Tesla/Elongated Muskrat fans.
“tHATs nOT tRuE the aRCHiteCTuRe iS cOmPlETlY dIffErEnT!!!1!11!!ONEONE!!!” <— Apple fanboys when this was predicted on launch of the M1 🤖
No you don’t understand the architecture is different and so the laws of physics don’t apply. Constantly energizing and de-energizing capacitors can only increase life expectancy, everyone knows that.
imagine showing this post to someone in 1995
shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like ‘a lot’ of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant
I still can’t fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.
If only it got bloated for some good reasons.
High quality content is the reason. Sit in a terminal and your memory usage will be low.
256MB or 512MB was fine for high-quality content in 2002, what was that then.
Suppose the amount of pixels and everything quadrupled - OK, then 2GB it is.
But 4GB being not enough? Do you realize what 4GB is?
They didn’t just quadruple. They’re orders of magnitude higher these days. So content is a real thing.
But that’s not what’s actually being discussed here, memory usage these days is much more of a problem caused by bad practices rather than just content.
I know. BTW, if something is done in an order of magnitude less efficient way than it could and it did, one might consider it a result of intentional policy aimed at neutering development. Just not clear whose. There are fewer corporations affecting this than big governments, and those are capable of reaching consensus from time to time. So not a conspiracy theory.
One frame for a 4K monitor takes 33MB of memory. You need three of them for triple buffering used back in 2002, so half of your 256MB went to simply displaying a bloody UI. But there’s more! Today we’re using viewport composition, so the more apps you run, the more memory you need just to display the UI. Now this is what OS will use to render the final result, but your app will use additional memory for high res icons, fonts, photos, videos, etc. 4GB today is nothing.
I can tell you an anecdote. My partner was making a set of photo collages, about 7 art works to be printed in large format (think 5m+ per side). So 7 photo collages with source material saved on an external drive took 500 gigs. Tell me more about 256MB, lol.
Yes, you wouldn’t have 4K in 2002.
4GB today is nothing.
My normal usage would be kinda strained with it, but possible.
$ free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 17Gi 3,1Gi 11Gi 322Mi 3,0Gi 14Gi Swap: 2,0Gi 0B 2,0Gi $I can do a cold boot and show you empty RAM as well. So fucking what?
It’s not a cold boot and it’s not empty.
So we’re just going to ignore stuff like Electron, unoptimized assets, etc… Basically every other known problem… Yeah let’s just ignore all that
Is Electron that bad? Really? I have Slack open right now with two servers and it takes around 350MB of RAM. Not that bad, considering that every other colleague thinks that posting dumb shit GIFs into work chats is cool. That’s definitely nowhere close to Firefox, Chrome and WebStorm eating multiple gigs each.
Yes, it really is that bad. 350 MBs of RAM for something that could otherwise have taken less than 100? That isn’t bad to you? And also, it’s not just RAM. It’s every resource, including CPU, which is especially bad with Electron.
I don’t really mind Electron myself because I have enough resources. But pretending the lack of optimization isn’t a real problem is just not right.
First of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket. But what’s more important is performance, because it affects things like power consumption, carbon emissions, etc. I’d rather see Slack “eating” one gig of RAM and running smoothly on a single E core below boost clocks with pretty much zero CPU use. That’s the whole point of having fast memory - so you can cache and pre-render as much as possible and leave it rest statically in memory.
CPU usage is famously terrible with Electron, which i also pointed out in the comment you’re replying to. But yes, having multiple chromium instances running for each “app” is terrible
When (according to about:unloads) my average firefox tab is 70-230MB depending on what it is and how old the tab is (youtube tabs for example bloat up the longer they are open), a chat app using over 350 is a pretty big deal
just checked, my firefox is using 4.5gb of RAM, while telegram is using 2.3, while minimized to the system tray, granted Telegram doesnt use electron, but this is a trend across lots of programs and Electron is a big enough offender I avoid apps using it. When I get off shift I can launch discord and check it too, but it is usually bad enough I close it entirely when not in use
First of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket
People don’t run just a single app in their machines. If we triple ram usage of several apps, it results in a massive increase. That’s how bloat happens, it’s a cumulative increase on everything. If we analyze single cases, we could say that they’re not that bad individually, but the end result is the necessity for a constant and fast increase in hardware resources.
Just wanted to point out that the number 1 performance blocker in the CPU is memory. In the general case, if you’re wasting memory, you’re wasting CPU. These two things really cannot be talked about in isolation.
