If 32GB is the max, why not just make that the one and only model and get rid of this weird segmentation. That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate. 8GB was practically criminal.
Or -- and I know this is crazy -- slottable RAM on a device that is designed for things other than portability. Wild, I know.
Presumably, their career economists found that this "weird" pricing scheme is actually optimal—that selling tiny RAM upgrades for $200 or $400 is empirically, measurably an effective way to sort their consumers by purchasing power, and optimally drain their wallets.
It goes by many names, the "microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of",
I mean, that's basically it. The difference between part costs of 8GB/16GB/32GB RAM chips is nearly a rounding error, and they're probably eating a bunch more costs stocking and adding assembly for different RAM SKUs.
That explains it then. The extra cost of supporting extra RAM SKUs has to be recouped somehow. What better way than by stocking extra RAM SKUs and charging a premium? :)
Arbitrary markup based on whatever they can maximally extract from their consumers is the name of the game. Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
> Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
I think people here forget that Apple is targeting a certain profit margin. Currently, their gross profit margin is about 45%.
If you're rolling this out on the Mac line, it's okay to have a profit margin closer to 35% on the base model; but maybe with 55%-65% margins on the higher-tier professional equipment, to "balance" it out. It also turns out, professionals have money, and will pay despite the grumbling. The RAM prices are basically a progressive tax.
I’ve never felt memory limited on my 16gb macbook pro, on which I code, run rust-analyzer (major memory hog), video edit, etc. Most people definitely don’t need 32GB
Says the first owner of the machine. Macbooks, and Apple devices in general, have a strong reputation for high resale value. That high resale value is based on having them last quite a while. This falls apart in a few years as hardware requirements continue to balloon.
That was fine when Intel was sitting on their ass, raking in the cash, and nearly everything else (storage, especially external drives, RAM, and even batteries weren't too bad) is upgradeable. This is less great when you can no longer upgrade the component most likely to be the first bottleneck.
Apple pays people to be smarter than me about this, but I still think it's a stupid long-term play to damage one of your biggest selling points
I’ve definitely been memory limited on a 32GB MacBook Pro. Though it’s probably due to Docker, Slack, multiple IDEs, and dozens and dozens of browser tabs all open at the same time. Consider me part of the exception.
If you use your PC to only run a single application at any time then yes, 8GB might be usable. If you need to have an Electron app opened, a few browser tabs and XCode (let alone some less efficient IDE)? Your compute will grind to a halt...
The problem is the insane markups, but my anecdata is the opposite of yours.
I'm also doing Rust dev, but I can't work with less than ~24GB.
On my headless rackmount dev box that I use for my remote development environment, the box sits around 17GB of memory in use + 8GB of cache. I've got an M3 with 36GB running a few Visual Studios Code (plus browser/Docker/Dropbox) with about 30GB used (8GB of that is cache).
16GB would not have been enough for me for my work at Deno. My current job involves both Rust and Python work and I'd quickly hit the limits of 16GB if I'm running my code while developing it, let alone running a browser or keeping my email client open.
The OS will use more RAM if you give it more RAM. The fact that you are currently using 46GB on an (I assume) 64GB model doesn't necessarily mean that your workload would run badly on a 32GB or 16GB model.
It's more likely to mean exactly that, because the less RAM, the more disk swapping.
At some point it becomes impossible for the OS to keep everything it wants in RAM at the same time, and then you get an orgy of disk thrashing and a potential lock-up.
This is not theoretical. I've had it happen on both Macs and Windows machines, sometimes with just a single main app running.
At best you'll get obvious delays if you switch apps, as pages get dumped to disk while other pages are loaded.
I might get away with 48GB (don't know, I have 64 now on my work machine) but I had a lot of swap usage when I was running on 32GB. Some of us do need a lot of ram.
Well, iMacs used to be fairly common in music/video production. Given the move towards more casual use-cases by Apple, I would say there aren't many anymore, but if they were to put pro chips in there, I'm sure there would be more.
I have the feeling most music/video producers these days like the laptop format anyway (a music producer would typically want to have access to his projet in his home studio, live stages and pro studios) and the imac format is getting limited to traditional pro desk use.
