Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenpresident | Hacker News Reader

Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.

Wow, that's actually a pretty big limitation. I guess it's tough to do 64 GB with their on-package unified memory.

I wonder if they're working on a version with discrete memory and GPU for the high end? They'll need it if they ever want to get Intel out of the Mac Pro.

I suspect/hope they are for the 16” MacBook Pro, which is still Intel-based.

Let's think about that a little bit. If the RAM is fast and the SSD is fast and the virtualization options are limited, then this is good enough?

Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM?

I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. But if you take out that possibility, for now, what if the paradigm has changed just a tad.

I have a project that won’t compile on systems with less than 32 GiB of RAM, and I refuse to refactor the hideously overgrown C++ template magic that landed me here.

I suspect "Apple silicon" will not really be very suitable for software engineering.

For now, most developers use MacBooks and tools like vscode already have apple silicon build.

Saying that "most developers use MacBooks" requires a very different understanding from mine of what the words "most" or "developers" mean.

You are downvoted, but you are right. In Asia (esp India, Indonesia, Phillipines & China) but also in the EU, I see 'most developers' walking around with PC (Linux or Windows=>mostly Windows of course) laptops. I would say that by a very large margin 'most developers' on earth use Windows machines.

The most vocal and visible (and rich) ones have Macbook's though, i guess that's where the idea comes from.

According to the Stackoverflow Survey 2019, 45% use Windows, 29% use MacOS, 25% use GNU+Linux

It's actually from the 2020 survey in 2019 windows was at 47,5% and in 2018 at 49,9%. Unfortunately this metric apparently wasn't tracked in 2017 so we'll never be sure if they were above 50% back then.

So currently the majority of responding dev use a POSIX (mostly)-compliant operating system. That is actual food for thought.

Sources: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology-_-... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...

I'm guessing some took issue with the possibly poorly phrased "our understanding [...] of what [...] 'developers' mean [differ]". It can be read as me dismissing people that use Macs as "not real developers", where my intent was to counteract the opposite: people dismissing others that might be using Windows as "not real developers" because otherwise they would be using Macs, which is circular logic that I have heard expressed in the past. And I say that as someone who has used Macs at work for the past decade.

Their performance claims are the very essence of vague, but Apple sure seems certain it will be great for software engineering. I'm curious. I won't be convinced until we get some real data, but signs seem to point that way. What makes you strongly suspect it won't be great?

    Build code in Xcode up to 2.8x faster.
    
    [...]

    Compile four times as much code on a single charge, thanks to the game-changing performance per watt of the M1 chip.

source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...

I have a hunch it will be adequate for single-threaded tasks and the real gains will come for multithreaded compilation, since its superior thermals should enable it to run all cores at full blast for longer periods of time without throttling, relative to the intel silicon it replaces.

Not everyone's codebase is an over-bloated mess

I've been building an over-bloated mess on Apple silicon for months now; it's been quite good at it actually.

I suspect your suspicion is going to be very wrong.

Virtualization and containers. Especially if you want to run an Electron based code editor next to it.

Containers on Mac rely on virtualization, don't they still? Will the new CPU arch have a native virtualization SW? Because if not, I suspect that the virtualization layer might break with the translations to and from X86, and/or might take pretty significant performance penalty.

A wild unsubstantiated guess of course, at this point (or rather, a worry of mine).

Containers on Mac still rely on virtualization, but Apple said at WWDC (and showed a demo) of Docker for Mac running on Apple Silicon, and of Parallels running a full Debian VM. Both were running ARM builds of Linux to run properly, and Apple added virtualization extensions to the new SoC so it doesn't have to resort to emulation (if the software running is ARM and not x86).

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

SSD latency is still several orders of magnitude higher than RAM latency. Having similar magnitudes of total throughput (bandwidth) isn't enough to make RAM and SSDs comparable and thus remove the need for more RAM. Random access latency with basically no queue depth is very important for total performance. Certainly, SSDs are far better at this than hard drives were... but, SSDs still serve a different purpose.

