Considering that there are lots of professionals switching from a $4000 Mac to a M1 Mac, your statement is quite bold.
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16GB m1 pro is hot and fan is running for 75% of my normal workload,battery last only 10 hours
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Is it swapping in and out? Or just swap usage in the sense that you see it in the activity monitor memory panel under swap used? (Personally I don't find that a useful metric except if it's changing rapidly)
Other than that I don't have answers but some thoughts (keep in mind these may not be mutually exclusive):
1) The only actually different underlying memory approach is the unified memory architecture - straight cores and GPUs directly addressing the same memory. Completely unclear to me exactly how this will shake out in use - could reduce memory usage (this is I think the ONLY change that would reduce memory usage). But it could also have less obvious effects, perhaps it does feed into the cache/swap heuristics somehow.
2) More likely and obvious is effectively beta ports of intel software to the M1 architecture. Yes, including potential memory leaks. This could even be from apple software like finder that they had to re-engineer because of reliance on internal or older APIs etc. Anecdotal but the only serious memory/swapping issue I've ever had on machines with lots of memory was a runaway iconservicesd process, something to do with a disk that I guess had some issues - crazy memory leak that brought a mchine to its knees - other than that swap issues have been due to serious abuse on my part.
To me not surprising comes up with browsers more. Man, some browsers/sites just seem to interact badly.
Minor memory leaks in a new system with faster ram and ssds might not be noticeable, if it's not too frequent and excessive.
3) It's possible apple has rejiggered their swap algorithms to be more aggressive with m1 or something lower down - i.e. to make better use of the differences of the M1 system on a chip. So swap behaviour we're used to looking at seems different.
Who? Probably those people didn't need a $4k Mac in the first place.
I don't know any professionals that switched from a high-end Mac for a M1, mainly due to the memory limits on the M1 machines.
My statement might be "bold", but it's the truth.
I'm not going to sugarcoat anyone, these M1 Macs aren't a high-end Mac replacement.
So much to disagree with here.
1) If charging $400 for 16gb is good because it makes everyone code better, why not charge $1000 so everyone will code even more better? Or $2000?
There's a trade-off, of course. The fact is non-apple ram (DDR4, not top of the line speed but pretty good) can cost about $100 for a desktop. Apple's gone top of the line, plus very healthy profit margin - call it $200 if you want. At some point, the benefits of the speed of having loads of ram outweigh apple's approach. (Also at some point 'moar ram' stops giving any extra benefit - faster ssds help ,and there too, apple has gone top of the line)
Or to use your buffet analogy, if what you really need is more calories and dietary fibre, go for cheap food and bran - waygu beef ends up just costing too much.
[I think the environmental points you try to make are a bit ridiculous - we're not talking about putting the diesel motor of an abrams tank in a smart car. The extra environmental cost of more memory is tiny. And apple's super-low energy consumption is way more impact than the extra memory. I could come up with complex explanation/argument of why more memory might be a lot more environmental than more ssd and hdd space or even just having the wrong balance of other resources. I'm not accusing anyone of being bad here - apple's better than most actually - but this should be further down the list of issues.
2) iPhone/ipad memory management is _completely_ different. The reality is you do NOT have 400 tabs open on your iphone, even if you think you do - the system shuts those down when not in use. iOs requires apps to be in states that they can be frozen/stopped at any time. Completely different environment, with big implications for how apps are written and what they can do. (If you wanted to be environmental, apple enforcing those restrictions for browsers would be potentially far more important than charging more $$$ for memory). There are underlying tech similarities and overlaps between ios and macos for memory management, but they are NOT identical.
They seem to be pretty cracking low-end - so the usual arguments about whether the new much better low end is good enough to substitute for the previous high end.
Answer's usually no - there is some shift of the window of acceptable performance that covers more users, but often temporarily. (I can see more pros being willing to compromise esp as a second computer/laptop though)
I'm more interested in the battery performance combined with better than acceptable speed than sheer raw power. Great combination. But I'm not in the most demanding group of users either.
Those that need high end though, they need something different from these. (Ports and other factors like number of screens matters too)
You're really going to have to define "high-end Mac". If you mean desktop, you're probably right (in the short term), but laptop, your argument falls apart - whether or not people you know are switching. There are many people doing real world tests where the base M1 MacBook Pro either keeps up with, or outperforms the most recent 16" MacBook Pro, whilst staying cool, silent and lasting more than double the battery run time.
Using swap before the OS runs out of memory is a good thing.
If the memory content is already in swap, the OS don't need to write to swap if it suddenly needs the memory for something else.
Agree, it high-ender than lots of 15'' or 16'' mac pro.
An update: my m1 mac pro crashed & rebooted itself 2 times while debugging with firefox nightly in 4 days.
This is not even a heavy workload so 10 hours is a bit disappointing. That is why I am waiting for the 16" MBP next year which should have more battery life (and 4 ports with 32+ GB RAM support).
You just discovered that useless synthetic benchmarks don't equal real world workload performance.
"terminal+react native + ios simulator, chrome 10+ tabs, firefox 10+ tabs, vscode, android studio and an extra monitor" it's an a medium workload, lots of thing consuming energy in the background. 10 hours is quite good.
My typical workload (similar to this, but also running docker containers etc) killed my 15" MacBook Pro in 2 to 3 hours. A laptop that runs it for TEN hours would be revolutionary for me.
I can't wait for the system to mature, so that I can return to MacOS for work!
Exactly. Being able to get through a work day on a single charge is something I’ve not been able to do with any Intel MacBook since 2006.
TechCrunch puts it pretty succinctly how much things have improved in their Xcode compile test. It’s no contest, really.
These numbers suggest that if you just constantly rebuild WebKit from clean, you can run down the battery in under 4 hrs. But even the 16” MBP would have run down in around an hour under that sort of load.
Yeah, Apple’s M1 MacBook Pro is powerful, but it’s the battery life that will blow you away | TechCrunch
Survival and strategy games are often played in stages. You have the early game where you’re learning the ropes, understanding systems. Then you have
techcrunch.com
Sure, but regular consumers aren't running resource intensive coding and development environments and graphics software in addition to all those tabs. I bet the OP wouldn't be maxing his machine if he were doing regular user/consumer stuff.