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i wonder how long can apple keep up with this 8gb base trend. and before ppl comment "8gb is more than enough for most" yeah so was 4gb back in the days but tech moves forward.

i wonder how long can apple keep up with this 8gb base trend. and before ppl comment "8gb is more than enough for most" yeah so was 4gb back in the days but tech moves forward.

Apple can keep up with 8GB base as long as people keep buying. It actually serves Apple well. People who know no better buy too little for their present & future needs and that leads to eventually realizing they need more horsepower under the hood. Replacements come sooner, making Apple more money.

People who do know better opt to pay outrageous prices to get it where "it should be" (or better), raining great profit on Apple for additional RAM and more SSD, now only available from a single source that can basically charge anything it wants. Again, Apple makes lots of additional money on this "smarter" crowd "getting it right."

We consumers actually control all such wants. We simply have to illustrate our demand in the language any seller understands: stop buying and seller will evolve their product (and/or upgrade pricing) to better motivate us to part with our money. Consumers seem to have just forgotten the great power of collectively endorsing or rejecting with their wallet. Instead, we roll over and buy anyway... and then complain about it on forums.

Revenue speaks farrrrrrrrrrrr louder than words.

I used the base model with the 8gb ram and it burst into flames when I launched chrome. When will Apple learn?

Tired of this useless base models, just axe the 8GB will ya?

I agree, 16 GBs and 512 GB should be standard now. You would be surprised how tech savvy the average consumer is on stuff like this these days. Came across a Twitter thread yesterday about the 2020 MacBook Air being on sale at COSTCO for 750, yet everyone in the comments seem pan it for the 8 GBs of RAM. Apple needs to show a little good will. Yeah, its DDR5 and its likely super fast. But the reality is people are keeping devices longer. Then again, I still use a 2015 13 inch MacBook Pro with a Broadwell CPU and 8 GBs of DDR3 and its surprisingly works well for email, web browsing, listening music, watching YouTube. So, maybe thats the angle Apple is approaching this from.

1GB swap usage is far from memory starved if the memory pressure remains in the green. Mac OS is very opportunistic about keeping file mapped pages, speculatively loaded pages with executable data, etc in memory (much more so than Windows or Linux). It will typically just compress these rather than freeing them (even though they're technically purgeable) because it's faster to decompress them from memory than it is to go grab them from the disk again in the event that they're needed. Pages that have not been accessed for a long time will just get thrown into swap to get them out of the way for other things within memory, and Mac OS will only start actually purging things once it actually needs to in order to free up space for actively used memory.

In other words, a lot of that "used RAM" (even RAM that is not labeled as cached in activity monitor) isn't really "in use" in quite the same sense that it would be on a Windows or a Linux system (well, it is, but much of it isn't frequently accessed data and can easily be swapped or compressed with no performance penalty). If your memory pressure is in the green, your system has plenty of extra headroom, no matter what activity monitor says. I've pushed my 8GB Macs into the 7-8GB swap usage territory before I observed slowdowns that were enough to be noticeable, and I've actually observed relatively similar performance between my 8GB and 16GB Macs on certain workloads even when the memory pressure was in the yellow.

I do agree that 8GB is tighter than it used to be (frankly I think that 16GB should be the starting configuration for all of the pro models, it's about time). But it's far from not being sufficient for the everyday user today. I've used both and pushed the swap usage much further than just 1GB, and it's generally hard to tell the difference for everyday web browsing types of workloads. For the everyday user, it's really more of a futureproofing thing.

My biggest qualm is that they usually don't stock the 16GB models in store for a lot of retailers, you often have to build-to-order. In 2023, you'd think it'd be easier to get 16GB, most PCs in the $700-800+ range come with 16GB as standard.

The only real qualm I have about swap on MacOS is that you can't, er, swap out the SSD if you *so* heavily use swap that it significantly affects lifespan. Most people's usage is never going to come close to that though, so it's more of a theoretical than real-world concern for the most part.