Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now. Y'all, this prophecy is entirely self-fulfilling. Please stop.
Software developers often have to run several emulators (e.g. Docker Desktop, Android, and iOS emulators), hundreds of Chrome tabs, compilers, heavy 'ol IDEs, Microsoft freakin' Teams, and a bunch of other stuff concurrently. 16 GB is just enough for many workloads, but it's easy to see use cases in which would exceed that.
(Also, I doubt you need hundreds of chrome tabs + heavy IDEs, a couple of tabs + <insert lightweight editor of choice> works just fine)
Yes, it would be possible to curate my tabs better, but I often have quite a few things on the boil at any one time and taking time out to carefully prune my tabs holds up delivery.
I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain.
It turns out that the heavy IDE is heavy for a reason, it provides useful capabilities! The kind of capabilities one needs as a professional software developer. When one is working on a foreign code base spanning thousands of files, it's genuinely handy to have some tooling to help you find your way around. VS Code tries, but it's generally pretty useless in my experience.
A friend recommended I try such a RAM diet, so I went from 64Gb to a 4Gb laptop. Unlike you, I've found it helped me focus.
So I've kept this laptop as a "productivity" laptop - when I work on a tight deadline, I use it, because there will be 0 risk of context switching :)
However, doing something as basic as loading up a large Java project (like Kafka) in Intellij would cause the the laptop to die a horrible death when it tried to resolve the Maven dependencies.
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/12/how-fast-is-the-ssd-insi...
The M1 Max is a monster, and either of mine easily outperforms any other computer I have ever used, but I don’t think it’s capable of 8GB/s reads or writes to disk.
Why should ? We don't run PC emulators or MacOsX emulators to develop SW. Only Android and iOS are not able to function as real OSs.
With root, Android could even make a decent host platform for doing development, but that doesn't obviate the need for emulators and virtualization systems.
What do you do for a living?
Literally Teams is one of them. Well, it is dropping Electron in the future.
- 24 Chrome tabs open with news
- 17 of Firefox
- Waiting for VMWare Workstation to finish an install of the new Fedora 35
- Intellij is compiling a Rust program
- Have Ableton live running in the background listening to a mix of last week
- A presentation on PowerPoint for next week that looks like it would use half the resources of AWS us-west-1
- CLion while trying to see why a C++ example does not compile and Visual Studio Code to cleanup a Cloudformation template....
Offloads the CPU and has the benefit that you have it exported aomewhere in case old plugins vanish, chaos happens etc.
When did people become so helpless? I was offloading interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days it’s to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance. If someone can’t get by in a pinch with vim and a command prompt, then I don’t particularly want them in my crew.
There”s a corollary to that old dictum, “a bad worker blames their tools”, and it’s “a good worker chooses good tools”.
Anyway, I generally work for big corporates that don't give the developers the ability to spin up arbitrary cloud workloads from their laptops.
Not merely because their undisciplined code will be substantially more expensive to run, especially at scale, but also in particular because it’s correlated to being a useless towel in a crisis.
The thing is, I don't think a lot of businesses care about whether the software they create is bloated or not. Performance isn't valued as much as features or functionality. Teams for example makes repeated multi MB REST requests where websockets would probably be much more efficient. Until the business incentives are changed, I don't think we should expect much change (and maybe that does start with the developers).
unfortunately I can't get rid of teams and Intellij at work.
I use Xfce on Linux and 32 GB of RAM are just enough to not encounter problems in my day to day job, imagine those poor folks using something like MacOS or Windows...
At home I have a laptop with 4gb of RAM, it's usable, I use it to watch YouTube videos and as a media player.
On Ubuntu the 4GB of ram are constantly used and the system also uses no-less-than 4gb of swap space (thanks fast SSDs for making my life better)
except for the JVM/electron based apps that I am forced to use, all the Linux native applications are as good as any other system.
Anecdotal, Firefox on Linux is the only incarnation of Firefox I feel comfortable using, I think it's between not great to terrible on other systems. I use WebKit based browser on other OSs.
difference being I can tune the OS to work as I intend and the developer tools are some of the best in their categories, that's not true for the other two.
MacOS is known for being slower and use more RAM on many developers task (docker, for example), but there are things you can only do on a Mac, iOS apps being one, and, honestly, I can't imagine using XCode with maximum 16 GB of RAM for the next few years.
You might develop on MacOS, but then you deploy the artifacts on some Linux box, of course because there is no MacOS server offering, but I wouldn't do it anyway if I had the option.
Windows as a server is not that bad either.
I've worked with all of them in the past 25 years, Linux desktop experience is not as polished as it could be, but for sure it's not slow or bloated in general.
Yes GNOME 40 is not great, GNOME 3 probably killed Linux on desktops, but I don't use it, so...
even Plasma looks super snappy compared to MacOS these days.
Claiming that Apple can double your RAM is a strong claim, that in my experience is not supported by any evidence.
