I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.
Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?
I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.
Because RAM is cheap and really helpful. If you have a Desktop, you can buy 16GB DDR4 RAM for ~30€ and 32GB for ~60€. That’s retail with VAT - Apple itself will get much better prices and so there is no reason why their expensive devices are shipped with 8GB RAM.
Not that this changes anything really, but the memory apple is using is much faster than DDR4 you can buy retail, they’re not really comparable. The closest thing would be the new DDR5 CAMM modules, but even these are not quite the same thing. Again, none of this invalidates the basic principle that Apple charges way too much for memory upgrades.
Apple uses bog standard LPDDR5-6400. LPDDR5 is a low power variant of DDR5. 32GB of DDR5-6400 is about $90 USD.
The only thing special about the Apple RAM configuration is the larger than normal bus on the CPU die.
That is a great argument — I can fathom anger toward this.