OTOH 8GB RAM is Apple's own self-inflicted limitation. Why should the other CPU be given artificially less RAM only because Apple chose a design that limits how much RAM their chip can use?
M2 is not limited to 8GB. 8GB is only the base Macbook Air M2 model. You can buy one with 16 or 24GB. Most people who buy 8GB Macs these days complain about performance, while people with 16GB praise it.
That is, however, an artifact of how Apple is pricing the models. The price difference between 8GB and 16GB is $200. This is absurd -- there's no way the added cost in ram is more than $50 for them and due to their market position and massive volume, it's probably quite a bit below that.
ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 starts at $1919. Macbook Air M2 with 8GB RAM is $1199. Macbook Air M2 with 16GB RAM is $1,399. So even at 16GB it's still a lot cheaper than the Lenovo laptop used. Price doesn't explain the disparity in the hardware used in the benchmarks.
(the 6800u ~= 6850u unless you're deploying them en masse in the enterprise, in which case there's extra management features in the Ryzen pro that the Mac doesn't have)
So, you're comparing a lower build quality on the Lenovo side against the Apple? Yeah, of course if you start cutting costs out of other places, the price comes down, that's not a particularly interesting or insightful point, you've just loaded the comparison.
no one is paying Lenovo listing price. In fact, there is a 40% off coupon right there on the page, bringing that $1919 down to $1151. You may even be able to get deeper discounts through your employer corporate discount plan.
This statement is not even wrong, in the sense that it is nonsensical. If you intended to say that the RAM is integrated on chip, that is incorrect. Apple marketing made that statement early on, but teardowns very clearly show that the RAM is soldered on package, not on integrated on chip. This is still a leap forward in power from other common devices, but a much smaller one than integrating the RAM on the chip.
Furthermore, the RAM on M2 is bog-standard SK Hynix LPDDR5. 2x 32gbit chips for the 8GB model, 2x 64gbit for the 16GB model, and 2x 96gbit for the 24GB model. I can buy the exact same chips that are used in 16GB Macbook Air for ~$70 each, and I am not Apple.
If the SKUs had the same level of markup, the price difference between 8GB and 16GB would be less than $50.
> I can buy the exact same chips that are used in 16GB Macbook Air for ~$70 each, and I am not Apple.
Makes me think of licensed trades. Anything a plumber or electrician installs for me will be significantly marked up from what I could buy it for myself.
It feels weird that 8GB is the entry level for a $1000+ ultrabook in 2022. I remember 4GB being standard 10 years ago. That whole "doubling every two years" thing really tapered off.
I haven't written my comment in the spirit of entering a competition of who can get more RAM, but in the spirit that the Phoronix benchmark compares completely different computers, one with 8GB, the other with 16GB of RAM and gives a title suggesting that it's a comparison between chips, when the chip with 8GB isn't limited to 8GB. They could have gone for the 16GB option and made the comparison more honest. The chip doesn't have any such limitation.
The apps they use for comparison are limited by the CPU performance not memory size, so 8/16 shouldn't matter here. Unless you can point at something that's likely losing due to swapping?
