Comment by Blackmist@feddit.uk on Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM

8GB RAM is what my phone has.

Having that in a laptop shows what they think of people buying their kit. They think you’re only buying it so you can type easier on Facebook.

My phone was manufactured in 2022, cost under USD250, and has 8gb of ram. New phones generally come with 12gb or more.

TBF 8gb of ram on a phone is actually psychotic. You really shouldn’t be doing all that much on a phone lol.

Then what should I be doing on my phone?

Obviously using it as a thin client for this MacBook, duh.

nothing that requires 8GB of ram lol.

I’ve played the entirety of java minecraft on an old thinkpad with 4GB of ram. It didn’t crash (i dont use swap)

There literally shouldn’t be anything capable of using that much memory.

Is this bait? Because like, you could be rendering, simulating, running virtual machines. Lots of stuff that aren’t web browsers also eat ram

Web browsers also eat ram.

I was trying to mention things that weren’t just web browsers. Since it seemed the comment was about programs that use more ram than they seemingly need to.

Edit: There’s like photogrammetry and stuff that happens on phones now!

90% of which can be paged in the background, it’s not like most people are chronically browsing the web on their phones.

you could be rendering, simulating, running virtual machines

On a phone? I guess you could, although 4gb is probably enough for any video game that any amount of people use.

People use phone apps for photo and video editing these days. The common TikTok kid out there doesn’t use Adobe Premiere on a desktop workstation.

Phone apps often are desktop applications with a specialized GUI these days.

on a phone? Why the fuck would anyone be running virtual machines on a phone?

My man, have you been to selfhosted? People are using smart phones for all kinds of crazy stuff. They are basically mini ARM computers. Particularly the flagships, they can do many things like editing video, rendering digital drawings, after they end their use life they can host adguards, do torrent to NAS, host nextcloud. You name it.

What about running a chrooted nix install and using a vnc to connect to it? While web browsing and playing a background video? Just because you don’t use your ram doesn’t mean others don’t. And no, I don’t use all my ram, but a little overhead is nice.

on a phone? I mean i suppose you could do that, but VNC is not a very slick remote access tool for anything other than, well, remote access. The latency and speed over WIFI would be a significant problem, i suppose you could stream from your phone to your TV, but again, most TVs that exist today are smart TVs so literally a non issue.

my example here was using a computer rather than a phone, to show that even desktop computing tasks, don’t really use all that much ram.

Well, then by that logic, since desktop computing tasks don’t really use all that ram: we shouldn’t need more than 8GB in a desktop ever. Yes, my example was a tad extreme, vnc-ing into your own VM on your phone, but my point was rather phones are becoming capable and replacing traditional computers more and more. A more realistic example is when I was using Samsung Dex the other day I had 80ish chrome tabs open, a video chat, and a terminal ssh’d into my computer fixing it. I liked the overhead of ram I had above me. Was I even close to 12GB? No. But it gave me room if I wanted another background program or had to spin something up quickly without disrupting my flow or lagging out/crashing.

Yeah, but if you have plenty of RAM on Android, there’s a chance those apps you left in the background will still be running when you go back to them, rather than doing the usual Android thing of just restarting them.

yeah i get that, but i often only have like 2 apps open on my android phone (maybe three). And even if you didn’t have enough ram there’s no reason android can’t cache old apps to page file or something. Then you don’t need to restart them, just load it from page. Given how fast modern phone storage is likely to be, this should be pretty negligible.

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM(9to5mac.com)

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Our Rules

Approved Bots

Community stats

Community moderators