[crypt1d]

disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 mac mini

edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.

[Nextgrid]

> More than a dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers has been enough to crash/significantly slow down my m1 Mac mini

On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

I remember a decade ago being able to have a dozen browser tabs and instant messaging clients on 4GB of RAM just fine, and neither the web nor instant messaging experience has changed significantly enough to warrant the extra memory consumption (the majority of today's day-to-day browser-based tasks have been done just fine in 2010 on that era's hardware).

[simplotek]

> On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

How would that work? You whine on an online forum over how bloated a software is, and in the process opt to be deprived of it's usage? Or would you continue to complain about bloated software while using it? Because none of those scenarios offer a compelling reason for the software maintainers to rearchitect their whole application.

Meanwhile, a 8GB stick of RAM can be bought for what? 40€?

[horsawlarway]

Way fucking cheaper than 40. Closer to $16 unless you really need DDR5. Even then, it's still around $29/8gb if buying 32gb or more.

The issue is that Apple is integrating the RAM in the SoC. Personally, I'm not really a fan of "smart-phonification" of my desktop computers.

I get that the mini is in a bit of a weird spot, since it's still got fairly challenging size constraints, but still... not my cup of tea.

[Nextgrid]

> The issue is that Apple is integrating the RAM in the SoC

Aren't there legitimate technical reasons for including the RAM in the SoC such as better bandwidth?

[loufe]

The integration into the SoC is partially responsible for the amazing performance. The extra travelling distance for a click-in ram stick adds up, in terms of latency, quickly

[kimixa]

Not really less latency so much as the signalling can be run at much higher speed and/or much lower power without having to worry about stuff like the optional termination, the electrical properties of the socket->dimm connection itself, and much shorter track lengths. It also allows you to have as wide a bus as you want, limited by cost of packaging and die sizes on the package, instead of dimm size and board layout, which naturally has a much higher trace pitch than the package.

The higher speed "may" cause lower latency, but it's likely secondary at best.

[astrange]

Memory latency on the M1/M2 is no better than other systems. Other things are better, but not that.

[yamtaddle]

The memory bandwidth is a hell of a lot better than that $16 8GB stick mentioned upthread, though. 100GB/s on the M2 or 200GB/s on the M2 Pro. It may be possible to find actual comps with similar performance at a much lower price than Apple charges, but that $16 stick ain't it, or even close.

[NavinF]

That should happen in the future, but so far Apple hasn't really taken advantage of the massive improvement in signal integrity and their latency is similar to desktop x86. If someone figures out how to overclock one of these machines, we can find out if they're just being extremely conservative or if the memory controller is extremely weak compared to what you see on x86 desktop CPUs.

[qwytw]

Intel minis have upgradeable memory and their internals took up way more space compared to the (old) m1 mac mini at least.

[almog]

Not saying you're wrong but specifically to address OP's memory usage issue when running over dozen tabs in Chrome, I'd suggest testing it against Firefox for start. I'm not proud of this bad habit, but I have an order of magnitude more tabs than that with FF running on a pre-M1 8GB Macbook and it's pretty great most of the time. I use Chrome mostly for development but wouldn't dream of keeping it running as many tabs as I have open on FF (perhaps that's a good thing if I want to get rid of my tab hoarding habits now that I think about it.).

[scns]

Maybe because Firefox automatically suspends old tabs, Chrome needs a extension for that. If you reopen FF it reloads only the tabs you actually visit.

[rob-olmos]

FYI Chrome is trialing that feature natively titled "Memory Saver". It's available in my laptop's settings, but currently still not in my desktop's.

[FollowingTheDao]

"Meanwhile, a 8GB stick of RAM can be bought for what? 40€? "

Ha! Not if you want to get it in your MacMini. 8GB will set you back $200!

The Apple Cult has gone all in...

[yamtaddle]

What's the memory bandwidth on the 40€ stick? Apple charges a premium most of the time, sure, but there's a loooong tradition of the loudest voices complaining about the so-called Apple Tax also failing to actually compare like-to-like when drawing their conclusions about e.g. "The Apple Cult".

[jeroenhd]

Interesting, how are you planning on adding those extra 8 gigabytes if RAM to an M1/M2 Mac? Do you know of a mod that will make the motherboard take DIMM slots?

[scarface74]

Simple, you don’t use Chrome and use the bundled browser that is much more power and memory efficient

[eigen]

> Meanwhile, a 8GB stick of RAM can be bought for what? 40€?

I think the M2 chips use on-chip LPDDR5. is it a 6400MT/s LPDDR5 stick for that price or a 2133 MT/s SO-DIMM?

[melling]

Yeah, people have been making the argument about inefficient software for about 4 decades now.

I remember a decade ago buying a 16GB Mac Book Pro, and listening to people complain that 8GB wasn’t enough, so I’m not sure what world 4GB was enough.

That same 16GB laptop still works great today.

[yamtaddle]

A few years back I was given an old 4GB Macbook to use temporarily when I started at a new job. Thing is, I could have kept using it indefinitely for the actual work, for which it didn't feel slow—but Slack (Electron) and Asana (project management... webapp, thing, that liked to eat tons of memory & cycles for no reason, at the time) were must-use tools and just having them open with nothing else brought that poor machine to its knees.

