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Comment by bzzzt | Hacker News Reader

While not exactly true, it is a fact that Apple tries really hard to make the most out of a little memory while other systems (Windows, Android or Linux) piss away a lot of memory due to inefficiency, virtual machines etc and the only answer is 'just buy more RAM', which adds to cost, battery usage and is generally frowned upon as a solution to inefficient programming.

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Do you have any real hard data that lets you to claim that macOS or iOS are more efficient than Linux or even Windows?

I think it comes down to a few design decisions like not standardizing on a VM based language with GC (like Java/.NET) which leads to more memory consumption. Only allowing a single browser engine will also keep memory usage lower on iOS. Apple was also early with a good memory compression implementation.

Of course, nothing will help you if you really want to run horrible applications, but at least the base system is optimized. You can run quite a lot of workloads even on an 8Gb Mac.

In my experience desktop linux is significantly lighter than macOS though

Depends on what desktop you use. A full Gnome or KDE desktop will eat a lot of memory.

Gnome uses 2GB at most when not memory-constrained.

I have 32GB on my Linux desktop. On a normal day I use 6GB of memory.

I let you in on a secret: If you run a docker container on MacOS, you're running it in a VM. On Linux, you don't (at least not if you don't install the braindead Docker Desktop) https://docs.docker.com/desktop/faqs/linuxfaqs/#what-is-the-...

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