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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Things may be great on the high end of Apple's M1/M2 laptops given they actually have enough ram for simple tasks. But those are also insanely expensive. At the low end Apple is actively ripping off users providing computers which can't even edit photos.

My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that the Apple M1 w/8GB uses ~4GB of that just to run the OS and if you happen to install adobe creative cloud there goes another 2GB and if you use some other "darkroom-alike" program to open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing.

Apple M1 8GB computers, stuffing the cache with their rosetta translation and lack of native software, cannot even edit photos. They're only good for surfing the web and sending email. Apple selling these as actual functioning general purpose laptops is a fraud.

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This is kind of a crazy story to me, and likely pointing to other issues. The "4GB just to run the OS" is probably just macOS preemptively caching... and all Macs use swap extensively so using e.g. 10GB of memory actively is totally fine. I've run out of memory before, but only with serious usage (100s of tabs, VSCode, a 100 MB+ pdf open, etc), and even then there was no actual crashes, I was told that I was using too much memory and suggested some programs to close. What was the "darkroom-alike" program?

Sounds a lot like Lightroom. Last time I used it (on Windows) it was a couple of years ago and while it was incredibly convenient for editing photos quickly, it was massively unoptimized. Drop a couple of pins and Lightroom starts hogging cycles and memory. I wouldn't even joke about running it with 8GB RAM let alone 4.

All that aside, it's borderline criminal any new computer is being sold with 8GB RAM. This is 2023 for crying out loud. Do you want a 56K modem to go along with your miniscule amount of memory?

To be fair I have a work-provided MacBook Pro (Intel to be fair) with 8GB of RAM and it's borderline unusable.

If I didn't have experience with higher-specced Macs in the past the experience would be enough to make me swear off ever using Macs again.

Sounds like you have Activity Monitor open constantly. Personally I wouldn't worry so much about RAM usage and instead let the computer do it's thing. I have done intense tests with my 8GB and it handled them just fine (compiling linux while having dozens of tabs open + recording screen + UTM VM, etc.).

The only reason I got a Mac for the first time is because the 8GB had good value. I would never buy the higher-end Macs because spending that much money on a fragile thing that cannot be upgraded is ridiculous to me.

Interesting. I have one of those computers with 8gb and have not had problems with Lightroom, Photoshop, or Autodesk fusion360. I'm not saying that there are no issues, but the m1s in my experience seem to need less RAM to do the same things.

... I think your dad got a funky laptop.

I've been on an 8GB M1 for two years, running Adobe CC the entire time. I've edited absolutely massive photos - Gigabyte TIFFs, batch processing, etc - and never had any crashes.

In fact I've done the above while playing HD video from YouTube with 40 tabs open and not experienced so much as a hiccup.

Or they’re using a pirated version of Creative Cloud from before 2020?

To me this sounds like issues on the Adobe side. I worked for 6 months on an M1 iMac with 8GB ram - it ran Xcode, iOS Sim, figma, slack, safari, terminal, calendar and zoom simultaneously for work on a large iOS app with zero issues. I used it because it was faster than using my i9 MBP 16” with 32GB of RAM - the MBP would be blasting its fans constantly with the same workload.

Now I’m on an M2 Air and I don’t see myself needing to upgrade in the next 2-3 years.

> Apple M1 8GB computers, stuffing the cache with their rosetta translation and lack of native software

This is not how this works

I can’t speak to Adobe’s problems but the M1 8GB has been shockingly fast in my experience, and has no issue at all with image editing.

Surely such an issue would have been solved with the invention of virtual memory in… the 50s?

Indeed, and said feature allowed me to open and edit 70MB photoshop files on a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM back in the late 90's. Albeit pretty slowly.

Yes. I feel that the tech media has done a terrible disservice by recommending the 8GB Apple M1 laptops. I am not sure what it is about that architecture but they are completely unusable under load in a way that's not true of my 2015 i5 laptop which also has 8GB of RAM (which is slow all the time, but not as bad at the worst times as the M1 was).

I believe that the M1 architecture is such that you don't actually need as much RAM as an older model computer. It is a system on a chip so moving data between RAM and storage is so fast that it can swap between the two without much performance degradation.

> It is a system on a chip so moving data between RAM and storage is so fast that it can swap between the two without much performance degradation.

How much faster? I’m not sure what your specific point of comparison is.

Sure, the SoC provides many advantages, many due to Apple’s UMA (Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture) but the system is still limited by storage speed and latency.

But if we’re talking about the relative performance difference between solid state memory (i.e. SSDs, if that is the correct technical term here) and UMA RAM, I’d expect* a significant difference, perhaps (1) an order of magnitude in terms of latency and (2) 2X to 5X in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention that excessive SSD writes would be unwise.

Now I will admit, if there are large parts of the operating system that don’t need to linger / lurk / creep around in RAM, they could be swapped out. And they might even be kept on SSD and not have to be rewritten at all except for patches and upgrades.

* This is a guess based on ‘usual’ data-locality rules of thumb, hopefully allowing for Apple architecture somewhat. I’m happy to be educated / corrected.

> At the low end Apple is actively ripping off users providing computers which can't even edit photos.

> open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing

Have an M1 laptop with Photoshop and Lightroom and need to edit 16-bit film-scans from a 6x12 that are more than a GIGABYTE each and have had zero issues.

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