Apple Makes 16GB RAM Standard on MacBook Air 122
Apple has boosted the default RAM to 16GB across its MacBook Air lineup while maintaining existing prices. The memory upgrade affects both M2 and M3 models, with base prices staying at $999 for M2, $1,099 for 13-inch M3, and $1,299 for 15-inch M3 versions. The move comes as AI features demand increased memory capacity.
Maybe... (Score:4, Funny)
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That's about right - I've been buying $135 n100 systems for solar clusters and putting a $59 32GB SODIMM in them (and a second $35 nvme for a ZFS root mirror).
It's wild that Apple still tries to bill itself as premium.
PS what to do now with a stack of 8GB dimms and Intel wireless modules?
Re: Maybe... (Score:2)
Are they M.2 WiFi or just minipcie modules? If the former I could use one ;)
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And Apple will still charge their $200 to add more RAM or double the storage. Just a flat $200 additional for each tier with no basis in reality.
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And Apple will still charge their $200 to add more RAM or double the storage. Just a flat $200 additional for each tier with no basis in reality.
Well, of course they will. That's the price-point that they have computed will bring them the most profit. You set your price according to what the market will bear - simple free-market economics.
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The memory controller might be in the SoC, but the RAM chips are part of the package. It's not really inside SoC. They are still standard RAM chips next to the SoC.
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You'll note that parent said "on the SOC" though (not in), so they meant what you are saying.
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If that's what they meant then they wouldn't think it justified the higher cost. It's the same DRAM chips.
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But it does create a difference in pricing.
SODIMMs are mass-produced.
When you've soldered the DRAMs to the package, and then soldered the package to the mainboard, you need a SKU for every combination of RAM and CPU.
I'll not try to argue that there's a performance benefit to soldering the DRAMs and package, likely unlike the parent, but there is an effect on cost structures.
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There is a _power_ benefit to placing the RAM as close to the memory controller as possible. The less opportunity there is for the signal to degrade, the less voltage the RAM needs. Also, latency decreases (very slightly) and you may be able to run higher memory clocks, but DDR5 kinda has solved the clock degradation problem by adding a buffer to regenerate the clock pulses. But power is the reason VRAM is physically placed close to your GPU.
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Also, latency decreases (very slightly) and you may be able to run higher memory clocks, but DDR5 kinda has solved the clock degradation problem by adding a buffer to regenerate the clock pulses.
The electrical latency is dwarfed by the memory controller issue latency. Absolutely dwarfed.
There's probably no better example of this, than examining the latency of your_favorite_x86_here with RAM 4 inches away in some DIMMs- and then that of an M1.
The M1's latency is higher.
Is its electrical latency? No. It's not. But that doesn't really matter here when the bottleneck latency is orders of magnitude higher.
Clock rates- also another "technically correct" aspect, but another practically meaningless.
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All LPDDR4 is soldered within a few cm of the memory controller, while most DDR4 is inches away.
LPDDR4 mostly accomplishes this active power savings by having roughly double the request latency.
The resistance on the trace may have all kinds of consequences- but in the regime we're talking about, no, it really doesn't.
The actual primary power savings between DDR4 and LPDDR4 is while the bus is entirely inactive- where DDR4 use
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No it is not the DDR4 chips you find in regular desktops. Bandwidth on these is 400GB/s or DDR7, manufacturers have problems putting DDR5 on a DIMM without sacrificing bandwidth and latency and often have to resort to custom packages. You don't see GPU with removable/upgrade memory for the same reason, they have to be soldered on right on or next to (around) the processing cores
Better volume pricing with M4 mini launch (Score:2)
Maybe hey couldn't find anybody to manufacture a modern 8gb module
Note they just launched the new M4 Mac mini. They are now getting better volume pricing on 16 GB and its more practical to use them on low end systems now.
So effectively, mini and air just got upgraded from 8GB.
Re: Maybe... (Score:2)
Given that the ram on these machines is on the SoC, that seems unlikely - they can speed 16kB if they like and TSMC will make it.
Re: Maybe... (Score:2)
Not an anti-Mac guy, by any means, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pathetic Apple needed this AI craze to justify putting more RAM in their notebooks as standard.
