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Comment by mesh | Hacker News Reader

-- I decided I don't need more RAM than 8 GB, because nobody from the first reviewers managed to give the RAM a hard time. It seemed to me it's a different beast altogether and it doesn't make sense to just compare numbers and say that more is better. Apple allows you to buy a computer with more than 8 GB RAM, but I think it's just a trap how to satisfy and charge those who don't believe the reviews and just want more RAM whatever it takes. --

I think the reason I would always buy more RAM is not because it needs it today, but because it may need it in 2 or 3 years, as app inevitably eat into the performance gains with bloat.

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I find that crazy. I bought a computer with 16gb of ram in 2011 and by 2015 I was hitting OOM left and right.

I bought a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I managed to OOM it a few times and oh boy was it ugly - already regret not taking the 64gb option at the time.

Agreed I’ve been 16gb+ for a decade now. He seems to have under-specced on ram and HD.

I risked it on an 8gb mini and quite frankly i can’t bend it even if I try.

Only thing it’ll probably die on is running VMs which I’m not going to do any more. They can live in DigitalOcean.

One liner review: this is the only computer I’ve ever had which can keep up with me.

> a mac mini with 32 GB in 2018 and I managed to OOM it a few times and oh boy was it ugly

How?

Depends on what you're doing.

People have been saying this for years and my personal 2011 17", 2016 13" and 2018 Mini have never had more than 8GB. Never noticed an issue.

Unless you know you're going to be running memory intensive workloads, I see no need.

SSD performance has improved such that if you do need to swap it's not a huge impact to performance.

It was a very different situation even only a few years ago.

Swapping would not be good for the longevity of the SSD.

Most of the 8GB users aren't likely to fully use all of the SSD.

So with wear levelling you should see the SSD last well beyond the usable lifespan of the device.

My wife has a 2013 mba with 4gb of ram. She’s never hit the limit doing office365, Firefox, and Citrix. I have a 16gb dev machine at work and I’ve only OOM a few times. I can’t actually tell you how little ram my phone has but it’s certainly less than 4.

How did you manage hitting OOM on 16GB, let alone 32? I'm curious. I had 8 till 2018 and then 16. Not even once did I run out of memory and I was running java apps in docker.

Very often with compilation & LTO of large software in C++, having 2/3 VMs open (not just docker, the whole GUI stack as it's for debugging a GUI software)

I upgraded to my M1 Macbook Air from a 2015 Macbook Air with 8GB of memory, i5 even. I almost never run into memory issues with it - ran the full complement of browser tabs, Microsoft Office, pixelmator, Photos, VPN Client, bit of Jupyter-labs, etc...

I do most of my data engineering in the cloud, or on a 32 GB Linux system - so I don't need a lot of memory for data sets - just something that will run the applications. I would never recommend that the average user buy more than 8GB of memory with a Mac Laptop.

Meanwhile - my 16 GB Linux Laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 Dell XPS 15 7590) routinely comes to a crashing halt if I try and do something crazy like open up 40 Browser Tabs and then start zoom. It's horrible. I've spent hours trying to see what's going on with top to no avail. If only it was a graceful degradation - but open a single browser tab on the wrong site once you are close to the edge- game over. Usually faster to just restart the system than wait for whatever swapping is happening to conclude.

I've rarely had this happen to me on the MacBook Air.

Different operating systems/hardware really seem to make a difference using pretty much the same workload, speaking from personal experience of someone who splits their time 50/50 on Linux and macOS.

You can tune how the linux memory allocation works, I've done some changes in a couple of servers (couldn't find which settings in the 60 seconds I google), might be worth investigating in workstations too.

(Not saying it is ergonomic or better than the mac.)

Which browser are you using? I've got no issue with around 50 tabs in Firefox in a similar laptop. But maybe I don't visit the same memory heavy websites.

It's usually gcc that eats up all my memory, turns out with template metaprogramming a single gcc instance can eat 3GB of RAM, and I usually build with 6 parallel instances. Thankfully I've got plentiful SSD-backed swap so I don't feel the system becoming too unresponsive.

Maybe zram can help you on Ubuntu: https://github.com/ecdye/zram-config

It decreases swapping to disk by using a compressed ramdisk for logs, unused stuff etc. The zram-config from universe may be broken (https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-swap-config)

I also opted for 8GB and a 250GB SSD. I've found that my M1 Mac Mini has completed replaced my Window desktop (an old i7, 16GB RAM, TB of SSD/HDD, nvidia 1070).

I mostly use my Mac for personal projects in TypeScript, Swift, and Java, and for browsing the web. I also play video games occasionally, and I'm surprised at how good the performance is.

It's incredibly fast, and at $700 it's a steal. Normally with Apple you pay a pretty hefty premium if you want performance, but the M1 makes it much more accessible.

I have to say, I'm rather concerned for Intel and AMD.

The magic of the M1 is not just the hardware, but also the software of MacOS.

Putting everything together on the M1 chip, the CPU / GPU / Neural Engine, and allowing all those to share memory, seem to be from where much of the magic comes. The further optimization of MacOS to leverage all that helps as well.

AMD already has a lot of experience with high-speed interconnects. They already have a lot of experience with APUs. I wonder if it'd be possible for Microsoft and AMD to enter some sort of partnership whereby the optimize Windows in the same way MacOS has been optimized.

