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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

The 24GB unified memory is a really nice upgrade (the M1 MBA has 8GB upgradeable to 16GB). The CPU/GPU upgrades are predictable and wlecome but the memory is huge.

A lot of development isn't CPU bound but is memory bound or at least can really benefit from more memory. This upgrade makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads.

I have a MBP (Intel) but it's expensive. Getting a viable machine for $1200 would be great. You feel less bad about losing it or breaking it or upgrading it more often.

Really happy to see this.

As an aside, having 8GB of unified memory even as an option in 2022 is a joke. It should just be 16Gb minimum.

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For web dev the base model (8GB RAM) MacBook Air M1 is a viable dev machine - makes the maxed out i7 MacBook Pro I had from work feel sluggish in comparison.

It’s viable but you’ll spend a lot of time with memory compression/swap working hard. Not a great experience IMO.

Looking forward to upgrading from the 8GB air to a 24GB air now.

why does web development require so much memory and computing power?

Running a more or less complete stack of the backend can be a lot of containers.

I want to make fun of javascript here

Docker

Not Docker, webpack. Your run-of-the-mill webpack dev server will happily gulp gigabytes of RAM, and pray that your frontend dev stack only runs one of them. Your IDE will probably use a few more gigabytes on top of that for static analysis and autocompletion, and that's how you need at least 8-10GB to run develop your average mid-size web app without swapping.

My webpack config for a fairly large app run under a single GB, and performance on my m1 pro machine is so good that I have it permanently running the background. Maybe you need to optimise your config?

How about the rest of the app? Database servers, other servers, more servers, other services, etc all running in docker.

Whether they run in docker or not has very little impact on the memory usage, especially on Linux where the overhead is tiny. In VMs, YMMV.

not docker, but the linux virtual machine that docker on mac has to use because mac os has no other way to run containers (which would mean running linux binaries anyway).

on linux you would have pretty much no overhead from running software in containers.

You need 8GB just to run "modern" web applications, let alone develop them.

Tell me you haven’t used an M1 device without telling me.

People getting their hands on 8GB M1 MacBook Airs in the early days were saying the memory management and performance were making it snappier than the 16GB Intel MacBooks.

I made a mistake of purchasing a 8GB M1 MacBook Pro. It was painful to work with. For casual stuff it worked just fine, but as soon as I ran a Docker image (with 2GB memory limit), had Slack and few other light apps open, some tabs in Safari it started to become slow. Painfully slow. The spinning beach ball was a very frequent sight to me. My RAM usage was often in the red zone and I had to kill applications constantly. When I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM all of these issues went away.

Docker on Mac is a pretty terrible experience in general in my experience. Better to run things natively if you can.

Docker on Mac (and Windows) is a full-blown VM. The containers assume Linux, so they are getting it -- inside that VM.

That also brings issue with networking. Sure, if you are using the bridged (in Docker's parlance) networks, you won't notice. If you need to use host/ipvlan/macvlan, you will.

VMs are much more memory intensive than other workloads because they wire a lot of memory and/or just access it constantly, which defeats pretty much every optimization you could conceivably do to hide it.

And then shortly thereafter they were saying that their SSDs were getting _hammered_ with swap. Very fast swap, but constant R/W on those devices.

I have M1 with 8GB, it can't handle basic node.js/react app. I have to force kill node and start again every few hours. This with just browsers and apple music playing.

You must have some kind of memory leak in that app. Node uses ~200MB at startup, and is limited to 4GB unless you explicitly increase it with a flag.

Because ppl use Docker, even when it's not really that necessary... I'm using Nix for the past few years and it has obviated the need for Docker. I have simple shell.nix files, which are activated via direnv and that's it; 0 runtime overhead, no need to install various java/node/python/ruby version managers.

What actually feasts on memory is the various chat apps and project management and knowledge-base management software, in-browser email clients, github pages, JetBrains IDEs.

