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Comment by gumballindie | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth does a macbook (pro nonetheless) have as little ram as a phone?

Only the Air and 13” Pro (which is a glorified Air with a fan) cap at 24 GBs. The 14 and 16” Pro models cap at 96 GB. The 13 inch is a bit of a lame duck product that is likely to be phased out at some point or otherwise be replaced, so while the headline is factually true it is not really indicative of the situation.

I will also say, Apple devices across the board are significantly better at memory management than both Android and Windows. Where on a Windows machine I feel I need 32 GBs, 16 GBs feels adequate on MacOS. And my understanding is the situation is similar between iOS and Android.

>16 GBs feels adequate on MacOS

Ha no, I'm using 9.98Gb of ram with literally just a single tab browser window open in Mojave. You'll be swapping constantly with anything resembling a normal workflow.

It's memory management, not memory minimalism. I'm always hovering about 12 GB out of my 16 GB MBA, but never have any issue opening a project or opening 10–20 tabs (rookie number) and I have a few apps that are always running. I believe that macOS uses the RAM for caching files, so the reported usage is not really tied to the number of apps running. There are memory-heavy workflows, but these are outliers. Even 8 GB would be fine for most of what I do.

Did you just say Mojave? Because I have extensive experience with Mojave and it does not use swap whatsoever. Instead, you have overcommit and memory compression. That application that the OS says uses 10GB of RAM does not actually.

If SWAP is fast enough....does it matter?

It doesn't - that's exactly why people have workstation with a ton of ram. As soon as you have to hop over the pci bus, you're looking at 1/10th of the speed.

I was quite amused hearing how people (probably the same who singed praises) ditched the first gen M1s with 8Gb, because 'not enough memory', merely a year later.

This.

I distinctly remember the reality distortion field that permeated the discussion ("Apple silicone doesn't need as much memory", "MacOS is more efficient than windows" and similar such idiocies) when those things first came out. Whoever Apple retained for this PR sure managed to bamboozle a lot of gullible people.

I don’t think there’s a reality distortion field. I have a 10 year-old MacBook Pro (the very first Retina model) with 8GB of RAM. I often find myself with VSCode, two dozen Chrome tabs, some terminal windows and Adobe Illustrator (2022) running simultaneously. Somehow, it manages to cope with all of that without an issue. Of course, it doesn’t work as fast as new computers, but the UI remains fluid and responsive. I’ve never had a Windows machine offer that kind of practical longevity.

macOS is much more memory efficient than Windows. Not hard to do.

It's not like they ditched them for x86 devices. If people said that 8GB M1s were more capable than their x86 machines, it can be logically consistent with them going for even more power as more M* series chips released.

The first gen went up to 16GB, so anyone buying 8GB was just price-chasing.

> just price-chasing

This is not the problem. You can find comments here how people literally said what 'it were running better than x86 Macs with 16+GBs'.

ADD: and 'nobody needs more than 8GB, because it works so fine'. Just to clarify.

I have one, and it did/does. Those statements were not untrue.

Idk if it swaps fast or what, and I don't care.

'Unified memory' access on M1 is allegedly almost as fast as CPU cache, and I believe the SSDs are extremely close to the SoC as well. Swap might be faster than some computers' actual RAM.

This is the exact kind of PR bamboozlement I was alluding to - literally none of the above is correct:

M1 memory latency is 100ns, which wasn't really competitive with amd/intel at the time (70 something nano). Any SSD read be an order of magnitude slower than reading from ram - something to the tune of 5gb/s version vs 70gb/s for the SOC ram. For comparison, the intel trashcan mac pro clocked in at 60gb/sec a decade prior.

Reference:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

See, this is the thing about M1: I don’t care about your numbers (which I have no doubt are true), I care about my personal experience with the magic cold $999 aluminum slab that runs circles around everything I owned before.

Reading these always feels like winning an F1 race, then being gaslit about how that’s not possible because of inferior cylinder design.

And all it takes is some Apple PR magic to make you disregard objective measures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Not Apple PR magic, but true firsthand experience. Objectively, this is the computer that makes me happiest and most productive. It could run on a 6MHz slime mold processor for all I care.

> This is the kind of PR bamboozlement I was alluding to - literally none of the above is correct

I'm basing my knowledge on discussions with other developers on rwkv.cpp because we were talking about how performance scales with the number of tokens per iteration. Memory speed/bandwidth came up and some things about M1 were said. Sorry about that.

I do find it a bit odd they even offer the 8GB version. It truly does not feel like enough. 16 GB feels like it should be the entry point for MacOS.

For someone that frequents Hacker News, maybe. My spouse has an 8GB M2 Air and has no complaints.

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