8GB RAM is a disappointment?

[dingclancy23]

Apple M1 Macs 8GB vs 16GB RAM - Multitasking STRESS Test

Another great video from Max Tech. What is interesting is that the 16gb and the 8gb are swapping the same amount of data on the SSD, like the amount of RAM does not matter to OSX. It looks like the 16gb is there for overhead but it is not behaving any differently.

That is impressive for the 8gb.

 

[leichti]

Actually at the end of the video (at about 19 minutes), Max does mention the swapping and SSD longevity, and he claims that modern SSDs are unlikely to fail due to excess read/write cycles.

I am not an expert on SSDs, but especially modern SSD have this problem, because they save more bits per cell to decrease production costs.

Haven't seen any evidence this is a substantial problem with current SSDs.

It may be a substantial problem on a (nearly) full SSD.

edit:
I just watched the new video of Max Tech and I think he really gets it wrong. His tests are just nonsense, it seems that he doesn't have any more experience than an average user. The weirdest thing one can do is comparing the size of the swap file. That's ridiculous. He would have to compare the bytes written into this swap file during his tests, not just the file. I am sure, the difference would be huge

 

[SmOgER]

Now I am not comparing Apple’s SOC to Microsoft as I don’t know how similar they actually are other than being based on ARM architecture.

Apple's M1 is more than twice as fast.

 

[Infinitatus]

People seem to forget that MacOS behaves like Linux. It will try to take advantage of al available RAM memory. So, no matter if you have 8 or 16 Gb RAM. It will use all anyways. This makes your system snappier. Windows doesn’t do that by default.
This means, it is difficult to value how much you really need.

 

[page3]

Pro does not equal photo and video production only, despite Apple ignoring the less marketable pro users.

Happily developing multi-million line software for corporations on an i5 with 8Gb.

 

[Booji]

Reminder - the Intel MBP 13's were available in both two-port and four-port configurations.

Presently only the two-port models are transitioned to ARM. The four-port models remain available on Intel.

If you need a four-port MBP13, you'd be better off waiting for the four-port models to transition.

Yes when I referred to previous MBP I should have said Intel.

The four ports is a nice to have, but not a deal breaker for me.

 

[Sanpete]

I am not an expert on SSDs, but especially modern SSD have this problem, because they save more bits per cell to decrease production costs.

It may be a substantial problem on a (nearly) full SSD.

If you know of any evidence of this it would be helpful.

I just watched the new video of Max Tech and I think he really gets it wrong. His tests are just nonsense, it seems that he doesn't have any more experience than an average user. The weirdest thing one can do is comparing the size of the swap file. That's ridiculous. He would have to compare the bytes written into this swap file during his tests, not just the file. I am sure, the difference would be huge

That may be, but the results he shows for performance aren't affected by it. The 8GB model is really very impressive.

 

[Eric Idle]

You do realize that not all tabs use the same amount of RAM, right? Might be worth realizing before you make sweeping statements like that...

You are incorrect. Again.

 

[alien3dx]

I can never understand the ports argument. Ports are very subjective. What if someone never uses ethernet? What if someone uses DisplayPort instead of HDMI? There you go, two wasted ports on a system. USB-C/Thunderbolt can be completely universal. It can be HDMI, DisplayPort, USB, power, NAS, Thunderbolt devices, eGPU and more. Instead of getting stuck with the 1Gbit Ethernet port on the laptop, you could potentially have future expansion up to 20/40 Gbps networking with one port.

hdmi is must. I dam hate dongle around my rip imac 2017. Most projector client has hdmi and some old have vga (yeah in 2020) . broken 3 cheap usb c hdmi to hdmi because of lightning(rain) .

 

[Yebubbleman]

You are incorrect. Again.

Sure man. Whatever you say.

 

[hagjohn]

hdmi is must. I dam hate dongle around my rip imac 2017. Most projector client has hdmi and some old have vga (yeah in 2020) . broken 3 cheap usb c hdmi to hdmi because of lightning(rain) .

We need to move on from all these old ports and move on to Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 for all ports. On the current intel mini's, HDMI to HDMI can cause issues. Hopefully this isn't the case on the M1 Mini's.

 

[Ethosik]

We need to move on from all these old ports and move on to Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 for all ports. On the current intel mini's, HDMI to HDMI can cause issues. Hopefully this isn't the case on the M1 Mini's.

Apparently people are reporting it can't do full 4K with the HDMI port.

 

[alien3dx]

We need to move on from all these old ports and move on to Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 for all ports. On the current intel mini's, HDMI to HDMI can cause issues. Hopefully this isn't the case on the M1 Mini's.

Maybe you don't know. Thunderbold 3 is intel license and adoption are very slow, then they open it. Most laptop have usb c normal not usb c 3.1 gen 2 like my old imac 2017. I have no issue if market from projector, usb hub all moved to usb c. Even iphone also stuck in era lightning. Apple must show standard all usb c also.

** most projector still hdmi
** most monitor still hdmi
** rarely i found customer bought the wireless projector yet.

 

[hagjohn]

Maybe you don't know. Thunderbold 3 is intel license and adoption are very slow, then they open it. Most laptop have usb c normal not usb c 3.1 gen 2 like my old imac 2017. I have no issue if market from projector, usb hub all moved to usb c. Even iphone also stuck in era lightning. Apple must show standard all usb c also.

** most projector still hdmi
** most monitor still hdmi
** rarely i found customer bought the wireless projector yet.

There should be no license for USB 4.0 (which is Thunderbold 3 compatible), which is what is being used in M1 Macs. You can buy cables with USB 4/Thunderbolt 3 on one end and HDMI on the other.

