Agreed. Especially as we are now entering the world of AI assistants.
Running these on device is going to need a lot of RAM.
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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
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Running these on device is going to need a lot of RAM.
That sounds feasible.
The vast majority of people do work like word processing, spreadsheets, documents, and other similar tasks. They also use computers to manage personal videos and photos, communication, and web surf. I can see this being popular in companies where the HDMI port means you don't have to walk around with an adaptor. Like you said, 8gb probably suffices for them.
That said, I don't see why "light productivity" is so frowned upon. I am a teacher dealing with a number of responsibilities this term, largely involving planning and timetabling and lots of google spreadsheets, and that has sucked up pretty much all my free time of late.
The idea that “work” is only coding/video editing or just “basic tasks” is a big tech blind spot which has become annoying in recent years frankly.
Did you run anything serious in that VM? Was the OS a modern one? I doubt it. I do a LOT of VM work and 8G is the minimum on a modern OS VM, 16G is common, and I have run VM's with 32G assigned to it. (Servers)
Yes, and yes. Ubuntu 23.04, and I manage a fleet of AWS web servers for a living.
I make the tools that I have work for me. When I need 8GB of RAM assigned to a VM, I use my 16GB Mac.
How much more expensive would it actually be for apple to just put 16GB in the machine as starting. Problem solved. 8GB looks bad. If they have a more efficient system, utilize it while giving actual common standard memory configuration of this generation. It is ridiculous and price gouging. I have read many people complaining 8GB is NOT enough.
However their upgrades don't cost nearly as much as Apple's -- that why they don't complain.
btw, that particular WS comes with a 12GB dGPU. So it has 20GB in comparison to a Mac.
It's only $104.69 to raise it up to 16G RAM. THAT'S why people are complaining about the Mac and not Dell.
Agreed.
Light productivity and light creativity (editing your own personal photos and videos) are what the vast majority of people will really use their Macs for, despite people on this forum (and places like Reddit) saying otherwise.
In fact, I'd bet that most people with a MBP are hardly ever doing anything that fires up the P cores.
It'll be like buying a fast car and driving it around a city at no more than 30kph.
I'd say also that tech reviewers review computers nowadays as if the only intended user is, you guessed it... A tech reviewer.
I.e. they'll say things like:
'It's disappointing that the entry level iMac hasn't got an SD card port and only has two USB-C ports'.
At this point, 'regular' people have likely not needed to use an SD card for years.
Nor is it likely that they'll ever use their USB-C ports for much. Maybe to charge a device. Otherwise, we live in a wireless world.
And I've read this week also, variants on:
'It's disappointing that the MBP M3 can only drive one display'.
I mean c'mon - most people will use the laptop's screen only. And maybe just one other screen if they use their machine for work in the office (if they have been provided with a screen).
If you even have two screens, you have to accept that you're a niche power user or a gamer.
And guess what, Apple has a MBP M3 pro (or Max) for people like you.
I try to make sure my tools fit what I need to begin with. I have 2 Macs working at home right now, a 32G M2 Pro Mini, and a 128G intel iMac. Like I said, I do a lot with VM's.
GUI? That sounds painful anyway. I have run DOS and Win95 in that small of VM's for testing and it can work quite well, so sorry for my surprise and query. I even have a Win 3.1 VM around here somewhere.
100% this. It really can't be said enough. There are consequences with BTO. Overpriced at $400 total for 16/512 and then I can't find them anywhere on sale--which I think is their real goal.
I am saying it's ridiculous to say you need 192 GB of RAM for After Effects when you are using 720p project files. Something my computers 10-15 years ago did well on 8 and 16GB of RAMI know too well how memory hungry After Effects are
Are you kidding me? The M3 Max performing the same as the M2 Ultra is a MASSIVE jump. Its only the Pro SoC that stalled, and they just fixed their lineup is all.
I do not believe the vast majority of users don't care about the specs that come with their laptop so long as it offers great performance and long battery life and its not just laptop users? When they use 'pro' in the name and where Apple do carry quite a premium from the Wintel devices, far better for Apple to be ahead of the game, as unlike Wintel RAM, you cannot upgrade unified ram and the longevity of a device where the base is 8Gb now may be restricted.
Incidentally although you cited part of my post, it doesn't actually line up with your comments or the comment in quotes, as I've never suggested Macs are completely unusable with only 8Gb Ram? I want to see Apple leading, not lagging, and 16Gb would help do that.
"Personally I believe Apple are shooting themselves in both feet. Apple like to have the moral high ground and Apple devices command a premium for multiple reasons, but they are losing that in the PR battle over base configurations."
A 16Gb base configuration would in some way future proof the devices, and making 16Gb base unified ram will cost very little indeed, and could quite easily gain more sales, and where they could push the price up by $25 and still cover their cost at the same time as showing Apple are ahead of the game.
On a PC it is so cheap to upgrade RAM, and where Apple would also save from not having to have the set up for the 8Gb unified Ram and could produce in bulk the 16Gb which would in my opinion help future proof devices and be a good PR coup.
The amount of posts on this thread and others, and even comments from external sources show its not good for PR, even if 8Gb performance in unified RAM was anywhere near 16Gb of WINTEL, I believe the comment made was not helpful to Apple as if anything its fanned the flames and not helpful PR.
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While he is talking about memory pressure he says Final Cut was rendering in the background, uh no it wasn't it was paused. WTF. I stopped watching after that.
Damn it I miss Barefeats.
I don’t care if they want to start at 8 but $200 for 8 more is the issue. You can buy 8gb of ddr5 on amazon for $20. Even if they charged $50 that would be fine but $200 is insane
Apple's going to bump this model to 16GB next year and claim '2X faster speeds!' and sell even more of them. And people will fall for it.
You apparently don’t use Final Cut Pro. When moving the mouse to bring it to the foreground, FCP automatically pauses, which is what he did.
Just to show I’m fair, here’s the other side of the argument from MaxTech. My only comment on this video is that MaxTech only believes there is one kind of professional, the kind that spends all their time editing video and thousands of photos, and does Blender rendering. They have a tendency to run exactly the same tests, regardless of whether it’s the MacBook Air or a Mac Pro.
I'm surprised to see discrepancies this large in the speedometer benchmark, that's a fairly substantial improvement on the 16GB model. If that's repeatable (and he had only five tabs open on each), we're talking about a 20%+ improvement just on web browsing responsiveness from that benchmark.
looks like you're waiting or switching to Windows.
Mac market share was low single digits ~25 yrs ago. Now it's north of 20%.
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I know you're joking, but that's a false induction by trying to compare infinite numbers with finite numbers. Inf = 2x inf has the same cardinality, but 8 Gb = 16 GB does not.
Thank you for the explanation; I do not use Final Cut -- and also, that is stupid. Why should rendering pause just because you brought focus to it; guess he was talking about background rendering. Apple lost me when they released Final Cut Pro X, another boondoggle.
I "have" used Final Cut X before, but I do not use it day to day. It just makes more sense to use Premiere since I do a lot of After Effects stuff and the integration is way better; even though Premiere sucks also. 🤣
The question was not correctly phrased. The interviewer should have asked:
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