Intel's Optane SSDs are based on a completely different technology than other SSDs, and their low queue depth latency is significantly better than any other SSDs out there, but good luck talking Apple into using more Intel stuff just when they're trying to switch away, and even then... just having some more real RAM would be better for most of these creator/pro workloads.

    Which processes really require occupying and 
    allocating bigger blocks of RAM?

It's not uncommon to work with e.g. 50GB+ databases these days.

They don't always need to be in RAM, particularly with modern SSD performance, but if you're using a laptop for your day job and you work with largeish data...

This would seem to point toward a tiered RAM configuration that acts somewhat like Apple's old Fusion Drives: On-package RAM would be reserved for rapid and frequent read/write, while the OS would page to discrete RAM for lower priority. Discrete RAM would act as a sort of middle ground between on-package RAM and paging to the SSD.

Then again, maybe their in-house SSD controller is so blazing fast that the performance gains from this would, for most applications, be minimal.

Apple doesn't like writing to their SSDs much, to prevent wear-out.

They must be... there's no chance they're wiping out their Intel lineup with machines that max at 16GB of RAM. Especially not for the Mac Pro.

They only launched their lower performance machines today. Air, mini, two port Pro.

So that’s the context to interpret the Ram they offer.

The context is the Mac Mini previously supported 64GB of RAM. In fact it was a pretty powerful machine, with options for a six core i7, 10Gb Ethernet, and as I said 64GB RAM. Now it's neutered with GigE and 16GB RAM, despite having much better CPU and GPU performance.

You can still buy an Intel iMac Mini with 64GB RAM and 10GB ethernet. If you don’t like the M1 mini, buy the Intel one.

But then you get worse CPU and GPU performance. What a choice.

SSD performance with their integrated IO controller might close the gap here, the same way that pretty fast storage on their iPhones makes the lack of RAM there not so debilitating.

But yeah, agreed that not having a 32GB option is somewhat disappointing.

(sent from my MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM)

mmmmm yeah, I will let you all be the guinea pigs here and check back next month.

I am very curious about the performance.

If the macbook air is editing 6k videos and scrubbing smoothly, I am optimistic.

Heh, I have no intention of being in the initial round of beta testing! I explicitly upgraded to an ice lake machine this summer in order to get the best Intel Mac while waiting for the dust to settle.

But I do believe the dust will settle, and I'm optimistic about the future of Apple Silicon.

While a valid workload for a segment, I would be a bit skeptical of generalizing the extraordinary video editing capability to general purpose computing, as those things are facilitated heavily by hardware decoders.

Agreed, but they did mention what sounded like impressive code compilation times in the presentation too, which is pretty salient for most of us here.

Of course, we'll need to wait for third party verification in the end.

Totally--was not diminishing <strike>A14Z</strike>M1 at all--just to moderate expectations from the quite astonishing video editing capability to "measly" ~2x. Even two year old iPad Pro A12X kicks ass on Clang benchmarks (see Geekbench), although I am not sure how sustained the performance is in that thermal envelope.

out of curiosity, were we saying thermal envelope before the Apple presentation today

This is an interesting line of inquiry. In the gaming console world, a similar principle has been explicitly espoused by Sony in the decision to only go with 16GB of RAM (a smaller factor increase than any previous generation) for the Playstation 5, as the speed of its custom SSD architecture should in theory make that 16GB go a lot further than it would have with a more traditional design.

And then PS5 load times are worse than Series X. Whoops.

That's for reasons that I would expect the technical readership of this site to understand.

Please take this shallow retort back to Kotaku.

That's when playing backwards-compatible games (PS4 games on PS5, and Xbox / 360 / One games on Xbox Series X) as Microsoft spent more time optimizing their console to play old games. PS5 loads next-gen titles significantly faster than the Xbox Series X due to the 2.5x faster SSD.

"significantly faster than the Xbox Series X"

You have every right to support your Sony stocks, but blatant lies though ?

PS5 shares memory with the GPU, doesn't it? Which is different to just using RAM to load games.