With usb-c/thunderbolt, it is hard to be a pro user AND be interested in the iMac form factor when you can have a mobile device that you can easily dock to a large screen and have the conveniency and comfort of both a laptop and a desktop.
Outside of companies that wants fixed, kensington locked desktops for their employees, I don't see who would choose an imac over anything else.
Definitely constrained by my 16gb, it's only 2 years old. Rubymine takes 4gb on it's own, Chrome eats a lot... I'm usually hovering around 10gb of swap.
Have you considered that your way of using the machine is based around the limitations, hence you don't recognize them?
Whenever switching company I went from a 64 gb ram computer to a 16 gb ram. Yes, it worked, but only because I had to adapt to it. But one might not see it if one's never tried.
Then again, the rest of the industry has figured out a way to make slottable RAM almost as fast and compact as soldered RAM with the new CAMM2/LPCAMM2 standards. The M4 has LPDDR5X-7500 120GB/sec memory and there are already LPCAMM2-7500 120GB/sec modules, with even faster ones on the way: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21390/micron-ships-crucialbra...
Two of those modules working in parallel would hit "M Pro" speeds as well. I doubt Apple will be adopting them though, for the same reason they don't offer standard M.2 SSD slots even on systems that could obviously support them with minimal design compromises.
These are still well below what Apple offers at the high end and you can not buy systems like that right now. If you want high memory bandwidth on the CPU today, you will be charged a big markup on Epyc/Xeon/ThreadripperPro CPUs and motherboards, rather than the DRAM.
Very unlikely. Apple can argue that less than 1% of computers users ever upgrade their memory (which is true), and after all, did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory?
> did the EU intervene when GPUs dropped their slotted memory?
The difference there is that slotted GPU memory is demonstrably impactical, but the memory on the M4 isn't demonstrably better than the LPCAMM2 module above. It's literally the exact same spec. Not that I expect the EU to do anything either when they didn't act on Apples soldered-in SSDs, which definitely aren't any better than standardized M.2 drives.
Actually, incorrect. On some scenarios, you’d need up to 4 CAMM2 slots to do what Apple does. This is due to CAMM2 maxing out at 128 bit busses; but M3 Max chips are currently at 512. Needless to say, battery life most affected.
Yes, the higher end Max and Ultra chips would still need soldered memory for sure. Two CAMM modules flanking opposite sides of the SOC is probably doable though, so I think the M Pros could practically have socketed memory.
For SSD speeds, that was already dismistified with iBoff new adapter which makes an M1 Macbook Air upgradable and faster. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true for RAM using the CAMM standard positioned near the CPU. Or maybe even better, slotted memory chips like in the old days, with a memory controller ready to accept multiple chip sizes.
Would the people who were buying the baseline 8GB model (presumably just for general computing/office work) care about the GPU being slightly slower, though?
I bet that the extreme lag when you run out of memory because you have an Electron app or two, several browser tabs and something like Excel is way more noticeable.
Hardly anyone is using Macs for gaming these days and almost anybody who does something GPU intense would need more than 16GB anyway.
> The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies.
Source for what? Parallel RAM interfaces have strict timing and electrical requirements. Classic DDR sockets are modular at the cost of peak bandwidth and bus width. The wider your bus, the more traces you have to run in parallel from the socket to the compute complex, which becomes harder and harder. You don't see sockets for HBM or GDDR for a good reason. The proof is there.
LPCAMM solutions mentioned upthread resolve some of this by making the problem more "three dimensional" from what I can tell. They reduce the length of the traces by making the pinout more "square" (as opposed to thin and rectangular) and stacking them closer to the actual dies they connect to. This allows you to cram swappable memory into the same form factor, while retaining the same clock speeds/size/bus width, and without as many design complexities that come from complex socket traces.
In Apple's case they connect their GPU to the same pool of memory that their CPU uses. This is a key piece of the puzzle for their design, because even if the CPU doesn't need 200GB/s of bandwidth, GPUs are a very different story. If you want them to do work, you have to feed them with something, so you need lots of memory bandwidth to do that. Note that Samsung's LPCAMM solutions are only 128-bits wide and reported around 120GB/s. Apple's gone as high as 1024-bit busses with hundreds of GB/s of bandwidth; the M1 Max was released years ago and does 400GB/s. LPCAMM is still useful and a good improvement over the status quo, of course, but I don't think you're even going to see 256-bit or 512-bit versions just so soon.
