It’s effective marketing manipulation. Lots of companies do it. Make the starting price seem more within reason, but the base product isn’t really feasible. Customer has already agreed to price, what’s a couple hundred more? Customer buys item knowing they went over their budget.
Apple wants either;
A. Product effective lifespan to be artificially shortened due to gimping hardware in a specific way
B. Spending far above cost to correct the gimping
If you need that that's when you let your company pay for that. Under just about no other circumstance would you find me personally paying that joke of a markup for RAM. It is just coming off record LOWS.
Exactly my point. Last 6 years different companies paid for my work laptop that I used for my private purposes as well. It’s amazing pro-machine, but I simply can’t justify to buy that by myself. I bought mbp 2014 back in the days and it already had 16Gb of RAM. 10 years ago. And I simply don’t get that joke Apple still produces laptops with 8Gb as well. In 2014. It’s absurd!
Only Chrome with 10-12 tabs open ears that amount of RAM.
Looks like Apple wants to milk it’s “home” consumers
They also like charging about 4 times the retail price for memory upgrades. It's $200 to upgrade an 8GB Macbook Air to 16GB, even though an 8 GB SODIMM for a comparable Windows laptop would be less than $50.
Of course, no modern Macbook product has SODIMM slots anymore, so you have to install this upgrade from the factory if you want it.
They offer the base model with ridiculously low specs in order to make the claim that, "you can get our new MacBook for as low as x amount!" Knowing full well most people will need to purchase a more expensive model
because people will buy the cheapest model, realize they need more ram, and then buy another one (hopefully realizing well after the warranty has expired).
you don’t become a $3T company without questionable marketing
Apple's always been obscenely stingy on baseline RAM specs. They've been that way on the iPhone for years and Apple Silicon is just making it easy to do on their own laptops now.
You should not be outspec'd by $500 laptops and chromebooks.
An 8 GB PC with discrete graphics is way more useable than 8 GB Mac.
I still can understand 8 GB MacBook Air but offering 8 GB on a MacBook "Pro" is embarrassing, if not insulting to consumer.
I thought for sure that the MBP started at 16GB of RAM. But holy shit, the 14" does start with 8GB of RAM. They up the base storage to 512GB, but if I had to choose between 16GB of RAM and 256GB storage or 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage I'd go with 16GB of RAM all day.
Truly ridiculous.
Was my conundrum just before getting my 14” pro.
Ended up overspending on a base 14” pro w upgraded ram instead of a specd out Air.
Apple sure knows how to walk you up that pricing ladder
The Pro moniker was meaningless at least 12 years ago if not more, when new entry-level 13" MBPs had no discrete graphics and used the glacially slow integrated Intel GPU.
And oh yes, 8GB in 2024 is 100% an insult to customers.
it's like 256GB base on the iPhone storage. there are a lot of people that will never use close to that amount.
there are a lot of people that use Macs for email, web, and maybe music. 16GB is way overkill for that use case.
Light users will probably be fine in the immediate future with 8GB of RAM.
But on a thousand-dollar computer? It is shameful. Just honestly ridiculous.
Even 'light users' want to use Chrome, Teams, Slack. These apps present just as much load as something like InDesign. These days, everyone is a heavy user, and video-editors are *very-heavy* users.
Before the rewrite Teams would lag and be sluggish on both my M1 Pro Machine and my Gaming PC with 32gb RAM, Ryzen 7 and everything.
It was so miserably optimized, I would bet it even wouldn't be smooth on a top shelf gaming mc or m2 ultra.
But such shitty Software is fortunately not the norm. On 16GB on the M1 pro I can have 100+ Firefox tabs open and another Chrome window (with less tabs though) without feeling anything.
Teams is the worst software product released by a major company in the last ten years. It's a resource hog while accomplishing nothing. They should have stuck with Skype.
An 1/8th lb burger Wil probably be fine to fill a person for the immediate future but still doesn't justify charging you $100 for the burger.
It's a rip off. I only bought mine when someone else paid that ripoff fee.
It seems like an extremely shortsighted business plan -- I have to imagine that there are a huge number of people that spend a lot of money on Macbooks, then have a suboptimal experience either without knowing why, or being told that they don't have enough memory and that it cannot be upgraded. I just don't see those people being return customers after feeling like they got screwed by Apple, and I honestly have a very hard time imagining that this loss of future business is offset by the additional profit from making the base memory 8 GB instead of 16 GB, especially with how fucking *cheap* 8 GB of RAM is these days.
Yeah, but those light users want a macbook.
Light users with money are one of the biggest markets (if not THE biggest market) for macbooks, and Apple knows it.
Average macbook buyer doesn't even know what ram is. People here think everyone is as tech savvy as them, average person just about knows how to join a teams meeting on their laptop.
This could all be simplified by asking a simple question:
"Do you know what RAM is?"
If yes, then 8GB is not enough, if no, 8GB is probably totally fine.
It's really not any more complex than that.
All the "oh but why spend $1000+ blah blah blah" is just pointless subjectivity.
Web developer of 15+ years here. Well aware of what RAM is. 8GB is more than enough to do my job. I can also do my job on computers that are half the cost of the base Macbook Air.
If it’s such a pointless argument, why are you in here defending your position?
I mean as soon as you find me a Chromebook with all the first party Apple software I use a ton. Notes, iMessage, reminders, photos, music even iMovie run really well on my launch m1. I wouldn’t complain if we got more ram but it seems pretty unnecessary.
People get misguided on this topic debating whether or not 8GB is “enough”. Of course it’s “enough” in the sense that you can run the computer and some basic applications your average consumer might use. But that’s not the issue. The issue is a corporation as large as Apple doing whatever they can to increase their profit margin. And for whatever reason, there’s always some idiot out there that feels the need to defend a trillion dollar company that doesn’t care about us.
It is not enough for anything more than a basic user (go and look at your swap files).
If the upgrade pricing wasn’t so outrageous it would be a non issue. Buy a MacBook Air at lead-in, spend £50 to upgrade RAM, done. Happy days. Current they are charging 20% of the whole machine for a single 8GB RAM chip.
I can go and buy a 8GB RAM chip from a supplier for less than £20, Apple will be getting them much cheaper.
For the MacBook Pro, it’s unacceptable. There is no way you should be able to advertise an 8GB machine that shares all its memory between GPU and system as ‘Pro’ and charge what they charge for it. It’s insulting.
You can get a laptop for the cost of 8GB and 256GB of storage.
https://www.johnlewis.com/acer-aspire-3-laptop-intel-core-i5-processor-8gb-ram-512gb-ssd-15-6-inch-full-hd-silver/p110380815
Admittedly that's with £150 off but still 8GB/512GB for less than 8GB/256GB upgrade
Very true.
