Why are Apple's base RAM and storage configs so low?

Unless you bought a 2017 13" MBP dog. That should have been replaced immediately, but it is only now that apple is rectifying some of the awfulness introduced in those models.

The amount of RAM a user needs varies quite a lot depending on what they want to do. In the past I always assumed you should buy more than the base configuration to leave room for growth. In buying a recent MacBook Air for my Mom, I realized she has no use for this. It would be a wasted $100.

MacOS uses RAM very efficiently. Apple invested a significant effort into this for iPhone. Inactive RAM is compressed (ala RAM doubler). Appleā€™s SSDs are incredibly fast compared to much of the industry so they can swap in data quickly. RAM just isnā€™t the whole story. The best value is to provide balanced performance.

If you know enough about computers to think you might need more RAM, buy it. If you have no clue, you probably donā€™t need it. Apple gives you the option not to waste money on needless RAM.

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Just for those who are curious, last week I bought a new Mac. A 2018 mini with BTO option upgrading to 16GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. Hereā€™s the timetable for delivery:

  • Order placed on the afternoon of September 23. Appleā€™s original estimate for shipping is 3-5 business days (September 28-30) and delivered by October 6-8 (standard delivery).
  • Invoice received and card charged on September 28
  • Summary of UPS tracking number history:
    • 9/28 2:20PM, Shenzhen, China. Origin scan
    • 9/28 3:20PM, Shenzhen, China. Departed from facility
    • 9/28 5:19PM, Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong. Arrived at facility
    • 9/29 4:06PM, Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong. Departed from facility
    • 9/29 5:21PM, Taoyuan, Taiwan. Arrived at facility
    • 10/1 10:03PM, Taoyuan, Taiwan. Departed from facility.
    • 10/1 12:59PM, Anchorage, AK. Arrived at facility
    • 10/2 12:35AM, Louisville, KY. Arrived at facility
    • 10/2 6:30AM, (the airport near my home). Arrived at facility
    • 10/2 7:22AM, (the UPS depot near my home). Destination scan
    • 10/2 8:26AM. Out for delivery. I should be receiving it later today.

So, from ordering to delivery it took a total of 10 calendar days (8 business days) to configure and ship it. The only strange delay is the fact that it sat for more than two days in Taiwan. I assume UPS was waiting to get enough items to fill the cargo container heading for my local airport.

This is slightly longer (by 2-3 days) than what Iā€™ve experienced in the past ordering Apple equipment with BTO options.

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In a multicore world, there are some other factors to consider. First you want to look at base clock speeds for all the cores. The marketing materials will emphasize the turbo clock speed like it runs at 5.0 GHz, but when a CPU is at its max turbo speed, it produces a lot of heat so the CPU will throttle down the other cores to the base clock speed. In 2015 I bought a quad core iMac at 4.1 GHz for all the cores and it has held up pretty well over the years in terms of performance in running things like xcode etc. The second factor to look at is thermal performance. Is the CPU a volcano of heat when it runs? What kind of heat dissipation is employed in the computer to allow the CPU to run at higher clock speeds? I recently bought the 16ā€ MacBook Pro and Apple finally stopped trying to make it thinner and put in a good set of heat pipes to cool the CPU (yeah Apple)! My 16ā€ MackBook Pro is about 10% faster than my 2015 iMac which shows how much base clock speed and thermal cooling can affect performance. Other factors for performance includes bus speed to the RAM and SSD. So the calculation on which CPU to opt for is more complicated in the multicore world.

But ultimately, it all comes down to what youā€™re planning to do with the computer.

If you do things that require performance (video, gaming, scientific number-crunching), then everything you wrote makes perfect sense.

If your usage is more pedestrian (web browsing, ripping/playing/streaming music, photo organizing, Microsoft Office), as is my case, then it hardly matters. Anything you buy will be fast enough as long as your get enough RAM and enough storage.

In my case, the only reason Iā€™m replacing the computer at all is that a 2011 mini canā€™t run any macOS beyond 10.13 (High Sierra). If not for that, replacing the hard drives (which are getting old) with either new hard drives or SSDs would be more than enough to keep this machine usable for at least another 5 years, if not longer.