I play modern games with RX 5700XT 8GB video card and 8GB RAM machine without issues.... So maybe there's not much need for more memory...

I’ll believe that when I see it. For like ten years now marketing gremlins have been breathlessly saying “these SSDs will be so fast they can replace RAM!” and it’s never even close.

I don't want my SSD being killed by being used as a swap device, especially as it's not replaceable anymore. My 16GB MBP can write 200-300GB a day if I'm pushing it hard. It doesn't bother me too much because I can just replace it with a bog standard NVMe drive. But if I'm going to buy a new Mac, I want lots of RAM.

For reference, I have a maxed 2018 mini I've upgraded twice -> 32GB then to 64GB.

Amazon price for 2x32gb modules is lower than it ever has been as of today ($218.58) [1] and I have had no problem making full use of that memory in MacOS. [2]

[1] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07ZLCC6J8

[2] https://i.imgur.com/BDWrGw3.png

A bit more: I also run the blackmagic rx580 egpu to the XDR pro display. The system outperforms the current entry Mac Pro in geekbench 5.

So I def have eyes on the new mini. My suspicion is the rx580 will still provide 2x or more graphical power than any of these machines.

And it costs an extra €224 to go from 8 to 16gb. This is ridiculously expensive.

It's not quite as insulting as their $800 2TB SSD.

I mean if it's SLC chip, that can explain the price.

Also if it comes with $600 in cash stuffed inside, that would explain the price. But it's neither of those things.

It's not, although it is ridiculously fast. But most people don't need ridiculous storage performance; they just need the space.

It's not, Apple most likely use TLC 3D NAND. There's no definitive source but the only remaining SLC drives being made are enterprise (and a few at that), and I think MLC is the same by now. (Even Samsung's Pro series moved to TLC)

The fastest drive available today is the WD SN850: https://shop.westerndigital.com/en-us/products/internal-driv...

The consumer price for 2TB is $450. $800 is absurd.

This has always been par for the course for computer manufacturers. I used to spec out Dell PCs for the school I worked at. At the time, retail cost for a 1TB HDD was the same price as a 512GB SSD. But Dell was charging double for the SSD.

For me personally, I used to buy the lower-end models with small HDD and RAM, then upgrade them. But that's no longer an option with these machines.

Apple price is always 2x consumer price.

You could get the smallest SSD (a laughable 256GB) and then add one or two external 10Gbps NVMe M.2 SSDs at very low cost and with adequate performance.

Any option in Euros is about 30% more expensive than buying the same in the US or Hong Kong (which is pretty crummy, but possibly related to taxes and the cost of doing business in the EU).

EDIT: I don't mean VAT/sales tax, I've considered sales taxes in the comparison, but also exchange rates of $1.18/1€. The difference is almost exactly 30%. It looks like the cost of doing business in the EU is much higher, and/or Apple chooses to price their products however they want by region.

Most of the US priced don't include tax... Eu prices include vat...

I did include CA sales tax (in Los Angeles) of 9.5%, vs the VAT-inclusive price in France/Germany/Italy, and the difference _after_ including those was about 30% higher in the EU. Germany was the lowest, probably because they temp. reduced their sales tax from 19% to 16%.

I can actually get a round-trip economy flight (pre-COVID and now) to LA just to buy a Mac mini, and save about $400. It's really.. unfortunate.

It's not just sales tax, there's also import taxes no?

That's true, I'm comparing local purchase prices with currency conversion rates. The rest depends on your personal situation and tax jurisdiction.

No what I mean is that Apple pays import duties to bring the computer into the EU from its point of manufacture. This further increases the cost compared with the US or a duty-free zone like Hong Kong. 30% overall increase of price is what I would expect for import duties + VAT, so Apple isn’t overcharging here.

Oh ok, gotcha. I’m not trying to blame any entity here, just pointing out the price difference that’s larger than the sales tax difference between the EU and CA. Interestingly HK prices for iPhones are almost exactly California prices (within a couple of dollars) even though there is no sales tax in HK - that’s probably on Apple.