You should keep these closed, whenever u can and then 8GB is enough comfortably. You will still receive Slack notifications on your phone, then u can fire up Slack to reply or have a discussion. Same with Notion or Logseq. You don't need to have a gmail tab open all the time either. The built-in Mail.app might just be enough for you too, which might eat slightly less memory. You can use Sublime Text or Emacs for editing, instead of VS Code or WebStorm. Install a browser-tab suspender extension. Download technical docs and read them via Dash (or whatever open-source equivalent it has). Have you looked into how much memory does a github.com page eats?

How is nix with M1 mac?

It’s viable but you’ll spend a lot of time with memory compression/swap working hard. Not a great experience IMO.

It's more complicated than that; if you look at the reviews and tests 8GB M1 machines, you'll see there were no issues like the ones you're mentioning.

The pipeline between the unified RAM and the SSD is so fast, it's essentially a L3 cache as apposed to swap as in the way we traditionally think about it.

That certainly hasn't been my experience on my M1 Max MBP. When it swaps, I can immediately tell.

In my experience this is just not true. Unless you are doing multiple vms and some wierd stuff. Base Macbook Air is wonderful. It is faster than my 32gig desktop xeon workstation desktop from 5 years ago.

I also think there is big argument for devs to be developing webaps on consumer gear. How else you can spot the issues with your apps. And tbh if your macbook air has problems running your webapp... well. Good luck.

Made a point not to install Docker on this machine. Honestly loved it when I first tried it.

Usually have like 20-25 tabs open in safari, a VS Code instance (sometimes two), a Nextjs app + express backend running against a local Postgres. This is always in the yellow memory pressure range for me.

If I close the browser or just stick with a few tabs it’s all good, but when each tab can suck 100s of MB it quickly adds up. It’s a workflow my 2014 MBP with 16GB still handles though so I don’t feel like my expectations are too high.

I have a MBA 16GB and everything is fine until I use Docker. It's under constant memory pressure and I was looking into getting a 32/64GB Macbook Pro 14 M1 Pro max. But really dreaded the additional weight/size of the laptop + 96W power brick which is an additional of ~2 lb

I needed more RAM to run SQL in a VM that I didn't expect I would need.

If you can guarantee you won't need more, sure it's plenty viable. If you can't make that guarantee, you need to remember there is no upgrade path. You will be selling the machine and buying a new one.

It absolutely isn't. I initially bought an M1 with 8GB, and it would constantly crawl to a halt. Unfortunately I was past my return window so had to sell it at a loss to buy another 16GB.

I have the M1 air with 8GB and it's unusable with pycharm on an external 4K display.

Should be better when this land (next version) https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-745

(switch rendering API in JRE used by Intellj/Pycharm to Metal for rendering)

I've been following that ticket for yeeears. Is it actually shipping in the next release?

Should be! https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/intellij-idea-2022-2...

Because you are most likely running the Intel version, not the Apple Silicon one! Check it in the Activity Monitor. There should be a "Kind" column on the CPU or Memory tabs. If not, you can turn on that column via a right click on the headers.

I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2 EAP (Ultimate Edition) Build #IU-222.2680.4, built on May 25, 2022 Runtime version: 17.0.3+7-b463.3 aarch64 VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o.

and it's freaking buttery smooth. notice the "aarch64" part!

> makes the MBA an entirely viable dev machine for many workloads.

So this, like the M1 supports only ONE external display.. so as long as you live the lopsided big-small life, sure.

I really do not understand this. The 14" Macbook Pro (M1 Max) does support up to three external displays. What was the problem with these new Macbooks to not support at least two displays..

The M1 Pro/Max have multiple GPUs, one in each CPU cluster.

Whatever wizard at Apple came up with "the number of monitors" as a distinguishing difference between price levels should get a pretty big raise.

It's perfect segmentation, most people don't care, and those that do will pay.

The Touchbar in the 13" MBP counts as a display. So the Pro already runs 2 displays and can add a third. The same GPU+CPU is in the MBA which only runs 1 + 1 external display. It't not a limitation of GPU or whatever they want you to believe. This is pure market segmentation.

Does it? The touch bar is something like 2170x60px. That's a tiny fraction of the processing power and data bandwidth compared to an actual screen. In terms of raw pixel count, it's only about 2x as many pixels as my old Commodore 64 would push every frame. Each of those pixels is a lot deeper but it's still probably pretty much a rounding error compared to how much is being dealt with for the internal screen, never mind an external one.

