Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM

Well yeah, they're enough to meet the minimum use cases so they can upsell most people on expensive RAM upgrades.

That's why I don't buy laptops with soldered RAM. That's getting harder and harder these days, but my needs for a laptop have also gone down. If they solder RAM, there's nothing you can (realistically) do if you need more, so you'll pay extra when buying so they can upcharge a lot. If it's not soldered, you have a decent option to buy RAM afterward, so there's less value in upselling too much.

So screw you Apple, I'm not buying your products until they're more repair friendly.

I had a extra stick of RAM available the other day so I went to open my wife's Lenovo to see if it'd take it and the damn thing is screwed shut with the smallest torx screws I've ever seen, smaller than what I have. I was so annoyed
- The real question is why you don't have a complete precision screwdriver set.
- smallest torx screws I've ever seen
  Torx is legitimately useful for small screws, because it's more resistant to stripping than Phillips.
  Now, if they start using Torx security bits or some oddball shapes, then they're just being obnoxious. But there are not-trying-to-obstruct-the-customer reasons not to use Phillips.
That's why I don't buy laptops with soldered RAM.
In my opinion disadvantages of user-replaceable RAM far outweigh the advantages. The same goes for discrete GPUs. Apple moved away from this and I expect PC manufacturers to follow Apple’a move in the next decade or so, as they always do.

Tim Apple be like "We've tried charging more money. Have we tried charging more money and delivering less stuff in exchange?"

Yeah, sure. Even if what they say about the OS resource usage is true, it's only a fraction of the total usage. A lot of the multiplatform software will use the same resources regardless of the OS. Many apps eat RAM for breakfast, doesn't matter if it's content creation or software development. Heck, even smartphones these days have have this much or more RAM.

I won't argue, I just won't buy an Apple product in the near future or probably ever at all.

buys [insert price] laptop, top of the line, flagship, custom silicon, built ground up to be purpose specific.
Opens final cut pro: crashes
ok...

8GB RAM is what my phone has.

Having that in a laptop shows what they think of people buying their kit. They think you're only buying it so you can type easier on Facebook.

TBF 8gb of ram on a phone is actually psychotic. You really shouldn't be doing all that much on a phone lol.
- Then what should I be doing on my phone?

My X220 and T520 each have 16GB. The designed max was actually "only" 8GB, but it turns out 16 GB actually works. I replaced the RAM modules myself without asking Lenovo for permission. Those models came out in 2011.

i have more ram on my old gpu apple sucks

A friend has a phone with more ram.

I was using my 2016 (or so) MacBook Air the other day and getting low memory errors. I thought, wow, this thing only has 8 gb, maybe it's time to upgrade, just to see this 😐

I mean. It makes sense. The vast majority of people buying apple computers are loyalists or people that simply need an Internet/word processor.

And if you want to develop in apple then you have to spend a massive premium for their higher end hardware.

My basic web dev Docker suite uses about 13GB just on its own, which - assuming you were on 16GB (double Apple’s minimum) - wouldn’t leave much for things like browser tabs, which also eat memory for breakfast.

A fast swap is not an argument to short-change on RAM, especially since SSDs have a shorter lifespan than RAM modules. 16GB remains the absolute bare minimum for modern computing, and Apple is making weak, ridiculous excuses to pocket just a few extra bucks per MacBook.

My basic web dev Docker suite uses about 13GB just on its own
Skill issue

Even the PC manufacturers selling "gaming" PCs using integrated graphics aren't usually this brazen about it.

As engineers, we should never insert proprietary interfaces into our designs. We shouldn't obfuscate the design.

The motivation for these toxic practices comes from the business side because it's profitable. These people won't share the profits with you because they are psychopaths. Ultimately we are making more waste when electronics cannot be upgraded, maintained and repaired. It's bad for people and it's bad for the environment.

To be fair, M-series Macs are pretty insanely efficient with memory. Unless you’ve actually used one extensively, I can understand the attitudes here…BUT:

I’ve done broadcast animation for many years, and back in ‘21 delivered an entire season of info/explainer-type pieces for a network show — using Motion, Cinema 4D, and After Effects (+ Ai and Ps) — all of it running on a base-level, first-gen M1 Mini (8/256). Workflow was fast and smooth; even left memory-pig apps running in the background most of the time…not one hiccup. Oh, and everything was delivered in 4k.

So 8gb actually is plenty for most folks…even professionals doing some heavy lifting. Sure I’d go for 16 next one, but damn I was/am still impressed. (Maybe it sucks for gaming, I don’t do that so have no clue).

It's okay if you run efficient OS on it, not the case.

That doesn't help with memory hungry apps though.
And it’s not RAM, it’s UM for an SoC. The usage of memory changed with the introduction of Apple Silicon.
- "Unified" only means there's not a discrete block for the CPU and a discrete block for the GPU to use. But it's still RAM- specifically, LPDDR4x (for M1), LPDDR5 (for M2), or LPDDR5X (for M3).
  Besides, low-end PCs with integrated graphics have been using unified memory for decades- no one ever said "They don't have RAM, they have UM!"

I'll admit I don't use Macs, so maybe they are more efficient than the Linux and windows machines I work off...

...but I typically use machines with 64GB and recently upgraded my personal machine to 128GB. I still swap about 50GB to my SSD from time to time.

And I'm not doing heavy graphic design or movie editing stuff.

I cannot fathom for the life of me how 8GB would ever be feasible.

How the fuck are you using that much ram of you aren't doing "heavy duty" stuff????
- I just said I'm not doing graphic design or movie editing. I typically have 10 different browser profiles open to separate data / bookmarks, maybe 8 email accounts in tabs and Outlook (if not on Linux), 4-8 VS code windows, a mix of jetbrains rider or visual studio instances, a smattering mix of postman/SQL server/azure data studio/thunder client, among other things like PDFs and documents. And then multiple docker containers and other local running servers.
  The swap usually comes in when I'm parsing a data file or something.
Do you understand kernel memory management fundamentals? I'm asking because what you wrote here strongly suggests otherwise - so, unless you're able to show me I'm wrong, I'm going to stick with my conclusion that this is all incorrect and likely complete bullshit.
I get the sense that a lot of people here don’t use MacOS.
I have a few ARM and Intel Macs in 8 and 16gig configs, and I do a lot of heavy multimedia work. My 8 gig M1 only really gets into trouble when my partner and I both have an account with files open in bloated creative software. One pro user, and it’s usually fine. 2 active accounts with shitty creative software running, and you get a few beach balls.
Dude, that's how much RAM I used to have on a super high-end dev box at work with 56 cores. It was very helpful for compiling Chrome. WTF are you doing with a personal machine that needs that much RAM?
- I mean it's my personal machine but I am a software engineer consultant/contractor so I use it for work, too.