No import duty either. HK is considered an international transshipment zone with no tarrifs.

Pop down to Switzerland. More than USA, less than Eurozone, and 7.7% VAT.

Not for computers into Germany.

Don't forget VAT. I think US prices don't include taxes as it's state dependent.

Maxed out Mac Mini is $1699 pre tax in US and €1917 in Ireland. That's €1558 pre VAT price, or $1838 including mandatory 2 year warranty.

$139 is NOT 30% difference.

1917€ would be about $2262, and $1699 pre-tax would be about $1699*1.095=$1860 with tax, or about $402 more expensive.

I'm comparing retail pricing in France (with a 2-year EU warranty) to business pricing in the US (with a 1-year warranty). That comes out to 1949€ including VAT in France, or about $2299 USD, vs $1749 USD including Los Angeles/CA sales tax with business pricing.

About 31% more.

IMHO it’s misleading to compare the gross prices due to difference tax rates. JAlexoid’s comparison is a much more honest representation of how much Apple marks up prices in Europe. I wouldn’t expect Apple - or anyone - to eat the 10% sales tax/VAT difference.

Right, but I’m not trying to determine Apple’s markups. I just want to know where to buy a new Mac for myself. I don’t care who gets the markup, Apple, the gov’t, whatever.

Since you use words like “misleading” and “honest”, I wonder what your agenda is. Maybe you’re an Apple shareholder who’s allergic to any perceived criticism.

Then your argument is with the typical EU VAT tax model, not Apple.

It's not Apple's fault, that our governments decided to tax the crap out of everything.

Holy cow, that's true. New 2020 Mini with a 16GB RAM, seriously?

Especially head scratching when you consider that a lot of folks still have 2012 Mac minis with 16GB of RAM.

I think 16GB is the bare minimum for a professional machine. Apple clears the bar here, but doesn't exceed it.

Maybe next year's machines? As a first product, I think it's good enough. And the performance gains elsewhere--if what Apple says is true--are actually pretty radically impressive.

It's possible to do development on 8 GB, you just can't use Electron apps.

To be fair, most of us doing dev on our machines probably have a Slack client or Mattermost app floating in the background.

...And we might even be doing dev in something like VS Code in the first place.

We all like to dunk on Electron, but it's kind of become part of the furniture at this point, for better our worse.

You can avoid Electron if you try hard enough. I use Slack through a native client, for example; before that I was using browser tabs.

I'm not stupid dude, I know there are ways to avoid it.

Sometimes they're not worth it. Electron's existence itself is proof of "sometimes it's not worth it."

Try hard enough, haha. I don't have a single Electron app, and yet have never purposely avoided them either.

Which native client? Slack for desktop is Electron.

https://shrugs.app/

Maybe we could use the iPad version of Slack for better efficiency.

This is really great point, and does highlight a key advantage of Apple Silicon going forward. This kind of thing will now be an option going forward on Apple's new computers, in a way it wasn't before.

Yeah, until Slack throws a fit and decides that desktop users don't deserve to use it.

I'm learning Flutter on my Windows 10 desktop. I have Android studio and the emulator open, and Firefox, Chromium and Brave opened.

Total 14G of ram. My combined browser ram use is about 3G. The flutter project is barely 20 lines of code. The PC was started up about 2h ago.

I'd feel much better with 32G on a dev machine (to be fair, my .net projects require much less ram than this).

Three browsers open is not a requirement for the vast majority of folks.

There are probably a number of useless Windows services that could be shut down as well.

Three browsers open is not a requirement for the vast majority of folks.

Every developer who makes frontend things for the web should have a minimum of three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, but maybe others as well) open any time they're testing or debugging their code. That's quite a lot of developers.

And 16GB is fine for that. That's not what is taking the majority of the grandparents ram.

Nah, most of us go browser by browser I think. I think I've been going with two browsers open at most the last 5 years, and at my current employer I'm so reliant on browserstack that I don't even have anything other than chrome running.