What’s wrong with using Gifs in work chat lmao, can laugh or smile while hating your job like the rest of us.
Get a better job.
The moment you use a file that is bigger than 1GB, that computer will explode.
Some of us do more than just browse Lemmy.
Wow. Have you ever considered how people were working with files bigger than total RAM they had in the normal days of computing?
So in your opinion if you have 2GB+ of a log file, editing it you should have 2GB RAM occupied?
I just have no words, the ignorance.
I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM, where my previous computer had 64MB, later upgraded to 192MB. And there were only like 3 or 4 years in between them.
It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.
You can always switch to a text based terminal and free up your memory. Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.
Just don’t compain that YouTube doesn’t play 4K videos anymore.
strange, mpv handles it just fine
MPV doesn’t work in terminal (well, technically it does, but what’s the point of 4K HDR video in ASCII mode?). Please don’t confuse terminal emulator in GUI mode with a real text mode terminal.
The point is that your example use case of “YouTube 4k videos” doesn’t need a browser full of bloated js garbage.
The point is that MPV will use shitloads of memory too.
Actually lot less than the browser. Under 300MB, I just checked, and that’s mostly just the network buffer which is 150MB by default.
That’s about what my Slack is using, while being written in Electron, lol. Oh, you people…
Guy from '95: “I bet it’s lightning fast though…”
No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touting a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they’re genuinely proud of it.
I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn’t the most ram efficient method of running apps.
A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.
So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is “hidden”
This is resource reservation, it happens at an OS level. If chrome is using what appears to be alot of ram, it will be freed up once either the OS or another application requires it.
It just exists so that an application knows that if it needs that resource it can use X amount for now.
Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.
Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.
I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.
That’s not true at all. The code doesn’t take much space. The content does. Your high quality high res photos, 4K HDR videos, lossless 96kHz audio, etc.
But there are lots of shortcuts now. Asset packs and coding environments that come bundled with all kinds of things you don’t need. People import packages that consume a lot of space to use one tiny piece of it.
To be clear, I’m not talking about videos and images. You’d have these either way.
All these packages don’t take much memory. Also tree shaking is a thing. For example, one of the projects I currently work on has over 5 gigs of dependencies, but once I compile it for production, the whole code based is mere 3 megs and that’s including inlined styles and icons. The code itself is pretty much non-existent.
On the other hand I have 100KB of text translations just for the English language alone. Because there’s shit loads of text. And over 100MB of images, which are part of the build. And then there’s a remote storage with gigabytes of documents.
Even if I double the code base by copy pasting it will be a drop in a bucket.
Absolutely.
Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn’t mean “8 Gb isn’t enough”, it means write tighter, better software.
That ship has long sailed unfortunately. The industry gave up on optimization in favour of praying that hardware advancements can keep up with the bloat.
You just have to watch your favorite tablet get slower year after year to understand that a lot of this is artificial. They could make applications that don’t need those resources but would never do so.
I once went for lower CAS timing 2x 128MB ram sticks (256 MB) instead of 2x 256s with slower speeds because I thought 512MB was insane overkill. Realized how wrong I was when trying to play Star Wars galaxies mmorpg when a lot of people were on the screen it started swapping to disk. Look up the specs for an IBM Aptiva, first computer my parents bought, and you’ll understand how 512MB can seem like a lot.
Now my current computer has 64 GB (most gaming computers go for 32GB) at the time I built it. My workstation at work has 128GB which really isn’t even enough for some workloads we have that use a lot of in-memory cache… And large servers can have multiple TB of RAM. My mind has been blown multiple times.
We measure success by how many GB’s we have consumed when the only keys depressed from power on to desktop is our password. This shit right here is the real issue.
Why do they struggle so much with some “obvious things” sometimes ? We wouldn’t have a type-C iphone if the EU didn’t pressured them to do make the switch
They didn’t have a reason to switch to USB-C, and several reasons to avoid it for as long as possible. Their old Lightning connector (and the big 30-pin connector that came before it) was proprietary, and companies had to pay a royalty to Apple for every port and connector they manufactured. They made a lot of money off of the royalties.
They don’t “struggle”. They are intentional and malicious decisions meant to drive revenue, as they have been since the beginning.