People have been forced to buy Apple's "high spec" version of machines for many years now, to get an adequate amount of RAM (and a reasonably sized SSD for mass storage). And with RAM being integrated in with the processor with the "M" series systems, it's obvious they're never getting upgraded in the future. Buying a Mac in 2024 with only 8GB of RAM amounts to a coach picking an athlete with a bad knee as his chosen marathon runner.
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"Buying a Mac in 2024 with only 8GB of RAM..."
In 2024? That was true when Apple introduced the M1.
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When I tested the M1 machines for work, it was hard to get our hands on them due to global supply chain restrictions. I was able to get a M1 Air with 16GB of RAM as I could not find a 32GB machine. I tested it and compared to the Intel based MacBook Pros with 16GB, it was actually faster and not breaking a sweat under our higher loads. We still got the 32GB machines, now 36GB machines. Overall everyone at work is very happy with the ARM machines, even though there are a tad bulkier than the Intel ones were.
re: M1 performance w/16GB vs 32GB (Score:3)
Sure ... but the "hidden" problem with the lower RAM configs on these M series machines is they do a lot more swapping to the SSD as virtual memory during normal use. Everything is fast enough so this doesn't cause users to see a real performance issue. But it puts unnecessary premature wear on the SSD, which is ALSO soldered in place on these computers, so not easy to swap out if it fails.
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This is true. It's also true that a large segment of the user base of lowest-spec MacBook Airs use their machines so lightly that this will never be a problem in practice during the lifetime of the machine.
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It's pathetic Apple needed this AI craze to justify putting more RAM in their notebooks as standard.
They didn't. The justification was "people are buying them"
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They didn't. The justification was "people are buying them"
The Air upgrade is suspiciously at the same time the M4 mini is introduced. I expect they are getting better volume pricing on 16GB.
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This reads ambiguously. Products are changed when people aren't buying them.
Apple has access to up to the minute sales figures because of their stores. They know when sales are starting to decrease.
Products are changed for lots of reasons besides obvious dips in sales. Sometimes they are changed just for a marketing brag. Sometimes they are cost reduced. Sometimes they are changed to support some other goal, like when they add parts DRM to increase service revenues.
Apple didn't put more RAM into their machines because people were buying the machines with not very much RAM, and also
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I haven't bought any computer with less than 16GB RAM in something like fifteen years, and the last two computers we bought (one new, one used from a college surplus) are 32GB machines.
For me, RAM either has to be modular, or has to be basically maxed-out. I'm not going to bother with under-spec machines to save a few bucks because I like my computers to remain viable for the better part of a decade. For me that means downselecting to the features I require, then trying to spec the machine to the best ban
Re:Not an anti-Mac guy, by any means, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pathetic Apple needed this AI craze to justify putting more RAM in their notebooks as standard.
More likely their cost of 16GB parts just got low enough due to volume as the M4 mini launched. Its not a coincident that Air got updated at the same time.
People have been forced to buy Apple's "high spec" version of machines for many years now ...
Nope, or more accurately only "power users". The people just doing email, browsing and running productivity software for personal or school use, 8GB configurations were just fine.
Personally I do development work, I double the RAM, and the Mac remains quite good for the next 7 or so years until it no longer gets macOS upgrades. I have a 2018 MacBook Pro with 16GB, I can start an Wndows VM that is allocated 8GB and Windows and macOS are running just fine. My 2011 MacBook Pro with 8GB is now my Linux laptop and running just fine.
Re: Not an anti-Mac guy, by any means, but.... (Score:2)
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8gb isn't fine even for the use cases you mentioned. You only need to have some tabs open in your browser and it easily use 4gb of ram, leaving precious little for your applications and OS
I'm doing software development work, not browsing web pages with terrible implementations :-). The more technical pages I'll hit during work are fine. Plus all my compile, test, debug are fine. Also some use of office for related documentation.
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The problem is its not user upgradeable.
Re: Not an anti-Mac guy, by any means, but.... (Score:1)
Youâ(TM)re not good enough at soldering
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More wasted RAM (Score:3)
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> I regularly catch Firefox using 10GB of RAM these days
The bloat isn't necessarily the browser's fault; Close some tabs and use bookmarks instead. It's also possible some of the sites you are visiting are exceptionally heavy with memory usage for some reason.