I have 1500 tabs open in Firefox, plus CLion, PyCharm, a few Jupyter kernels eating 5-15G, a few apps running in background - it’s often nearing 32G on a 32G 7-year old Mac and sometimes goes into swap space. I personally won’t consider anything less than 128G as a main machine at this point (and it’s a pity that you can’t swap upgradable RAM on iMacs for 256G).

...Can I ask why you have 1500 tabs open?

Stuff that’s easier to keep as open tabs (in a tree format via TreeStyleTab) and eventually close those trees when they are no longer needed, as opposed to bookmarking everything and eventually accumulating a bajillion of irrelevant bookmarks. E.g., I’m doing house renovation so I might have a good few hundred tabs open just on that topic which will eventually get closed.

On most browsers you can organize bookmarks in folders/tree structures. You could then delete folders/trees of bookmarks at a time, eliminating this "accumulating a bajillion of irrelevant bookmarks".

I know. Been there, done that. To each his own, I guess. An open tab is an open tab, if I close it, it's gone forever unless I bookmark it which I would very rarely do. A bookmark is an inverse, it's going to stay there forever unless you clean it up and manually delete it. In my experience, a few hundred more open tabs beats ten thousand dead bookmarks, and closing tabs is easier than cleaning up bookmarks.

Tabs being "open" doesn't mean they're loaded into ram.

That's a little radical...

People used to tell me that Java development was resource consuming... But I somehow manage to build systems with 16GB. I didn't even go for 32G on my new laptop.

Atom, Chrome and Firefox on a 2017 8GB 13" MBP - no issues in using it for development.

I upgraded it only because my keyboard died.

I guess I mean more that if you're going to buy a brand new dev machine in 2020, you shouldn't buy anything with less than 16GB of RAM.

You can still be productive right this moment on 8GB of RAM (you're proving it!), but the march of time will inevitably start to make that amount feel less and less tolerable, if it isn't already.

Personally, when I buy a dev machine, I'm generally trying to look at the next few years of ownership. Will 8GB of RAM cut it in 2023? Doubtful. 16GB? Yeah, a little safer. But 32GB would make me feel better.

What kind of development? Firefox, Spotify, Slack, WhatsApp, any JetBrains IDE, an iOS Simulator, and an Android Simulator will have my 16GB MBP swapping like crazy.

I run a few Electron apps daily within 4GB RAM, it's (fine - 1); =~ almost fine lol.

They’re not advertising any 16Gb models on their web site. It’s all 8Gb. Which you’re not going to be able to upgrade.

I’m out

You can choose 16Gb for +$200.

Ah yes just seen that.

8Gb of RAM for £200 they can piss off. I paid £240 for 64Gb of decent stuff in my desktop.

This is super interesting. I personally wouldn’t consider a 8GB or 16GB laptop this year as my daily driver, but it’s true that the performance gain from extra RAM beyond 8GB is marginal, especially for average audiences and especially when their performances are measured only externally.

Like, you might get super frustrated, develop mental health issues, not that the corporate cares. Expenditure reduces, ROI might even slightly improve, why bother then?

> you might get super frustrated, develop mental health issues

Uh, what? Is your comment literally "because I don't have enough RAM in my computer my mental health will decline"?

Yes, literally?

I’m talking about 4GB DDR4 non-SSD Office machines still in production that are borderline crime against humanity.

But you were just talking about 8 GB machines with fast SSDs…

you have to admit when you're in a busy day w/ looming deadlines and your machine starts chugging coz it can't handle the excel docs/dev work going on it feels like the worst thing ever.

the kinda company that can't afford to give you the latest stuff is more likely to have those kindsa days all the time too so it feels even worse. management even rides your ass coz you can't make it work...

part of "making it" as a software dev in a lot of countries is getting a machine per your specs not having a machine specced out to you by IT.

My 100 Chrome tabs easily consume 8GB

I agree, i was going to order one but 16GB is not enough for me. I guess i'll wait until 32 is available.

