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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't until 2017ish before getting 32GB in a MacBook Pro. So the fact that they have 16GB in the first gen seems about right. According to Apple's propaganda and blogospere, the M1 is much more efficient not "needing" the extra RAM. That's just too much for my old dog to wrap my mind around.

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I’m using one as a daily driver (red teaming) and it easily handles a couple busy vms, term, few services, editor, obsidian, slack/teams/whatever and browser.. I stopped even bothering carrying the charger with it..

Sometimes I look at activity monitor and it is swapping a bit but I don’t notice any perf degradation so I stopped thinking about it.. shrug

I'm sure that swapping isn't a huge deal, but the big issue is around longevity of the SSD. If you have workloads that use more than 16gb of ram, swapping a lot will prematurely wear the SSD, which isn't replaceable.

I think this has been largely debunked by now, early SSDs had these problems but newer ones? not so much..; I mean, here's what smart says about the drive in my Mac atm:

    Percentage Used:                    0%
    Data Units Read:                    12,515,207 [6.40 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 13,202,995 [6.75 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 264,092,805
    Host Write Commands:                158,635,815
    Controller Busy Time:               0
    Power Cycles:                       188
    Power On Hours:                     223

The % used is (I think) the lost capacity due to wear, I've fairly hammered it so far and it's not even at 1%.. I'm pretty sure I'll get at least a few years out of it based on that..

Hopefully, the keyboard lasts as long as the SSD. Previous gens spectacularly did not.

Ha, seems to be a bit better. I kinda hate working on the laptop keyboard tho so I tend to use an external magic keyboard :}

If you care about the keyboard longevity, I'd get the macbook air or wait for the new macbook refresh when they bring the air keyboard over to the pro.

The MacBook Air keyboard is exactly the same as the Pro keyboard, except for the Touch Bar. Any problems with the Touch Bar are UX issues: I don't think anyone has questioned its longevity/reliability.

Uhh, that may be what apple is reporting but most SSDs only last for about 100-200TB of write, so I would take that percentage used with a grain of salt. They are probably counting wear leveling percentage used.

On the low end assuming 200TBW that means you have used about 3.3% of the life of your SSD and on the high side you have used 6.75%. Lets say you got your M1 on release in November, that would mean you are using about 1.68%/month on the high end and .84%/month on the low end.

Assume it lasts 200TBW, which I don't think they will, you would be on track for a 8 year lifespan of the SSD. Otherwise 4 years on the low end, assuming the write amount stays the same (which won't likely happen), which would imply you are using the same or less swap.

Every year, I find that I use about 1-2gb more on average, so for me/my usage patterns I almost find the 16gb of memory in the MBPs to be a slap in the face. I have a 13'' and a 16'' MBP with 32/64gb respectively and I don't think I would find anything less acceptable. Right now, my typical memory usage is around 30-40gb when I run docker, vscode, chrome, slack, zoom, etc. I am not even running any VMs(other than the docker vm), I typically will spin those up elsewhere.

For reference, this is my 16'' daily MBP after nearly a year (4.84TB write) and I typically pull down lots of logs/data.

    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          99%
    Percentage Used:                    0%
    Data Units Read:                    4,406,559 [2.25 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 9,454,881 [4.84 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 183,307,692
    Host Write Commands:                406,821,556

High end SSD can have over 1000 TBW. Any idea which are in Apple HW?

> "most SSDs only last for about 100-200TB of write"

My 3.5-year old MacBook Pro has 119 TB of writes, and still claims 79% "available spare":

  Available Spare:                    79%
  Available Spare Threshold:          2%
  Percentage Used:                    15%
  Data Units Read:                    256,111,725 [131 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 232,470,299 [119 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 2,872,362,421
  Host Write Commands:                1,547,764,735

That said, my 1-month old M1 MacBook Air is already up to 7 TB writes, so seems to be writing at a significantly higher rate. Both are 8GB machines.

From what I have seen the available spare value will decrease rapidly near end of life.

As Flash cells start to fail they are replaced by spare. Because of write leveling this is delayed for a while, but then as each cell reaches its 300 or 3,000 writes, they all start to fail.

How do you get these stats? What command do you run?

  brew install smartmontools

  smartctl -a disk0

I replaced my i9 16” MBP with a 13” Air. Performance with Xcode is either the same or better on the Air.

Battery life is the true game changer though. When I went out with the 16” I had to make sure I had 100% charge, if I wanted to use it for ~3-4 hours while out. With the Air I can grab it with 25% battery left and be fine for the same amount of time.

The “actual” pro machines with M1 derivatives are going to be incredible…so long as apple doesn’t make another Touchbar/butterfly keyboard-esq mistake.

I also replaced a 16" (although i7) with a 13" Air. Best computing purchase I've ever made.

I was lucky if I could even make it to 4 hours battery on the 16", but the real killer for me was heat and noise. It was like sitting in front of a little aeroplane all day long, and because the video out is wired up through the dedicated GPU, just plugging it into an external monitor added an extra 20W to dissipate. It also had weird sleep issues the entire time, if I left it connected to a monitor overnight I'd often sit down at my desk the next morning to find it burning hot, fans blasting, with the lid closed.

So happy to see the back of that piece of crap. It got reasonable reviews at the time, I can only imagine that either no-one tested it with external monitors, or because it was the first model to drop the butterfly keyboard people just gave it a pass on everything else.

I got the Air and when I was compiling Nodejs to install it the chassis got really hot. I read a lot about it barely ever getting warm but I guess those reviews were a little exaggerated.

