About time. This also applies to their older models such as M2 and M3 laptops.
In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.
The M2 macbook air now starts at $1000 for 16GB RAM and 256GB storage. Limited storage aside, that’s surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops.
Completely laughable. Literally had 16 GB of DDR3-1600 for my 2600K from 2011 that I handed down to a kid nephew for their first PC to tinker with. Hell, my local NAS has more than that…
And here I thought that 8GB on Mac was at least as good as 16GB on plebian PCs.
Considering their industry-leader status, it’s about 5-7 years too late.
I dunno if I’d even consider them an industry leader, unless you break down their ubiquity by industry category (in which they lead graphic design and maybe video editing, iirc). They lead phone sales in the US by a lot, but their overall desktop share is still relatively small (<10%), and their global footprint is buoyed only by iOS (which is still below Windows and Android).
I would say they’re an innovator, and they push certain companies to innovate, but they don’t really lead by that many metrics.
I meant leading as in “if Apple does something, others will too”. That has been true for quite a long time now.
Perfect, just when I’ve decided 16GB is the bare minimum these days too. My day to day I max out 16 on my laptops without even trying. 32 is my new minimum.
insultingly tiny, unupgradeable storage aside, that’s surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops
It’s not ideal, but you’re getting probably the best hardware in the market in return. The M series still dominates Windows CPUs, and the build quality on most $1000 laptops leaves a lot to be desired.
build quality on most $1000 laptops
You’re not kidding.
I have a couple of laptops from various vendors, and they’re all built like shit.
ASUS is especially eyerolly: the case is literally crumbling into pieces. Like seriously? You couldn’t have picked a material that’s not literally going to disintegrate in two years on a $1200 laptop?
Yeah, a lot of manufacturers are just bad. I knew people who had Dell and MSI laptops and those things feel like toys. Cheap plastic and very wobbly hinges. The only manufacturer I genuinely trust is Lenovo. My Legion is a bit thick but I can at least rest easy that it’s built well.
I saw someone’s Samsung laptop last year and the screen was wobbling all over the fucking place. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I commented on it, and the owner just gave me a blank look.
Lenovo is, outside of their really cheap consumer options - like, the $500-and-under options - are pretty solid.
But yeah build quality is one reason when I roll my eyes at the ‘haha stupid buying apple! apple tax! lol ripped off!’ crowd: I mean maybe, but as soon as you pick up a Macbook whatever it’s immediately obvious that you’re getting something for what you’re paying, and not some bendy flexy piece of plastic crap that will maybe physically survive the warranty period, but not much more.
The best? Debatable. You ever watch Louise on YouTube? He constantly rags on bad hardware design when repairing MacBooks lol.
There’s hardware performance and then there’s hardware repairability. He’s talking about the latter.
That’s what I’m talking about too. Hardware repairability.
and I’m saying that Simple was talking about hardware performance
The localllama people are feeling quite mixed about this, as they’re still charging through the nose for more RAM. Like, orders of magnitude more than the bigger ICs actually cost.
It’s kinda poetic. Apple wants to go all in on self-hosted AI now, yet their incredible RAM stinginess over the years is derailing that.
I do have a 64gb m1 MacBook Pro and man that thing screams at doing LLM AI. I use it to serve models locally throughout my house, while it otherwise still works as a fantastic computer (usually using about half the ram for llm usage). I still prefer a 4080 for image generation though.
“640k is enough for anyone.”
With no programs running my mac mini is using 16gb so I’m not surprised
That’s normal for these computers. Idea being it doesn’t really benefit you to have a ton of empty ram sitting around waiting to be used. So the OS makes no effort to clear it out until the space is needed.
If you believe their marketing it’s actually doing the opposite, and preemptively loading stuff into ram in order to make your common tasks feel as snappy as possible. But yeah either way you’ll notice the memory is always “full”, but you never seem run out
Well that would be good, but it goes completely against how i’ve learned to manage my machine these past three decades.
Yeah it was a trip for me as well to adapt to the new ways. For example it took me a long long time to adjust to allowing the computer to manage the multitasking for me. I would habitually always close out programs I wasn’t using, because I felt deeply from my decades of experience that running tons of things at once would cause many issues.
I was very uncomfortable letting all these “active” programs pile up, but it really turned out to be all good. The computers are designed to be used this way. And really, I’m better off for it, not having to go in and micromanage everything constantly.
What I’m trying to say is that learning is not something that is ever finished, you know? There came a day when we stopped defragmenting our hard drives, and now the day has arrived where the computer utilizes all the ram all the time
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Is that controlled by the operating system or something else? I’m curious about whether my Debian laptop does the same.