Perhaps the feeling of Apple system being faster comes from the fact that there are only relatively recent Apple machines around and it's rare to see some 8 years old Apple laptop still in use, while my 7 year old laptop with 64gb of RAM costed as much as an M1 Pro but can still do its job relatively well because I can put a lot of things in RAM, reducing the pressure on the rest of IO subsystem (I feel I have to specify that power efficiency is an order of magnitude worse than an M1, if battery life matters to you, Apple is ahead of the competition right now)
But it's no secret that one of the strongest feature of Linux is giving new life to old systems.
I still remember when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to High Sierra and everything became slower, sometimes unusably so.
After 10.6.8 MacOS (best version of the OS I've ever used) has only got worse, in my opinion.
Well back in my day we had to timeshare the punch card machine and our punch cards only had zeros. Ones were too wasteful and anyone who asked for them would have been fed to the lusers.
Also too: Next time people complain about JS, Java, Electron, etc? Remember this.
That reality is part of the problem the parent wrote about...
It is… for development. Which is what software developers do and what they often buy hardware for.
Whether it's too little for the apps that they develop to run on users' machines is a separate question.
Please restrict this to web developers. My decade old ThinkPad x200s with two Core2 Duo cores and 8gb of ram and an SSD can do most things very well, except browsing websites.
Loading a large book in PDF format? no problem.
Opening ten years of email in Claws Mail? sure thing.
Opening the same amount of e-mail in thunderbird? A little sweaty, but why not?
Playing mp3 files over bluetooth? Yeah!
Wanna write a document in libreoffice writer? As long as you're a bit patient.
Chat with other people using Telegram or Hexchat? No problem.
... What? You want to browse the web? F--k you.
Electron is the most glaring example, it essentially ships an entire browser with your app, which we may as well call an OS nowadays. So in the end, if you have 10 electron apps, you have 10 copies of Chrome in memory, in addition to your OS main browser. They are all the same except for a few minor differences. Sure, it solves "DLL hell" but at an extreme cost in efficiency.
I think this is a side effect of the main trend, which is write once, run anywhere. There are a handful of frameworks aiming to do that, and it is difficult to accomplish and rely on native APIs. Also, I’d suggest it’s a trend for economic reasons rather than because people think electron is technically superior to native APIs. The economic reason is that even a medium/large company can just hire a sole developer or two to spin up an electron app that loads an existing web application and it works everywhere and is “good enough.” The alternative is hiring lots of people to build a native app that users only might think is better.
I don’t think most electron examples are because people wanted a technically superior solution to native applications.
For me, the problem is that an Electron app ships with its own browser instead of using the one the system already has.
Another example, mostly in the Linux world, is to use containers with their own subsystems instead of using system libraries. Snap, AppImage and Flatpak do that, especially Snap, which I think is the only one that doesn't support external dependencies.
I understand the appeal, but that's really wasteful.
no, that's not the reason.
Anyway, it's 2021,16gb max for a new laptop in 2021 is factually low.
Laptops had 16GB max more than 10 years ago.
I think it's fair to criticize the specs of one of the most expensive pieces of hardware on the market if they are somewhat underwelming and when even new game consoles have the same amount of RAM, at a fraction of the price, with only one thing to do.
edit: not comparing the performances or the energy efficiency here, but a Dell with a ryzen 5700 and 16gb of RAM (upgradable) costs € 829, an M1 with the same amount of RAM and less storage space costs € 1.659 on Apple website
I think Apple could have done better in this regards
For some reason nobody here brings that up. Considering that AAPL is the most valuable company on the planet, they might just have a good understanding of their market.
AAPL is serving their market well, and then make enough money each year to buy the entire Dell company. You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do, but I don’t think AAPL needs to stuff 64Gb of Ram into everything.
We agree.
Porsche and Apple base offers are overpriced, for what they actually offer.
A 959 pearl white it's one thing, but a Macan?
in this particular case the M1 is not comparable to a Porsche, but more to a luxury hotel that has a very tiny bathroom or a limit of one cup of coffee at breakfast.
When you consciously spend the kind of money a Mac costs, you really expect the best the money can buy.
> You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do
You got it backwards though.
16gb of maximum RAM for a laptop in 2021 doesn't even match the Dell offering...
Imagine if the afore mentioned Porsche had a limiter that let you use only 50% of the accelerating power, unless you buy the more expensive "pro" model. That is basically the same car, only with the limiter removed.
Anyway, nobody said anything on the ability Apple to make money, probably it says more on the people who buy macs than on Apple itself
The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true.
False, Air is NOT the 'best'; that is the Pro, urm Pro-Max or whatever marketing verbiage Apple is spitting out now.
Air is the low-end model, so makes sense to make it 16Gb max (though that config is /hard/ to find retail). Reports say that M1-native code uses less memory, & memory usage is fast & efficient. So safe to say 16Gb with M1 ~= 20Gb Intel. So a 16Gb M1 Air is great /value/ machine, but not 'best'.
1st gen M1 Pro with max 16Gb, that was poor decision making IMHO.