(Hell, is the central GPU even running the touchbar, or is there a specialized display circuit just for it?)

That said, my reaction to this whole thread is pretty much "I guess multiple external monitors is a reason to upsell you to a Pro machine" so we agree on that point :)

If the Touch Bar could refresh at 60 hz or something, maybe it's a display.

But if it (as it actually is I suspect) a USB connected thing that refreshes very slowly, it's not a display at all.

And the MacBook Air can take a USB "monitor" for whatever that's worth.

It seems to refresh fast enough to run Doom on it. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/11/21/13697058/...

Framerate's hard to determine from a youtube video of someone pointing a camera at it, single-stepping has some things seeming to move at the same framerate as the camera but redrawing the whole screen as the player moves around looks more like 1/3 of the camera's framerate to me.

True, but the "can run Doom" framerate could be 1 per minute. It obviously can update decently fast, but whether it's a "display" is arguable.

It looks to be at worst 10fps to my eyes. Which is also where animation really starts to shift from “moving drawings” to “fast slideshow” in my experience. So right on the border.

Isn't it just based on amount of pixels needing to be pushed through? So if it can support a 6K external, it should be able to support multiple monitors as long as combined resolution doesn't exceed 6k?

M1 Mac Mini does natively support up to two external monitors – one via the HDMI port and a second via USB-C.

Maybe multi-monitor is considered a pro feature?

M1 Mac Mini does natively support up to two external monitors – one via the HDMI port and a second via USB-C.

Yeah, they seem to treat their desktop machine differently.

Nope, just as the sibling wrote: with that chip, they have two outputs total to play with, and on laptops one of them is wired to the internal display.

That because it doesn’t have an internal display… this has to displays in total as well.

I'm pretty sure Apple has the technical expertise to "turn off" internal display on clamshell mode and allow two external displays (that's my usual setup) but somehow they don't want to do that.

>So this, like the M1 supports only ONE external display.. so as long as you live the lopsided big-small life, sure.

Oh no, you're breaking my heart. Is there no adapter you can buy that splits that 6k thunderbolt bandwidth into two smaller external displays? Okay I just googled, and it looks like there are third party DisplayLink which sort of maybe work, but are not officially supported? But people SEEM to have dual 4k monitors working?

DisplayLink is an actual USB graphics card. You also won't get any acceleration as far as I know, all you have is a dumb framebuffer there.

I’m using a Dell D6000 hub with two 4K screens using display link and one iMac 5K with a luna dongle. So 4 screens in total with the MacBook Pro M1 with 8gb and all screens at 60hz. Everything is fluid with a web stack (node, angular and tools like Vscode, DB, slack etc). The only thing that puts it on its knees is when I share a screen with some apps. The buffers might not be done the right way. Otherwise it works surprisingly well !

This is true, but that one display can be a 49" 5120x1440 ultra wide and it will drive that with no problems.

Running Macbook Air M1 with 16 GB of RAM and never had performance issues running multiple Electron instances, simulators, compilers, browsers and what not. Changed to Macbook Air after my 3 times as expensive Macbook Pro 16" (8 core Intel) was stolen and never missed it for a second. Doesn't seem like there is a compelling reason to upgrade to Macbook Air M2.

On the contrary, I was planning to get an almost maxed out M1 Pro, and now I'll buy an almost maxed out M2 Pro (when 16" comes out), because the things I do need extensive processing power and every bit of performance counts.

If I can not have a big desktop system and just use my daily laptop for developing these hard, CPU bound simulation tasks; I'll be a happy camper.

So, horses for courses.

The macbook air with 24gb memory and 512gb ssd is $1800, not $1200. Another $100 if you want the extra GPU cores.

I'm using 256GB machines for Clojure development in IntelliJ since 2017 and I never run out of disk space. I have 36GB of photos and 10GB of iPhone backups on iCloud Drive though.

