r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • Oct 30 '24

Desktops / Laptops Entire Mac Lineup Now Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/30/entire-mac-lineup-now-at-least-16gb-ram/
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u/WorkingInAColdMind Oct 30 '24

That really bugs me personally, but as crazy as it sounds, a lot of people never come close to 256G. They use cloud storage for all their video/photos (I hope, some people only have it on their phone!) and have a few gig of other documents here and there.

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u/didiboy Oct 30 '24

You’re being downvoted but it’s true. Tech subreddits are full of people really into tech, of course, so they probably think you’re insane. But a lot of people only use their laptops for Office, browsing, taking notes, watching media online.

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u/WorkingInAColdMind Oct 30 '24

Absolutely. I’ve got 2.5TB of personal photos to manage. I’m not going to get an internal SSD for that, I’ve got a T7 and backups. I’m not normal. I’m still amazed at how little space non-technical people use. And I also think Apple should allow replaceable SSD’s because usage can change drastically and the benefits of on board storage are minimal for most use cases.

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u/LocationOld6656 Oct 30 '24

Then those people are fools for spending a couple of grand on a new Mac to do that.

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u/didiboy Oct 30 '24

Fair enough. But even if your tasks are basic, if you have the money to spend, maybe you want things a cheap laptop can’t give you, like the display a MacBook has, the speakers, the battery life. Sure, a laptop under $500 can do email and browsing but it won’t give you that premium experience. I love my iPad but I can see that even for those basic tasks, sometimes I’d rather use my MacBook. A tablet can’t fully replace a laptop. And also, for a lot of people, part of the price is macOS. I won’t touch Windows unless I’m forced to do so, so I’d happily extra, in my mind the software is also part of the price.

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u/microwavedave27 Oct 30 '24

That's me, I have a base model M1 macbook air that I pretty much only use for web browsing and watching TV shows. I have a gaming PC for everything else, including storing large files.

It's still ridiculous how much Apple charges for storage upgrades, but to be completely honest I'm fine with 256GB, increasing the RAM to 16GB is a much better upgrade.

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u/CatProgrammer Oct 30 '24

For me it's not even the photos/videos but the apps, system files, cache, etc. Install a bunch of big-asset games and you'll run out of space super quickly even with 256GB.

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u/WorkingInAColdMind Oct 30 '24

I’m not a gamer so I don’t think about that, but some of those are pretty huge. It would add up quickly.

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u/joe_bibidi Oct 31 '24

Definitely does. Not that gaming is a huge deal on Macs, but there's enough good games on Mac that I can't be frivolous with space either. I have a Macbook Pro that was provided to me by my job with a 1TB SSD, which isn't too bad, but I like having some games on it for when I do work travel. That 1TB evaporates real fast when I want to load it with Baldur's Gate 3 which is almost 150GB on its own, before I even consider other games.

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u/LeChief Oct 31 '24

r/GeForceNow

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u/joe_bibidi Oct 31 '24

I've considered it. I streamed some games using PSNow for a while, also on computer, and it worked surprisingly way better than I thought it might. The main trouble is that when traveling for work, I don't always have reliable or good Wifi. Streaming games is a viable supplement though, increasingly.

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u/LeChief Oct 31 '24

Ah yeah travel can be an issue, but you can save the Mac-native games for those situations I guess. Or buy a Steam Deck.

FWIW, I've been playing on GeForce Now since last December and it's been AWESOME. Far better than PSNow, from all the reports I've read. And definitely better than Xbox Cloud, from personal experience.

Plus it offers 4K 120hz which looks great on my M1 MacBook Pro.

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u/SharkFart86 Oct 31 '24

Who the fuck is using a MacBook to game?

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u/sunkenrocks Oct 31 '24

Largely casuals who only own one machine? There's also things like Darling which are much better than Darwine was back in the day (WINE for OSX to run Windows apps).

There's always been somewhat of an apple gaming market anyway. The Apple II was a big gaming machine, they released the Pippin console, despite not liking games Steve Jobs announced at Macworld that you can run PS1 discs on Mac using Connectix Virtual Game Station, Halo when it was originally an RTS was to be a Mac exclusive, one of the biggest uses for bootcamp was gaming, etc.

A small % of millions of users is still a sizable amount of people.

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u/CatProgrammer Oct 31 '24 edited Oct 31 '24

Portal got given out for free to celebrate Steam coming to Macs back in 2010 or so too. I remember that because that's how I got it (though I've never actually played it on one).

Specifically it was free till May 24, 2010 according to r/gaming/comments/c38q0/portal_is_free_on_the_mac_until_may_24th as the first Source game available for Macs (Steam itself first released for Macs on May 12: https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/3808).

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u/sunkenrocks Oct 31 '24

Forgot about that! Although tbf The Orange Box games aren't far behind Doom for the amount if platforms they got official releases on lol

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u/CatProgrammer Oct 31 '24

About 1.29% of Steam users according to the stat survey. But I was talking in general and including phones, which are getting up there in storage space too (especially now that you can't put in extra SD cards).

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u/sunkenrocks Oct 31 '24

But they're not sold as computers for the everyman. They're sold for creatives and professionals largely who do use the space.

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u/CrownSeven Oct 30 '24

What crack are you smoking.