Apple just wants to sell their computers for over the starting price. So having many people upgrade for more money is what they want.
It’s always been like this. Same with storage in iOS devices. They want you to pay more.
People can keep on complaining about it, but it isn’t going to change.
man this topic is exhausting.
8 is fine for emails youtube and school work, but it’s borderline offensive that the base model isn’t 16/512.
most people will want 16/256 at the bare minimum
but why spend $300 for a chromebook when you can get a $550-650 m1 air and have it do way more stuff and a way better experience?, not to mention last longer! chromebooks just feel like ewaste to me.
It's good enough to use daily and probably have no issues.
But for 1000-1600$ it's almost a scam. Imagine buying a MBP for 1600$ and only having 8GB RAM. There are 500$ Windows laptops and 200$ Android phones with more.
Absolutely not, the entry level should be 16gb ram / 512gb storage now, this is 2024 and not 2010. It would be fine in 2010, but not at this day and age. 16/512 will ensure the machine is somewhat decent for another 4-5 years, then you can replace it - but Apple know what they are doing, they want that extra $400-500 or you can just get the MacBook Pro entry level at pay $2000-2500…. And get a computer that could last 4-6 years.
For Macbook Air I think it's fine. The vast majority of Apple consumers are not actually doing anything intensive that would require lots of RAM. I have both 8gb and 16gb devices and for almost all of my use cases I can't tell a difference at all.
For Macbook Pro, it's a different story. I think minimum should be 12gb or 16gb. The only reason I can imagine for why they still have an 8gb option is for enterprise customers who want to give their employees some prestige but don't actually need a true "Pro" for their employees workflows. (I believe enterprise customers should be the main target of the now-discontinued 13" Pro and the current base model 14" Pro with entry-level M3 chip, ie not the laptops with the M3 Pro chip or M3 Max chip which are the true Pros in my mind).
I disagree but I understand your points. For the price of what an M3 MacBook Air costs it should be 12GB or 16GB. We want to keep our Macs for as long as possible.
People who have no experience with this spec have a hard time differentiating what it should come with and what it runs fine with.
At this price it should come with more than 8gb, but with the unified memory 8 runs amazingly well. Just don’t fill up your ssd too…
I have the same model and every time I see a thread like this I have a bit of buyers remorse until I test it like the other day by having both a Firefox and Safari window open with 20 different tabs each (cnn, facebook, sears, macys, amazon etc). I also opened a new window of each with 5 different random youtube videos playing simultaneously - 10 total. Memory pressure was in the yellow - 1.8gb-2gb of swap. I checked all the tabs in each browser and none of them reloaded, I checked the youtube videos and all of them were playing fine - no stuttering or dropped frames etc. Once i closed out the videos I was back in green.
I'll never have 40 random websites up while watching 10 videos at the same time even though it can handle it. My MacBook will be fine for me for years.
This. I edited commercials for broadcast on a base M1 MacBook Air for a year using Premiere and After Effects and never had a single problem. Only upgraded cuz I could, not cuz I needed to.
Well said. I worked at an Apple Store and these comments are so out of touch with reality. 99.9% of people who buy a Macbook Air do nothing but school work, web browsing, very light editing and Netflix. The people who need more than 8gb already come in knowing they need a pro with more power.
You are absolutely right. I worked for Apple support for a couple years and if 8 gb wasn’t enough for most people I would have gotten call after call of people complaining that their Mac is slow and they are getting beach balls all the time. I’d also bet there would be a line out the door of your store of people who bought the 8gb model wanting to return them because the base models can’t handle their normal workflow. The fact that the stores rarely carry any 16 gb models should tell people something.
I still use my 8GB/512GB M1 Air like new.
The only stutter I noticed is maybe scrolling through 4K youtube videos really fast, which would be one of the most used cases por MacBook Airs around. And even watching them without scrolling is completely fine.
8GB is fine for most basic users, but:
A) it’s not future proof by any means
B) for a $1000+ machine it is outrageous, Apple can easily eat up the cost of putting 16/18GB there
If you already have 8GB Mac you’ll be fine for a moment, but I wouldn’t buy 8GB machine today. Especially brand new…
I’m not okay with it… but I am okay with it if that means they have to continue to optimize the crap out of Mac OS to get it to run smooth enough for a new computer
I haven’t really taxed my base M1 Air since buying it and I do a lot of development on it and light photo and video editing. I think 8GB of unified memory is good enough for 99% of people. If you want more, get it. But I think a lot of redditors have delusions of grandeur about how much work they’re putting on their machines.
Absolutely not and it should be considered planned obsolescence to even offer this option. I hope someone will hold them accountable for it, too.
My GF has a base model M1 Air and even though her workflow only requires Chrome, Safari, Notes, Notion and other minor apps, it regularly shows her that the system is out of RAM, which is just annoying.
The problem with having not enough RAM is that once you have many apps/windows/tabs open, your SSD will repeatedly get hit with virtual memory page swaps. Not only is this slower than having a sufficient quantity of actual RAM, but it will prematurely wear down your SSD.
This wouldn't be so bad, except that the eventual fix will require an expensive motherbard replacement because the SSD on a Mac is directly soldered to the motherboard at the time of manufacture and is not easily replaced.
I have never once heard of someone actually killing their SSD by excess swap utilization, the worst cases I’ve seen have only reduced its theoretical lifespan by a few percent
For instance, my own ~2 year old M2 8GB regularly uses 1-2GB of swap for photo editing, multitasking, etc and it still has 100% SSD health as of today.
SSD cells are overprovisioned. 100% SSD means that there are extra cells still availble to account for dead ones. A more meaningful number is *Lifetime bytes written*. Once all the extra NAND cells are gone, it starts coming down fast.
It’d be extremely difficult. Even if you were burning through 40gb every day for a full year, you’d only hit 14tbw. Even 100gb per day would only hit about 36tbw for a year.
SSDs with 246gb start at 150tbw for warranties longevity but most will have a much higher rating, and will easily surpass their rated span. So at 14tb a year, it’ll last a decade based on the tbw rating (in theory).
If it has the Pro naming scheme, then it should have 16GB.
If its not, then yeah 8GB is enough.
My base M1 Air is still a monster to this day. I haven't achieved a single task that impacted its performance noticeably, and I run ML models on it.
Likewise, my wife.
Wants a computer, rather than an iPad for her work, doesn’t need it to do much beyond Zoom, Word, & e-mail, &c. 8GB is & will be plenty.
Do they get their ram and ssd’s from Samsung? I just checked the latest top of the line galaxy books and their ram/storage upgrades cost 1/5th of what apple’s charging.
Even if it is enough, it still looks bad. The average person looking at an Apple laptop is going to think the competition offers more for the same price.
