Almost 10 years ago we purchased a MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for approx 2K UK pounds. It's really surprising and disappointing that a decade later these same specs essentially cost the same!
Even the RAM and SSD stats you cite are apples and oranges - both have gotten dramatically faster in the last decade.
Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
> What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all!
The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.
Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
The idea that Mx swapping to NVME is essentially no-op from performance perspective is patently wrong.
NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
Plenty of people will be more than happy with 8GB of RAM on an M1. I had a base model M1 Mac Mini and it worked great even for gaming.
Obviously if you're running VMs or editing video or doing any other memory intense workload you're going to need more memory. But for anyone who doesn't need an absurd (>16gb) amount of memory (college students, many programmers, those who use computers just for web browsing and Netflix), 8GB or 16GB will feel snappy.
There's no need for personal attacks.
> as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
Yes, probably. Two points though:
1. My comment was that _if_ SSD performance was comparable to RAM, there would be no need for the latter.
2. I have very rarely swapped on my 16Gb M1 Air, and when I did I only noticed later when looking back at graphs. I'm sure there was a performance hit but I never felt it.
> Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
I do plenty of actual, professional use on my 16Gb M1 Air. Right now I have 3 VS Code windows open compiling Go code, running acceptance tests and whatnot. I also have Mail, Safari (with tens of tabs) and Firefox (with >100 tabs) open. A few minutes ago I also had Slack open on it. I regularly start iTerm to do terminal tasks.
You must have an Intel machine. I had a powerful fully specced 32Gb i9 16" MBP. This cheap and humble 16Gb passively cooled M1 blows it right out of the water in every single aspect. It's even better at running Intel Docker images!
Well, I use my M1 (16 GB) for heavy video editing and music sessions, plus professional programming, with IDEA, VMs, and so on. And I don't seem to ever need even close to 16GB, much less "way north", or even saw it be slow.
>As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
Maybe it's time to come over to M1 and 12.4?
This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use.
Citrix will still need to buffer the same (compressed?) 4K worth of pixels and Edge will still to load up the full DOM, cache all the sources, stand up a sandbox with javascript virtual machine etc.
There's nothing magical there... a single frame of 16 bit 8K RAW will allocate the exactly same amount of heap on M1, M2, Intel or anything else for that matter.
I'm now playing a 4K movie on Plex. It's using a little over 1Gb RAM for that. After I started it, my computer swapped ~250Mb to the SSD. Firefox is still snappy. Safari is still running normally. VS Code is still doing its thing. I even started a `brew update` on iTerm, and I have the App Store installing a couple apps. Mail still runs fine, sends and receives, and I can switch between mail accounts and messages.
So, you may be technically right about the memory usage and the need for swapping. What you're missing is the fact that it doesn't hurt the user experience.
This is not marketing or bamboozlement. This is me on the same laptop I'm typing this answer.
You should probably do a deep inspection of your beliefs and stop denying the actual, practical experience of many people who are responding to you with real world experience.
Oh, but it does when it has a hardware memory compression engine. The very different GPU design also means it can use less (or more) memory in different situations.
Even more so for other pipelines, involving CPU+GPU.
MacOS also has memory compression, assisted by the CPU.
And there are other ways an OS can use to keep memory usage lower given a different CPU architecture...
No. Dual channel DDR3 went up to about 18 GB/s read and 14 GB/s write. [1]
The latest NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD are about 13 GB/s read and 12 GB/s write. [2]
Apple SSD are about half that now, but most DDR3 users didn't have highest clocked dual channel RAM either. So roughly a factor of 2 or so at best, about a 50x difference compared to two orders of magnitude :-)
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/2792/5
[2] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/86395/apacer-is-first-with-pc...
The M1/M2 apple hardware specifically seems to be around an order of magnitude from what I've seen (ddr4x 60-70gb/sec vs 7gb/sec for the NVME or thereabouts).
The obvious observation here is that the fab yields for high memory apple silicone must not be all that great, which is why they're mostly shipping 8 and 16gb versions.
You were wrong, it's ok...welcome to the SSD future :-)
Never mind comparing bleeding edge NVMe with (by now) decade-old DDR3, while the current bleeding edge DDR5 is now trickling out at 100GB/s+ pretty easily.
Never mind DDR memory latencies of ~50ns, vs NVMe at 50uS+.
Just because the user doesn't notice GUI problems doesn't mean it's not going to be a catastrophic bottleneck in any memory-intensive application.
I'm sitting here on an M1 MacBook Pro with 64GB of memory. I'm running Chrome with a few dozen tabs open, Slack, VS Code, and Terminal. Apparently 32GB of memory is being "used".
Do you believe I would experience noticeable performance loss if I was running 16GB of memory?
Over 22GB of that is cache. I’m sure some of that is useful but the overwhelming majority of it is just being used because the memory is freely available so why not? If it improves performance it’s not in anything I’ve ever managed to notice between my 16GB work machine and 64GB personal one (which are used for largely similar tasks, though I’d say the work one is a bit more heavily stressed).
Sure some cleanroom laboratory benchmark will say the 64GB version is faster. And for some workloads I’m sure it’s a bigger deal. But a human just isn’t going to perceive much practical benefit from a full Chrome restart being 5% faster or whatever.
