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In my wife's case, the 16GB macs don't even have enough memory to drive a 4K display. Her mac goes crazy, overheats, fan at 100%, everything slows to molasses, piece of junk. And it's x86.

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Yes, well known, same here on an mbp-16" i9.

For whatever reason the m1 mac's are crazy different. They feel like they have more ram (maybe a faster NVME for swap?), they run the fan crazy less, some don't even have fans (the mac book air). I've heard it speculated they use hardware assist for compression for swap. In any case don't assume that a 16GB M1 will feel like a 16GB x86-64.

The x86 macs are noticeably inferior in a lot of ways to the new Apple Silicon macs. I have both. That is as much how macOS runs on x86 versus the M1 as it is the underlying silicon. There has long been an impedance mismatch between what Intel is optimizing for and what Apple wants their silicon to be optimized for, and I think the M1 is an expression of that gap. There are things that Intel is still better at, but Apple largely doesn't care about those things.

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