I know use cases are different but I can't imagine 95% of people needing more than 16GB of RAM especially with mac os "unified memory". I have intellij, pycharm, firefox, slack and a mongodb instance running on my windows laptop and its only using 10GB. Who knows how much of that 10GB could be reduced.

"unified" memory is bad not good. It's agree with GPU.

My guess is that they are using up to 2 HBM2 memory stacks (from the picture). Each is limited to 8GB . If they were to go to HBM2e in M2 they could get up to 2x24GB. The biggest advantage of HBM is lower power per bit as the signals are all on the package running at a lower frequency.

The memory market is getting fragmented with Nvidia having seemed to moved from HBM2 to GDDR6X (Micron being only supplier). LPDDR super low power (cell phones) and DDR4/5 for rest of market...

Are they using HBM2 memory? I keep waiting for AMD to do that in a cpu package.

After more consideration it is much more likely to be LPDDR4X just like the recently released A14 chip. It would seem unlikely that they would have developed a brand new memory interface.

16GB is fine for mobile and low end. I'm a developer and struggle to fill that amount of memory, even with VMs running.

I guess they made a cost trade-off for these machines, which will not be carried forward to the high-end. Perhaps a new "M2" chipset, with discreet RAM and graphics. Next year?

It would be amazing if they could bring ECC for a decent price as well, time will tell.

I'm a rails dev and I constantly struggle with 16GB. Once you start up rails, background workers, webpack, vs code, MS teams, a database, plus your web browser you very quickly run out of memory.

Wasting that much is a choice.

I develop Django and unfortunately have to run a 4GB Windows 10 vm in the background for work, still have plenty of ram and don’t even have swap enabled.

Its not a choice because not a single item on that list can be closed and let me do my job. So rather than petitioning to replace 10 years of existing software development, I'll ask for a 32gb laptop.

Doing mobile dev on my 16GB MBP causes it to constantly swap, and on my 32GB desktop I often get very close to using all 32GB. I wouldn't buy a new dev machine with less than 64GB.

I do Android stuff occasionally and never got close to that. I suspect you’ve made some choices to use that much, and it’s your prerogative. Hardly necessary however.

And it's unified memory too, shared with the graphics.

Which makes it worse, Intel Macs look appealing than these.

Depends what you need it for I guess, and how much differently ARM uses RAM than Intel. Anyone know?

Also how much OS X optimisation can help with that. The iPad Pro is a lot faster than most laptops with, what, 6gb memory? And iPhones always seem to have a lot less RAM than Samsung phones but still run faster.

It's mostly the same, perhaps a little bit less.

iOS doesn't use swap, it just kill background apps when it needs to devote the whole RAM to a single app; iOS apps are designed with that in mind.

MacOS doesn't get to use any of those tricks.

It could even be advantageous

The Intel GPUs shared RAM too

Also no more 10G ethernet.

And no way to buy a previous Mini with 10Gbe/64GB now either?... (from Apple)

At least in the US Store, the Intel Mac Mini is still for sale:

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/3.0ghz-intel-cor...

Getting one via their refurbished store is an option, if you're lucky and they have what you want: https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/mac-mini

iPhone has typically had lower specs while outperforming its competitors in benchmarks. I think the integration goes a long way toward efficiency.

But Mac OS X isn't iOS. The relative memory usage should be the same between an intel Mac and an ARM Mac. Which means for power users this is extremely disappointing.

> But Mac OS X isn't iOS.

Not yet. MacOS has been moving towards becoming iOS for a long time now. Now with iPad and iPhone apps running natively on them, they only need to lock a few more things down until it becomes an iPad with a windowed interface.

That's not obvious at all. The memory hierarchy is very different in an Apple SOC compared to a typical PC architecture. For example, I don't think there is the equivalent of a system level cache in a PC.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14892/the-apple-iphone-11-pro...

Power-users generally won't be purchasing the lowest/mobilest end for work purposes.

Some of us are power users don't have a choice in what computer our work provides us with and many companies just buy the absolute base level MBPs, "cos it's Pro right, says it right there on the box so its good enough"

I'm expecting 16" MBP and iMac to support more along with an M1X chip or something along those lines.