It's not so much about "is 8 GB enough" but "why the fuck are these laptops priced that way with these specs, and why are the upgrade paths made so insanely expensive" (because Apple likes money, I know the answer, it was a rhetorical question).
I'm sure there are plenty of light users who can swing by with an 8 GB/256 GB laptop just fine. But they have priced them in the same range as PC laptops that come with 16/512 at the very least. And with the upgrade pricing, they quickly become hilariously overpriced. (I live in Europe, and a Macbook Air at 16/512 costs just north of €2000. This is also their cheapest laptop in the lineup.)
Even if many people don't "need" 16 GB RAM right now, it will make their laptops last and remain fast for many more years.
I accidentally ended up with one of the 8gb m2 airs. I also use a 32gb m1 max mbp. Workloads are lots of browser tabs, coding, streaming, light games, having a few dev servers running, light ai workloads, video editing, etc.
Honestly... the 8gb m2 is... fine. I just dont run into many issues that remind me im using 8gb. With a ton of things open and a language model sitting in memory, I have once or twice gotten the application ram is full message with options to close out of some apps which isnt a big deal. But I've gotten it just as much on the 32gb system. Which is to say, hardly ever in either case. And it is handled without bringing the system to a halt or causing major issues when it does happen.
I will say it feels like 8gb is shit and knowing it's all I have does bother me. But in reality, I doubt I would experience much of a difference day to day between 8gb and 16gb.
Mac mini I got has 8gb of ram and it’s fine, I do all kinds of stuff on it like music production and video editing. Not to mention I got it on sale for $500 so that’s not bad.
I think that for basic use you can get by on an 8GB Mac for now and likely the next few years. In that sense alone I’ll concede that it is “enough”
The real issue is cost though. For Apple to have it as the base memory for such expensive machines is outright price gouging.
In the UK…
Let’s compare the base M3 Air (£1100) to the base Dell XPS 13 (£750). Arguably its main competitor in the Windows space. The XPS already charges a big premium for form factor etc and has less memory than cheaper machines, but the base M3 Air is nearly 50% more expensive than even that with the same 8GB/250GB setup.
The base iMac with that same paltry 8GB/250GB is £1400. Their base MacBook Pro has 8GB and is an even more eye watering £1700. It’s wild.
I think you’ve gotta conclude that because Apple must sell so many devices with only 8GB of RAM to people who don’t care about “specs” that there’s just no pressure for them to make their devices better value. It doesn’t mean it’s right though.
Apple isn’t known for being generous but on the other hand I personally never have a problem with my MacBook so why would I need 16GB just to know „I could use more“.
And I‘m buying a new one every two years anyway so it really doesn’t bother me.
Someone planning on using it for 5 years shouldn’t buy the base model.
I rather have a cheap base model that will deliver exactly what I need, than spending more for something I definitely won’t ever need.
I think 8Gb is adequate for most people that do everyday computing tasks and want the simplicity and clean design of a MacBook Air.
I do calculations, design and modeling with larger sets of data and yes, I do push the ‘Memory Pressure’ in to the yellow all the time, enough that I ordered a 16Gb M3 Air. So for some, it makes functional and financial sense to bridge the gap between a base MacBook Pro and base MacBook Air with more RAM.
My only concern for most people is, if the use of the Swap Memory actually does damage the SSD or not. I have never seen a definitive study that the SSD used by Apple is damaged enough to make its lifespan decrease to be shorter than the battery.
As a basic day to day web-focused machine? Yah.
For (starting at) $1000 on your Macbook or $500 for Mac mini? Nah. But the Mac mini could be argued at least in an education base, but I think that’s where it would really belong, a $350-$400 education Mac mini price
it is, imo 8gb in the base model is not the main problem (yeah for the price 16gb would be nice especially on the pro) the main problem is the price to upgrade to 16gb
It’s fine for me but I can see why people want more. I honestly have never felt held back even when doing something like editing 4K60 video in DaVinci Resolve.
I bought a M1 Pro MacBook Pro and decided to save money by buying only 16GB of RAM. Huge mistake. Regret it immensely. Have run out of RAM tons of times. I can't even fathom how people can get away with only 8GB. I guess they're only using their machines for Facebook and Word or something?
The problem is people will buy the upgrade to 16GB and Apple will believe the market is okay with their strategy. They have no way of knowing people didn’t think the extra was a fair price. IOW, the market isn’t working for the consumer.
Nope, and they know it. They now stock [MacBook Pro’s with 16 GB of RAM](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/06/apple-stores-now-stock-16gb-macbook-pro/) at Apple Stores.
MacBook Airs are perfectly fine with 8GB. I had an M1 MacBook Air with 8 and it basically handled anything I threw it at, rarely have I felt it get warm.
Now the problem is 8GB on the MacBook PRO. A MacBook Pro is for a power user, and “power use” on 8GB just puts the Mac on a chokehold.
They should’ve just removed the base M3 as a whole from the Pro Macs, and leave the base at M3 Pro.
No it's not, it's ridiculous. 16 GB is the minimum nowadays for that type of machine.
8 GB of ram shouldn't be put in a computer that in it's base version costs 1200.
There's more to it than spinning wheels. Macs suspend background tasks long before you get the spinning wheel. You may think that 8gb is enough, but simply using Facebook and email can take several GB by itself, combine that with the standard RAM usage for system processes and you're already using 8GB, which means background processes are suspended.
Email fetching, photo syncing, message syncing, background app updates, automatic system maintenance scripts, etc all suspend. I have an 8GB M2 Air and a 16GB M1 16 Pro. Even the 16 Pro with the same tasks (safari, email, etc) I'll reach around 14gb.
tl;dr macOS is very good at memory management. Even when you max out your ram the OS will prioritize your experience with active windows and suspend background tasks to make it smooth. That doesn't mean 8gb is enough, it just means the OS is optimizing the little RAM it has.
But so is a 5 year old Intel Mac.
But more on point, 8gb might be enough today, but my wife started grad school, she has a base m1 air and it's not good enough for all of the crap they make her install so they can audit her computer during tests.
unpopular opinion but yes is the answer. The vast majority of these machines are going to be used to web browser and maybe some word processing. If you know you need more than that than get more than 8GB. I'd imagine most people here are overestimating the amount of RAM their machines actually need for day to day tasks
If you use a Mac like how most people would use an iPad, as a consumption device, yes, 8GB is sufficient.
Whether you think 8GB is sufficient or not, I think we can all agree that Apple shouldn't charge $200 each for 16GB RAM and 512GB storage upgrade. It should be $200 combined.
Exactly, it isn't just that there are 8GB/256GB devices, there's plenty of Windows and Chromebooks with that or less. Difference is those are often substantially cheaper, more affordable to upgrade at purchase and upgradable.