Except I have two M1 MacBook Pros (one 16GB, one 64GB). I frankly don't notice the difference between the two on any workload. This involves compiling multiple projects, running multiple docker containers locally in virtual machines, running VS Code, Slack, Chrome, and other productivity tools.
These machines frankly feel like alien fucking technology and I don't say that lightly. I'm used to year-over-year improvements being almost unnoticeable. These machines feel like I've jumped ten or more years forward in performance and responsiveness. And they do so while barely generating heat. My previous Intel MBP would make my home office hot just by being in a Zoom call. When I first got my M1 MBP, I left it running all night performing a SIMD-heavy pure math workload pegging every core at 100%. Not only was it faster, but the room wasn't even perceptibly warmer than ambient.
I have a gaming PC next to my work area. Zen 9 3950X, GeForce 3080, 64GB of DDR-4000 RAM, and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The fans go blazing and I start sweating just booting Windows. And unless I'm doing something in VR, it performs comparably to the MacBook Pro. I barely turn the damn thing on these days.
Alien technology.
It's really impressive what Apple has managed to do with the M1 and M2 chips. If an Apple M chip ever offers comparable performance on AAA games, I'll get rid of my desktop computer.
I doubt that AAA game devs would develop for the MacOS/Metal platform anytime soon.
I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.
I never said it was. I said _if_ it was, we wouldn't need RAM.
If I go to their store website it shows me only two options:
- 8 core, 8 core gpu, 8gb, 256
- 8 core, 10 core gpu, 8gb, 512
No indication whatsoever that this 8gb is not fixed. Nor is the storage fixed. But the only way to find out is to try and buy it, at which point I can just turn the first model into the second or something else entirely. Also, none of the presented options is anywhere close in price to the top spec model.
I thought apple was supposed to be good at UX?
> how would you know that ram is confugurable?
2 options:
- Scroll down a little, and under "Gemeinsamer Arbeitsspeicher" it says:
"Der M2 hat einen schnelleren Arbeitsspeicher als der M1, mit 50 Prozent mehr Speicherbandbreite. Er kann mit bis zu 24 GB konfiguriert werden – 8 GB mehr als beim M1 – für flüssigeres Multitasking und einfaches Arbeiten mit großen Dateien."
- Click on the "Wählen" button under the chosen model. It's very obvious in the next screen that you can configure RAM.
That is the whole point and I said that already...
If you look through this thread you see quite a few peopke thinking you can only get 8gb of ram because the only two models shown feature 8gb and no text next to that indicating otherwise. Only if you think that apple might be lying, you go to the next page and see that they offer more than 8.
> Scroll down a little, and...
No, scroll down a lot and then it is hidden in the fluff text. Great, doesn't change that it is missing in the central place people actually look at.
All the "well technically you can find out by jumping through these hoops" does not change that this is bad UX.
That's just some handwaving complain that doesn't mean much.
>What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
Try
- opening 2 Linux/Windows VMs on that 2012 laptop
- or opening a big Logic project with 100 tracks, convolution reverbs, high end AU/VSTs, and so on
- or opening and editing several 8K, ney, 4K video streams, and slap some VFX nodes on them...
- or running a programming IDE like Idea
- or compiling a large C++ codebase
... and several other tasks, and compare running the same on the 2022 machine.
Since "software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years" it should be comparable, right?
I am aware that macOS is better than Linux with low memory conditions but I can’t imagine this, granted I have an older (2020) MacBook Pro, but I have ran out of ram and I specifically opted for the 32G one.
As in: I got the infamous “your system is low on memory” dialog.
All it took was teams, slack, chrome, MS word, docker (vm with default config) and 2 1G VMs invirtualbox
My point is rather, "16GB in 2012, 16GB in 2022, no difference". And I say: try doing any of those things on your 2012 machine and a 16GB M1, and you'll immediately see the difference.
Unless you want to run VMs. Then more RAM is generally more better.
Anything more than that and it chokes. Too many tabs, it chokes. Too many software updates, woo boy does she choke. That poor machine!
That's not to forget the improvements in network speeds, the screen, the speakers, the battery life, the webcam, etc.
If I did have endless money, or my regular work was heavily IO bound, then it wouldn't change anything, except I'd be much more willing to ignore how much it costs.
- the processor has several times more transistors and cores,
- plus several special purposes devices for encoding video, AI tasks, and so on
- the video performance is several times faster
- the battery lasts 4 times as much,
- the RAM is several times faster,
- the SSD is 4-5x faster,
- the display has twice the resolution and extremelly improved brightness and color rendition...
and so on
So dissapointing /s
With inflation, £2000 in 2012 is equal to about £2516 today. I configured an M2 MacBook Air with these specs for £1750 today, so it actually costs less in real terms.
Edit: A 13" MacBook Pro with the same specs is also £1750
Though if you ignore the specs, the M2 air (for 1500 so you get the same storage space), is probably equivalent – 8GB unified RAM and fast SSD seems equivalent to 16GB ram from decade ago.
Together with the improved software capabilities, I think the overall "experience" is "better" and you get more bang for buck.
Historically, if you compare pre-M1 Macs to equivalent PCs, they were very price competitive. There are no equivalents to Apple Silicon Macs.