8GB RAM is a disappointment?

[4sallypat]

....
Everybody's so obsessed with RAM.

From PC side I'd say that processor matters way more. My MSI has 8GB of RAM and Ryzen processor and my work HP has some Intel processor, but my MSI is way faster.

Agreed - ever since Intel CPUs were used by Apple, more and more RAM meant more and more performance.

That's what brainwashed a lot of people now with the M1 SOC - which is not your traditional RAM handling system - Apple calls it unified memory....

After almost a year with my base 8GB M1 Mini - I have to say it has not slowed down, lagged or ever seen the spinning beach ball...

Compared to my Intel based PC which I use for gaming (Flight Simulator 2020), it needs more and more RAM to keep up not to mention a very expensive video card!

 

[alien3dx]

Agreed - ever since Intel CPUs were used by Apple, more and more RAM meant more and more performance.

That's what brainwashed a lot of people now with the M1 SOC - which is not your traditional RAM handling system - Apple calls it unified memory....

After almost a year with my base 8GB M1 Mini - I have to say it has not slowed down, lagged or ever seen the spinning beach ball...

Compared to my Intel based PC which I use for gaming (Flight Simulator 2020), it needs more and more RAM to keep up not to mention a very expensive video card!

m1 nor perfect

1. i got some beach ball upon xcode
2. Rendering youtube using da vinci for youtube . really fast 2x compare to my imac2017 16 gb ram
** tutorial programming video.

The problem of some user internet is simple
1. If you frequennt go to side like facebook and open chat , video call same time . Get those 16 gb ram.Just static surfing should be enough 8 gb ram.

 

[MacBH928]

Even my MSI laptop has 8GB of RAM and it has been able to handle everything that I throw at it. Any game or Visual Studio.
Same with Macs.

I remember back in 2014 my classmate said that 2GB of RAM isn't enough for phones too, but iPhone 5s had only 1GB and I never had any issues.

Everybody's so obsessed with RAM.

From PC side I'd say that processor matters way more. My MSI has 8GB of RAM and Ryzen processor and my work HP has some Intel processor, but my MSI is way faster.

In 2002 I got an iMac that had only 256MB RAM. It was supposed to run illustrator, photoshop, web browsing, and video editing. It did with not any real problems. Now 8GB is not enough ?

Agreed - ever since Intel CPUs were used by Apple, more and more RAM meant more and more performance.

That's what brainwashed a lot of people now with the M1 SOC - which is not your traditional RAM handling system - Apple calls it unified memory....

After almost a year with my base 8GB M1 Mini - I have to say it has not slowed down, lagged or ever seen the spinning beach ball...

This is what I am saying in this thread, 8GB is above anyone consumer use. How I know? They are using 4GB iPads and no complaints!

 

[Natrium]

In 2002 I got an iMac that had only 256MB RAM. It was supposed to run illustrator, photoshop, web browsing, and video editing. It did with not any real problems. Now 8GB is not enough ?



This is what I am saying in this thread, 8GB is above anyone consumer use. How I know? They are using 4GB iPads and no complaints!

The amount of RAM needed really depends on each specific user’s demands, ie the apps you’re intending to use.

When more RAM is required than available, the system will swap parts of the RAM to the SSD. That itself takes time, plus SSD’s are still significantly slower than RAM. The data also has to be swapped back from the SSD to the RAM when it is requested. Having more RAM available is going to be faster in such case, as long as the additional RAM is not exceeded, simply because it increases the threshold before swapping occurs.


However, whether any additional latency is noticeable to the user is another question. Thanks to Apple’s fast SSD and RAM, most users using “typical” apps like web browsers probably won’t notice a difference.

 

[MacGizmo]

The only people who claim that "8 GB is enough" are (apparently) people who have never had more than 8 GB of RAM. ?

 

[BootLoxes]

Agreed - ever since Intel CPUs were used by Apple, more and more RAM meant more and more performance.

That's what brainwashed a lot of people now with the M1 SOC - which is not your traditional RAM handling system - Apple calls it unified memory....

After almost a year with my base 8GB M1 Mini - I have to say it has not slowed down, lagged or ever seen the spinning beach ball...