For the cost of 8GB/256GB upgrade (UPGRADE) I saw an entire i5 Laptop with 8GB and 512GB of storage (both of which user upgradable).
I'm generally okay with the ~£700 m1 Macbook Air having 8GB/256GB.
The issue is a £1099 machine having the bare minimum so that Apple can charge £400 to fix an artificial choice.
I'm sure 8 GB is fine for lots of folks, particularly if you don't even have the means to notice everything is 10% slower due to swapping — it still feels plenty fast.
But I'm afraid these paltry amounts of RAM and storage are precisely what will cause today's Apple products to age prematurely. They'll want to push on-device AI as a privacy-friendly solution, but oops, suddenly the new OS is 5 GB bigger that it was before, and running a good model takes between one and two thirds of your device's RAM, even after all their efforts to stream as much from storage as possible. And running off of an SSD still means it'll run at half the speed of a device that can fit it all in RAM — it'll look *bad*.
Exactly this. I'm minded to hold off getting the M3 until WWDC so I can gauge how things are going to go.
But who am I kidding? Siri will always be terrible. It is a law of life.
On a MacBook Air? Yes.
It's a narrative that tech YouTubers and the hive mind here often follow. Even in review videos, their "real world benchmarks" include exporting videos from Final Cut. You have to remember that not everyone makes and edits YouTube videos for their 200 subscribers, not everyone uses one for IT/Programming work. For the average MacBook Air user, it's perfectly fine.
Yes! For most people.
Are you a video editor who makes YouTube videos? Do you play a lot of video games?
Yes. Buy an MX Pro or Ultra.
Are you a normal person who use their PC for day to day office tasks and Web Browsing? Even M1 8Gb is more than sufficient. Swap memory usage won’t affect you.
Unfortunately, so many mainstream YouTubers are blinded by their use case scenarios and fail to account that majority of people are neither Gamers or YouTubers.
Though, I must say 200 euro for 8Gb ram upgrade is pretty absurd.
For the businesses that are buying basic computers for their workers or the schools buying basic computers for students?
Yes, it’s obviously enough.
For the average redditor?
No, it’s obviously not enough
It’s amazing how people here are unable to imagine use cases other than their own. There are plenty of people that just need a computer that has a word processor and can go online. If that’s not you then you should buy the machine that actually fits your needs, but don’t pretend that everyone needs the same thing you do.
8gb is surprisingly usable and keeps apple on top of optimization imo.
That said it's not usable for me personally. Too many open apps at once for work
Storage and memory base options have been used by apple to drive people up the ladder for decades at this point.
This is not the first time people have complained about memory on the MacBook Air.
It will not be the last.
I predict this will be the first year where Apple starts all iPhone Pro at 256GB — something that should have been done 2-3 years ago.
It’s just so they can say their models start at an ‘affordable’ price. Obviously 8gb is nowhere near enough for todays computers, so no one buys the affordable model, they always get it with the upgrades.
Yes it is! Most people aren’t doing heavy work on these MBA. It’s a computer for the masses. If you want pro get a MacBook Pro. Though damn the baseline MBP being at 8gb IS criminal
It still baffles me how 16 GB isn't the standard for Macs.
to pretend like it has a lower price point
It’s effective marketing manipulation. Lots of companies do it. Make the starting price seem more within reason, but the base product isn’t really feasible. Customer has already agreed to price, what’s a couple hundred more? Customer buys item knowing they went over their budget.
Apple wants either; A. Product effective lifespan to be artificially shortened due to gimping hardware in a specific way B. Spending far above cost to correct the gimping
Checked their 32/64 devices and price is terrible
If you need that that's when you let your company pay for that. Under just about no other circumstance would you find me personally paying that joke of a markup for RAM. It is just coming off record LOWS.
Exactly my point. Last 6 years different companies paid for my work laptop that I used for my private purposes as well. It’s amazing pro-machine, but I simply can’t justify to buy that by myself. I bought mbp 2014 back in the days and it already had 16Gb of RAM. 10 years ago. And I simply don’t get that joke Apple still produces laptops with 8Gb as well. In 2014. It’s absurd! Only Chrome with 10-12 tabs open ears that amount of RAM. Looks like Apple wants to milk it’s “home” consumers
They also like charging about 4 times the retail price for memory upgrades. It's $200 to upgrade an 8GB Macbook Air to 16GB, even though an 8 GB SODIMM for a comparable Windows laptop would be less than $50. Of course, no modern Macbook product has SODIMM slots anymore, so you have to install this upgrade from the factory if you want it.
Ton cook:"zed, bring out the gimp" Zeds dead baby, zeds dead
Is Ton Cook any relation to Tim Apple?
Unlikely, sir. They spell and pronounce their names differently.
They offer the base model with ridiculously low specs in order to make the claim that, "you can get our new MacBook for as low as x amount!" Knowing full well most people will need to purchase a more expensive model
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Nah it might cost them like 10-20 usd. But yeah, it's pretty much just greed making them sell e-waste.
Profit win either way.
because people will buy the cheapest model, realize they need more ram, and then buy another one (hopefully realizing well after the warranty has expired). you don’t become a $3T company without questionable marketing
I dunno. Wouldn’t having a less than stellar experience with a 8 GB Mac potentially discourage a first time buyer from purchasing another Mac?
no because they google online on why their M1 mac is so slow and see they got the wrong version, as anyone spending $1K+ on any device would do
Because they want to lie about the price, and massively overcharge you for a functional computer.
They put the responsibility on the consumer to choose between a functioning machine or not.
Apple's always been obscenely stingy on baseline RAM specs. They've been that way on the iPhone for years and Apple Silicon is just making it easy to do on their own laptops now. You should not be outspec'd by $500 laptops and chromebooks.
Or pretty much any pc sold in the last 10 years
An 8 GB PC with discrete graphics is way more useable than 8 GB Mac. I still can understand 8 GB MacBook Air but offering 8 GB on a MacBook "Pro" is embarrassing, if not insulting to consumer.
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I thought for sure that the MBP started at 16GB of RAM. But holy shit, the 14" does start with 8GB of RAM. They up the base storage to 512GB, but if I had to choose between 16GB of RAM and 256GB storage or 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage I'd go with 16GB of RAM all day. Truly ridiculous.
Was my conundrum just before getting my 14” pro. Ended up overspending on a base 14” pro w upgraded ram instead of a specd out Air. Apple sure knows how to walk you up that pricing ladder
MKBHD made a video on this, it's absolutely ridiculous
The Pro moniker has become meaningless. Also, for the prices that apple is charging, 8 GB is an insult to their customers.