Heck, for that matter, my old PowerPC G4 Macs would work just fine today if there would be some way to put 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage and a modern web browser on them. Modern CPU/GPU technology has gone far far beyond what is needed for basic home usage requirements.

What I wrote applies to all. What I was listing was ā€œfactorsā€ to consider and what effects they can have. It should be obvious you donā€™t want to pay for performance you wonā€™t use. When one considers bumping up the specs of a machine, there are tradeoffs you have to consider.

It will be interesting to see how far Apple will be able to push the performance in new iMacs with their chips when combined with a good thermal solution.

We talk pretty generally about what types of apps work fine on a single core (Web, email, office productivity apps) and which will benefit the most from multi-core processors (video editing, compiling apps, number crunching).

But is there any way to know more precisely (without being a developer) if your particular apps and tasks within those apps would benefit from more cores? Or is it another of those annoyingly non-deterministic things that are becoming more common in our increasingly complex tech ecosystem?

How many threads do you see maxed out? If itā€™s only one, adding cores will likely not help. If OTOH you see youā€™re maxed out because of many threads, chances are extra cores can help. But as @MrMurfMan points out above that only holds within a certain thermal envelope. If you run many cores in a MBP for example, you wonā€™t be able to sustain that peak turbo clock. OTOH if you have only a single thread youā€™ll want just one core to be able to run at as high a turbo clock as you can get.

Developers will generally advertise multicore support as a feature.

You could pull up the CPU history in Activity Monitor and watch how many cores are lighting up with activity as you work with the program.

Lots of apps these days (including mainstream web browsers) are multi-thread and/or multi-process. If you have more cores then you (or the app, if it auto-configures properly) can use additional threads/processes to take advantage of them. (e.g. Firefox has a configuration where you can specify how many processes it will try to run at once.)

It also helps if you keep lots of apps running at once (e.g. web surfing while iTunes is playing music and Photos is processing faces), even if no single app is a CPU killer.

No disagreement about thermals here. If yourā€™re going to heavily drive all the cores, then theyā€™re going to generate heat, which could result in throttling if the situation persists for too long. Apple has had a problem with this for a long time, especially in the laptops and I donā€™t expect the situation to go away any time soon.

Yes, there has long been a name for it: ā€˜Built in obsolescenceā€™ - meaning no disrespect but in case as with many people you are unaware - ā€˜obsolescenceā€™ means out of date but still in use, as opposed to ā€˜obsolescentā€™ meaning out of date and out of use.

Apple, at least, have not yet reached this level. I still regularly use the last MacBook Pro 17" from late 2011 as well as a Mac mini from 2018. I even have a Mac SE that is still operative and perfectly useable for word processing and such, though obviously very slow. Now kept as a curiosity and for sentimental reasons rather than for use.

Remember that 95% of Mac users donā€™t know this forum. They live very different lives between you and me. If you donā€™t do a lot of media, 256Gb of total storage maybe perfectly fine.

I do support for people. Most people I work with have less than 150Gb on their system. Only one person has more than 256Gb on their system, and that was only because they had someone running a porn site on their system. (I didnā€™t think this person was doing it. The web directory storing the site was under a directory C:\Office\Extras\ā€¦\Temp that was just long enough, so all the files under there were invisible to Windows, and most utilities and programs.)

As for 8Gb of memory, it might be just fine. Last year, I did an emergency purchase of a new iMac for my wife. Her old Mac broke, and I had to buy her a new one that day. I had to take what they had, and they had an M1 iMac with 8Gb of memory.

Her Mac beats up my super development machine before breakfast. Yes, mine is about six years old, but it was a top of the line MacBook Pro. Mine pauses and gasps and the fan sounds like an F15 taking off. Hers is quiet and fast. 8Gb on an M1 isnā€™t the same as 8Gb on a Intel i7.

If I get a new Mac, I will princely be fine with just 16Gb. I may even be fine with just 8Gb, but my developer friend will mock me.

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