The E-Mac (looks like a toilet, sounds like a jet) came with 256 MB of RAM in one of the two slots, adding a 512MB stick was dirt cheap (everyone had at the very least 1GB on their PC), well it was dirt cheap except if you bought it from Apple…
It’s how Apple monetizes their customers. Figuring out an artificial shortcoming they can sell as an upgrade to them (check out dongles for example).
💸💸💸
I don’t consider that an “admission” at all…
The Voyager space probes disagree.
Oh man, I remember so many people defended 8GB since the M1 first came out (and since).
I always argued it would significantly reduce the lifetimes of these machines if you bought one, not just because you’d be swapping a lot more on the (soldered in BTW) ssd, but because after a few years of updates it would become unbearably slow, or hardware would fail, or both.
Didn’t stop people constantly “tHe aRchITecTuRE iS cOmPlETelY diFFeRenT!!!”
Sure it’s different, but it’s still just a computer. A technical person can still look at the spec sheet and calculate effective performance accounting for bus widths etc.
Disclosure: I bought a top spec 16GB M1 Mac Air on launch and have been extremely happy with it - it’s still going strong.
Didn’t stop people constantly “tHe aRchITecTuRE iS cOmPlETelY diFFeRenT!!!”
Different Turing Machine on different math and alternative physics.
I bought a top spec 16GB M1 Mac Air on launch
My condolences.
I’d love to have 8GB of RAM. The SOC I’m working with has only 2K ;-)
Come on, man, AVR chips aren’t SoCs except in the technical sense.
No AVR, it’s a small LPC from NXP. Chosen for the price, of course, but I have to somehow squeeze the software in it. At this point, even 8k would make me happy…
NXP, fancy. I expected ST, AVR, nRF, WCH or some chinese cheaptroller.
Why them? Something to do with NFC?
Bet your compiler isnt running on that hardware either ;-)
Luckily, no ;-)
2 kilobytes?
Yes. 2 kilobytes. Coincidentally, this is as big as the displays internal buffer, so I cannot even keep a shadow copy of it in my RAM for the GUI.
Thanks for clarification.
I’ve never seen backbuffer called shadow copy.
And I have never heard it called “backbuffer”, so we are even.
I guess so.
Example: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Default_Framebuffer#Double_buffering
EDIT: Wait. Do you have framebuffer at all? Because from sounds of it, you might not even have it at all. If you don’t store entire frame in RAM, then you don’t have framebuffer, not just backbuffer.
I never said anything about framebuffers. The 256x64 pixel display in 16 brightness levels probably has something comparable inside. I just tell it that i want to update a rectangle, and send it some data for that.
I can’t believe, there’s no Linux reference yet!
Give your “8 gigs not enough” hardware to one of us and see it revived running faster than whatever you’re running now with your subpar OS.
Software and AI development would be hard with 8gb of RAM on Linux. Having you seen the memes on AI adding to global climate change? Not even Linux can fix the issues with ChatGPT…
I don’t think anyone anywhere is claiming 8GB RAM is enough for software and AI development. Pretty sure we’re talking about consumer-grade hardware here. And low-end at that.
The lede by OP here contains this:
[…] addition to Xcode 16 […] is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it
So either RecluseRamble meant that development with a feature like predictive code completion would work on 8 GB of RAM if you were using Linux or his comparison was shit.
That’s absolutely what I’m saying. Apple is just holding back that feature for upselling (as always) and because it’s hardly possible to debloat macOS.
My main development machine has 8 GB, for what it’s worth. And most of the software in use nowadays was developped when 8GB was a lot of RAM
This. My Mac has 16GB but I use half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux (server) software.
I don’t need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB. Also I don’t need to give the Linux VM less memory, all my production servers have way less than that. But I don’t need to - because 8GB for the host is more than enough.
Obviously it depends what software you’re running, but editing text, compiling code, and browsing the web… it doesn’t use that much. And the AI code completion system I use needs terabytes of RAM. Hard to believe Apple’s one that runs locally will be anywhere near as good.
Macbook Pros aren’t really consumer grade hardware. Nor are they priced like consumer grade hardware.
Nor are they priced like consumer grade hardware.
Apple products in general aren’t.
That’s not true at all. Macbook Air starts at $900. You can even find a used M1 Air for cheaper. Absolutely was a steal compared to the budget thin laptops from Asus, Acer, etc. which start around $700. Once you go below $700 in laptop market, corners are cut. Perhaps Mediatek WiFi chips are used, laptop isn’t thin, touchpad is awful, screen colors are worse. Apple usually puts iPad + keyboard in that market segment instead.