Every tab is functionally an entire virtual machine for security reasons. For Firefox specifically, you can put about:processes in the address bar and get a rundown of how much memory and CPU each tab is using. Find out the biggest offenders and co
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The bloat isn't necessarily the browser's fault
You want me to do busywork so Apple doesn't have to pay an extra $10 for memory on a thousand dollar machine?
Re: More wasted RAM (Score:2)
Re: More wasted RAM (Score:3)
Your comment is so off base I decided to log in.
Absolutely nothing streams in a webpage the way you describe it. Iâ(TM)ll provide a simplified overview.
âoeStreamingâ in a browser involves downloading a CHUNK of data (RAM needed to store this chunk),
It is then fed into the appropriate codec to read the chunk and decompress (RAM needed for codec), the codec needs to move the raw bits to audio hardware, this often involves copying the bits from RAM to the hardware device, which can have its own
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The Codec is in the OS.
And an mp3 file or similar, hardly is in the 10MB range. Usually a song is below ONE mega byte.
So: a browser tab that consumes giga bytes to stream a 10MB file - note, streaming has a meaning - does not make any sense at all.
If you still think IÃ(TM)m wrong, remove the RAM from your computer and boot. It canÃ(TM)t. It wonÃ(TM)t. Everything that runs uses RAM.
Sure idiot.
To "stream" a 300MB music file, I need 10GB of RAM, I got it now.
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There is no damn reason that a tab that is not in front uses memory at all!!!!
Nonsense.
Where would you like it? Flushed to disk? Would you like to wait for it to be re-loaded every time you switch tabs?
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Yes. ...
As flushing to an SSD and reloading it: is instant in our times.
It is not 1984
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As flushing to an SSD and reloading it: is instant in our times.
It's not instant- and there's a wear cost to doing it.
I disagree with you whole-heartedly. RAM is there to be used to make things quicker.
Do you want switching tabs to take 5-10 seconds because you have a high-rate file transfer occurring in the background? Do you want the file transfer to grind to a halt while it loads tabs?
There have been people who claimed that the SSDs were so fast that you could swap without noticing it- but those people are idiots.
Your SSD is good for ~6GB/s. A single core of you
Re: More wasted RAM (Score:1)
I agree with everything you said expect one thing:
RAM is not cheap if you're an Apple customer.
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There is no damn reason that a tab that is not in front uses memory at all!!!!
The whole point of tabbed browsing is so you can instantly switch between open web pages. If you have to wait for it to re-render the page every time you switch tabs, that is a miserable user experience. I say this from experience, because it's exactly how it works on RAM constrained iOS devices, where tabs are essentially just temporary bookmarks and switching between them frequently does result in the page being reloaded.
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Reloaded from cash, or reloaded from the internet?
That is the big differences.
The tab itself is usually in a different process. So: it should be swapped out. And swapping it back in and if necessary rerendering it: costs nothing on a modern CPU.
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I probably should have looked at about:memory before
That's awesome- I didn't know about that.
421MB for slashdot, single tab, everything enabled.
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A universal trade-off in software engineering is RAM for CPU.
The more buckets I put in that hash, the less likely I am to have to traverse a second layer.
"Wasting" RAM can directly lead to less CPU usage, and thus less power, while the cost for RAM usage, power-wise, is fixed independent of usage.
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RAM is there to be wasted. Anything not in RAM when needed needs to be fetched from a cache which is orders of magnitude slower. You want less RAM used? Fine, but you're going to have to invalidate your open tabs resulting in them displaying slower or outright reloading (which is what Edge does to save RAM) when you click on them.
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This is why software is so bad these days. No, RAM is not there "to be wasted". Wasting memory is exactly why so many applications use way more memory that they need to and you need a computer with 16GB of RAM to do shit you used to be able to do with 16MB.
Pretending memory is free can seriously hurt performance. I don't just mean cache misses either, a problem the average 'coder' isn't equipped to even understand, though that is a real problem that can only really be addressed by carefully designed data
Re: More wasted RAM (Score:1)
My unibody MacBook shipped from the factory with the max 4GB RAM config, and it thrashed under real use in 10.6. It took Apple a couple of years to ship firmware that would recognize 8GB; we were stuck with 6GB for a while.
