Apple VP says 8GB RAM on a MacBook Pro analogous to 16GB RAM on a PC: 'We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently'
After being challenged over the company shipping $1,599 MacBooks in 2023 with just 8GB of RAM, an Apple VP has responded with the claim that it's «probably analogous to 16GB on other systems.» With those «other systems» being PCs. Aaaaand, fight!
For those who haven't been keeping up to date with the latest Apple announcements, the 14-inch MacBook M3 Pro was revealed last week with a starting MSRP of $1599 for the base model with 8GB of RAM, with 16GB and 24GB options available for an extra $200 to $400 respectively. This news has been met with a somewhat frosty reception among Apple fans, as a MacBook with the «Pro» designation is generally regarded as a laptop for content creators and power users. 8GB of RAM seems more than a little stingy for these use cases, and Apple has already received a fair bit of backlash for not upping the default specs.
Apple's VP of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers recently gave an interview to Lin YilYi, a Chinese machine learning engineer and content creator who directly asked him about this criticism, and his response was somewhat surprising. He said:
«Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture. Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently.»
While it's true that the new MacBooks do make use of a unified memory architecture that is somewhat more efficient in certain uses, it's difficult to believe that it makes so much difference that an extra 8 or 16GB of RAM is unnecessary. Beyond this, charging a whole $200 for a
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