I also have an M1 with 16GB, what are you doing that you feel it's "normally under memory pressure"? I don't feel any memory pressure but I might not be able to see the signs, or have a different workflow (if you regularly edit photos, videos, 3D, ML, etc. then _of course_ the more RAM the better, but for normal webdev?)
If you open the Activity Monitor and switch to the memory tab you'll see a graph of the memory pressure at the bottom. I think it roughly reflects the degree to which the system is swapping out to the SSD?
On M2 16GB I recently accidentally ended up with Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Spotify, Intellij, GoLand, VSCode, and Docker doing heavy builds in a cross-platform VM. Obviously unreasonable, but interestingly the system crashed with an SSD error.
Memory pressure on Mac means you get this popup saying "you must close one of these apps NOW or I'm going to crash". On 8GB that's indeed pretty common.
M-series 8gb MacBook Airs and 8gb MacBook Pros have now been in the market for years. The M1 Air launched in 2020.
Yet you'll still have the usual zealots on HN claiming that they have this exact device and it's horrible and worthless and swear blue that their experience is representative.
If the 8gb Air and Pro were a problem: you'd have heard it loud and clear. It would be on the news and called MemoryGate. TheVerge would dedicate a week on it, then bring it up every time apple launch a new laptop. Android9to5 would ring the figurative Apple deathknell and a flurry of lawsuits would be aiming for class action status.
This entire thread is a laughable nothing burger and it's only served to bring out the liars and those on an anti-apple crusade. Some people here have a brain disease that flares up the moment the word "Apple" is muttered.
Be careful when looking at memory pressure and how much it is using. For the same kinds of things I do, it scales well between 128GB of ram to 32 and even 16 GB of ram. If you are using a 32 GB machine and seeing it has high memory pressure or used up most of the memory, it does not necessarily mean it won’t work well on an 8 GB machine.
To know if 8GB is enough, you often need to just try it and see. So that’s why I don’t want to put myself in that situation (that I’m running out of memory and the only option is to upgrade an entire machine.)
(It is because there’s many things aggressively using more memory to make things faster or more responsive by cache things. But those can be released under high memory pressure without much apparent performance loss. That makes use the memory more opportunistically but making it hard to gauge how much really is needed.)
"Enough" certainly. My newest Macbook Pro is 2013, so I have zero insight into the performance of the Apple Silicon devices, but the nature of software development is memory intensive in my experience. The biggest reason claiming "8GB == 16GB" is silly is that Apple doesn't have control over many of the programs that people are using (much as they would like to).
Maybe Xcode makes spectacular use of their own hardware, but do we believe that these optimizations are present in Chrome and Photoshop and Docker and Emacs (hahaha) and whatever NodeJS tooling and probably more that many developers are using at all times? I really, really doubt it. Unless the memory compression discussed here is capable of 50% reduction on average, then it's just a dumb thing to say.
Ultimately your programs all want to have some readily-available bytes in RAM, and most of them don't just cycle out constantly. 8GB is a hard upper bounds on multitasking, and while it might not be our grandpa's 8GB, I really have a hard time believing that it's comparable to 16GB. All this is is beside the point anyway: I switched to desktop like 5 years ago so I could affordably have 64GB and I could never go back. Turns out I don't actually want to take my work home with me, too.
franciscop|2 years ago
iudqnolq|2 years ago
On M2 16GB I recently accidentally ended up with Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Spotify, Intellij, GoLand, VSCode, and Docker doing heavy builds in a cross-platform VM. Obviously unreasonable, but interestingly the system crashed with an SSD error.
digger495|2 years ago
Docker on mac uses emulation and is a gigantic resource hog.
wkat4242|2 years ago
49para|2 years ago
But generally I'll have zoom sessions, citrix, IntelliJ, vscode, Safari with a lot of tabs, etc.
quitit|2 years ago
Yet you'll still have the usual zealots on HN claiming that they have this exact device and it's horrible and worthless and swear blue that their experience is representative.
If the 8gb Air and Pro were a problem: you'd have heard it loud and clear. It would be on the news and called MemoryGate. TheVerge would dedicate a week on it, then bring it up every time apple launch a new laptop. Android9to5 would ring the figurative Apple deathknell and a flurry of lawsuits would be aiming for class action status.
This entire thread is a laughable nothing burger and it's only served to bring out the liars and those on an anti-apple crusade. Some people here have a brain disease that flares up the moment the word "Apple" is muttered.
KolenCh|2 years ago
To know if 8GB is enough, you often need to just try it and see. So that’s why I don’t want to put myself in that situation (that I’m running out of memory and the only option is to upgrade an entire machine.)
(It is because there’s many things aggressively using more memory to make things faster or more responsive by cache things. But those can be released under high memory pressure without much apparent performance loss. That makes use the memory more opportunistically but making it hard to gauge how much really is needed.)
amichail|2 years ago
trey-jones|2 years ago
Maybe Xcode makes spectacular use of their own hardware, but do we believe that these optimizations are present in Chrome and Photoshop and Docker and Emacs (hahaha) and whatever NodeJS tooling and probably more that many developers are using at all times? I really, really doubt it. Unless the memory compression discussed here is capable of 50% reduction on average, then it's just a dumb thing to say.
Ultimately your programs all want to have some readily-available bytes in RAM, and most of them don't just cycle out constantly. 8GB is a hard upper bounds on multitasking, and while it might not be our grandpa's 8GB, I really have a hard time believing that it's comparable to 16GB. All this is is beside the point anyway: I switched to desktop like 5 years ago so I could affordably have 64GB and I could never go back. Turns out I don't actually want to take my work home with me, too.
elisaado|2 years ago
pivo|2 years ago
NavinF|2 years ago
blueflow|2 years ago