Probably M1Z, like the iPad Pro.

It'll most likely ship some time in July, so could be an M2

That's it for the M1 crop of machines, higher-powered ones will go higher...

I bought a Mac mini 2 weeks ago and I was sweating when they announced the new Mac mini, not anymore now that its only max 16GB. Apple has effectively killed expandable storage and memory in all of their line up. No doubt in the future they will offer larger memory options when they release the 16" Macbook pro. Need 32GB a year later down the road for your mini? Just buy a new one!

The current Intel Macbook Pros aren’t expandable either, though. 16GB is a disappointment for me too.

I'm with you on the sweat factor as I just bought a new iMac 5K, but FYI it has a purpose-built expansion slot for RAM that surprised and pleased me. I bought it with the least RAM possible from Apple and maxed it out via an upgrade I bought from Newegg for like 40% of the price.

This is the first CPU/ SoC and the first SKUs. It's likely (almost certain) 32GB options for the 13" MBP will come out when the 16" MacBook is launched. I'm not so sure about the Mac mini, but considering they are just dropping the same chip on all three devices, I suspect the mini will have a higher end option as well.

The choice to do on-package RAM makes it hard. They limited themselves to just two dies here, so maybe a real "pro-focused" machine can have 32 GB later. I guess those of us that need the extra ram will have to wait for Apple to release the M2 with DDR5 support and then re-evaluate our options. But for now these are a hard no for me.

what is interesting to me is they all use the same chip but don't reveal their operating frequency. I am hoping I am just overlooking this.

I expect the Pro to run faster as it has a fan to support it but how much faster than the Air would it be?

Yeah this is surprising considering how much they talk about how great the processor is for ML, too...

The mini still does support 64GB of RAM.

They’re still selling the intel mini which supports up to 64GB, so that option has not been taken off the table if you need the RAM. This is just an additional option with a different trade off. Faster RAM but less of it.

Not all RAM is used the same, and the SSD is on par with RAM speeds from a decade ago. Probably won't need it. An iPad Pro does magic with only 4GB.

Right? "Oh we can't give you a 64GB MBP because Intel can't use low power dram yet". Launches Apple Silicon with 16Gb.

> Launches

They purposefully launched with consumer-level hardware. There is no way that the "real" pro machines will not let you ratchet all those specs up.

Did you expect they would launch every single configuration on day 1?

Apple said the transition is going to take 2 years. This is day 1. You can still buy Intel based Macs with 64GB RAM. When Apple phases those out and you still can't buy 64GB Macs, then you can complain.

What are the chances that happens?

It just seems silly though. If you want a Mac Mini with 64GB of RAM you're forced to take the slower CPU and GPU. If you want a 13" MBP with 32GB RAM it will cost you $500 more and also get you a slower CPU and GPU.

It doesn't make sense because we're only seeing a part of the picture right now. Once they release the rest of the product line on their own architecture, it will come together. (Well mostly, Apple has been known to leave big holes in their offerings)

I confess, that now I've looked at all the details, I can't argue that they've done the right thing. It seemed to me that it was daft to launch an MBP13 with less RAM than the intel, but in fact the M1 is so far ahead in every other respect that it would be foolish not to give people that option.

I might have to get an Air for myself, just to have an ARM based computer again, like it's 1988.

The 13" MacBook Pro has an option to upgrade to 32.

I just checked the store configurator and there is no option to upgrade the Pro with M1 to 32, which is consistent with the presentation.

I don't see that.

You might have looked at the 16" one, which did not get updated today.

The 2 lower machines on the selection page are intel ones, and are the only ones with 32Gb option

The M1 MacBook Pro starts with 8GB and has an option for 16GB. I was talking about the Mac mini which in the Intel version has an option for 64GB (at +$1000 it's not exactly cheap).

Intel's MacBook Pro 13" is still available for purchase with 32GB upgrade. The M1 is capped at 16GB.

edit: spelling

Really, 16GB max? I find it very strange how Apple went from targeting professionals, seeing the strategy work from the ground up for many years, but now somehow want to pivot to hobbyists/others instead of professionals.