M1 is their first generation Mac SoC. Still using LPDDR4, if you want 32GB, you will have to wait for M2 MacBook Air which should have LPDDR5 and allows 32GB. Assuming Apple allow such configuration. Or they may decide to save cost and stick with LPDDR4.
M1 Pro and Max has wider memory bus and controller with LPDDR5.
You can built a Laptop with 128GB if you wanted to, just at the expense of Battery Life.
If we dont have a borderline fair comparison with products, why dont we compare to a Chromebook? I think most if not all people should agree the build quality of MacBook Air M1 is better than 99% of Dell's laptop.
I dont want to sound like an Apple apologist but that is just an objective truth. If the argument is about pricing, then Apple isn't a brand sell product on low margin. Consoles are sold at small or even negative margin. They aren't even in the same business model. That is a marketing and pricing strategy question.
And almost no one realise, partly because 99.999% of people inclusive but not limited to HN aren't working in CE or supply chain. The price for DRAM hasn't moved in the past 10 years. And LPDDR memory are actually more expensive per GB.
that's for the 8gb model
and it's € 1.429,00 on the Italian Apple store
> I think most if not all people should agree the build quality of MacBook Air M1 is better than 99% of Dell's laptop
it doesn't actually matter, honestly.
If people need more RAM and don't want to spend a fortune on the pro Apple models, they have to look elsewhere.
An ASUS ROG with 32gb of RAM and a discrete NVidia GPU costs more or less the same of an M1 Air with 16gb (maximum, I wanna stress the concept, that's all you are going to get out of it, forever)
I think the solution is to increase the amount of caching RAM on NVM storage, so the NVM acts more like RAM used to.
So I really don’t think what Apple is doing with regards to RAM is a problem. But they should have a user replaceable NVM slot. Perhaps tiered with a soldered on NVM chip so you can cache some of the data on a low power, low latency NVM.
This is the whole point: devs with 32gb/64gb machines looking at their own app taking 1gb aren't going to realize that for many people this is 25% of the available non-os ram (8g system with 4g free non kernel / other.
Moreover, when you develop for a platform like iOS, you have very limited control on how fat your application will be.
This is becoming more and more false. See Firefox for example.
I think some of this is very smart and fast swapping because I do sometimes notice a tiny hang when I use a window I haven’t touched in a while.
I don’t know if the M1 is the best laptop, but it is the best I have used by a wide margin.
But for reasons RAM and CPU performance have kept stagnated without a lot of changes for around 10 years (until recently with Ryzen 5000, Intel 12th, and Apple M1).
Still I find funny you could buy a 16GB RAM Macbook 13" in 2012 as the top model... and today 16GB is still it's the max capacity of the line. To give a point of reference the 2002 Powerbook the Max RAM capacity was 1GB.
We developers use a desktop operating system and programs with a GUI. That by itself uses at least 1 GB of RAM extra. We have an IDE, like IntelliJ that uses about 3 GB of RAM on my machine, there are web browsers, known memory hogs. There are e-mail clients, video-chat apps and all of the production stuff besides backup too. Some of it is recompiling stuff live e.g. shadow-cljs. There is also Spotify or occasionally a video call or screen recording e.g. using OBS Studio. That uses even more memory temporarily. There is a healthy reserve with 32 GB of RAM to make the experience smooth but 16 GB doesn't cut it anymore. So we use about half of the amount of RAM eBay used on their Sun E10ks in 1999 just for development and that is ok. The RAM costs perhaps 100 € now. The 50 € difference really doesn't cut it, if I am having hangs because of swap and the GCs doing their best everywhere.
If I’m presenting some code, I’d prefer to do it in a familiar environment (i.e. my IDE of choice) — so that I don't get lost, so that I know the keyboard shortcuts, and don’t add more stress and fumbling to the presentation. Also, everyone on my team uses IntelliJ IDEA, so presenting with Code might add more confusion or might make it impossible to show IDEA-specific stuff (eg. run configurations or the debugger).
Every new tool changes your workflow and is a distraction that doesn't benefit the customer or our work-life balance anything. Some people on our team run Windows, because they feel at home there. I am not sure you can do a quick 'choco install spotifyd' and be done with it.
SSDs are fast, but switching windows is faster. People just forget, what a hassle it is to wait 5 seconds here, and 5 seconds there. We are used to hot-code reloading and basically instantaneous response like more than 95% of the time when developing. That is the power of Clojure/ ClojureScript. It eats a bit more RAM in development. We can live with that as long as the RAM fits in a normal laptop and doesn't cost a fortune. We save much, much more by not running on Heroku/ AWS. :-)
Every professor at uni: "Ten days is plenty of time to complete this project."
I’m not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with a $199 device. I’m interested in selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device.
That’s the guy I’m going to listen to.
I love the way you're thinking (and presenting it)
> That’s the guy I’m going to listen to.
You and me both!
Saving a few dollars on RAM is penny wise, pound foolish.