Cut out webapps/Electron and it was entirely fine, though. Like if we'd just used XMPP or something instead of Slack I might even have been able to make it work without serious issues

[antifa]

I had an employer hand me a macbook with a small HDD (not SSD) with 4GB or 8GB of RAM. It was incredibly slow, especially with slack. It's somewhat symbolic of why I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

[friedman23]

Get ready for AR apps written in react native. The reason we have shitty inefficient software is because Apple, Google, and Microsoft haven't standardized on a performant cross platform framework other than the browser. Don't blame people writing software for not wanting to waste their lives translating the same logic to 3 different platforms and then maintaining 3x the code for the rest of their lives.

[hgs3]

> Don't blame people writing software for not wanting to waste their lives translating the same logic to 3 different platforms and then maintaining 3x the code for the rest of their lives.

If you decouple your UI from your business logic, then you only have to re-write the UI. If you must use a web-based UI, then consider using the platforms native browser control rather than bundling electron.

[friedman23]

Ok, you decouple UI from business logic, have some state machine written in language X let's say that can compile ios, android, and wasm and allows for interop with the kotlin, swift, and js. Even then, the view code is often the most complex and bug prone part of the app. Business logic is easy by comparison (in my opinion).

[qwytw]

Electron itself is not really that bad though. Sure there is not insignificant overhead but you can still make fairly resource efficient apps with it if you actually want to (and you can use Tauri if you want to go even further).

Also Slack, Discord etc. are not really using React Native (but rather normal web react if they are not using another framework). You don't really need Chromium for React Native which significantly reduces memory footpring (in fact a react native app can be close to indistinguishable from a "normal" native app in most ways). You can probably reduce React Native overhead to not much more than 100-200MB compared to purely native apps which seems reasonable.

[friedman23]

I was just using the original poster's language when I was referring to "shitty inefficient software". I'll say it does bother me that we are standardizing on typescript with react being the default for cross platform development.

When I first started using react I loved it compared to what existed at the time, the ease of composing everything and the fact that it just used JS instead of a DSL for templating and it didn't mandate all these cargo-culted framework patterns.

But the warts are really starting to show up, writing React today with useEffect hooks everywhere reminds me of writing VHDL in college to simulate an automated train controller and now I'm reaching for things like XState to handle almost all state management (I have a feeling this complexity ends up appearing for all complex UI interactions though).

Also we are taking on a type system (which is good) but not seeing any of the performance benefits that could bring. Why is golang more than 100% faster than typescript? Both are statically typed languages but TS doesn't get any compiler optimizations because of the JS baggage.

That being said, I'll take JS with React + React Native if it means I can write apps once and ship to all three major platforms. It's exciting that ui frameworks like Tamagui allow for close to 90% code sharing.

[scarface74]

So exactly how do you create a performant cross platform framework that takes advantage of all the platforms features? What happens when one of them create a new feature for their operating system?

When has there ever been a performant cross platform framework?

[friedman23]

The abstraction doesn't have to be perfect. Most apps don't even take advantage of native platform functionality.

[scarface74]

So now you’re going to have half assed cross platform products that you still have to have a bunch of #if ios preprocessing statements and won’t take advantage of the native features.

As a developer you will always have applications that are behind and have to wait on the third party.

This has been the case with every cross platform framework ever. See also JNI.

[friedman23]

Nothing's perfect and often when there are platform inconsistencies like that someone abstracts the functionality away in a package so the application developer doesn't need to worry about it. I'd rather have 80% code sharing across platforms than no code sharing.

[gwt4life]

THIS

[tromp]

You're being downvoted because upvoting is the desired alternative to THIS spam...

[mrstone]

> On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

I think that war has been lost. Apple should just allow more RAM to be put in.

[guestbest]

I’m using a M1 and it is very performant with Brave and unlock origin with only 8gb ram and XCode opening in the background. I try to stay away from Discord and Slack on the desktop as years ago they would cause my system to slow down

[Koshkin]

> very performant with Brave

To add to that, my 8GB "late 2014" Mac Mini is very performant with (the modern) Linux on it. (It was barely usable running a recent MacOS.)

[hgs3]

> On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

Agreed. Some might say "RAM is cheap" but that line of thinking is why one day 64GB RAM won't be enough for a dozen browser tabs.

[deno]

What was the resolution a decade ago? Just having the Web in 4K is going to require significantly more memory. And something like Discord is not exactly comparable to an IRC client.

[j5155]

A lot of Discord’s memory usage is because it uses Electron/embedded Chromium. I agree that it does a lot more then IRC clients do, but I think it uses a lot more resources and is a lot less snappy then a native app.

[criley2]

"no one needs more than 640k of ram"

[ant6n]

Well it seems like for more than a decade, Apple seemed to think that nobody really needed more that 8GB of ram.

[tromp]

Apple offering 16GB is a clear counterexample to that. We can only say that Apple feels 8GB is enough for a significant fraction of users...

[qwytw]

I think it's much more related to market segmentation and upselling. If they started shipping 16GB in the base model they'd probably have to price it closer to the current price of the 8GB one than to the 16GB to stay competitive.

8GB is probably enough for most users in most cases currently (not necessarily in a couple of years, which means they'd update earlier) but the cost for adding 8GB would be pretty low for Apple.

[13of40]

I have a Mac Mini from around 2010 that I saved from the recyclers recently. Dusted it off, put in 8GB of RAM and an SSD, and it booted up Windows 11 just fine. However, as far as I can tell there is no up to date MacOS available for it because Apple considers such a thing too obsolete to support.