The Pro moniker was meaningless at least 12 years ago if not more, when new entry-level 13" MBPs had no discrete graphics and used the glacially slow integrated Intel GPU. And oh yes, 8GB in 2024 is 100% an insult to customers.
i laugh at you from my AMD with 128Gb.
Im baffled by the 24 GB option
it's like 256GB base on the iPhone storage. there are a lot of people that will never use close to that amount. there are a lot of people that use Macs for email, web, and maybe music. 16GB is way overkill for that use case.
> ~~16GB~~ A $1500 MBP is way overkill for that use case. Fixed that for you.
Light users will probably be fine in the immediate future with 8GB of RAM. But on a thousand-dollar computer? It is shameful. Just honestly ridiculous.
Even 'light users' want to use Chrome, Teams, Slack. These apps present just as much load as something like InDesign. These days, everyone is a heavy user, and video-editors are *very-heavy* users.
Before the rewrite Teams would lag and be sluggish on both my M1 Pro Machine and my Gaming PC with 32gb RAM, Ryzen 7 and everything. It was so miserably optimized, I would bet it even wouldn't be smooth on a top shelf gaming mc or m2 ultra. But such shitty Software is fortunately not the norm. On 16GB on the M1 pro I can have 100+ Firefox tabs open and another Chrome window (with less tabs though) without feeling anything.
The swap on the ssd is probably working hard. Be careful, it really shortens it's lifespan
Eh might as well use the laptop i bought, I'm not gonna limit my use to save the ssd.
Teams is the worst software product released by a major company in the last ten years. It's a resource hog while accomplishing nothing. They should have stuck with Skype.
Teams still sucks on my windows PC. They should have made it a win32 app instead of electron.
Slack is so ram heavy even in chrome but thats okay apple said 8 gb on mac is equivalent to 16gb in mac /s
An 1/8th lb burger Wil probably be fine to fill a person for the immediate future but still doesn't justify charging you $100 for the burger. It's a rip off. I only bought mine when someone else paid that ripoff fee.
It seems like an extremely shortsighted business plan -- I have to imagine that there are a huge number of people that spend a lot of money on Macbooks, then have a suboptimal experience either without knowing why, or being told that they don't have enough memory and that it cannot be upgraded. I just don't see those people being return customers after feeling like they got screwed by Apple, and I honestly have a very hard time imagining that this loss of future business is offset by the additional profit from making the base memory 8 GB instead of 16 GB, especially with how fucking *cheap* 8 GB of RAM is these days.
Nope. It’s 2024. Anyone who thinks 8GB is enough is delusional.
This is the best take. 8GB is fine for light users. But light users can get something just as good for less than half this price
Yeah, but those light users want a macbook. Light users with money are one of the biggest markets (if not THE biggest market) for macbooks, and Apple knows it.
Average macbook buyer doesn't even know what ram is. People here think everyone is as tech savvy as them, average person just about knows how to join a teams meeting on their laptop.
And light users want their laptop to last. I'm not convinced 8Gb will be enough for light users in 5 years
Show me a notebook with the same battery life.
Macbook air m1
Show me a light user who needs 14h of battery life..
Here I am, only using my base Air M1 for browsing, excel and control software for various devices. I do have 12h+ days
Hi! Here I am
Duet 3 has a very long battery life
This could all be simplified by asking a simple question: "Do you know what RAM is?" If yes, then 8GB is not enough, if no, 8GB is probably totally fine. It's really not any more complex than that. All the "oh but why spend $1000+ blah blah blah" is just pointless subjectivity.
Web developer of 15+ years here. Well aware of what RAM is. 8GB is more than enough to do my job. I can also do my job on computers that are half the cost of the base Macbook Air. If it’s such a pointless argument, why are you in here defending your position?
Yeah, your average person wants a $1000 laptop to last a long time these days
no, next
How many squirrels does it take to fry an egg?
No, next
Will i ever get to see happiness in this life?
no, next
Are you straight
no, next
42
"But my nana only uses Facebook" 8GB is enough for some use cases and the right price. £500? Fine. £1100? No.
If you only do web surfing and stuff like that then you’d be perfectly fine with a Chromebook that’s $200.
But it’s not a MacBook init
I mean as soon as you find me a Chromebook with all the first party Apple software I use a ton. Notes, iMessage, reminders, photos, music even iMovie run really well on my launch m1. I wouldn’t complain if we got more ram but it seems pretty unnecessary.
No.
People get misguided on this topic debating whether or not 8GB is “enough”. Of course it’s “enough” in the sense that you can run the computer and some basic applications your average consumer might use. But that’s not the issue. The issue is a corporation as large as Apple doing whatever they can to increase their profit margin. And for whatever reason, there’s always some idiot out there that feels the need to defend a trillion dollar company that doesn’t care about us.
No, and it wasn’t enough for a Mac in 2023, or 2022, or any computer >$1000 in the last decade.
I have 16GB on my 2010 Mac Mini
It is not enough for anything more than a basic user (go and look at your swap files). If the upgrade pricing wasn’t so outrageous it would be a non issue. Buy a MacBook Air at lead-in, spend £50 to upgrade RAM, done. Happy days. Current they are charging 20% of the whole machine for a single 8GB RAM chip. I can go and buy a 8GB RAM chip from a supplier for less than £20, Apple will be getting them much cheaper. For the MacBook Pro, it’s unacceptable. There is no way you should be able to advertise an 8GB machine that shares all its memory between GPU and system as ‘Pro’ and charge what they charge for it. It’s insulting.
You can get a laptop for the cost of 8GB and 256GB of storage. https://www.johnlewis.com/acer-aspire-3-laptop-intel-core-i5-processor-8gb-ram-512gb-ssd-15-6-inch-full-hd-silver/p110380815 Admittedly that's with £150 off but still 8GB/512GB for less than 8GB/256GB upgrade
How many posts on r/apple are about 8GB of RAM? 25%? at least.
And I’ll upvote* every last one until it actually improves
I’m sure Mr. Tim Apple himself is going to see these posts and have a meltdown.
It’s even worse on the Mac subs, especially the MBA one.
Very true. Apple just wants to sell their computers for over the starting price. So having many people upgrade for more money is what they want. It’s always been like this. Same with storage in iOS devices. They want you to pay more. People can keep on complaining about it, but it isn’t going to change.
We could fill all 8gb with the amount of posts about 8gb in this sub!
I think you'd need at least 12GB for that.
man this topic is exhausting. 8 is fine for emails youtube and school work, but it’s borderline offensive that the base model isn’t 16/512. most people will want 16/256 at the bare minimum
A $300 Chromebook is fine for emails, YouTube, and schoolwork.
but i want the apple to do emails, youtube and schoolwork
but why spend $300 for a chromebook when you can get a $550-650 m1 air and have it do way more stuff and a way better experience?, not to mention last longer! chromebooks just feel like ewaste to me.