Compared to my Intel based PC which I use for gaming (Flight Simulator 2020), it needs more and more RAM to keep up not to mention a very expensive video card!

The only time I see a beachball on my 8gb m1 air is every now and then on safari i will click the + tab button and it will freeze and beachball for about 2-3 seconds. Not sure what causes it though as it can happen even when I only have just 1 tab open.

 

[ctjack]

The only time I see a beachball on my 8gb m1 air is every now and then on safari i will click the + tab button and it will freeze and beachball for about 2-3 seconds. Not sure what causes it though as it can happen even when I only have just 1 tab open.

Exactly the same is on mine. I am too lazy to reinstall everything. Well that is the reason why i went Apple and not windows - i don't want to resolve this type of problems with reinstallation anymore.

 

[UBS28]

My M1 iPad Pro has 8GB of RAM, and even in an iPad Pro it is not enough.

 

[BootLoxes]

Exactly the same is on mine. I am too lazy to reinstall everything. Well that is the reason why i went Apple and not windows - i don't want to resolve this type of problems with reinstallation anymore.

I would assume its a bug rather than a limitation of resources. I wonder if the upgrade to the new macos will fix it

 

[MacBH928]

Exactly the same is on mine. I am too lazy to reinstall everything. Well that is the reason why i went Apple and not windows - i don't want to resolve this type of problems with reinstallation anymore.

you can check other browsers if you like , Brave (Chrome without spycode) , firefox , Orion (basically Safari that can install FF+Chrome add-ons)

Orion is still in beta so you have to signup to get invited and they will send you alink after sometime.

 

[iHorseHead]

In 2002 I got an iMac that had only 256MB RAM. It was supposed to run illustrator, photoshop, web browsing, and video editing. It did with not any real problems. Now 8GB is not enough ?



This is what I am saying in this thread, 8GB is above anyone consumer use. How I know? They are using 4GB iPads and no complaints!

How come I'm able to run Photoshop and browse the web and use Unity and Xcode on 8GB of RAM though? I'd say processor matters way more.
I have 4 laptops with 8GB of RAM and processors matter way more. My work laptop (HP) with 8GB is way slower than my MSI laptop with 8GB and it can handle more. I've tested.
Also, 8GB of RAM didn't help my MacBook Pro mid 2010 at all. My MacBook Air M1 with 8GB or RAM is way faster and is able to handle more things.
I don't understand the RAM people. My coworker has the same laptop as me (the ones we got from work) and he has 16GB of RAM and it's not that much better than my work laptop anyways. Processor matters way more.

I switched from Photoshop to Pixelmator. I know people will laugh at me but this subscription system turned out to be pretty expensive.

 

[alien3dx]

How come I'm able to run Photoshop and browse the web and use Unity and Xcode on 8GB of RAM though? I'd say processor matters way more.
I have 4 laptops with 8GB of RAM and processors matter way more. My work laptop (HP) with 8GB is way slower than my MSI laptop with 8GB and it can handle more. I've tested.
Also, 8GB of RAM didn't help my MacBook Pro mid 2010 at all. My MacBook Air M1 with 8GB or RAM is way faster and is able to handle more things.
I don't understand the RAM people. My coworker has the same laptop as me (the ones we got from work) and he has 16GB of RAM and it's not that much better than my work laptop anyways. Processor matters way more.

I switched from Photoshop to Pixelmator. I know people will laugh at me but this subscription system turned out to be pretty expensive.

i'm using pixel mator compare photoshop.. unity quite heavy thou..

 

[dogslobber]

The only people who claim that "8 GB is enough" are (apparently) people who have never had more than 8 GB of RAM. ?

I have used a 16GB M1 Mini for months and now an 8GB M1 MBA. For what I do with it, there it no real difference in performance. I’ve even run a 1.5GB VM regularly for a while and it is really efficient to avoid swapping. Certainly over the life of a Big Sur updates I see that Apple has streamlined the OS for 8GB. 11.6 introduced this swapping efficiency in my experience. They also solved the excessive write design flaw. Over all it’s been a great experience on the 8GB MBA I picked up for 799 bucks. I’ll stick with Big Sur indefinitely due to stability.

BTW I also have a 32GB Intel Mini 2018 which gathers dust.