[qwytw]

You might be able to install latest macOS using OpenCore-Patcher (it's just bootloader IIRC it does not modify the OS itself in anyway so it should be pretty safe). I've used it on 2011ish 17" mbp and had no issues.

[JodieBenitez]

Actually, my M1 never uses the 16gb (8 at most), even though I have several IDEs running (also browser of course). I'm not sure what generate such memory consumption for some users.

[jeroenhd]

Running IDEA, a Java backend, a nodejs frontend, a secondary nodejs frontend and a browser with dev tools open has caused my computer to hit 32GiB of RAM usage easily. I didn't decide the tech stack, unfortunately, but this has become a real problem.

Personally I think 8GiB should be more than enough for any normal end user though the Electronification is taking a real toll these days. However, this is the M2 Pro, labeled for professionals, and professionals generally need more resources. Capping the machine at 32GiB means I can't even comfortably run my current stack without swapping. I can only imagine what this will do do professional video/photo editing.

[mvanbaak]

my M1 with 64GB is pushed to its limits from time to time. Running a couple of vms and database servers for local development takes up a lot of memory.

Like always, it depends on your usecase. For some 4GB will be enough, for some it wont.

[tracker1]

Full stack software development (background servers, database, redis, often under Docker).

[bsg75]

I will go a step further and state that they appear to top out at 32GB which is asinine. These are not manilla envelope laptops, but semi-compact bricks where the form factor in other brands can commonly take 64GB or more.

Its sad for me that my initial reaction to this is where previously a corp Windows laptop was for email and MS Office, and the Mac was for "actual work", now Mac's are headed to the "email and Office" role, and a halfway decent machine running Linux is where "real work" happens.

[coob]

I'm sure Apple would point you in the direction of a Mac Studio instead…

[trynewideas]

That's kind of a problem, too.

A top-spec M2 Pro Mini on CPU and RAM (12-core CPU, 19-core GPU, 32GB unified RAM) is $1,999.

A bottom-spec M1 Max Mac Studio (10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 32GB unified RAM) is $1,999.

Since the low-end Studio has 10Gb Ethernet and four Thunderbolt ports at the same price, and neither has upgradable RAM, there's no reason to buy the high-end Mini.

[aclatuts]

The mac mini is less than half the size which may be important in some cases.

[coder543]

> and four Thunderbolt ports

The Mac mini with M2 Pro includes four Thunderbolt ports too, just FYI.

[trynewideas]

I know — the only thing a new M2 mini might've theoretically brought is going all-in on Thunderbolt ports vs. the Studio, even at the cost of the HDMI or built-in LAN ports, but it doesn't do that either.

Same RAM, same performance, slower built-in LAN, less storage expansion, same price. Is the smaller form factor really worth it? If not, why would anyone who'd consider that spec not get a Studio (or wait for an M2 Studio bump to get a M2 Max)?

[coder543]

For $100, you can opt to have 10Gb ethernet as well, so it's not really slower LAN. Personally, I think choosing the higher end M2 Pro doesn't make the comparison more fair than the lower end M2 Pro, so you can get 10GbE and "save" $200 (compared to the Mac Studio) by choosing the base M2 Pro Mac mini for the comparison and including 10GbE.

But, I agree. I don't understand the purpose of the M2 Pro Mac mini very well.

Apple is charging way too much for the M2 Pro upgrade, which makes it a confusing option. Is the fully enabled M2 Pro chip really worth $600 more than the base M2 chip by itself? That's the cost of an entire base Mac mini! I don't understand why Apple is charging this much. I think $200 for the base M2 Pro chip and $400 for the fully enabled variant would have been a more sensible price structure. Still a bit expensive, but less confusing.

[bitL]

My NUC11Pro has 64GB of RAM and 2x SSD, and is way smaller than Mac Mini. Not sure why Apple thinks they need to dumb down smallest form factor for market segmentation reasons.

[kylec]

It's way smaller, but only if you ignore the external power supply. The Mac mini has an internal power supply.

[icedchai]

(I was wrong here! oops!)

[coder543]

(not relevant anymore)

[icedchai]

Oh, you are correct! Sorry! I didn't even realize I was selecting the "Max" when going through the configuration screens.

[arprocter]

Oof - once you bump the base model to 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage it doubles the price

Apparently Mini RAM hasn't been user upgradable since the 2014 model

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041#2020

[coder543]

On the plus side, with a desktop like this that isn't going to be moving frequently, there's really no compelling need to upgrade the internal storage. You could attach an external 1TB (or bigger!) NVMe SSD and you should be able to install macOS on that. You could just use the internal SSD as an extra storage drive. AFAIK, you're not required to use the internal SSD at all.

[isolli]

Is it realistic to have an external drive for photos that integrates seamlessly with the native Photos app?

[chrislund]

I've had my 2.4 TB Photos library on external solid-state storage for six years now with no issues. Four years were via a laptop and so the drive was only connected when needed (to import photos into it or to back it up). The remaining two have been with it permanently tethered to a Mac mini. Of note is that I don't use iCloud Photos, though. Not sure how macOS would handle things if I did. If you had it always connected I bet it'd be seamless. If not, probably There Be Dragons. IIRC back in the days when I didn't have my Photos drive always connected, macOS would occasionally instantiate a fresh Photos library in ~/Pictures on the internal drive for Photo Stream (which I have turned on) photos.

[coder543]

If macOS is installed on it, Photos won’t even think of it as an external drive.