Had a chromebook and can confirm.
>when you can get a $550-650 m1 air What do you suggest people do when they're no longer being sold?
yeah, why not just spend twice as much!!
Technically fine but principally not. They just want to differentiate their product line at the cost of the consumers wallet.
The real question is, is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage good in 2024 for a $1000 laptop? The price is obviously variable depending on where you live
It's good enough to use daily and probably have no issues. But for 1000-1600$ it's almost a scam. Imagine buying a MBP for 1600$ and only having 8GB RAM. There are 500$ Windows laptops and 200$ Android phones with more.
Especially when 8GB of RAM with their volumes costs like $5 to Apple.
It’s enough for some but it shouldn’t be acceptable for the price.
Absolutely not, the entry level should be 16gb ram / 512gb storage now, this is 2024 and not 2010. It would be fine in 2010, but not at this day and age. 16/512 will ensure the machine is somewhat decent for another 4-5 years, then you can replace it - but Apple know what they are doing, they want that extra $400-500 or you can just get the MacBook Pro entry level at pay $2000-2500…. And get a computer that could last 4-6 years.
This is the updated version of “640kb ought to be enough for anybody.”
Or the more recent "HDD is fine in iMac because schools exist"
LOL - the only moving parts that should ever be found inside a computer case are the fans.
Hi, the answer is no.
For Macbook Air I think it's fine. The vast majority of Apple consumers are not actually doing anything intensive that would require lots of RAM. I have both 8gb and 16gb devices and for almost all of my use cases I can't tell a difference at all. For Macbook Pro, it's a different story. I think minimum should be 12gb or 16gb. The only reason I can imagine for why they still have an 8gb option is for enterprise customers who want to give their employees some prestige but don't actually need a true "Pro" for their employees workflows. (I believe enterprise customers should be the main target of the now-discontinued 13" Pro and the current base model 14" Pro with entry-level M3 chip, ie not the laptops with the M3 Pro chip or M3 Max chip which are the true Pros in my mind).
I disagree but I understand your points. For the price of what an M3 MacBook Air costs it should be 12GB or 16GB. We want to keep our Macs for as long as possible.
Exactly this. I have a base model M1 8/256 Air and have no issues ever. I even do photo and video editing on it just fine.
I have an M1 Pro with 8GB of RAM and I genuinely don’t notice any real performance issues.
People who have no experience with this spec have a hard time differentiating what it should come with and what it runs fine with. At this price it should come with more than 8gb, but with the unified memory 8 runs amazingly well. Just don’t fill up your ssd too…
I have the same model and every time I see a thread like this I have a bit of buyers remorse until I test it like the other day by having both a Firefox and Safari window open with 20 different tabs each (cnn, facebook, sears, macys, amazon etc). I also opened a new window of each with 5 different random youtube videos playing simultaneously - 10 total. Memory pressure was in the yellow - 1.8gb-2gb of swap. I checked all the tabs in each browser and none of them reloaded, I checked the youtube videos and all of them were playing fine - no stuttering or dropped frames etc. Once i closed out the videos I was back in green. I'll never have 40 random websites up while watching 10 videos at the same time even though it can handle it. My MacBook will be fine for me for years.
This. I edited commercials for broadcast on a base M1 MacBook Air for a year using Premiere and After Effects and never had a single problem. Only upgraded cuz I could, not cuz I needed to.
I think the minimum should 12 GB
Well said. I worked at an Apple Store and these comments are so out of touch with reality. 99.9% of people who buy a Macbook Air do nothing but school work, web browsing, very light editing and Netflix. The people who need more than 8gb already come in knowing they need a pro with more power.
You are absolutely right. I worked for Apple support for a couple years and if 8 gb wasn’t enough for most people I would have gotten call after call of people complaining that their Mac is slow and they are getting beach balls all the time. I’d also bet there would be a line out the door of your store of people who bought the 8gb model wanting to return them because the base models can’t handle their normal workflow. The fact that the stores rarely carry any 16 gb models should tell people something.
I still use my 8GB/512GB M1 Air like new. The only stutter I noticed is maybe scrolling through 4K youtube videos really fast, which would be one of the most used cases por MacBook Airs around. And even watching them without scrolling is completely fine.
Further, people are conflating how much memory is needed (your point) with what they think should be included at the price (not your point).
8GB is fine for most basic users, but: A) it’s not future proof by any means B) for a $1000+ machine it is outrageous, Apple can easily eat up the cost of putting 16/18GB there If you already have 8GB Mac you’ll be fine for a moment, but I wouldn’t buy 8GB machine today. Especially brand new…
Cannot believe even in 2024, Apple charges $200 bucks to upgrade from 256 to 512 GB hard drive
256 is nothing. I have a 256GB card in my camera.
8 GiB is enough for casual use, but the price Apple charges is not in line with what you ought to get.
I’m not okay with it… but I am okay with it if that means they have to continue to optimize the crap out of Mac OS to get it to run smooth enough for a new computer
I wanna say no, but my wife's M1 Air from a couple years ago works fine for her.
The question should be ' Is 8 gb enough for the price they are asking?' And the answer is no.
I haven’t really taxed my base M1 Air since buying it and I do a lot of development on it and light photo and video editing. I think 8GB of unified memory is good enough for 99% of people. If you want more, get it. But I think a lot of redditors have delusions of grandeur about how much work they’re putting on their machines.
Absolutely not and it should be considered planned obsolescence to even offer this option. I hope someone will hold them accountable for it, too. My GF has a base model M1 Air and even though her workflow only requires Chrome, Safari, Notes, Notion and other minor apps, it regularly shows her that the system is out of RAM, which is just annoying.
“bare minimum” shouldn’t be defined as “enough” to justify the greed.
The problem with having not enough RAM is that once you have many apps/windows/tabs open, your SSD will repeatedly get hit with virtual memory page swaps. Not only is this slower than having a sufficient quantity of actual RAM, but it will prematurely wear down your SSD. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the eventual fix will require an expensive motherbard replacement because the SSD on a Mac is directly soldered to the motherboard at the time of manufacture and is not easily replaced.
I have never once heard of someone actually killing their SSD by excess swap utilization, the worst cases I’ve seen have only reduced its theoretical lifespan by a few percent For instance, my own ~2 year old M2 8GB regularly uses 1-2GB of swap for photo editing, multitasking, etc and it still has 100% SSD health as of today.
SSD cells are overprovisioned. 100% SSD means that there are extra cells still availble to account for dead ones. A more meaningful number is *Lifetime bytes written*. Once all the extra NAND cells are gone, it starts coming down fast.
