[MyFirstSass]

It's one of the most infuriating things about Apple.

The ram tax so absurd it's bordering on criminal, but it also just seems stupid, because if they hadn't put 8gb's of ram in the new smallest macbook air m2 their whole lineup would be more than capable at running local quality LLM's, or double their gaming devices because of their awesome chipset giving them 16gb's of vram essentially, but no, not now when 25% have low ram, ie. no new OS LLM updates.

Also we can't have gaming because half their new sold devices have shit ram, so they also kind of already ditched their "gaming" plan they just got started on a year ago - all because they wan't to push products with ram levels from 10 years ago - bizarre!

They must be betting on local AI as a "pro" feature only.

[whywhywhywhy]

8GB ram models don't exist to be used they exist to be e-waste that gets you to the checkout page where you click 16GB instead.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

8GB for a premium device in 2024 is a hard ask, completely agree. But I hold absolutely zero hard feelings toward Apple for not catering to gamers as a demographic

Most importantly, though, we are talking about iPhones here. I can’t say I’ve ever thought to myself “gosh, I wish my phone had more RAM!” in…over a decade?

[foobarian]

> But I hold absolutely zero hard feelings toward Apple for not catering to gamers as a demographic

Honestly I'm glad they don't. The PC is the last open platform out there and the last thing I'd want to see is Apple encroaching on it with their walled gardens and carbonite-encased computers.

[nnq]

...so, you haven't used Android in over a decade?

[ben_w]

Last time I cared how much RAM any phone had, iOS or Android, I was working at Augmentra on the ViewRanger app, and we were still supporting older devices with only 256 MB.

That was… *checks CV*… I left in April 2015.

I think RAM is like roads: usage expands to fill available infrastructure/storage.

That an iPhone today has as much RAM as the still-functioning Mid-2013 MacBook Air sitting in a drawer behind me is surprising when compared to the 250-fold growth from my Commodore 64 to my (default) Performa 5200… but it doesn't seem to have actually harmed anything I care about.

[nnq]

I was basically always slowed down by RAM on Android - prob bc I switch between lots of very badly coded apps... so even on desktop I've grown to see RAM as "insurance against badly written code" as in "I'll still be able to run that memory leaky crapware and get what I need done" or in "I'll just spin up a VM for that crap that only runs on that other OS"...

Swimming in badly written SPAs and cordova/whatever hybrid apps is seriously helped by eg 12GB of RAM on a mobile :)

[hnfong]

> > we are talking about iPhones here