However, yes, you can: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

[jbverschoor]

Big question for me is - how will it behave when you also use icloud photos as well? And what if it's an encrypted disk?

I'm asking because of the following:

Let's say your laptop is 1TB, but everything except photos and for example dropbox is under 512gb.

If you then need to restore, your new laptop has to be able to contain the full restore (1TB, or whatever is used). This also means you can't just run to the store an get a standard model (instead of built-to-order) and restore, unless you buy something that has enough storage.

Having multiple apfs volumes helps here, and I'd love to have all cloud storage off of my main one.

[coder543]

I’m not recommending any of this for laptop users, at all.

If the external drive won’t be connected 100% of the time, there are all sorts of headaches that can occur because Apple doesn’t really design their software to handle intermittently available disks, in my experience, except (for obvious reasons) for Time Machine.

[isolli]

Oh, I see. I thought of MacOS installed on the internal drive, supported by an external drive for extra storage. Thanks.

[coder543]

Photos would work that way too, as shown in the help article I linked.

[johnvanommen]

I have a 1TB SSD connected to my Mac Mini M1 via USB3 and the speed is great. I have no complaints. It was about $80 from Amazon.

[lowercased]

similar here - 2tb. partitioned it to 2 1tb drives - one as time machine backup for internal, and the other for 'extra' stuff.

[wil421]

Just have a NAS serve the files. I keep about 1/2 a 1TB collection of personal pictures and videos. When I add new folders for an event I rsync them to by NAS. If I need to I will rsync folders to my windows machine for editing (have a new 16 core 7950x I’m playing with).

[hollerith]

>with a desktop like this that isn't going to be moving frequently

When I owned a Mac mini it moved all the time: I took it on the bus with me to and from my girlfriend's house 100s of times.

(Although it died faster than it would have if I had left it in one place, it did last almost 9 years.)

[coder543]

Obviously using an external drive as your boot drive might not be the best idea in that situation, but that situation does not sound fun at all.

[hollerith]

Commuting by bus in not particularly fun (I assume that that is what you mean, though I'm not sure) but it wouldn't've been any more fun with a Macbook Air than a Mac mini: they weigh about the same, but if I had carried an Air I would have had to carry a charger or buy a second charger to keep at the girlfriend's house. And of course the Air costs more (even after accounting for the cost of the extra monitor, keyboard and mouse I kept at her house).

[luxoramonrising]

External NVMe?

[coder543]

Yes. You can buy an NVMe SSD and put it into an external thunderbolt enclosure.

Here is one random $115 option for a thunderbolt external NVMe enclosure with seemingly good reviews: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BB74BQVN

Realistically, you probably don't even need a thunderbolt enclosure to have a good experience with an external Apple Photos library, but this option is still way cheaper than the prices Apple charges.

[jbverschoor]

I was really looking forward to thunderbolt accessoires, until I saw the prices. An external bay for a GPU (just a piece of junk metal!!) was over $400 when I was looking at it.

At this point I don't need it, and I prefer USB, because I don't like the idea of hot swapping something directly on the PCI bus

[luxoramonrising]

Wouldn't it bottleneck on usb. I thought the entire point of nvme was that it puts solid state storage on pcie lane.

[coder543]

No, it wouldn't. Thunderbolt versions 3 and 4 are giving you 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 on an external connector. You can easily get 3GB/s from an NVMe SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure, which is the same performance as putting a PCIe 3.0 SSD into your computer.

We don't yet know how fast the SSDs are in the new Mac mini, but the M1 Mac mini was using ~3GB/s SSDs, which is the same speed you get from PCIe 3.0, and realistically.. that's plenty fast for this discussion regardless.

[shortformblog]

It was upgradeable in 2018, but they the teardown to reach the RAM needlessly complicated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQq4hLKv1Cc

[dougSF70]

You can walk into an apple store and buy 8GB models all day long but 16GB models are special orders...this has always seemed sketchy to me

[tracker1]

Think it varies by location... I know the N. Scottsdale Apple Store had 16gb with the M1 models at launch.

[octotoad]

The 2018 model has socketed RAM.

[goosedragons]

And could do 64GB too.

[wilsonnb3]

Another anecdote: I have a M1 air and an m1 iMac both with 8GB and have never run into a problem.

I think 8gb is still the sweet spot for casual users.

[cmatthias]

Can you define "sweet spot" in this case?

Usually I see that term used when the thing being considered is a pricey upgrade, and you need to strike a compromise between price and performance.

In this case, we're talking about an extra 8GB of memory, which would add perhaps $10 in cost to the bill of materials for the machine (or maybe less in sufficient volume). Given that Apple is also overcharging by at least 3x current standard retail price for SSD upgrades, my guess is that there's some room to bump up the wholesale cost a bit.

Not doing so is, IMHO, insulting to users, and given the non-upgradable nature of these machines, bad for the environment, counter to all of Apple's talk about being environmentally friendly.

[tracker1]

Worth noting the M1 memory is MUCH faster and higher bandwidth than x86 options at launch (about 2x). That accounted for a lot of the difference in perception. At least for general usage... for Docker + containers, it definitely uses a bit more.

[cmatthias]

Did you intend to reply to a different comment? The speed of the memory has no bearing on the capacity, obviously, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said.

[simondotau]

It's relevant because you are assessing value.

[cmatthias]

The original M1 (I assume that's what GP meant by "at launch") uses LPDDR4x DRAM modules, the same as many x86 laptops that have soldered RAM. You can literally look up the part numbers based on the photos of the M1 CPU package. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I'm not sure why it would be any more expensive than x86 laptops' memory, and it might even be less expensive just due to the volume that Apple is likely buying.