And if your problem can be parallelized, then the higher your bus width, the lower your clock speeds can go, so you can get lower power while retaining the same level of performance. This same dynamic is how an A100 (1024-bit bus) can smoke a 3090 (384-bit) despite a far lower clock speed and power usage.
There is no magical secret or magical trick. You will always get better performance, less noise, at lower power by directly integrating these components together. It's a matter of if it makes sense given the rest of your design decisions -- like whether your GPU shares the memory pool or not.
There are alternative memory solutions like IBM using serial interfaces for disaggregating RAM and driving the clock speeds higher in the Power10 series, allowing you to kind of "socket-ify" GDDR. But these are mostly unobtainium and nobody is doing them in consumer stuff.
32 GB seems plenty for me for the target audience. The iMac is aimed at a rather casual computer user, especially now that they nixed the larger screen size one.
I agree, I run 32gb on a dev Macbook pro and it's enough, even our largest app is around 20k files and the language server uses 5gb of ram. I often sit around 22-24gb of usage with Docker running.
For most people 32gb is not going to hold them back.
On the one hand, sure, Apple loves to get that extra margin for more RAM and SSD, no doubt.
On the other hand, the MacBook Air ships with 8GiB RAM standard, and it's robustly popular. One could suppose that all those customers are suffering from the lack of RAM, or one could suppose that for many use cases, it's an adequate amount.
The latter is more likely. macOS manages memory well, and a fast SSD means that swapping is fast enough that it often results in no visible delays to the user.
I'm not sure how can we tell. The Mac revenue has peaked back in 2022 and has been declining since. But assure, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad (i.e. at most a single app and/or browser and 8GB might be enough for that).
That they sell a lot of stock MacBook Airs? They do. I don't find the topic interesting enough to find a link, but I'm pretty confident on this one.
> a lot of people use their Macs as they would an iPad
A lot of people have pretty undemanding requirements in a laptop, yes. 8GiB is more than enough for some web browsing and light document editing, a bit of photo retouching, that kind of thing. There are many Chromebooks on the market right now with 4 GiB and they sell in numbers.
The HN tilt trends toward systematically overestimating system requirements because development is fairly demanding of them.
I just doubt there is actual meaningful data available (at least that's publicly accessible). We'd need to measure the proportion of base config MBA users who regularly get OOM warnings?
> many Chromebooks
Yes. People just have different use cases. I mean almost nobody who does anything that might require > 16-32 GB of memory would likely buy this iMac (even if Apple sold such configs).
It's an entirely different product than the 27 inch "Pro" iMacs with Xeons from back in the day.
Hardly anybody "needs" a desktop PC these days (outside of gaming and some niche applications). So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
Ah, yes that was why I asked what I did. I'm quite confident they sell a lot of stock MBAs, is what I said, as a guess at what we were trying to 'tell'.
As for "low on application memory" warnings, macOS doesn't really do that unless the user is also out of swap. Offer may not be valid for XCode. My wild-ass guess is that users who need lots of RAM tend to know that when they buy computers, and that percentage wise, there are more over-provisioned Mac users than under-provisioned. But who knows.
> So this is just basically a generic office / front desk PC for people who don't need laptops.
Right. Apple market-segments their products pretty carefully, and the post-Pro iMac line is for receptionists, desktop publishing, light-duty visual/creative, the occasional desk-oriented email job, and so on. 16 GiB is a generous baseline for those tasks, and 8 GiB was probably adequate for most customers.
> That's a ridiculously low minimum and only just barely adequate.
What are you doing? I'm still doing web development with Chrome, JetBrains, and Docker on a 16GB M1 Pro and it isn't a problem. For the average Chrome-using citizen, 16GB should be fine.
Yeah I'm a huge fan of Apple hardware and even I can't handle this. The different in price between 8GB and 16GB for the M3 Air was like $500 at Costco. My air from 2016 came with 8GB.
Or -- and I know this is crazy -- slottable RAM on a device that is designed for things other than portability. Wild, I know.