News Apple Claims M3 MacBook Pro's 8GB Equals 16GB On PCs

[Admin]

Apple executive Bob Borchers asserts that Apple uses memory more efficiently, so "8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems."

Apple Claims M3 MacBook Pro's 8GB Equals 16GB On PCs : Read more

 

[peachpuff]

Your $75k salary from Apple equals a $150k salary from Microsoft...

 

[brandonjclark]

Your $75k salary from Apple equals a $150k salary from Microsoft...

Bwa-hahahahahah!

This guy's response is a joke, TBH. Even if Apple's memory management and OS ARE better optimized for half the amount, IT DOESN'T EXPLAIN WHY THEY CHARGE MORE FOR LESS!

 

[hotaru251]

Apple Claims M3 MacBook Pro's 8GB Equals 16GB On PCs​

remember when Nvidia said the 4060 ti's 128bit memory bus 288 GB/s was equivalent to 554 GB/s which was much faster than the prior gen 60 series' 448 GB/s?

turns out in 90% of situations it was in fact slower.



Never trust the company's word if they sell product as they will always take best result even if its minority of results.

 

[ezst036]

I mean, Apple does have something of a point.

8GB on Linux equals 16GB on PCs too. (Question for all: Are we allowed to acknowledge right here, right now, that the term "PC" is a derogatory term specifically for the Apple cult aimed directly at Microsoft Windows?) Although:

Apple's Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing

We do need to understand that first and foremost, Apple is a Marketing company that happens to have technology departments(both software and hardware, both mobile and desktop). Windows is terribly heavy. MacOS isn't the lightest chicken on the block now either, but it's not like lifting Mt. WinEverest over there.

 

[Sippincider]

Thanks but let’s see what a VP of engineering has to say about this, someone who actually worked on it.

Not a VP of marketing who’ll tell us how great it is…

 

[-Fran-]

I'm so sad there's people that actually eats this marketing and enables Apple in doing so. Same with other similar practices from other Companies, mind you.

Oh welp. I guess some people deserves to eat this type of marketing whole.

Regards.

 

[Colif]

Aren't half their staff marketing? Convincing people who buy their things that 8gb is enough saves them money (Apple, not the people) and is up there with resisting bigger screensizes on phones long after Android made their phones look like toys.

 

[Amdlova]

This is so stupid. With that money you will get workstation grade machine.

 

[K60185758]

Aren't half their staff marketing? Convincing people who buy their things that 8gb is enough saves them money (Apple, not the people) and is up there with resisting bigger screensizes on phones long after Android made their phones look like toys.

"Shut Up and Take My Money!"

 

[magbarn]

Ahh Yes, RDF continues to exist, even without SJ. I bought the BS when I got my wife a Macbook Air M1 with only 8gb of ram. Turns out when you're a Realtor, you'll have dozens of websites open at a time when showing clients. She was missing her macbook pro 13 2017 that had 16gb of ram as her M1 was slower when it had to start swapping.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

There is absolutely no way this is true. Anyone who does 4k video editing or 8k photo editing needs minimum 16GB but probably should opt for 24GB (or get a desktop that can get 32-64GB). The real reason Apple has the 8GB version is so they can justify charging an extra $200 for the 16GB model. People would complain if the base price was $1799.

 

[PEnns]

Many people would believe that

On the other hand, even "experts" on techie websites are still peddling / recommending "gaming" PCs and laptops with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB SSD....as a "great deal"!!

And many people would believe that too, unfortunately.

 

[Colif]

On the other hand, even "experts" on techie websites are still peddling / recommending "gaming" PCs and laptops with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB SSD....as a "great deal"!!

They need to update their advice then as 2 to 4x times is better for both.

Shame you can still buy 128gb ssd. It works if you only ever install windows on the drive.. but I still wouldn't suggest it.

 

[Order 66]

Even if that was true, 16GB is the new minimum for anything that a MacBook pro would be used for.

 

[fatalshot808]

While their OS is more efficient with memory management the use of photo/video editing software might have crashes for the lack of memory.

Having 8 GB of memory isn't a bad thing, having 8 GB of memory and not being to upgrade it the problem here. Apple already overcharges on their products to make 8 GB a slap in the face.

 

[palladin9479]

8GB on Linux equals 16GB on PCs too. (Question for all: Are we allowed to acknowledge right here, right now, that the term "PC" is a derogatory term specifically for the Apple cult aimed directly at Microsoft Windows?) Although:

Apple did not coin the term PC, it means Personal Computer as in a computer a normal person can own and doesn't require an entire room dedicated to it. IBM made the term famous with it's IBM PC line that created the x86 + Microsoft standard we see in desktop PC's today. Back when Apple was circling the drain, Steve Jobs stepped in and in a move of pure market brilliance, turned an industry term into a derogatory term by saying that Apple Personal Computers were not in fact Personal Computers.

