Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
Finally the RAM on that thousand dollar machine is on par with my decade old T420!
The localllama people are feeling quite mixed about this, as they're still charging through the nose for more RAM. Like, orders of magnitude more than the bigger ICs actually cost.
It's kinda poetic. Apple wants to go all in on self-hosted AI now, yet their incredible RAM stinginess over the years is derailing that.
I do have a 64gb m1 MacBook Pro and man that thing screams at doing LLM AI. I use it to serve models locally throughout my house, while it otherwise still works as a fantastic computer (usually using about half the ram for llm usage). I still prefer a 4080 for image generation though.
insultingly tiny, unupgradeable storage aside, that's surprisingly competitive with most modern Windows laptops
It's not ideal, but you're getting probably the best hardware in the market in return. The M series still dominates Windows CPUs, and the build quality on most $1000 laptops leaves a lot to be desired.
build quality on most $1000 laptops
You're not kidding.
I have a couple of laptops from various vendors, and they're all built like shit.
ASUS is especially eyerolly: the case is literally crumbling into pieces. Like seriously? You couldn't have picked a material that's not literally going to disintegrate in two years on a $1200 laptop?
Yeah, a lot of manufacturers are just bad. I knew people who had Dell and MSI laptops and those things feel like toys. Cheap plastic and very wobbly hinges. The only manufacturer I genuinely trust is Lenovo. My Legion is a bit thick but I can at least rest easy that it's built well.
Lenovo is, outside of their really cheap consumer options - like, the $500-and-under options - are pretty solid.
But yeah build quality is one reason when I roll my eyes at the 'haha stupid buying apple! apple tax! lol ripped off!' crowd: I mean maybe, but as soon as you pick up a Macbook whatever it's immediately obvious that you're getting something for what you're paying, and not some bendy flexy piece of plastic crap that will maybe physically survive the warranty period, but not much more.
I saw someone’s Samsung laptop last year and the screen was wobbling all over the fucking place. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I commented on it, and the owner just gave me a blank look.
The best? Debatable. You ever watch Louise on YouTube? He constantly rags on bad hardware design when repairing MacBooks lol.
There's hardware performance and then there's hardware repairability. He's talking about the latter.
Just in time for 32gb to become the necessary standard, so they can still sell you egregiously overpriced ram upgrades.
Completely laughable. Literally had 16 GB of DDR3-1600 for my 2600K from 2011 that I handed down to a kid nephew for their first PC to tinker with. Hell, my local NAS has more than that...
We use windows PCs at work as software engineers now, but when I was training I used a MacBook Pro M1 with 16GB of RAM and that thing was incredibly performant.
I know it in vogue to shit in Apple, but they build the hardware and the software and they’re incredibly efficient at what they do and I don’t think I ever saw the beachball loading icon thing.
Now the prices they charge to upgrade the RAM is something I can get behind shitting on.
I used Windows, Mac and Linux in the past year.
It's not Mac that's fast, it's Windows that sucks hard.
Same.
- Mac - Fast, user friendly, and UNIX based.
- Windows - Fast (I have a beast), bloated, stupid command prompt (“Add-Migration”, capital letters really.), wants to spy on me.
- Linux - Fast, a lot of work to get everything working as you would on Windows or Mac and I’m past those days, I just want to turn the thing on and play Factorio or Minecraft, not figure out if my 4080 will run on it etc.
it’s almost like people make choices to suit their needs and there isn’t a single solution for everybody.
I wonder what the industry standard is for developers? Genuinely. I’ve heard it’s Max, but my company is all in on Microsoft, not really heard of companies developing on Linux. Which isn’t to say Linux doesn’t have its place, but I’m aware this place is insanely biased towards Linux.
Every place I've been at had developers using windows machines and then ssh into a linux environment
Makes sense for sysadmin or something but little sense for developers and engineers writing code to build enterprise software.
I just want to turn the thing on and play Factorio or Minecraft, not figure out if my 4080 will run on it etc.
Funny that you chose two games that run natively on Linux.
I wonder what the industry standard is for developers?
The Stack Overflow developer survey (which has it's bias towards people who use Stack Overflow)... says 47% use Windows, 32% use Mac, and uh, Linux is split up by distro so it's hard to make sense of the numbers but Ubuntu alone is at 27%. (each developer can use multiple platforms so they don't add up to 100%)
The chip and OS won't do shit when your ram is saturated by electron apps taking 800MB each. Maybe MacOS behaves better under very high memory pressure than windows does, but it doesn't mean it's okay to rip off consumers. That whole 8GB on mac = 16GB on windows has been bullshit all along, and is mostly based on people looking at the task manager and seeing high ram usage on windows (which is a good thing)
I know it’s in vogue to shit on Apple…
Apple does have a lot of vertical integration which allows first party stuff to function well and they work closely with a lot of their premium 3rd party software partners, but you try running an actual RAM hungry process like a local LLM model, for example, and all but the highest end latest edition MacBook Pro WILL shit the bed.
You can use Linux with RAM compression to have the same kind of economy that MacOS does.
Just nobody bothers.
Fucking PHONES had more RAM. It was so fucking stupid. And despite their arguments, it was proven time and time again 8GB was not enough.
“640k is enough for anyone.”
Perfect, just when I've decided 16GB is the bare minimum these days too. My day to day I max out 16 on my laptops without even trying. 32 is my new minimum.
Apple finally caught up with 2018 technology
And here I thought that 8GB on Mac was at least as good as 16GB on plebian PCs.
watch how (corporate) operating systems will now be heavier accordingly.
Yes it’s described as being for “Apple intelligence” which I’m sure won’t be bloated nor hard to disable at all.. sigh
It’s literally a toggle in the settings under apple intelligence
With no programs running my mac mini is using 16gb so I'm not surprised
That’s normal for these computers. Idea being it doesn’t really benefit you to have a ton of empty ram sitting around waiting to be used. So the OS makes no effort to clear it out until the space is needed.
If you believe their marketing it’s actually doing the opposite, and preemptively loading stuff into ram in order to make your common tasks feel as snappy as possible. But yeah either way you’ll notice the memory is always “full”, but you never seem run out
My daily driver MacBook Pro has 8GB of RAM, and so far, that’s been perfectly sufficient for my needs. Some might argue that 8GB is inadequate for a 1,700€ device, but I don’t think most people would notice a difference. This focus on specs might make more sense with computers, but with smartphones especially, I never understood the obsession with performance. My mid-range Samsung handles everything instantly - I can’t think of a reason it would need to be any faster. Numbers on a paper seem irrelevant when it doesn't translate to everyday use.
MacOS, no matter what anyone says, has extremely efficient memory management. It's seriously impressive how efficient that OS truly is, and it's no surprise they stuck with 8GB for so long. The thing these clickbait articles don't really bring to light is that the 16GB increase is really for Apple intelligence. If that wasn't a thing these Macs would stick to 8GB.
It is "efficient" because they just dump everything on swap. If I cold boot my M1 air, it'll be using 7GB of RAM and 4GB of swap without anything running in the background. I have this ongoing bug as well where some background apps will stop responding and the system can't stop the process, so it starts a new one and it keeps doing this until I either stop the app manually, or my storage is completely full because swap is taking 80GB of my internal storage.
Your MacBook is a cell phone?! Hahaha jk
People don't want the 8gb ram because they are all used to windows I bet it.