Wasn't the 32gb Macbook Pro infeasible (for battery life) initially because Intel kept on recycling their memory controller and it wasn't until the 8th gen processors where LPDDR4 was officially supported [1]. It appears that Apple gave up trying to do LPDDR4 on the 15/16inch [2] and released it with DDR4, while on the 13 inch they released a 32gb version using 3733MHz LPDDR4X [3].

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/05/17/intels-first-10nm...

[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/12/apple-refreshes-m...

[3] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...

So it was intel’s fault apple could not release a laptop with more than 16gb? Then why were PC laptops available with 32GB?

It was Intel's fault that there was no low power memory controller that would work with 32gb for a laptop.

There were definitely PC laptops available with 32gb of ram, but the wired powered consumption doubles from ~6 to ~11/12 watts [1] [2]

Reviews of pc laptops at the time (eg: Skylake) with 32/64gb of ram showed some detrimental battery life and it appears in Apple's case it wasn't a tradeoff they were willing to make.

To me it seems as though Apple gave up and just put DDR4 into their laptop anyway and also increased the battery W-h from 76Wh in the 2016 model [3] to 83.6Wh in the 2018 [4] thus offsetting some of the battery life issues but there may have been other hardware improvements that reclaimed some battery life.

As for the 13 inch MBP, the 2020 model was the first to include LPDDR4X and could allow the bump to go to 32gb but is much more battery constrained at 58Wh. [5]

[1] https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/ [2] https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/how-much... [3] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP749?locale=en_US [4] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP776?locale=en_US [5] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

>According to Apple's propaganda and blogospere, the M1 is much more efficient not "needing" the extra RAM.

Marcan recently found custom instructions to handle memory compression / decompression in hardware.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1362450439845781505

These are not new and have been part of Apple’s ISA extensions for several years. For some reason marcan decided to blackbox them, but they’re fairly easy to find if you open the kernel in a disassembler so I’m not sure why he did.

New to Mac, new audience. People are used to iPhones being parsimonious with RAM, it’s new on Mac.

It's basically the same processor; it stands to reason that the instructions are the same (but maybe not used in the same way).

Honestly the SSD is so fast, that for everyday workload you will not notice the lack of RAM even in an 8GB system (I am coming from a system with 32GB or RAM). But RAM is RAM, and using swap memory that aggressively can reduce the life span of the SSD very fast.

Not true. I desperately wanted to keep my M1 MBA, but with Cities:Skylines I have enough mods and assets where I really do need 32GB of RAM. When you really need it, there is no substitute for RAM.

When I loaded up a new game with minimal assets (it easily fit with the 16GB of RAM I had) the MBA played C:S smoother than my i7/1080ti gaming machine. I think if I can get a laptop with at least 32GB of RAM I won't have to maintain a Windows gaming machine and will be able to consolidate everything onto an M powered MacBook Pro.

Now if Apple would just produce a 5K external monitor life would be perfect :)

>That's just too much for my old dog to wrap my mind around

My theory is that Apple has specific hardware for much faster and better memory compression and decompression. macOS has always had memory compression but I think those are done with Software on CPU.

You may also get some additional memory from Unified Memory. ( Not sure how it worked previously on macOS, so this is a reference from PC perspective. )

But Yes generally I agree, That's just too much for my old dog to wrap my mind around.

They say that because the SSD is fast and the performance hit for hitting swap isn't that big of a deal. Without mentioning that the SSD is soldered to the motherboard and is a wear item. The fact you can't swap hard drives is silly, almost like having a car with tires that can't be changed.

SSD is NOT as fast as RAM. If you really need more RAM, do yourself a favor and wait until they come out with a machine that has more RAM. I'm waiting, rather impatiently. It was hard to return my M1 MBA but I think it will be well worth it in the long run.

> ”According to Apple's propaganda and blogospere, the M1 is much more efficient not "needing" the extra RAM.”

The M1 Macs come with very fast SSDs. I think what’s really going on here is that, with write speeds exceeding 2GB/s, macOS can use NVM almost as if it is RAM with little performance penalty.

It works. With 8GB, my MacBook Air feels as if it has a lot more RAM than it does.

The downside is increased wear on the SSD. My 512GB SSD has accumulated 7 TB of writes in the few weeks I’ve owned it.

>It wasn't until 2017ish before getting 32GB in a MacBook Pro.

And that's on special customization option, that a handful of hardcores ever got...

And as soon as 32GB became available, those same hardcores where asking where the 64GB options were. I had workflows on desktops with only 32GB of RAM that would choke, but it was a Hackintosh, so I was able to bump up to 64GB and the issues went away. Which is why 16GB max is so hard for me to wrap my head around

Can you give some examples of workflows that need that much ram? I stay away from docker and VMs, and I really struggle to think of everyday situations where more than 16gb of ram is going to be worth it for me.

IME if you are not doing video editing, it will be docker and VMs. So it makes sense that devs would want the 32g (standard at my work, too). When I got my own personal laptop. 16G was fine, and I haven't had issues.

I shoot lots of timelapse on a full frame dslr RAW. I import my image sequences into after effects at full image size at 16bit color (the RAW is 14bit native). Exporting those 1:1 image size would choke on 32GB. Upping to 64GB saw the errors go away.

I'm not so sure it's so hardcore. The standard laptop that new engineers at LinkedIn get is the 16in Macbook Pro with Core i9 and 32 GB of RAM. I'm sure we're not the only ones issuing this spec, and it's not even the maxed out 64GB spec.

For work the $400 difference between 16GB and 32GB is pretty negligible over the course of 3 yrs. Consider the cost of each engineer and $400 / 3yrs for even a tiny improvement in productivity is worth it.

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