It's the marketing equivalent of saying "its not a Car, it's a BMW" or "it's not a bag, it's a Gucci". Illogical yet invokes a feeling of superiority and exclusivity.

 

[bit_user]

The key thing people need to understand is that memory compression isn't magic. It doesn't work equally well for all types of apps. How much mileage you get from it depends both on how compressible your application's memory really is, as well as the rate of turnover. Thus, their claim that "our 8 GB = their 16 GB" won't hold for all apps, if any.

For having a bunch of memory that's mostly static, like keeping lots of browser tabs open, it would probably work rather well. For gaming or memory-intensive content creation apps, I expect the gains would be much less.

 

[peachpuff]

The key thing people need to understand is that memory compression isn't magic.

But it is magic!

Maybe Apple should include this with every Mac they sell.

 

[bit_user]

But it is magic!

Maybe Apple should include this with every Mac they sell.

Heh, good call!

Apple's M-series CPUs (and I don't know how much further back it goes, among their phone SoCs) perform this using a hardware compression engine. So, in essence, they actually did include such technology.

I don't know about Windows, but Linux has a feature called zram, which does something similar:

​

zram - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

​

 

[fisher.wei]

+8g ram = $200
only apple can do

one more thing

+ 512g ssd = $200
only apple can do

 

[bit_user]

+8g ram = $200
only apple can do

one more thing

+ 512g ssd = $200
only apple can do

For comparison, I'm looking at the Dell website, pricing out a Precision laptop. In the model filter, I picked one with 8 GB of memory, and it's got a 256 GB SSD (coludn't find one with 8 + 512 GB). Upgrading the memory to 16 GB adds $105.39. Upgrading the SSD to 1 TB adds $102.88.

I haven't verified your numbers, but they appear to be nearly 2x of Dell's.

 

[Darkoverlordofdata]

This would not surprise me. One of the biggest criticisms of intel/amd x64 when it first came out was how much memory it wasted. I can double your memory requirements over the prior 32 bit arch just because it allocated chunks of memory that were twice as big.

 

[bit_user]

This would not surprise me. One of the biggest criticisms of intel/amd x64 when it first came out was how much memory it wasted. I can double your memory requirements over the prior 32 bit arch just because it allocated chunks of memory that were twice as big.

I think that's not really accurate. However, it does matter whether you're talking about Linux or Windows. On Linux, sizeof(long) increases from 4 to 8 bytes, when you go from 32-bit to 64-bit. On Windows, the only things that change are size_t and pointers.

So, if you're talking about some kind of pointer-heavy datastructure, or maybe some datastructures on Linux that make heavy use of long int but really just need int, then you you could see up to about 2x memory footprint.

However, as this handy table shows, ARM is really no worse than x86 on either OS:

	ARM 32-bit Linux g++ 4.9	ARM 64-bit Linux g++ 7.5.0	x86 32-bit Linux g++ 4.8	x64 64-bit Linux g++ 5.4	x86 32-bit Windows 7 VisualStudio 2013	x64 64-bit Windows 7 VisualStudio 2013
sizeof(bool)	1	1	1	1	1	1
sizeof(char)	1	1	1	1	1	1
sizeof(short)	2	2	2	2	2	2
sizeof(int)	4	4	4	4	4	4
sizeof(long)	4	8	4	8	4	4
sizeof(long long)	8	8	8	8	8	8
sizeof(float)	4	4	4	4	4	4
sizeof(double)	8	8	8	8	8	8
sizeof(long double)	8	16	12	16	8	8
sizeof(size_t)	4	8	4	8	4	8
sizeof(void *)	4	8	4	8	4	8
sizeof(DWORD)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	4	4

Source: https://www.ccoderun.ca/programming/2017-03-10_sizeof/
(The version on this page has highlighting to show the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit.)

 

[Colif]

It's the marketing equivalent of saying "its not a Car, it's a BMW" or "it's not a bag, it's a Gucci". Illogical yet invokes a feeling of superiority and exclusivity.

+8g ram = $200
only apple can do

one more thing

+ 512g ssd = $200
only apple can do

Apple uses the magical power of marketing and design to sell their sheep on these things.

Zram. I think windows can do all of that but not as part of same process. It compresses ram but mostly data not being used, and you can set up ram drives if you want to.

Downloadable ram beats ram doubler. https://downloadmoreram.com/ (I don't have anything to do with this page, use at own risk)