 

[dogslobber]

How come I'm able to run Photoshop and browse the web and use Unity and Xcode on 8GB of RAM though? I'd say processor matters way more.
I have 4 laptops with 8GB of RAM and processors matter way more. My work laptop (HP) with 8GB is way slower than my MSI laptop with 8GB and it can handle more. I've tested.
Also, 8GB of RAM didn't help my MacBook Pro mid 2010 at all. My MacBook Air M1 with 8GB or RAM is way faster and is able to handle more things.
I don't understand the RAM people. My coworker has the same laptop as me (the ones we got from work) and he has 16GB of RAM and it's not that much better than my work laptop anyways. Processor matters way more.

I’d say it’s the law of diminishing returns. M1 processors are super fast so compressed memory is less of a burden. It takes 30 secs to cause throttling on an M1 but an Intel laptop will start making thermal decisions as soon as the machine runs any workload for a few secs. Noisy and hot v sluggish and cool in what the Intel Proposition gives us. M1 can do more faster and cooler with 8GB.

 

[leman]

Thanks for taking the time to write that explanation. What you wrote makes sense based on the RAM usage scenario you portrayed. Essentially you are saying that, with conventional architecture, any memory usage by the VRAM also requires the same memory usage by RAM. So having separate VRAM doesn't add any additional capacity.

But aren't there use cases that would require significant VRAM without also requiring usage of that same amount of RAM, i.e. where the GPU was using a lot of VRAM for its own internal processing? E.g., suppose you send 1 MB of data to the GPU with a processing request (say, run a simulation on that data and give the result)*. It then processes that internally, requring 4 GB of VRAM to do so. Then once it's done it sends the answer back to the CPU, where the answer is 2 MB in size.

If the CPU needs 16 GB RAM while this is going on, then total memory usage is 16 GB RAM + 4 GB VRAM.
But with UMA (unified memory architecture), total memory usage during this process would be 20 GB RAM.

*Not saying things would actually work this way; just trying to illustrate a concept.

The problem is that the OS and the driver needs system RAM to operate a dGPU. Often, GPU resources are doubled in system RAM so that they can be recovered if the GPU needs to free space for something else, or if both the CPU and the GPU need to have access to the data. To be honest, I don’t really know how it works for modern drivers and modern OS, and I assume that the details will vary. But in general, the assumption that VRAM is additive with the system RAM is not correct.

Unified memory is much more flexible, radically simplifies memory management, removes hidden cost, is much simpler to reason about and can be paged out directly. These are all massive advantages, especially for a professional system.

 

[bunnspecial]

Firefox user and tab collector here.

I also use Lightroom(Classic) a lot. Before the M1 native version of LRc, it was basically unuseable on 8gb with anything else running in the background. The M1 native version does handle it better, but I've found it still slows everything down if I don't quit it before going back to doing something else. I never had to do that on the 2012 MBP with 16gb this computer(M1 MBP) replaced.

Firefox unchecked can easily grow to 10+gb and I need to restart it every day or two because it drags the system down so badly.

Docking and undocking seems to make memory use go through the roof and I don't know why.

Bottom line for me is I'm regularly seeing 80%+ memory pressure and I can't find any reasonable explanation for it. Even with fast swap, I can feel this bogging down the system. It was unusual doing the same sort of tasks on my 2012 MBP to hit ~60% compression, and that was even running a VM.

I do have a Mac Pro 5,1 with 96gb RAM, and OS X(High Sierra) doesn't seem to know what to do with that much. I can hit it in certain situations(manipulating huge film scans in Photoshop) but in general that's a difficult amount of RAM to use. 32gb is likely a sweet spot for me.

I'm planning on buying a Mac from the next generation of ARM(M1x or M2 or whatever) and I will get at least 16gb, more likely 32gb if I can. I managed 9 years out of my last primary Mac, and it was(and still is) perfectly useable. My M1 Pro won't make it that long, but I'm hoping the next gen will.

 

[Dammit Cubs]

Is 8gigs of ram a disappointment? Depends on what you are using that RAM for? What's the point of having a dining table if you are the only one eating at the table.

For me, while I prefer 16Gb, having 8 gigs has not deterred me in getting effective productivity out of my machine.