[threeseed]

Majority of users are just going to be using web, email and photos.

There is simply no need for more than 8GB for those use cases.

[cmatthias]

Why would you not want an extra 8GB? The point is that it's dirt cheap to add, and Apple's refusal to do so is an insult to its customers.

[qwytw]

Also it makes it much easier for Apple upsell upgrades and increase their margin through market segmentation.

> There is simply no need for more than 8GB

I don't really agree. But let's say that the case. Will it still be the same in 2-4 years? Possibly not? Great Apple can just sell another mac.

[jghn]

my personal machine is an 8GB M1 Air. I don't usually do dev work on it, but always have dozens of Safari tabs, often a bunch of Chrome tabs, a bajillion Slacks, and other apps. And I'll do light dev work on it, mostly for personal things. I even play the occasional game.

In other words, I think I'm well beyond what you're even describing. And while I do wish I had bought the one with more RAM, but usually I don't notice it. The swapping is that good.

[theshrike79]

16GB M1 mini here. I've had memory issues exactly zero times. Current memory usage is at 15%.

I've had games running with full on tab-hoarded browsers and IDEs open among with any other crap I haven't bothered to shut down.

[chimerasaurus]

I have a 16gb m2 MBA. I’ve hit memory issues exactly once.

I had FF open with a ton of tabs, Capture One open, and I was stacking 400 frames in PixInsight.

The fact I had to push that hard was immensely impressive.

[mathverse]

I doubt that. Almost every app out there uses at least 200MB of memory. I would say 16GB is a sweet for casual users. 32 a minimum for devs/tech people and 64 an optimum if you happen to be using a lot of k8s/docker stuff.

[tracker1]

8gb might be okay for casual use on M1, given the higher memory bandwidth... but for Software dev, spot on. I've got 128gb in my desktop, and have gone over 64gb only once or twice with a lot of data loaded.

[vlunkr]

It feels like they're always wasting the potential of the Mac Mini. I assume the whole point of the product is to be the cheaper desktop option (I could be wrong), but when you compare it to any Windows desktop, it's a bad value. The base model has lame specs, if you upgrade to something reasonable, it's no longer competitive on price, and most components can't be upgraded later, which is half the appeal of buying a cheaper desktop.

[jbverschoor]

If you're looking only at idle power usage, the difference is around 20 watt compared to an idle pc. That's 0.5KWh. With the currency energy prices in NL (40ct/kwh, subsidized by the gov btw, because it's actually around 70ct now), this will save you €73 per year when idling, and even more when it's in use.

So the macmini essentially for free after a few years compared to your windows machine

[NavinF]

meh, only if you run it 24/7 and only if you live in Europe with very high energy prices. If the machine sleeps for 16 hours a day while the user goes to sleep or goes outside, you'll never break even. There's also no guarantee that next year will be as shitty as the last one regarding electricity.

[jbverschoor]

If you're actually using it 8 hours a day then it's 30 watts for the mba, and 150 for the pc + 30 for the display. So the difference is 1.2kwh per day. For 200 days of work in europe, that's 2001.2.4 = 96 per year.

In the US that's 235 working days per year at around $0.20 (13 - 25ct), so about $50 per year.

[scarface74]

The mini hasn’t been meant to be cheaper in over a decade. The mini is meant to be for the odd use cases.

[jillesvangurp]

Once you start adding memory and ssd, it makes more sense to just get a mac studio. You basically get less for more with the mac mini. Once you max out the memory and CPU, the entry level mac studio is cheaper and comes with the M1 Max instead of the M2 Pro. A bit of a toss up which is faster but for 230 euro extra you jump to 32 GPU cores, which is not an option with the mini.

[coder543]

> edit: the ad says up to 24/32GB of ram, but seems like 8gb/16gb models are the only ones available for pre-order at the moment.

I see both 24GB and 32GB configurations on the Apple Store configurator. Not sure what you're looking at.

[crazygringo]

8 GB is perfectly fine for most people who just use the web, office software, and play media. Even when I have dozens of Chrome tabs open it's always been zero problem on my 8 GB M1 Air.

Also, starting last month, Chrome aggressively unloads tabs in the background with its new "memory saver" feature [1]. So if you were having issues with 8 GB before because of your tabs, you might not anymore.

[1] https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-chrome-features-to-s...

[roebk]

And a whopping £200 to add an extra 8gb. Ouch.

[coder543]

This is the real problem. M2 is just using LPDDR5. The memory modules themselves don't appear to be anything special; it's just the memory interface bus that is different. Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs. The entry-level product is a decent value, but the upgrades are ridiculous.

[winter_blue]

> Apple is charging multiple times the actual cost per GB, and they do the same thing for SSDs.

Yup. I just checked Newegg, and laptop form factor DDR4 (not DDR5ᵃ) RAM is selling for $126 for 64 GB (2 x 32 GB).

So market price for 1 GB of DDR4 small form factor RAM is $1.96 per GB.

ᵃ DDR5 is almost twice the cost.

Apple is charging 200/8 = $25 per GB.

Apple charges 12 times the retail price of DDR4, and about 6 times the retail price of DDR5.

It's crazy, but they get away with it by soldering these chips down.

If we could legislate a working effective Right to Repair bill, we might be able to fix this predicament.