I guess some people don't really use their computers very hard.
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The original Macbook in 2006 had only 512 megabytes
A 512 MB module cost $100-$200 in 2006. Sold in an $1000 machine. 10% of the cost.
And now a macbook air costs order of magnitude the same, but the RAM they're putting in it.... $10-20 (1-2% of the cost).
I wonder if that difference in cost is going to some other part of the machine or into margins?
(I know Apple don't pay retail prices for their RAM, which is what I quoted here, the actual percentage of cost will be lower)
Re:More wasted RAM (Score:4, Interesting)
And now a macbook air costs order of magnitude the same, but the RAM they're putting in it.... $10-20 (1-2% of the cost).
Negative.
LPDDR5 goes for about $20/4GB (M2, M3).
I can't find unit prices for LPDDR5X (M4) but a 32GB LPCAMM module from Micron costs ~$180.
The LPDDR4X in the M1 when it first came out was similar in price to LPDDR5X now.
These are not retail prices.
So, the 16GB in the M4 is probably ~$70-$90.
This isn't to say that their margins on the RAM isn't good- it is- but LPDDR is actually pretty damn expensive.
It gets cheap when a new generation comes out, but -current is always pricey as hell, particularly LPDDRX.
With 8GB reserved for AI (Score:3)
I'm sure this is because they are going to force you to keep an 8GB LLM model in-memory at all time even if you don't use the feature. You might still only have 8GB usable.
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I'm sure there'll be an option in settings to turn that off. .. right?
What are AI features (Score:3)
And can I remove them?
I remember upgrading my DOS-based 486dx2-66 to 8MB of RAM. And despite having 1/2000th the RAM, it nearly had about 2000 times more games for it than a Mac.
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There are still 2,000 times more games for Windows than Mac. Linux might even be close to overtaking Mac in game availability.
Re: What are AI features (Score:2)
If you count only the windows games which run flawlessly on Linux (sometimes better than on Windows, even) then the Mac isn't even in the running...
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Well, except you're ignoring that Wine runs on Mac as well.
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About 30% more of them support Linux natively (not via Proton) than Mac.
My library is of course not necessarily representative of "all libraries", but afaict, Linux support overtook Mac support in gaming a long, long time ago.
AI-driven? Please... (Score:2)
16GB of RAM has been the minimum for running a Gmail tab in Chrome for quite a while now.... they have just been juicing margins with expensive RAM step-ups that you had to pay for if you wanted to... get a usable computer...
Good (Score:2)
8 GB is criminal.
Welcome to 10 years ago chumps (Score:1, Troll)
Just an amazing week of announcements.
Must be so disappointing to the Mac users (Score:2)
Wow, all the apple boys here said we don't need 16GB because 8GB is like 32GB on PC. Wouldn't they have prefered to remove the $10 from the price that 8GB of RAM costs these days? Maybe Apple can make an 989 dollar macbook with 8GB for them?
Only your imaginary Mac users are disappointed (Score:3)
Wow, all the apple boys here said we don't need 16GB because 8GB is like 32GB on PC.
Straw man. Want to know the sort of thing actual Mac users are saying. That they have 16GB in a 2018 Intel Mac and they can run a Windows 10 virtual machine allocated 8GB, leaving 8GB for macOS, and both Windows and macOS runs just fine.
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https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-... [pcgamer.com]
I exaggerrated with the 32GB, but you can find a million fanboys claiming it about 16... including Apple itself. Despite all tests proving it wrong.
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Oh look an Apple fanboy downvoted me posting facts. Probably crying while posting.
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https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-... [pcgamer.com]
I exaggerrated with the 32GB, but you can find a million fanboys claiming it about 16... including Apple itself. Despite all tests proving it wrong.
I think there is some exaggeration for 16GB also. The complaints are most like power user doing something that requires a lot of RAM.
I am referring to modest users being OK in 8GB. People just doing email, browsing, some office productivity. We are talking about the low end configuration after all. Apple had two additional configurations for people doing more involved things.
