I upgraded my 2018 Mac mini to 64 GB and realized that all my performance problems immediately disappeared. Everything is instant. CPU and GPU are totally meaningless for my use case, but RAM is massively important.
I don’t do anything fancy, just kind of standard home office stuff- photos, music, email, Evernote, OneNote, etc. But I have large databases in each. I use up most of a 3TB RAID. I regularly cross the 32gb threshold in memory use.
I could get by with 32gb if I wouldn’t mind tolerating some throttling, but 8-16gb is off the table entirely. Even my little 16 gb macbook I just use to screw around on while I watch tv can’t keep up with just doing email, some text editors and browsers without bogging, sometimes massively.
It’s getting to the point where Macs are just becoming unusable due to this nonsense, and I’ve never been more motivated to leave the platform. I can’t pay $3000 for every computer or just live with bog slow computers.
lud@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
You sure about that? I got my work to buy me a new one very recently because I need a new one for testing stuff (my main machine runs Windows). I choose the cheapest one available, because I don’t need a Pro model or anything. I also prefer a light computer since I often carry around both the Mac and my Windows machine in my backpack.
The cheapest M2 or M3 MacBook Air I could find had 16 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage. It’s only 999 USD which is quite cheap compared to my Windows laptop.
Where do you get your numbers from?
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Maybe they started to include 16gb this year, but I can assure you that the basic model recently came with only 8gb ram. I’ve had dozens of students with those in the past couple of years. Right now, a basic M3 on Apple.ca is 1449$ CAD. .
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
There was a recent Lemmy post saying Apple had just raised their minimum RAM specs to 16 GB. I think I came across this in the last couple weeks. I didn’t do more than skim the comments since I don’t have any products from them.
realitista@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Yes they did but that’s only because now 16gb is equally as bad an experience as 8gb used to be due to the ram needs of their new AI chip.
yonder@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Erm, actually, the Pi 5 can do 6 monitors with a dGPU attached. Jeff Geerling just did a video about using AMD cards with the PI.
realitista@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Compare the experience on that with any Mac (even an old intel one) with 64gb and you will understand instantly how important it is.
lud@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I’m not denying that 8 GBs of RAM is too little.
My personal PC has 64 GB, my work PC has 16 and the new work PC will have 32 GB.
8 GB is absolutely too little and apple absolutely charges way too much for more storage and ram.
I was just doubting their observation that new MacBooks from 2024 had 8 GB of ram.