[NavinF]

Soldered chips are here to stay. DDR5 already struggles on 4-slot desktop mobos and laptops with SODIMM slots. You can use 2-slot mobos and CAMM to solve those problems for now, but I would be unsurprised if the DIMM/SODIMM DDR6 never sees wide adoption and everyone moves to soldered RAM by 2030.

[winter_blue]

> everyone moves to soldered RAM by 2030

This would be really horrible, and I hope it never happens. I was just readin up on CAMMᵃᵇ, and to me, CAM looks really promising. It solves the challenges with SODIMM, and the article says:

> We mentioned the faster DDR5 speeds above, but it is thought that CAMM could really take off when DDR6 arrives. Another appealing variation might be for adding LPDDR(6) memory to laptops. Traditionally LPDDR memory is soldered, so the new spring contact fitting modules might mean much better upgradability for the thinnest and lightest devices which tend to use LPDDR memory.

I'd like to see legislation passed (even if at the state/regional/provincial level) that forces laptop (and other device) manufacturers to use user-replaceable CAMM memory modules instead of solder-on modules (unless solder-on memory is absolutely needed/justified by a high technical need for it – and the bar for this should be high). Similar legislation for batteries, device screens, etc. – mandate standard interfaces and easy replacibility.

This will likely increase BOM, but it shouldn't add more than $10 to the overall average retail price of various devices.

ᵃ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/camm-to-usurp-so-dimm-lapt...

ᵇ https://www.pcworld.com/article/693366/dell-defends-its-cont...

[NavinF]

Realistically, higher end manufacturers will just stop selling devices to that state/region/province and people who live there will figure out a way to buy what they want. There's a reason why the single most popular laptop model in the US happens to be a macbook and the iPhone is the most popular smartphone here.

There will always be laptops with DIMM slots in the future just as there are laptops that have CPU sockets today. But the bulkiness and performance gap will only increase every year. CAMM has about the same thickness as a single SODIMM slot so it only saves space if you need 2 sticks worth of RAM. Also compare 2 slot vs 4 slot DDR5 overclocks on desktop to see the impact of signal integrity.

[ziml77]

Apple has always charged those kinds of prices for RAM and storage upgrades. They don't care that their devices aren't a value purchase. And as long as people buy their products and pay those kinds of prices for upgrades, they really have no reason to change.

[coder543]

At one time, the prices kind of almost made sense. Apple just hasn't really "remembered" to update their upgrade prices for the last 5 years or so, and now they really don't make sense. I expect Apple will adjust upgrade prices to reflect reality at some point, but they will certainly milk this "forgetfulness" for as long as they can.

[Nullabillity]

At one time Apple had to be competitive with aftermarket upgrades.

[nicoburns]

They have, but it used to be the case that these components were user-upgradeable.

[wrldos]

16Gb is minimum on M1 I found. I hit problems on my 8Gb machine regularly. It’ll work fine but you do get heavy pauses.

The thing to be careful of is if your custom config breaks then the turnaround to fix it can be a couple of months. Ergo only buy stock configs. That makes the market somewhat less friendly.

[NavinF]

Agreed, 16G on my 2021 M1 Pro macbook is just enough for software development. I'm definitely upgrading to 32G when the M2 Pro is released so I can have more headroom.

Also worth mention that 64G is pretty cheap on desktop and that's what the Mac Mini should be compared to.

[smoldesu]

Same here. I've heard people argue that 8gb is enough for web browsing, and while that is true, I genuinely struggle to imagine a use-case that doesn't max out the memory within 30 minutes of usage.

[jeffbee]

I have the 8G M1 and my typical use-case is building huge notebooks in Observable, including one I’m looking at right now that has over 100 million datapoints loaded from a USGS web service into hundreds of separate plots and it’s fine. I’ve never run into the supposed limits.

I also have over 200 PDFs loaded in preview in the background, related to a law suit I’m researching. Still no issues.

ETA: I’m likely to replace my m1 with the m2 since the m2 gets +30% scores in common web benchmarks and heavy JavaScript hacks are my main thing. That should bring it up to par with my Linux box that has the top of the line Intel CPU.

[gnicholas]

Before buying my M2 MBA, I had the opportunity to try one out that had 8 GB of RAM and another that had 16 GB of RAM. I set up each as a restore of my main laptop, which included hundreds of browser tabs, slack, email, messages, calendar, notes, keynote open at all times. There was no noticeable difference whatsoever.

I ended up getting the 16 GB machine (my RAM usage was around 12 GB most times, and never north of 15 GB), but I would be fine recommending an 8 GB machine to my parents. Even from a future-proofing perspective, their use is so lightweight (some photo editing, web browsing, and email) that they would never need more than this.

I could see a case for offering the new version with 16 GB and up, but keeping around an old M1 version with just 8 GB. But I don't think it's necessarily in everyone's interest to pay more for that much RAM.

[FollowingTheDao]

"disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM. "

I can assure you that the shareholders are not disappointed. The premium you pay for more RAM (and SSD) is insane.

Besides that fact that no one is making a computer for the ordinary user anymore. Hardly anyone needs that much power in a computer.

[Zanfa]

My 8GB M1 Air kicks my 64GB 10-core iMac’s ass in most scenarios. Don’t think I even know how to use less than 30+ tabs open at the same time. Smooth as butter.

[highwaylights]

I was really hopeful for these, but so disappointed.

I have a triple monitor setup, and there's essentially a 117% surcharge to add support for the third display.

