M2 Pro Mac mini review: Apple’s Goldilocks desktop for semi-professionals | Hacker News Reader

M2 Pro Mac mini review: Apple’s Goldilocks desktop for semi-professionals

arstechnica.com

34 pointsevo_919 comments

I really wish they would stop shipping stuff with only 8gb of ram. With how memory hungry things are this day, 16gb is the least amount of ram most people will find usable.

Case in point, I have Chrome, with 5 tabs open, slack, dropbox, xcode and terminal and I am using more than 18 gigs of ram. I feel like apple services/apps are probably taking up at least 4-5 gigs of memory.

When I pulled up the M2 Pro Mac Mini, the minimum amount of RAM was 16GB.

I have 3 chrome profiles, all with multiple browsers, docker, slack, vscode, terminals coming out the wazoo, zoom... I'm at 12GB out of 16GB. Wish I had 32.

As it should be for $1300. The M2 (non-Pro) models still ship with 8GB. Kinda sucks when you browse Amazon and see loads of Ryzen mini-PCs shipping with double the RAM and storage (or more) for roughly the same $600 price and they're socketed too so you can add more down the line if need be.

Engineering giveth and Marketing taketh away.

Apple's unified memory couples great bandwidth and efficiency with annoying non-upgradability.

But it's the pricing tiers that get you: cheapest 8GB at $600, 16GB at $800, 24GB at $1000, and then ... 32GB at $1700 (M2 Pro), 64GB at $2500 (Mac Studio.) The upselling trajectory is clear, as is the separation between the Mac mini and Studio.

My daily driver is a 16GB MacBook Pro; I don't think I would be happy using an 8GB Mac mini. But I'm glad that there is a $600 Mac. It's probably great for some users, and it's cheaper than my iPhone.

Tons of PCs still ship with 8GB RAM as well. I don’t know how much it hurts margins to sell 16GB to people who would be happy with 8.

One thing special about Apples hardware is that you can't upgrade the RAM.

Apple's unified memory is great for bandwidth and efficiency and terrible for upgrades.

However, I suspect that a large portion of PCs are used as-is and are replaced rather than upgraded, much like phones or tablets.

It's worth noting that Steve Jobs was originally against RAM and other upgrades for the Macintosh. It was supposed to be an appliance like a toaster, and (most) toasters are non-upgradable. He also didn't want it to have a fan - making it more like a toaster or a MacBook Air.

There's nothing special about the ram for either bandwidth or efficiency.

I hear people say this, but the fact is my workflow “fits” on an 8GB M1 and doesn’t fit on an 8GB Intel machine. By “fits” I mean “is usable enough that I think about my work, not my machine”

So I really don’t care what anyone says, there is definitely something special about Apple Silicon re. RAM usage. Maybe it’s just swapping really fast. Doesn’t matter, it works.

Macs just use standard LPDDR RAM that's nothing special, but also not replaceable

Which was a terrible mistake on both counts. Having a fan installed and the board bumped to 512k were common mods on the original Macintosh. 128k was just not enough for it. Apple ended up adding the fan and RAM upgrades to the classic Mac line.

Yes, but that's a separate issue from whether anyone should be allowed to buy a computer with 8GB in it.

> With how memory hungry things are this day, 16gb is the least amount of ram most people will find usable.

I see people saying this all the time but it doesn't match my experience at all.

I currently have an m1 iMac and an m1 MacBook Air, both with 8gb of RAM, and have never run into a memory related slowdown or issue.

8GB of RAM is not only usable, it provides a great experience that is indistinguishable from the M1 air with 16gb that I used to have.

Obviously as software developers, sometimes we need more for large projects in IDEs, docker, VMs, etc. but the base models of the iMac, MacBook Air, and Mac Mini are not intended for that purpose.

To strengthen this even more - I have an 8GB M1 Air that I use for development when I don’t want to carry my 64GB M1 Max machine somewhere. My usual dev stack is a few Docker containers, PHPStorm and RubyMine (at the same time, don’t ask…), and the usual bunch of tabs.

And… yeah, it’s a bit slower on the 8GB machine, but by no means unusable. It’s hard to tell how much is just perceived lag due to 60hz v. 120hz screen. It’s certainly not enough to make me want a 16GB model for my pseudo-disposable machine.

If I had to go a couple months on just the 8GB machine, I’d survive.

My wife has a 32gb Intel MBP from 2018 and regularly uses 12-16gb just browsing the internet, checking email, playing with her photos and watching TV shows.

Just because the newer stuff has fast SSDs and can page/unpage memory quickly doesn't mean it isn't memory constrained. I actually want to go to an apple store and see what the base OS sits at memory wise.

I just did a reboot with nothing started other than my standard startup apps/services (Creative Cloud helper, Dropbox, 1Password, SnagIt, Rectangle) and my m1 is sitting at 8.02 GB memory used, with NO apps running.

macOS heavily caches basically everything; it’s allergic to unused memory. If there’s space it’ll find something to put there in the off chance it’s useful.

You really have to go off memory pressure, not the naive used/free numbers.

You must not be using any electron-based apps :) j/k

Exactly.

If you do serious 3D VFX work, 64GB is the norm since years.

My whole network of freelancer friends working in that industry have machines with that spec constraint. Or even 128GB if they do effects-heavy stuff, e.g. simulations.

That and Apple's surcharge on RAM upgrades (on those models where it's possible at all) is the main reason all of them are other hardware running mostly Windows (or some Linux).

"Intel and AMD is still faster" but you look at the chart, the dominating metric is "Crypto" which should get a guffaw out of most.

It's completely missing the point if they are testing an Apple for it's orange-ness.

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