I'm just saying that if we only had one port for everything, it would be easier for everyone. If I'm using thunderbolt 3 / USB 4 port for video, then the HDMI is just wasted.

 

[hagjohn]

Apparently people are reporting it can't do full 4K with the HDMI port.

Hopefully that can be fixed.

 

[bpcw]

This is true, but I definitely see a trend to requiring less powerful machines for development due to the increased use of Cloud infrastructure. I've been working with public cloud since about 2015 and now *only* work with customers using AWS or MS Azure, and there are a lot of them!

I used to need a beefy machine with as much RAM as I could reasonably afford in order to run VMs and local resources, but these days, it's much easier, quicker and arguably cheaper (if time=money) to spin up such services on cloud platforms. I do some development locally, but it is now both possible and practical to do the whole job in the Cloud, including the IDE.

My main reason for wanting more memory and decent performance is to open up more browser tabs to monitor all the stuff that's running on my cloud infrastructure!

Among others, I develop cloud services on AWS, Azure, Google and Ali.
In the ecosystem I have to work in, there is not much you can do in the cloud other than deploying and monitoring your services there.
Coding and testing needs to be done locally before pushing it anywhere into the cloud. Deploying everything into the cloud during development would mean unreasonable roundtrip times, resulting in higher cost.
Debugging is a no-no in the cloud, and slow even when deploying and debugging into a cloud test environment.
I have yet to see a powerful IDE that is web-only and could compete with e. g. Eclipse or IntelliJ.

 

[M1 Processor]

Before I got the M1 I was arguing that 16GB is what most users should get, and that 8GB is the bare minimum to get buy. Now that I have it and am using it, I feel more sure that 16GB is the sweet stop. As I went to right this comment, I decided to look at my system resources. I only have 3 tabs open and besides the system monitor nothing else is open. The three tabs is using more than 2GB of RAM, and I am getting nearly 1 GB of swap. None of the websites are heavy, and the video is only playing at 720p. Safari is the only thing that's open which seems to be very RAM hungry.

 

[alien3dx]

Before I got the M1 I was arguing that 16GB is what most users should get, and that 8GB is the bare minimum to get buy. Now that I have it and am using it, I feel more sure that 16GB is the sweet stop. As I went to right this comment, I decided to look at my system resources. I only have 3 tabs open and besides the system monitor nothing else is open. The three tabs is using more than 2GB of RAM, and I am getting nearly 1 GB of swap. None of the websites are heavy, and the video is only playing at 720p. Safari is the only thing that's open which seems to be very RAM hungry.

if for me if you get 16 gb shouldnt swap at all. something wrong.

 

[Jinbei]

Guys... look at the test video from MaxTech and you'll see the os always use as much ram as it can, so you can't base your ram consumptions with those numbers. Moreover the 16gb swap just as much than the 8gb version. This is just how m1 mac works...

 

[09872738]

if for me if you get 16 gb shouldnt swap at all. something wrong.

Or is it? Consider this. Assume the OS swaps out memory while the system resources allow it easily. Then, the user goes ahead and opens some very memory intensive app, so you need all the RAM available.
In this situation the OS usually has to swap out the stuff residing in RAM. Except if the OS already has swapped the RAM out, in which case the OS could release the RAM to the newly spawned app right away.

Dunno what the strategy is Apple uses, but the described procedure may actually be a good idea

 

[alien3dx]

Or is it? Consider this. Assume the OS swaps out memory while the system resources allow it easily. Then, the user goes ahead and opens some very memory intensive app, so you need all the RAM available.
In this situation the OS usually has to swap out the stuff residing in RAM. Except if the OS already has swapped the RAM out, in which case the OS could release the RAM to the newly spawned app right away.

Dunno what the strategy is Apple uses, but the described procedure may actually be a good idea

unsure . some part of me scare some part of me thinking back intel 16gb no swap . im not using for basic browsing but development which any ram is precious

 

[armoured]

unsure . some part of me scare some part of me thinking back intel 16gb no swap . im not using for basic browsing but development which any ram is precious

Use top in terminal to get a more detailed look. Look at Swapin/swapout - don't look at the raw numbers but the (bracketed), which is recent swapin/out. If those are staying at zero, it's not doing anything active.

You can check under your heavy load use case to see what it's doing.

(My view is to generally ignore the swap used in memory part of activity monitor if it's not changing and there's no obvious signs of memory pressure - the fact that something was swapped out at some point is not a sign of distress, particulary if long uptimes. That may or may not be appropriate for your usage, your mileage may vary, opinions differ, etc.)

 

[M1 Processor]

People seem to forget that MacOS behaves like Linux. It will try to take advantage of al available RAM memory. So, no matter if you have 8 or 16 Gb RAM. It will use all anyways. This makes your system snappier. Windows doesn’t do that by default.
This means, it is difficult to value how much you really need.

You're right, but macOS is WAY more RAM hungry than Linux. My M1 MBA with 16gb is using approximately double the RAM that my Linux Mint desktop does with 24 GB of RAM in comparable workloads. MacOS is just RAM hungry. Like I REALLY have to push my system under linux to use 5GB of RAM and am usually under 4GB of usage, and that's with 24GB of RAM and the Cinnamon desktop which is heavy by Linux standards.

 

[M1 Processor]

if for me if you get 16 gb shouldnt swap at all. something wrong.

It could be, I'm suspecting memory leaks under Big Sur or something. It is using more than my Intel MacBook Pro under Catalina, and way more than my Linux system does. I reinstalled my OS and it still gobbles RAM.

 

[whiteonline]

Repeat after me: swap is not evil.

It's a concern when performance is impacted (swap size is not an indicator of performance)