[phonon]

There are workarounds.

https://www.macworld.com/article/675869/how-to-connect-two-o...

[highwaylights]

I know, but they all require granting full screen recording access to third party software on an ongoing basis, which is a complete non-starter in my case.

[phonon]

How does DisplayLink require recording access?

https://www.reviewgeek.com/75284/everything-you-need-to-run-...

[highwaylights]

Almost none of the YouTube/blogs recommending this mention it or seem to be aware (or have just clicked through and granted the permission without thinking about it), but it absolutely does require screen recording to operate.

The DisplayLink driver requires your admin password to install, and installs itself as a background process that records the screen constantly in order to software render the extra display. There are other similar products, they all work this way.

From DisplayLink’s own website:

https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/19509...

[phonon]

I am not sure using a screen recording api/permission in a driver is really the same thing as "screen recording". I.e. The recording is not being saved to a file. It's just a way to access the display pixel buffer.

But if that makes you uncomfortable, well you're going to have to pay$$$...

[incanus77]

I run an M1 mini with 16GB with 10 discord servers and hundreds of Safari tabs. Chrome is the hog here.

[tyingq]

Maybe people still want 8gb models for affordable-ish CI/CD runner farms?

[qwytw]

Well Apple could add the extra 8GB keep the same base price and still have higher margins than any other PC OEM.

Of course why would they do this if they don't have to...

[neighbor1]

> dozen chrome tabs and a few discord servers

This is absolutely not normal...

[apetresc]

Huh? It's completely normal (on the low range of normal, I'd wager), especially in the market of people buying desktop computers in 2023.

[JustSomeNobody]

Huh? I can easily have 40 - 50 tabs open.

I don't know what a discord is though.

[JustSomeNobody]

Only thing tighter than Apple is a frog's butt and that's water tight.

They really should be upping this to 16GB RAM. There's just no reason not to.

[pwinnski]

I have more than 18 servers in discord, 8 tabs in iTerm, Textual IRC, iMessage, Music, Signal, TextEdit, VSCode, and two different browsers running right now on an 8GB M1 Mac mini, with no issues. Then again, neither browser is Chrome.

Safari has twelve tabs open across two windows, and Arc has sixteen tabs open.

Checking "memory pressure," I'm in the yellow zone, so I definitely agree that 8GB is not enough. But perhaps you should look at alternatives to Chrome in the meantime.

[dutchbrit]

Indeed, but then again, it says more about the apps really. No real reason why they should consume so much memory.

[GeekyBear]

> disappointed to see them still selling these with 8gb RAM

Doesn't Microsoft still sell laptops with 4 GB of RAM?

[cmatthias]

This is whataboutism, but yes, the Surface Go 2 base model has 4GB of RAM. It's shameful, but that laptop is also half the price of the cheapest Mac laptop, and doesn't absolve either company of blame for ridiculously high memory and storage prices.

[nerdponx]

Never had an issue with Firefox on M1. Time to give it a try?

[tracker1]

You have to pick the higher CPU variant apparently.

[rsstack]

At checkout you can add memory, up to 32GB total.

[turtlebits]

Why take away consumer choice? They've always been available with at least 16GB.

I'm perfectly happy with 8GB on my M1 and it was fine on my 2016 13" Pro.

[cmatthias]

Because the alternative is to add literally a few dollars to the bill of materials for the machine, double the memory, and give everyone a better experience. This also means the machine will last longer and likely not end up in a landfill as soon.

$200 to add 8GB of memory is _insane_, and framing it as "consumer choice" is bad when consumers are being gouged so badly. It's literally at least a 20x markup on the wholesale cost. You can buy 8GB of DDR4 at retail for $20 or less.

[theshrike79]

But this is an M series system, it's not running of off-the-shelf Kingston DDR4.

[cmatthias]

Yes, and? Apple's wholesale RAM cost is likely even lower than a computer with socketed RAM, due to economies of scale and fewer parts overall (RAM soldered directly vs. RAM on a separate PCB, plus a socket soldered to the main board).

[JustSomeNobody]

Then it's probably cheaper to add RAM.

[jeffbee]

You seem to believe that doubling (or quadrupling as suggested elsewhere) the installed DRAM has no energy cost. Adding several watts of mandatory 24x7 idle power consumption to a machine mostly celebrated for its energy efficiency seems odd.

[cmatthias]

Citation needed for your claims, please.

My understanding is that at least for the lower-end machines, there are no additional DRAM chips in the 8GB vs. 16GB machines, they just use chips that have double the density, so the power consumption remains the same.

Even if I'm completely wrong on the above, I seriously doubt that adding 8GB of memory to a machine that consumes 7W at idle in total[1] would add "several watts of mandatory 24x7 idle power consumption."

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/m1-mac-mini-power-consumption...

[phrz]

Running Chrome on an Apple product is downright wasteful.

[austenallred]

1. You can add more

2. New RAM is not like old RAM.

Macs are dramatically more optimized than they used to be.

I have a MacBook Air (M1) with 16GB of RAM and it runs more smoothly than older systems that had twice that much.

8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to. 8GB of RAM can handle very process-heavy tasks, like... running Chrome ;)

[counttheforks]

> 1. You can add more

Tell that to Apple so they can do that out of the box.

> 8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to

No. I think you're confusing memory speed with capacity. Making ram faster doesn't mean it can magically store more.

[coder543]

> Making ram faster doesn't mean it can magically store more.

