Apple insists 8GB unified memory equals 16GB regular RAM
Facing renewed criticism that it provides too little RAM in its iMac and MacBooks, Apple has doubled down on how Apple Silicon uses memory so much more efficiently.
Bob Borchers in front of an iMac
One of the design changes brought by the move from Intel to Apple Silicon in 2020 was to do with RAM. In Apple Silicon, memory is hard-wired into the processor using Unified Memory Architecture (UMA), and that removes traditional bottlenecks.
Memory in Apple Silicon is accessed faster than in previous designs because the RAM is on board the processor, it doesn't have to be reached via the traditional bus and separate chip method. There are potential issues, but overall Apple is right that this is a significant improvement.
However, a core claim of Apple's is that this improved design means Mac need less RAM than they did.
"Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent," Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers said in a new interview, "because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture."
"Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems," he continued. "We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently."
Several years in to using Apple Silicon, however, there is also an increase in the use of AI's large language models. Along with that comes an increased perception that Apple is short-changing its Pro users by making RAM upgrades costly.
"[So] what I would say is I would have people come in and try what they want to do on their systems, and they will I think see incredible performance," continued Borchers. "If you look at the raw data and capabilities of these systems, it really is phenomenal."
"This is the place where I think people need to see beyond the specs, and actually go and look beyond the capabilities, and listen to trusted people like you who have actually used the systems," he said. "People need to look beyond the specifications and actually go and understand how that technology is being used. That's the true test."
Borchers' claim is fair for regular use, like surfing, light image editing and the like. However, there are several professional workflows that we highlighted in our Apple Silicon Mac Pro review from just after WWDC, and will again in our M3 Max MacBook Pro review, that demand the RAM. His comments likely won't hold much water with those users.
Apple is arguably again under pressure over RAM because the new 14-inch MacBook Pro comes by default with 8GB RAM, as does the new 15-inch MacBook Air. These and the new 24-inch iMac can be increased to 16GB RAM for $200, or 24GB RAM for $400.
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Comments
Apparently there are some issues with Adobe's memory management with apple silicon. If this is resolved, then I guess Apple might be correct!
Now, is this exactly a 2:1 ratio? Of course not, but for layman's speak for a general use device macOS on AS is going to need less resources to run. Of course, if you'd like to find some example of an Adobe app loading a 40 GiB RAW image to prove that both will need x-amount of RAM to load the image, then you go right ahead, but we both know that's not what is being discussed here.
I’ll add that my personal experience bears this out. My M1 Max MBP 32Gb absolutely kept up with the Alienware R12 i7 64Gb. The only difference between the two was the graphics card (NVIDIA) performance and the ability to ramp up the processor cycles (and sound like a hair dryer).
I pushed the limits of both machines in video encoding and streaming.
They can certainly say that they are getting superior performance and efficiency with 8 GB compared to other competing platforms or architectures running with only 8 GB. But if you’re doing an Apple Silicon-to-Apple Silicon comparison and you would benefit by having 16 GB available due to the combined working set of your running applications, the benefits of having more memory available are real and there is no equivalence between 8 GB and 16 GB.
Apple Silicon effectively rebases my expectations. I already know it’s better on so many levels (but not all) than other platforms. I don’t want to compare it to lesser platforms. Upping the base level Unified Memory to 16 GB would make the Apple Silicon argument even more pronounced, no song and dance required. We’re paying a premium for choosing Apple, so why not make the perceived value and useful lifetime of the products stand out from the crowd even further? Software is not getting smaller.
If I'm performing an operation on hundreds of thousands of rows of data, they have to be somewhere physically fast, they don't exist in aether. Anything that swaps to SSD has access times in ms, not RAM's ns, one millisecond is 1000000 nanoseconds if anyone needs the reminder so I'm not exaggerating when I say several orders of magnitude slower. Despite techtubers also only looking at peak sequential read speeds you almost never hit real world except in single big file transfer.
If you need RAM, you need RAM, there's no way around it. Unified is just faster when you share data from CPU to GPU or the other way because of no pool swapping, but otherwise the physicality of RAM remains.
The M3/8gb is the replacement for the 13” MBP. It’s a starter level machine for those that need something more powerful than the Air (with a better display, speakers, etc)
So I hope that clears things up for all the internet.
An Apple Sheep :P
For 10 years-ish prior to the M series Apple Silicon, Apple was making do with the A series Arm Chips in iPhones AND iPads, using only 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 GBs of RAM, for nam 10 years!
Then they broke out the M1 with 8GB, and some have 16GBs sure, but they HAVE experience under 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 GBs of RAM workloads. I bought an M1 8GB MacMini, that thing is a beast STILL...
Laters...
We are NOT doubling RAM like we used to anymore because we no longer need it thanks to SSDs capable of transferring huge data instantly.
RAM was literally created as a gap solution for slow disk access and transfer rate. It was also necessary for windowing systems which takes a lot of memory and needed to be accessed quickly.
Now we have SDDs capable of transferring at least 2GB per second with instant access seek which makes virtual memory management a breeze for many tasks. The lifespan of SSDs also improved as well. By the time, SDDs wear off badly, the machine would be outdated and need to be replaced by a new machine that's certainly at least 10X faster.
Also, MacOS uses RAM compression on the fly so having 8GB is like 16GB. And the unified RAM makes it a lot more efficient with memory usage.
If you use HDD as a boot disk, you'd definitely notice a significant performance hit which is where adding more RAM makes sense but virtually no modern computers use HDDs for boot. SSDs are what makes the OS run fast with less RAM.