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Comment by TheAdamist | Hacker News Reader

16GB pc isn't even the correct comparison, on apple its 8GB unified between cpu+gpu+more.

The 16GB pc equivalent, especially for equivalent pricing of a mbp is going to have a video card with dedicated vram in addition. A $1549 dell xps has a 6GB Nvidia card, with options for 4GB-8GB cards.

8GB equivalent to 22GB is the real comparison we should be making and the answer is obviously no. Especially with all the other io performance cuts apple has been making.

Now you will say theres far more bloatware on the windows laptop, especially in a corporate environment necessitating all that ram, and thats true.

For light use 8gb would be plenty, but its not going to cut it for power users.

Im also curious what the "memory compression" they use is, i would imagine its similar to linux compressed in memory swap. Unless they are just talking standard gpu texture compression and such.

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macOS has been doing memory compression for years. Basically, apps and background processes that are idle have their memory compressed, and then upon exiting idle (due to user interaction, a timer firing, etc.), the memory is decompressed. The compressed memory doesn’t touch swap.

It’s possible that Apple Silicon has some hardware acceleration for doing this in-place memory compression, but otherwise it’s pretty old news, which makes this marketing shtick even more frustrating. 8GB was borderline not enough even back when memory compression was added to macOS (maybe ~10 years ago?).

> macOS has been doing memory compression for years

So has Windows.

With multi-core CPUs, it’s easy to do so without impacting performance in most cases.

And Linux (although not enabled by default on some distros).

So any working set that fits into 16 GB but exceeds 8 GB, eats into cpu performance and/or SSD longevity.

That's fine for a low-end laptop in 2023, and if you're upfront about that tradeoff.

For a ~$1500 laptop, that's just marketing bs.

Sounds like zswap for Linux. The "swap" part of it is poorly named as it also doesn't involve a physical disk, at least not directly.

zswap was implemented after Apple showcased their own memory compression. It's a copy of what macOS did first.

OSX Mavericks was released in 2013, while Compcache was initially developed in 2008.

Does that make it "not count" or somehow less effective?

Why do they have to shave a few bucks of BoM and jump through hoops explaining why their 8GB is equivalent to their 16GB.

It’s like AMD saying our megahertz are better than your megahertz. It may be true but people just look at standard numbers.

That example is very actually very good one.

It has been known for years that megahertz are a terrible metric to measure CPU performance. The peak of that discussion was during the launch of Pentium 4, where it was proven that the IPC was much worse when comparing to a previous Pentium even though it had a lot more the clock speed.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 (Microarchitecture)

In order to sell another 8G for $200 obviously.

Like theregister puts it:

> There's a reason why we used to refer to Apple as the Cupertino idiot-tax operation.

The Apple version of "community-adjusted EBITDA"

Even worse actually. The DRAM cache which is included on-PCB for normal SSDs doesn't exist for Apple. The system RAM is used for the SSD cache.

Sharing the ram with the CPU, GPU, and the SSD cache makes me wonder how the 8Gb models are even useable with how heavy modern programs are.

Memory compression combined with swap to very fast SSD storage are extremely effective.

Both are available on most modern Windows and Linux machines as well, so these cannot be used as a justification for why 8GB is somehow different on a Mac.

They aren't really usable in any meaningful way. Those low-end models get bought by people that mostly use them as Netflix/Facebook machines. I'm really not kidding about this; I have seen it with my own eyes. I have a friend who has a MacBook for the 2015 era, and I have only ever seen him use it to watch movies, the most tabs I have seen him use are maybe 5 and the most apps he ever used at once is probably 5 too, and just because he forgot to quit the torrent video player client I put there or something like that. It's all about prestige for social status. This is precisely why Apple can get away from selling hardware so compromised.

I told him many times that he could have gotten a computer at one third the price that would have done essentially the same thing just as well, but he doesn't believe it. He thinks Apple is obviously better and obviously longer. Even though I'm tech geek using Apple hardware before he even knew Apple existed. He also has a fetish for Apple cables and chargers, because somehow, they are the only ones who know how to build those things (not that they are bad per se, but there are better options at half the price...).

It's really a lot like a religion or some sort of cult at this point. Unsurprisingly this guy has a lot of beliefs about many things; true Apple fanboys are very often like that.

As far as I'm concerned, Apple stuff is pretty good but the pricing just doesn't make sense, especially nowadays considering of the locked everything down...

And yet they work fine. Perhaps it is your priors that leave us wondering.

Apple is well known for their extremely optimized software due to their tight integration with hardware and software. This would make sense to keep it 8GB for Apple-only software idealistically. Realistically, those modern software are not optimized for any OS. I had MBA M1 4GB, it wasn't enough. I imagine macOS put memory compression to constant heavy use and swap.

Asahi linux proved that's not the case. Comparing compile times on OSX vs Asahi linux shows that Asahi linux was a ton faster.

SSDs using Host Memory Buffer for cache instead of dedicated DRAM are getting pretty common on PCs too.

In defense of the design, the design itself isn't a bad , just lack of total DRAM is bad.

What compels you to defend Apple?

This is amazing to witness as a Linux person that is apathetic to the Windows/Mac thing. Windows people never do this stuff.

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