Hacker News Reader

Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

It's called wishful thinking with blinders.

What? The M1 MacBook Pro is not the magical device with no compromises???

People were way too enthusiastic and purposely skipped over any weaknesses of the form factor.

People were claiming that it was capped at 16G ram because there were no purpose for having 32G ram (it was amazing to see the hacker news technical set reclaim Bill Gate's "640K ought to be enough for anybody" and "1 monitor is enough for every use case").

There are no perfect computers. Even Apple has to compromise. They were clearly stated but people just didn't want to accept that the M1 isn't a perfect computer that could do everything.

View on HN

Apple didnt have to compromise here, but did - they've definitely sold customers on the "everything just works" approach, and so updating those details and then expecting all the customers who were literally sold on the concept of not having to check on all the details to check them... interesting approach.

My mother bought a new macbook m1 with me telling her about the monitor stuff and she cant even get her 1080p normal external to work with the dock that the apple store sold her.

Take the dock back. I’ve tried 4 or 5 different ones, and the only one that was any good is the caldigit ts3+. If it’s not DisplayPort/usb-c video output then the dock is using some converter internally that messes everything up.

It’s definitely an Apple issue, but the specific problem can be worked around by basically not using hdmi (I appreciate we don’t all have that luxury :/)

This is an extremely entitled viewpoint. I'm not sure which "Apple" you are talking about, but as far as my experience has been for the last 20 years of Apple computers, Apple is the king of forcing consumers to compromise.

Do you want 256G ssd size or do you want the upgraded processor or memory size? Do you want 2 usb-c ports or 4 usb-c ports? do you want touchbar or no touchbar?

Apple has market segmentation and compromise down to a science. Apple computers have been forcing people into a compromise for their entire history. Want more features? Give more money. need that money for rent? ok buy the 256G version instead that you can't upgrade because everything is soldered in.... you have more money? pay for 512G version.

And in the dock's case - that's always been the case where apple will happily charge you more money to get certain accessories to work properly. (want this accessory to work? you gotta get the right adapter! oh that old adapter won't work, you gotta get a new one for 80$! oh sorry even with an adapter that old dock won't work anymore, you gotta get the right interface! usb-c vs thunderbolt vs firewire vs usb-c 4!)

I’m not aware of anyone (except those using VMs) who are complaining about the memory. I personally went from 16gb to 8 and don’t miss it. Do you actually own/use an m1 Mac?

If it works for you, it works for you.

However in 2021 I am not interested in a computer with less than 32GB ram. Sure, I could work around the limitations and close not in use programs/tabs to avoid going OOM, or using swap, but life is short and memory is cheap. I'd rather not have to worry about it.

I was similarly skeptical, but my old laptop died on me so I had to replace it. My M1 MacBook Pro is a better laptop for me as developer: my 16” 2019 MBP with 32GB of RAM I got from work has performance and memory issues (mostly too many open browser tabs) more frequently than my personal M1 laptop.

So why did you buy one?

Yes I am using one.

There are workloads that don't fit into 16G ram. Even with paging, there are legitimate needs for 32G and beyond memory sizes.

What specific workloads? If you bought a 16GB machine to keep 32GB of data in RAM then clearly you bought the wrong machine. But I am able to run WAY more applications in 8GB than the 16GB intel Mac I had previously.

> But I am able to run WAY more applications in 8GB than the 16GB intel Mac I had previously.

Then your limitation clearly wasn’t RAM.

Memory management is different on the M1. This has been widely discussed.

"management" is important.

It can't make it appear out of thin air. If you need 16GB of ram and only have 8GB, you will run out of memory.

Which is why I asked for specific workloads in the comment you decided to reply to. I also say in the same comment this very thing you are reiterating...

It can swap to ssd real fast.

I am not using VMs (unless you count the JVM or something) and I regularly exceed 16GiB of ram. I offloaded my docker VM to another machine because it was so bad.

For context I regularly have open (what I consider to be standard apps):

* IntelliJ IDEA (Pycharm or Clion, never both)

* Slack

* Chrome

* kitty (20 or so terminals)

* Outlook

* yabai & bartender

* littlesnitch & adguard

Have you gotten yabai to work on the M1?

I have an M1 Macbook Air with 8 gigs of memory, and it's definitely a bottleneck for me. I haven't even thought about trying a VM on it...

In what way? I run xcode, firefox, safari, gimp, mail and a few other things. It is so much better than my last 16gb macbook pro. And this is an air.

Same here, i am running intellij IDEA, 3 vscode instances concurrently - all autobuilding on change. I also have 2 ios simulators and an android simulator running, as well as chrome, safari (with MANY tabs) and Firefox. Mail, slack, QBServe, Datagrip and affinity designer also all running. The machine is fully responsive, flicking between apps, running both the internal display and an external 43" 4k monitor.

The ONLY time I run out of memory (or leave the "green" memory pressure) is when i use Figma - but that is a known memory hog. And it does crash, it just warns me that im running out of memory and asks to close something.

This is all on an 8GB machine. Previously I had 16GB intel macbook pro (2015) and it simply wasn't possible to run this quantity of applications.

Obviously (as i have said, and keep getting downvoted for), if you are using VMs or you have a specific memory requirement, then you need to account for that.

Thank you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com