TECH NEWS – These days, 8GB of RAM isn’t enough to run a YouTube video in the background alongside Windows, a word processor and Discord. By comparison, Apple’s idea is a little… unfair.

Releasing a MacBook in 2023 that costs $1,600 and only has 8GB of RAM… that’s reality. Do you need 16GB of RAM? That’s an extra $200. 32GB? Another $400. Not to mention that these machines are not designed so that you can replace the RAM or storage, as Apple solder everything to the motherboard, so if it breaks or the hardware is not powerful enough, you can go and buy another one.

The MacBook Pro’s name suggests that it will be used for more than just browsing. For that, 8GB of RAM is a bit much. By comparison, Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of international product marketing, told Lin YilYi, a machine learning engineer in China: “If you compare our memory to other systems’ memory, it’s not really equivalent because we use memory so efficiently, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture. In fact, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently.

While it is true that they have a unified architecture that is more efficient, 8GB of RAM might not be enough. Oh, and they charge a fortune for an extra eight gigabytes of memory, which is not a consumer-friendly move (nor is an SSD soldered to the motherboard). A PC laptop is not really advertised for content creation with 8GB of RAM anymore. Even 16GB can be a bit low (especially for Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro) and 32GB is more the new standard.

8 gigs is an entry-level PC. Not on a Mac, apparently.

Source: PCGamer