The trick is not to mix your personal stuff, like movies, photos and music with your work stuff. Also make sure you regularly clean up the older versions of the software you use, including Docker layer caches, brew / nix packages, JetBrains IDEs, browser caches, etc. If you are not doing audio/video work, then removing iMovie and GarageBand frees up 4.5GB. Similarly Keynote/Numbers/Pages 2GB.

The RAM being on-die, the 8 gig option is probably a result of binning and marketing what makes sense with yield rates.

It’s on-package not on-die. The RAM capacity isn’t related to the binning of the M2 die.

for the person who's looking for a machine to handle emails, facebook, netflix, and maybe a bit of document editing, 8GB is totally fine. and even if that extra ram was free, it still has a cost in battery life. 8GB of ram is the right choice for a lot of people buying a macbook air.

> a machine to handle emails, facebook, netflix, and maybe a bit of document editing, 8GB is totally fine

for that kind of usage a $750 acer/asus laptop would probably be good too, however.

If you're OK with 30 minute battery life and your CPU fan running at max decibels when trying to open a single email...

For 1/3 of the price? Sure!

$750/$999 is closer to 3/4, not 1/3. A little bit of diligence and patience could get you one on sale for $900 or $800.

Strawman. Most mid-range ($700-1200) PC laptops are just fine nowadays.

Ah yes, every laptop I've owned over the last 20 years is a "strawman".

It would, but people like macbooks and apple likes their money

8GB is less than phones are starting to be.

I have a mini with 8gb and its great. I run logic, intellij, node and it doesn't flinch. For work I would want more but for personal stuff, 8gb has been fine.

the 24GB are for the MBP

For Air too: https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/

> Configurable to: 16GB or 24GB

Store is updated too, 16GB upgrade is 200$ and 24GB is 400$.

400 USD for a 16GB upgrade is daylight street robbery. The power of brands.

Actually, when you consider how many banks of memory it would take to obtain 100GB/s, it's a bargain. Desktop DDR5-4800 tops out at 38.4 GB/s, so you would need three, desktop DDR5 memory sticks to get that - but it would not even matter because a 12th Gen desktop Intel Core i9 can't handle more than 75GB/s at once. Now, DDR5 is falling in price, but low-power laptop grade DDR5 is still quite a specialized part, let alone with such bandwidth potential.

In a nutshell, not all RAM is created equal.

Apple charges $400 for 32 GB when you upgrade the memory in computers with M1 Max. That used to be a decent price, at least before DDR5 prices started falling. The M2 memory upgrade is twice as expensive.

Edit: 16 -> 32 GB with M1 Pro is $400. 32 -> 64 GB with M1 Max is also $400. 64 -> 128 GB with M1 Ultra is $800. Memory upgrades for the high-end Macs are surprisingly cost-effective.

This is not true. The M1 Max machines start with 16GB of RAM, upgradable to 32GB, so you are adding 16GB more for $400. The new M2 machine starts with 8GB of RAM, upgradable to 24GB for $400. They are both adding 16GB for $400 or 8GB for $200 if you check, so the cost of upgrades is exactly the same.

For slow-ass DIMM memory, sure. But we're talking on-die integrated memory that's leagues ahead of any PC memory in performance.

Its on package not die

It's actually in-package, not on-die. It's still insanely fast, though.

Kind of ridiculous when you can get 64GB of laptop RAM for less than $400 easily. I still don't get why the M-series chips have such ridiculously low memory ceilings.

It’s DDR5 on-die ram. The M1 ultra is essentially 4 M1s with an on-die messaging fabric and separate ram for each compute “node”, iirc.

Which is the same per GB price that I paid 10 years ago to upgrade my 2012 MacBook Air from 4 to 8 GB, which cost $100.

$400 should buy 128gb, not 16gb.

I doubt Apple will allow you to configure up to 24GB on a MBA though - they’d likely want to reserve that to the MBP which has active cooling and can sustain peak performance.

Edit: as comments pointed out, I’m wrong - thanks for the corrections.

That is one of the current options for the new MBA announced today.

You can indeed configure the MBA with 24 GB. It's a $400 upgrade.

You can but it costs +$400 to go from 8gb to 24gb.

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