I really fucking hate Apple. I hate their walled garden approach. I hate their "trendiness". So I have a small bit of self-loathing that I own the base model new Mac Mini, but I can't allow my seething hatred for the company to cloud my judgment when it comes to using the fastest and most productive platform for my work, and, I'm sorry to say, this little $699 machine outperforms my Ryzen 9 3900X w/ 32 GB of RAM and an RX 5700XT for most tasks. I still game on this machine, but most productivity work has been relegated to the Mac Mini now.

Learning MacOS has been frustrating, but also kinda fun.

A friend of mine said: "Hassen macht hässlich". In english this would be: "To hate makes you ugly"

A friend of mine said: "People who try to control everything suck dick." I don't know what that translates into in German.

I used to hate Apple too, but I've found their products to be better than the alternatives. I was a die-hard Windows/Android user for something like 6 years, and I slowly moved over to Apple once I got my first MacBook. WSL is great for development, but it doesn't come anywhere close to macOS in my opinion.

Anyway, the walled garden sucks, but it's worth the trade off to me.

On Linux anyway once you get over ~8GB of ram doing normal things in tmpfs starts to make a lot of sense. My 2012 macbook pro runs entirely from tmpfs. I regularly compile Linux and Firefox in tmpfs on my desktop with 32GB of ram.

Memory is one of those things where increasing the size tends to result in a qualitatively different experience rather than a quantitatively different one.

Same story for storage. Much faster storage is noticed immediately.

Has anyone done app development (either XCode for iOS or Android Studio for Android)? How limiting is the 16gb RAM? Can you smoothly run both XCode/AndroidStudio AND 1+ virtual machines for testing? Curious if it is worth waiting for the upcoming MBPs with 32/64GB RAM?

I've done dev in Xcode on the original 12" fan-less MacBook with 8 GB and it was fine, simulators and everything.

It was also fine for me at the time. However, I've found it to be increasingly unbearable with each subsequent OS update and each XCode update. At this point, XCode is not useable on my 2015 8GB RAM Macbook -- it could work, but productivity would be so low it isnt worth doing. I was planning to make a mega-upgrade up to 64GB, but the chatter of "16GB w/ M1 is the new 32GB" has me intrigued.

And the M1 MacBooks are also much better aT tHe TiMe.

I’m honestly wary of devs who think 16 GB would be too “limiting” for app development. They’re probably also the ones responsible for churning out bloated crap that stinks like ass even in 32 GB.

I'm pretty confused by this take, not all apps are tip calculators or note taking apps. There are entire classes of enterprise apps with sophisticated functionality. I used mine with on-phone AR, which involves computer vision, on the edge. Further, my app (and many others) have multiple user roles (in my case: Patient, Hospital Staff, Admin).

When I'm using 32gb RAM for an app, i'm not actually running the entire app in 32GB RAM. The breakdown is usually:

- 8gb: XCode/AndroidStudio, chrome, slack

- 4-8gb: Virtualized App VM in profile 1 (Hospital Staff)

- 4-8gb: Virtualized App VM in profile 2 (Patient)

- 4-8gb: Virtualized App VM in profile 3 (Admin)

Interactions in one VM affect the other. You typically debug and test UX across all at the same time. Hopefully much of it is already tested with REST API layer testing, but not all, and definitely not QA/UAT. Is this not how it is done? How do other people do it?

I have a friend doing something similar for a ride hailing app, he has a customer app, and a driver app. He constantly runs both side by side while developing. I have another friend doing a food delivery app -- again, he has three profile VMs running side by side: customer, restaurant, admin.

So, yes, it seems M1 MBPs are not limiting, correct, at this time. They probably will be in 2025 after a dozen OS and XCode updates, and I imagine i'll need another laptop then. If none of us did, we'd still be on the 2008 iMac with 4GB RAM and we wouldnt be speaking about the M1 at all.

Not quite what you're looking for, but I've noticed IntelliJ resident memory staying suspiciously low. I have the vague suspicion that they're taking advantage of the faster processor to be way, way more aggressive with memory compression, but I can't easily prove it :)

I use Xcode on some fairly large projects and "upgraded" from a maxed out 2018 MBP (i9, 32GB) to an M1 Air (16GB). It's faster and more responsive in every way. Especially under load

The most noticeable things for Xcode are:

- Iterating is faster, the build-run loop is much quicker so it feels lighter when you make code changes

- Indexing and autocomplete is very quick. Noticeably better than the MBP

I also use Android Studio and it's definitely not as quick or smooth as Xcode. But it never was on my old Intel machine either. The UI seems to lag under load and navigating a large code-base just feels a bit more clunky due to lag on character input and opening files

Android Studio feels about the same as it did on my i9 as the M1

Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was looking for!

On your last note:

>> Android Studio feels about the same as it did on my i9 as the M1

It seems even this would be progress also - so you're getting ~ the same Android Studio performance on a 32GB RAM i9 (expensive) and 16GB RAM M1 (less expensive)

This seems like a win all around.

> Apple allows you to buy a computer with more than 8 GB RAM, but I think it's just a trap how to satisfy and charge those who don't believe the reviews and just want more RAM whatever it takes.

And 640kb ought to be enough for anybody. Anyone trying to sell you more RAM is just setting up a trap in order to charge those who don't believe Bill Gates and just want more RAM whatever it takes.

> "Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is unlikely to die," Fallows wrote. "It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's sense that no one can be sure what will happen next."

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...

for under $1000 (after EPP) I'll just trade-in if it came to that

This mentality is exactly why Apple charges such a high tax on RAM upgrades.

The vast majority of people upgrading their RAM are doing so simply because they see a bigger number and not because they need it.

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