Hacker News Reader

Comment by bijant | Hacker News Reader

This should include a (2020) in the title. The situation for the new iMacs is even worse with 8gb ram max. It can't be because the additional GPU Power necessary to properly drive the 4.5k display limited available space on the die for the chip as the ram is not on chip but on SoC ? Is it that the demand for high capacity ram modules is outstripping supplies and Apple wants to conserve what it has for a MBP 14/16' launch ?

View on HN

They are configurable to 16GB. The Air can drive a 6K external monitor already at 60hz (in addition to the built in display), and by now multiple benchmarks have shown that performance is basically the same for 8 vs 16GB on the majority of workloads, except if you’re rendering multiple 4K video streams at once.

While this is true for the benchmarks, the UX experience may not be the same between an 8GB and a 16GB depending on your use case.

My use case: Mail, Calendar, Messages, Signal, Safari running at all times. Safari running an adblocker and with 1-3 tabs open. Firefox open as needed, adblocker, no more than one tab. Lightroom as desired.

8GB MacBook Air: slowdowns when typing. Slowdowns when switching apps. Returned.

16 GB MacBook Air: zero slowdowns, snappier than my old i9 MacBook Pro 16.

Could I have adjusted how I used my Mac and gotten a better UX? Probably, but I have been working that way for 5+ years.

That's sad. 8GB should be more than enough for that workload. Sometimes I feel like we are regressing.

I would expect the workload as described to be fine on M1 Macs too (perhaps excepting Lightroom). If I had to guess, something in the background was adding memory pressure. For instance, I’ve seen the Spotlight background processes (mds, mds_stores) take over 16 GB. And those definitely work hard during the first run.

Keep in mind the new M1 macs have pretty decent CPUs (wins handily over the Intel I9 on several benchmarks) and a quite fast SSD.

I believe it's sustains around 5GB/sec to the SSD and I've seen a fair amount of hand waving about custom hardware support for compression/decompression and some OSX magic for compressed swapping.

So 5-10 years ago you tended to have spinnings disks, or SSDs connected over SATA (a bandwidth bottleneck), and SSDs not designed for nearly the IOPs available today.

So while swapping could be really annoying 5-10 years ago, it's not necessarily so today. Switching tabs or apps is not necessarily going to be annoying if some swapping happens.

Numerous reviews of things that usually required a ton of ram (like editing multiple streams of high resolution video) have shown that 16GB ram M1s do quite well compared to previous generation machines with more ram.

With all that said, I'm anxious to see future apple products with more ram and M2/M1x or whatever they call the follow on chip.

The new iMacs are not 8 GB RAM max. They can be configured with 16 GB

Reply on news.ycombinator.com