For real. This myth that "Unified RAM" doesn't need as much capacity as "regular RAM" needs to stop being perpetuated. Intel-based Macs already had memory compression and SSD swap.

My M1 MBA with 16GB of RAM was definitely limited by the amount of RAM a number of times throughout its life, and my 24GB M2 MBA has a much better balance due to the additional RAM.

8GB is fine for someone who doesn't do anything but basic web browsing and word documents, but I'm not comfortable recommending 8GB of RAM to anyone who intends on doing more than that. I'm honestly a bit uncomfortable with 16GB these days, but it is tremendously nicer than 8GB.

If Apple hadn't just lowered prices by $100 on Mac mini, I would say that 16GB should be the minimum, but for $599... I think 8GB is probably fine for what you're getting.

[seanw444]

If it's running an SSD, at least the swap speed won't be as crippling. Assuming it uses any.

[dijit]

Everything you said is true; I'll even add that MacOS is probably the best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions!

However the parent is right, it's disgusting how much memory capacity is needed to run a basic environment.

Maybe having exceptionally fast machines with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage.

[davidy123]

> the answer to bloated apps

RAM is dirt cheap these days. Bloated apps are bad, but 8GB really is simply a joke that punishes many people for the sake of product categories, at least until RAM is indistinguishable from storage.

[Tepix]

Not all RAM is dirt cheap. RAM in DDR4 sockets is dirt cheap.

[cmatthias]

8GB of general-purpose RAM, regardless of form factor, is dirt cheap. In fact, not having the sockets might make it cheaper than socketed RAM in volume, since there are fewer parts in total.

[jimsmart]

Except, with Apple's new kit here, the RAM isn't simply some external chip soldered to the main board, it's actually on-die with the CPU silicon (and everything else in that silicon: GPU, memory controllers, etc).

So yes, arguably there are fewer parts (just one), but in the event of e.g. some bad RAM during manufacture, it's far more costly to throw out the chip containing that bad RAM.

[qwytw]

> best functioning Desktop OS under low memory conditions

Not it's not. Gnome or KDE can have 2x if not 3x memory overhead.

> with limited ram will cause people to actually think about their resource usage

Why? Memory is cheaper than designing new CPUs. 8GB in the base model is just a way for Apple to upsell upgrades and improve margins through market segmentation. If they shipped 16GB in the base model they'd have to cut prices or lose customers. It's a simple as that.

[dijit]

GNOME and KDE are desktop environments, not operating systems.

Linux (probably the operating system you mean) performs terribly when there is no available memory. Solaris run (ran?) GNOME and was also excellent when there was low memory

Why force people to build software more efficiently? Because I have a desktop with 64G of ram and it is doing the same thing my desktop from 2008 was doing, only a few more pixels, a few less animations and a whole bunch of people thinking that hardware can pick up the slack from development companies externalising their costs (since devs cost money, right!?).

well. hardware costs money for us. fix your software.

[qwytw]

> Linux (probably the operating system you mean) performs terribly when there is no available memory.

I assumed you were talking about system with low amounts of memory rather than well almost all available memory is already used. You might be right about the second case (of course why would anyone have a new Linux PC with just 8GB of memory. Linux laptop OEMs charge the same for an upgrade to 64GB as Apple does for 16GB)

Why do you need to buy the latest macbook with a very fast CPU? Well you wouldn't, if software was more efficient. It's exactly the same argument as with memory.

> doing the same thing my desktop from 2008

Similarly to how your desktop from 2008 was doing the "same" job as a Windows 98 machine? Except it's not really doing the same job, expectations consumers have on software have changed dramatically over the last 15 years.

> well. hardware costs money for us. fix your software.

Yes it does cost money. Because Apple charges extremely high margins on memory upgrades. If you could update your own RAM or if Apple's upgrades had the same margin as the base model itself additional 8GB wouldn't be more than extra $50 (maybe a $100 at most if the memory Apple uses is so 'advanced' AFAIK it's not..).

[dijit]

Send messages to people, write some code, do some online shopping. I don't see how much has changed except battery life and a few more pixels.

8GB of ram is more hardware cost than 16,32,64- thats just how it goes.

Now, I dont want to make it sound like I am an apple fanboy, but iPhones have less ram than android phones, and for some time this had a material impact on size and battery life: the reason they got away with this is because in order to make software for iPhone, you had to deal with what you were given.

the situation today is: “everyone has 16GiB of ram, why would I spend company resources prematurely optimising”, and since every fucking company has this same mentality it leads to slack, teams, asana, jira - fucking everything basically, using more RAM each than my first computers had disk space.

The state of hardware progress has slowed, for most of the last decade you could barely buy a laptop with more than 16GiB of memory, I had to buy some godforesaken workstation laptop to get 32G in 2017- It is not OK to externalise this cost on people, and some downward pressure is needed.

I’m not really defending Apple like you think I am, I’m saying 8G is enough for doing most things, but our apps have become bloated as fuck and make us think that 8G is nothing.

My last linux laptop used 300MiB (not including filesystem caches) for everything, including mail, chat, development (but that bursted during compilation); until I opened discord, teams, a web-browser with all of its integrated product suite, or slack.

then I was up to 12 or even 15GiB of resident memory.

I wont apologise for that and force my hardware vendors to give me more ram at a lower price because of that.

The better performance of the CPU helps everything, battery life (race to idle) included.

More RAM helps people who don't close tabs; and people making software that does not even attempt to constrain its resources.