Could someone try to help me figure out the reasoning behind Apple changing the target customer?

This is their 13" model. Their 15" model is targeted for professionals.

Both have a 16 GB limitation.

They haven't announced a 15/16inch Apple Silicon Mac yet.

Oh indeed. Disregard my comment then, I've mixed something up.

There isn't a 16" MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon yet.

That's not true. The 16-inch model remains Intel and supports up to 64GB of memory.

There is no 15" model anymore and the 16" model has not been announced with an M1 yet.

> ... 16" model has not been announced with an M1 yet.

That's the point the above poster was making.

This is Apple's first CPU, there is a reason Apple said the transition will take 2 years. More powerful CPUs with more RAM for the 16" MacBook, the iMac, and the Mac Pro lines will be coming later. Some of those CPUs will likely be available for the 13" and the Mini.

I mean, "Pro" is in the name, I expect Pro-level specs, haha :P

It was a long time ago MacBook Pro meant "MacBook for Professionals", as other makers have now equalized and sometimes even passed Apple when it comes to producing quality hardware for reasonable cost.

Right, but the person I'm responding to says the 15" model is for professionals -- I argue the whole line of MacBook Pro is "for professionals" :)

Nothing they launched now is for "professionals". The RAM is a joke.

Apple believes that there are different kinds of professionals. An artist that uses a lower-powered computer is still a professional, of course, just not a software engineer.

My guess is the pros are going to be the tock to the consumer tick in the Apple silicon upgrade cycle. It takes months before pros are comfortable upgrading MacOS to begin with, and it will probably be a year or two before they're comfortable that pro software vendors have flushed out their bugs on the new architecture.

Basically I'm guessing that no one who wants more than 16GB on their professional machine was going to upgrade on this cycle anyway. We'll see

Since about 2-3 years back, the film professionals I hang around with are all starting to dump Apple hardware in favor of PC workstations now, as they are tired of paying large amounts of money for something that can be had cheaper and with less restrictions. Especially when it comes to price vs quality for displays and hard drives that Apple sells.

I think today's presentation is just confirming what we've known for a while, Apple is pivoting away from professionals.

While I use it for gaming, I cannot fathom anyone using Windows 10 professionally.

Not sure what industry you're in (professionally) but at least in creative industry it's either Windows or OSX. And if you need really powerful hardware, it's either Windows or Linux (with custom software), at least that's what I'm seeing in my circles.

Although OSX used to be popular with the indie-professional scene, it's disappearing quicker than it appeared years back.

I think it depends a lot on your job. I used to do a lot of Cadence Virtuoso work in Windows (now I've moved to Linux) but that fact that is was running on Windows only mattered once, when I setup the tool. From then on I was full screen in the CAD tool and my day to day was basically identical to my flow now. I imagine for a lot of professionals, like myself, it's the application suite that matters, not the OS.

It is the leading OS for enterprise users by miles

Same thing in the audio engineering world. It’s crazy how quickly it’s pivoted from Mac to PC in such a short timeframe.

Probably saturated market. "What got them here, wont get them there". They continuously need to show growth. As you said, the strategy of focusing on Pro users worked. It's now time to focus on not so Pro users... those who don't need matte displays, 32gigs, fancy keyboards and much rather use a colorful touch bar than another row of buttons.

And macOS doesn't support Linux-style compressed RAM either, at least as far as I know.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...

One search away and you can prove yourself wrong. In fact they have had it since 10.9.

Cool. I stopped using it in 10.6. Glad macOS has caught up.

Caught up with the 1990s when RAM and disk compression were popular on Macs and PCs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

Interestingly enough Stac was apparently co-founded by Nvidia/Stanford's Bill Dally. The story of them being "sherlocked" by MS-DOS 6.0 and successfully suing Microsoft is interesting as well.

That was before the current NS-based OS and so doesn't count

It does compress RAM, although I’m not sure if you mean something different here.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com