Tl; dr: Apple products are more expensive than budget electronics but priced comparatively to items that compete with it. However, electronic prices in the high end tier are getting hirer.
So it’s more expensive than the competitors which also have real budget options at easily half the price but then “corners are cut”.
You know, I won’t even argue about the quality of Apple products - they are top tier. But calling the pricing “a steal” is just dishonest.
They have consistently been averaging at 150-200% the price of comparable hardware at least since the 90s. While there may be examples like yours where the gap is smaller, there are plenty of outrageous examples like the infamous monitor stand or some ridiculously priced chargers.
What if I want to run applications that do not exist for Linux?
As I said: feel free to upgrade your MacBook just don’t throw the one with a “meager” 8 gigs away since it’s totally usable with a non-bloated system.
what’s it to you? do I know you??
You replied, I replied back. That’s how public social media work. It’s unlikely we know each other.
we’re just talkin’ that’s right. you know what if you like talking so much, why don’t I send some of my guys over, just to talk.
Do you actually want to run an application that doesn’t exist on Linux?
I use a virtual machines for the 2 or 3 times a year I need to use a couple garbage windows-only programs. Usually for configuring some arcane piece of proprietary hardware that people were getting rid of because it is incompatible with everything.
You come to my house and talk big about how I should do this that and the other, frankly it’s disrespectful.
“Disrespectful” would be telling you that you in particular should continue to use windows or mac, and avoid Linux like the plague.
OK you know what, let me make it up to you. Just walk down the street, third entry to the right, we came into some really nice designer clothes, choose whatever you want, it’s on the house. Just walk in the door, go ahead.
If I wanted your clothes, I wouldn’t have left them at goodwill.
You can run Windows on 200 MB of RAM
I’d love to see you run xcode 16 code completion on your superior OS. Send me a link once you’ve uploaded the vid.
Pls provide source code.
Why limit it to proprietary software? Almost every linux distro can run Github Copilot X and Jetbrains, which both have had more time to be publicly used and tested and work better in my opinion.
Send me a video link of Mac having direct access to containers without using a VM (which ruins the point of containers). THAT is directly related to my actual work, as opposed to needing a robot to code for me specifically using Apple’s AI
Because that was what the article was about…I actually am a Linux user and fan, folks just misreading the intentions of my post.
I would genuinely love to see it, because I’m stuck on mac hardware to do my job and I really hope one day they get crucified for their anticompetative practices so I can freely choose the OS my business uses.
There is a project being worked on called Darling, but it isn’t ready yet. The developers are making progress though.
We all know how that will end
I can run Arch Linux (BTW!) in a potato with starch RAM!
Honestly I have no qualms with MacOS. Probably the best OS. Problem is you can’t run it on anything that is repairable or upgradeable, and in 7 years it won’t be supported any longer. If they would just sell me a $500 lifetime license for MacOS that I could install on a Framework laptop, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. But they know they make way more money by not making that option available.
I actually bought a m1 mini for a linux low power server. I was getting tired of the Pi4 being so slow when I needed to compile something. Works real well, just need the Asahi team to get TB working. And for my server stuff, 8gb is plenty.
You wouldn’t happen to run a jellyfin server on that mac mini would you? Currently looking to find something performant with small form factor and low power consumption.
No I do not, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work though. I have PiHole, Apache, email, cups, mythtv and samba currently.
Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.
That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.
Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn’t optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).
TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air. Or even better, consider an iPhone with Linux in a virtual machine - https://getutm.app/ - though I’m not sure how optimsied ffmpeg will be in that environment… the processor is certainly capable of encoding video quickly, it’s a camera so it has to be able to encode video well.
I’ve run Plex servers on Mac Minis (M1). Docker on MacOS runs well finally — the issues that were everywhere a couple of years ago are resolved.
It ran very well on the hardware. The OP of this post is right, 8gb is not enough in 2024; however I would also wager that the vast majority of commenters have not used MacOS recently or regularly. It is actually very performant and has a memory scheduler that rivals that found on GNU/Linux. Apple’s users aren’t wrong when they talk about how much better the OS is than Windows at using memory.
8GB of dedicated VRAM is hardly enough these days…
This is my biggest lament about getting a 2060 without knowing how important vram is. I can make it perform better and more efficiently a bunch of different ways, but to my knowledge, I can’t get around the 6GB vram wall.
Especially with 4k