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Right, it totally wasn't to give a ludicrous base spec at a sort of tolerable price (8GB + 256GB SSD), and then let people decide for it be obsolete in a couple of years or pay 300 USD for 30 dollars more of hardware to have at least low end modern specs. A 2TB high speed SSD retails for $100, but you'd think it's made of solid gold at the prices Apple sells them.
Also some of the most heavy stuff people do like browse screens with dozens of HD videos and keep all their apps open at the same time is done th
Good, but did they fix multi monitor? (Score:3)
Anyone know if they fixed that yet? At least let us keep the darn thing open. If your GPU can't drive 3 displays just disable the laptop display in software.
Of course that's not "elegant"...
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Probably not, but the M4 chip supports an additional external display so you can have dual displays while leaving your laptop open. Not certain when the M4 will come to the Air but they will probably make the transition at some point soon. I suspect once they have burned through there stock of M3 chips.
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Closing the clamshell does, and always has, radically reduced its cooling rate, since the screen is now an extra layer of insulation to the rising heat.
If you want that not to be the case, you need to get one of the actively cooled models.
Alternatively, you can lift the laptop off the flat surface it's on to more than overcome that loss of cooling efficiency (the bottom is all metal and radiates heat much better)
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Seems weird, are you sure there is no other way to disable the built-in monitor except for closing the screen?
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I have an Air with multiple displays. Do they support DisplayLink?
Ridiculous (Score:1)
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Period.
I own an MBA and an MBP- with 16GB, and 64GB, respectively.
It's not Apple that's lost in the past, it's simply the fact that some of its purchasers were OK with that small amount of RAM.
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I bought my current machine with less than 32 GB because I bought it used, and that's a take it or leave it proposition. I promptly added 32 GB more to the 16 that I started with, though.
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Why do you need 128G of RAM? I have currently 3 IDE's (JetBrains), dozen or so SSH sessions, a few RDP/VNC sessions, portions of 3 Office suites (Libre and Microsoft and Apple), an unholy amount of tabs in Firefox and Chrome, Slack, Teams, Skype, an image processing tool, a PDF editor, Docker with a few Docker containers running, Ollama, Wacom, Plexamp, Dropbox, VPN (848 processes with 5000+ threads).
Memory used: 36GB + 20GB cached files - most of the high-memory stuff I think is de-duplicating itself in RA
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Yay! (Score:2)
Hardly enough these days. (Score:2)
That's it, really. It's nowhere near enough to do anything serious on a laptop these days with all the heavy, unoptimised, rushed, memory-hungry apps.
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Currently sitting here developing the software for the ground segment of a space mission and visualising the result of algorithm changes on the data using a Mac with those specs - absolutely flies compared to the fully-specced iMac Pro it replaced.
1K ram on my first computer.. (Score:1)
ah I remember my first computer... sinclair zx81... 1K of ram... and then I bought the 16K RAM expander module and killed that....
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Damn, you were rollin'.
Still wouldn't buy, 32 GB is my minimum now (Score:2)
Flux will thrash the hell out of your page file if you have less than 24 GB of RAM, sometimes more -- but 32 should be enough for most cases, although I've seen RAM usage go as high as 38 GB during generation tasks.
Needless to say, I require a discrete GPU as well.
The MacBook Air is below minimum spec hardware for me. Not that Apple should cater to me, I wasn't buying at those prices anyhow.
Not Newsworthy (Score:3)
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Ah, what? More memory requires virtual memory? I think you just failed "OS Design 101" there.
$200 for 256 GB SSD (Score:1)
They were seriously shipping 8GB machines? (Score:2)
I mean, what is this? Low-powered tablets?
It's about fucking time! (Score:2)
Macs have need 16 GB standard since the M1 Macs were first released, pretty much ever since 8 GB Macs were reported to be thrashing the SSDs prematurely with excessive swapping. When I bought my M1 iMac. I paid the excessive Apple tax of $200 to get the extra 16 GB of RAM. The thing almost never swaps, unlike my previous iMac which had 8 GB.
What if folk just do not want AI? (Score:2)
What about SSD? (Score:2)
Need more internal storage!
10 years overdue..... (Score:2)