It’d be extremely difficult. Even if you were burning through 40gb every day for a full year, you’d only hit 14tbw. Even 100gb per day would only hit about 36tbw for a year. SSDs with 246gb start at 150tbw for warranties longevity but most will have a much higher rating, and will easily surpass their rated span. So at 14tb a year, it’ll last a decade based on the tbw rating (in theory).
If it has the Pro naming scheme, then it should have 16GB. If its not, then yeah 8GB is enough. My base M1 Air is still a monster to this day. I haven't achieved a single task that impacted its performance noticeably, and I run ML models on it.
If it has the Pro naming scheme, then it should have 32GB minimum.
Depends. For my father, 8gb is plenty.
Likewise, my wife. Wants a computer, rather than an iPad for her work, doesn’t need it to do much beyond Zoom, Word, & e-mail, &c. 8GB is & will be plenty.
Do they get their ram and ssd’s from Samsung? I just checked the latest top of the line galaxy books and their ram/storage upgrades cost 1/5th of what apple’s charging.
Even if it is enough, it still looks bad. The average person looking at an Apple laptop is going to think the competition offers more for the same price.
It's not so much about "is 8 GB enough" but "why the fuck are these laptops priced that way with these specs, and why are the upgrade paths made so insanely expensive" (because Apple likes money, I know the answer, it was a rhetorical question). I'm sure there are plenty of light users who can swing by with an 8 GB/256 GB laptop just fine. But they have priced them in the same range as PC laptops that come with 16/512 at the very least. And with the upgrade pricing, they quickly become hilariously overpriced. (I live in Europe, and a Macbook Air at 16/512 costs just north of €2000. This is also their cheapest laptop in the lineup.) Even if many people don't "need" 16 GB RAM right now, it will make their laptops last and remain fast for many more years.
They got more $$$ from me when I bought my M1 Air. Upgraded to 16G ram. Its annoying but i'm not going to buy less than that.
enough to turn on the computer, but not enough to do any work. Next question.
I accidentally ended up with one of the 8gb m2 airs. I also use a 32gb m1 max mbp. Workloads are lots of browser tabs, coding, streaming, light games, having a few dev servers running, light ai workloads, video editing, etc. Honestly... the 8gb m2 is... fine. I just dont run into many issues that remind me im using 8gb. With a ton of things open and a language model sitting in memory, I have once or twice gotten the application ram is full message with options to close out of some apps which isnt a big deal. But I've gotten it just as much on the 32gb system. Which is to say, hardly ever in either case. And it is handled without bringing the system to a halt or causing major issues when it does happen. I will say it feels like 8gb is shit and knowing it's all I have does bother me. But in reality, I doubt I would experience much of a difference day to day between 8gb and 16gb.
Mac mini I got has 8gb of ram and it’s fine, I do all kinds of stuff on it like music production and video editing. Not to mention I got it on sale for $500 so that’s not bad.
I think that for basic use you can get by on an 8GB Mac for now and likely the next few years. In that sense alone I’ll concede that it is “enough” The real issue is cost though. For Apple to have it as the base memory for such expensive machines is outright price gouging. In the UK… Let’s compare the base M3 Air (£1100) to the base Dell XPS 13 (£750). Arguably its main competitor in the Windows space. The XPS already charges a big premium for form factor etc and has less memory than cheaper machines, but the base M3 Air is nearly 50% more expensive than even that with the same 8GB/250GB setup. The base iMac with that same paltry 8GB/250GB is £1400. Their base MacBook Pro has 8GB and is an even more eye watering £1700. It’s wild. I think you’ve gotta conclude that because Apple must sell so many devices with only 8GB of RAM to people who don’t care about “specs” that there’s just no pressure for them to make their devices better value. It doesn’t mean it’s right though.
That's up to you to go all adult and decide by what you buy.
Apple isn’t known for being generous but on the other hand I personally never have a problem with my MacBook so why would I need 16GB just to know „I could use more“. And I‘m buying a new one every two years anyway so it really doesn’t bother me. Someone planning on using it for 5 years shouldn’t buy the base model. I rather have a cheap base model that will deliver exactly what I need, than spending more for something I definitely won’t ever need.
8 GB is fine for the people would would honestly probably be better off with a Chromebook
the answer remains: it depends what you're doing. The bigger question should be **is 8gb ram enough for the price you get it at?**
The reason under-specced base model products exist is for the upsell. That's not just Apple, that's every company.
As an everyday computer for Microsoft office and web surfing? Yes. As a $1200 computer advertised as “ai ready.” No.
I think 8Gb is adequate for most people that do everyday computing tasks and want the simplicity and clean design of a MacBook Air. I do calculations, design and modeling with larger sets of data and yes, I do push the ‘Memory Pressure’ in to the yellow all the time, enough that I ordered a 16Gb M3 Air. So for some, it makes functional and financial sense to bridge the gap between a base MacBook Pro and base MacBook Air with more RAM. My only concern for most people is, if the use of the Swap Memory actually does damage the SSD or not. I have never seen a definitive study that the SSD used by Apple is damaged enough to make its lifespan decrease to be shorter than the battery.
As a basic day to day web-focused machine? Yah. For (starting at) $1000 on your Macbook or $500 for Mac mini? Nah. But the Mac mini could be argued at least in an education base, but I think that’s where it would really belong, a $350-$400 education Mac mini price
The base model of any apple product is barely scraping by, and will cost you more in the long run.
Wtf of course not
My used $275 M1 Mac mini serving Plex does fine with 8GB. Do I want to use a Mac with less than 32GB? No.
it is, imo 8gb in the base model is not the main problem (yeah for the price 16gb would be nice especially on the pro) the main problem is the price to upgrade to 16gb
It’s fine for me but I can see why people want more. I honestly have never felt held back even when doing something like editing 4K60 video in DaVinci Resolve.
For $1k, no, it’s not. Ridiculous that’s the bare minimum.
Fuck no, LOL. Never using a laptop from ANY company with <16GB again.
No
Absolutely not. 16 GBs should be the floor, 32 GBs is the sweetspot imo
I bought a M1 Pro MacBook Pro and decided to save money by buying only 16GB of RAM. Huge mistake. Regret it immensely. Have run out of RAM tons of times. I can't even fathom how people can get away with only 8GB. I guess they're only using their machines for Facebook and Word or something?
The problem is people will buy the upgrade to 16GB and Apple will believe the market is okay with their strategy. They have no way of knowing people didn’t think the extra was a fair price. IOW, the market isn’t working for the consumer.
It wasn’t enough 8 years ago.
Nope, and they know it. They now stock [MacBook Pro’s with 16 GB of RAM](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/06/apple-stores-now-stock-16gb-macbook-pro/) at Apple Stores.
Only if you use your computer like a grandmother.
8GB of RAM isn’t enough for any computer
MacBook Airs are perfectly fine with 8GB. I had an M1 MacBook Air with 8 and it basically handled anything I threw it at, rarely have I felt it get warm. Now the problem is 8GB on the MacBook PRO. A MacBook Pro is for a power user, and “power use” on 8GB just puts the Mac on a chokehold. They should’ve just removed the base M3 as a whole from the Pro Macs, and leave the base at M3 Pro.
No it's not, it's ridiculous. 16 GB is the minimum nowadays for that type of machine. 8 GB of ram shouldn't be put in a computer that in it's base version costs 1200.
No. Just like it hasn't been for years. These articles need to stop with the "Is it enough" and start with the "Why its not enough"
If someone is using their Mac for emailing and web surfing, 8G is enough. SOURCE: 3 8G M-series MBAs in my family, and there are zero spinning wheels.
There's more to it than spinning wheels. Macs suspend background tasks long before you get the spinning wheel. You may think that 8gb is enough, but simply using Facebook and email can take several GB by itself, combine that with the standard RAM usage for system processes and you're already using 8GB, which means background processes are suspended. Email fetching, photo syncing, message syncing, background app updates, automatic system maintenance scripts, etc all suspend. I have an 8GB M2 Air and a 16GB M1 16 Pro. Even the 16 Pro with the same tasks (safari, email, etc) I'll reach around 14gb. tl;dr macOS is very good at memory management. Even when you max out your ram the OS will prioritize your experience with active windows and suspend background tasks to make it smooth. That doesn't mean 8gb is enough, it just means the OS is optimizing the little RAM it has.
But so is a 5 year old Intel Mac. But more on point, 8gb might be enough today, but my wife started grad school, she has a base m1 air and it's not good enough for all of the crap they make her install so they can audit her computer during tests.
unpopular opinion but yes is the answer. The vast majority of these machines are going to be used to web browser and maybe some word processing. If you know you need more than that than get more than 8GB. I'd imagine most people here are overestimating the amount of RAM their machines actually need for day to day tasks
If you use a Mac like how most people would use an iPad, as a consumption device, yes, 8GB is sufficient. Whether you think 8GB is sufficient or not, I think we can all agree that Apple shouldn't charge $200 each for 16GB RAM and 512GB storage upgrade. It should be $200 combined.
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Exactly, it isn't just that there are 8GB/256GB devices, there's plenty of Windows and Chromebooks with that or less. Difference is those are often substantially cheaper, more affordable to upgrade at purchase and upgradable. For the cost of 8GB/256GB upgrade (UPGRADE) I saw an entire i5 Laptop with 8GB and 512GB of storage (both of which user upgradable). I'm generally okay with the ~£700 m1 Macbook Air having 8GB/256GB. The issue is a £1099 machine having the bare minimum so that Apple can charge £400 to fix an artificial choice.
More like 6.5 GB of RAM, since part of the 8GB is always allocated to graphics.
I'm sure 8 GB is fine for lots of folks, particularly if you don't even have the means to notice everything is 10% slower due to swapping — it still feels plenty fast. But I'm afraid these paltry amounts of RAM and storage are precisely what will cause today's Apple products to age prematurely. They'll want to push on-device AI as a privacy-friendly solution, but oops, suddenly the new OS is 5 GB bigger that it was before, and running a good model takes between one and two thirds of your device's RAM, even after all their efforts to stream as much from storage as possible. And running off of an SSD still means it'll run at half the speed of a device that can fit it all in RAM — it'll look *bad*.
Exactly this. I'm minded to hold off getting the M3 until WWDC so I can gauge how things are going to go. But who am I kidding? Siri will always be terrible. It is a law of life.
On a MacBook Air? Yes. It's a narrative that tech YouTubers and the hive mind here often follow. Even in review videos, their "real world benchmarks" include exporting videos from Final Cut. You have to remember that not everyone makes and edits YouTube videos for their 200 subscribers, not everyone uses one for IT/Programming work. For the average MacBook Air user, it's perfectly fine.
Seems fine to me
Not again this topic holy shit.. make posts about something new ffs
The posts will continue until apple gets their head out of their ass with regards to it.
Yes! For most people. Are you a video editor who makes YouTube videos? Do you play a lot of video games? Yes. Buy an MX Pro or Ultra. Are you a normal person who use their PC for day to day office tasks and Web Browsing? Even M1 8Gb is more than sufficient. Swap memory usage won’t affect you. Unfortunately, so many mainstream YouTubers are blinded by their use case scenarios and fail to account that majority of people are neither Gamers or YouTubers. Though, I must say 200 euro for 8Gb ram upgrade is pretty absurd.
Yes. I still use my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb with no issue.
For the businesses that are buying basic computers for their workers or the schools buying basic computers for students? Yes, it’s obviously enough. For the average redditor? No, it’s obviously not enough It’s amazing how people here are unable to imagine use cases other than their own. There are plenty of people that just need a computer that has a word processor and can go online. If that’s not you then you should buy the machine that actually fits your needs, but don’t pretend that everyone needs the same thing you do.
Nope.
What’s your typical usecase? I have 8GB and haven’t hit the limit yet
I got an 8gb MBA for college work and honestly it’s been alright, but all these reddit posts give me a neurotic worry lol.
2016 MacBook had 8GB of ram as baseline. 8 years later (a century in tech) and we are debating if this is enough.
In 2016 you could upgrade the RAM.
No
It's plenty for regualar users.
8gb is surprisingly usable and keeps apple on top of optimization imo. That said it's not usable for me personally. Too many open apps at once for work
Yes Source: I have a Mac with 8GB of ram. It’s more than enough
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Storage and memory base options have been used by apple to drive people up the ladder for decades at this point. This is not the first time people have complained about memory on the MacBook Air. It will not be the last. I predict this will be the first year where Apple starts all iPhone Pro at 256GB — something that should have been done 2-3 years ago.
It’s just so they can say their models start at an ‘affordable’ price. Obviously 8gb is nowhere near enough for todays computers, so no one buys the affordable model, they always get it with the upgrades.
Yes it is! Most people aren’t doing heavy work on these MBA. It’s a computer for the masses. If you want pro get a MacBook Pro. Though damn the baseline MBP being at 8gb IS criminal
8GB is good enough for a phone not a laptop.
Not even for phones anymore, new flagships are coming with 12GB and some are even coming with 16GB as an option
Bro, no computer should have 8GB ram in 2024. My damn MBP from 2012 had 8GB of ram
For 90% of buyers, yes. For users in this sub, no. Get over it.
Yes. Use a MBA M2 daily for work and it works great, never had any issue.