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For student? MBP 16" 2019 Gray 2.3 i9 32GB 1TB 4GB 5500M
- Thread starter Gary Kline
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It's basically outdated information that some people can't let go of. I never look at Activity Monitor unless something is bogging down, but from the things I read here apparently some people are just obsessing over their "memory pressure" and swap space stats and have fooled themselves into thinking that's important.
To be fair, though, the prices of Macs have held steady for well over a decade now, even with eye-watering inflation. Back in the early 2000s I paid $1000 for my old iBook. Today's entry level Mac laptop is still $1000 -- which really means the price has fallen.
People are whining about a $200 RAM or SSD upgrade that they'll use for several years at least, when they're spending that much on one trip to the grocery store or maybe two dinners out. I think the takeaway here is that people love to complain
It isn't. Assuming you're actually using your machine instead of clutching pearls over the stats.
It's fine to get into a tizzy about swap space on your own machine, but when people start spouting that crap to someone asking for buying advice, I think it has to be countered with reality.
People are whining about a $200 RAM or SSD upgrade that they'll use for several years at least, when they're spending that much on one trip to the grocery store or maybe two dinners out. I think the takeaway here is that people love to complain
I think the complaints are valid when you look at how much more you get for your money, if you're okay running ChromeOS or Windows.
You're assuming quite alot over my habits. Why are you projecting so much crap onto my post without reading? What a terrible response. I'm baffled!
Please return to your 8GB Macbook Air and give it a go with some just slightly bigger documents. You will see what I'm saying. Once it scraps all resize filtering and changes it to nearest neighbor you tell me how usable this software is.
People have been making that comparison for decades now, and it's no more relevant now than it was in the 1990s.
Right, it's the same argument we've been talking about for decades. People buy Apple hardware because they want to run Apple software. It is a relevant argument because at the end of the day, a RAM chip is a RAM chip and Apple charges more for it simply because they're putting that commodity hardware in a Macintosh. But you have to buy it if you want to run Apple software so it is what it is.
This is an interesting comment. It would be nice to get more information for general knowledge.
Picture previews - is that when working with photos?
I was wondering if there is any equivalent for more creative work, where you create something new from scratch?
Also why wasn't this picked up by MaxTech's test? I saw him scrolling through photos and photo previews in Lightroom without any lag on 8GB.
Do you have a screenshot of this happening?
They probably do not have a screenshot of it happening because you'd have to consume over 10GB of RAM (assuming a 16GB system) in Photoshop before it starts to be an issue. Obviously it's possible but not something that most people will run into without forcing it to happen.
Basically when you have an open ordinary canvas but are running out of RAM, Photoshop de-prioritizes showing filters. That means, any layer that has an active filter (non-rasterized layers essentially) will possibly no longer display them, making what you see on the canvas no longer being representative of the actual document.
This is similar to how Photoshop reacts when there's a GPU-error which isn't common on Macs to my experience, but something I've run into on Windows. It suggests to me that the filters affected are GPU-accelerated and that when VRAM (the unified memory for macs, then) runs out, such effects are no longer applied correctly. I'm not an adobe-dev so I can't really pin-point the underlying cause but I'd say it's a decent guess.
This can manifest in different ways depending on document, but the resize-filtering switching to "nearest neighbor" becomes very obvious and makes it very hard to work on the document. The downgrade in picture fidelity is just for the open document and won't apply when exporting the picture.
I can't answer as to how low RAM does or doesn't affect lightroom as I've never used it in combination with low RAM. It is entirely possible that it runs fine. I consider MaxTechs tests a bit too surface-level for the most part but a lot of software does run okay on swap. Photoshop just isn't one of them.
To reiterate so I don't get more silly replies from people who don't read more than the latest post: I'm not advocating against 16GB Macs. I am against 8GB Macs for Photoshop. I am against the blanket statement that "swap just works".
Thanks, I'm new at this so never heard of Swappa.com (yes, super newbie!) So, I went there and they had a 2021 16" MBP M1 Pro 10 core 16Gb 512Gb for $1185 so I grabbed it!! Paid w/ PayPal. Thanks! (and to everyone who left comments, thanks!!!)Sounds like you nailed it through all our rift raft. You’ll be alright
There’s a ton of 512gb for sale on eBay for 1200 and under. Pay with PayPal because their buyer guarantee is better than eBay’s. As someone else said, keep an eye out for age of the seller and their reputation.
Also if you haven’t heard of it, give Swappa.com a look. I’d sooner buy there than eBay personally.
Killer deal! It’ll be hard for your upcoming college student not to love it. Enjoy! Post a pic when you get it. Infinitely better computer for a little under $200 more. Well done and good find
AWESOME deal. You got an incredibly good machine for your money
Good Job! That M1 is more than capable. It's a better buy than the Intel I9. And, you bought it at a great price too!
Putting money into a larger onboard SSD is expensive and wasteful. If you have more funds they should not go into larger SSD but should stay in your pocket or go into more RAM instead. External mass storage is cheap, and nothing in your description suggests that she needs more onboard mass storage.
Also your comment suggests that the difference between MBA and MBP is size, 13" versus 14"; which is true but not what is important. MBP is superior in every regard (including display quality) except weight, so carefully read the specs if comparing MBA/MBP choices.
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Perhaps you need to study up on Unified Memory Architecture before making false statements like "simply because they're putting that commodity hardware in a Macintosh."
First off, no, RAM is not all the same.
Secondly, other companies also price upgrades sometimes higher than what you might think you could get, if you buy bits and pieces at some deed discount from an internet retailer.
My college setup was the 12" PowerBook G4 (yeah, aging myself) then about a year after graduation I bought myself a 17" MBP, since it wasn't going to move around as much. Now I've been through a 15" MBP and my current machine is 14" M1Max MBP. Liking the 14" a lot as a machine I take with me every day, closest experience to the good ol' 12" machine in terms of being small but mighty. I used to play WoW on the go on that old thing, and it was less crashy (if a bit slower) than the college-student-affordable gaming PC I built for when I was in my dorm.
I would pick the 15 inch air over the 2019 16". I had the 2019 16" and regretted it. It was a $4k computer at the time and when the M series chips came out they absolutely smoked it.
I now use a 13 inch M2 Air as my daily and it's so much more powerful than people realize (and the airs will be much more pleasant to carry around). Some stuff I do on my Air:
-Houdini (a high end 3D animation and visual effects program)
-Logic (music program)
-Blender (3D animation program)
-Godot (game engine)
-Xcode (coding)
-Final Cut (video editing program)
-Affinity Suite (similar to Photoshop and Illustrator without the monthly subscription)
and much much more.
I'd grab the 15 inch air M2 personally (or if you can wait just a little bit, M3 Airs are rumored to come out around March) with 16 gigs ram, 1 tb hard drive. IF you have to cut back on price grab a 512 hard drive, there's always external storage drives if really needed.
Your omitting that the RAM and even swap speeds are faster because of unified memory, and disks (which are NNME, which stands for non-volatile memory and if you don't know what that is, it means its persistent, even when you switch the computer off).
The unified bus architecture with everything on chip accounts for its performance in disk and memory heavy activities like photoshop...
On the other hand when if ever Apple will catch up to Cuda or Fire GL is the big unknown. M2 is good, but the video performance is pitiful even compared to sub $1000 3670 based mobile GPUs.
On the other hand if you want GPU performance you have to put up with sub-optimal battery life, heat issues, and chunkiness, that Apple did away with in 2008 with the Unibody MacBook. In that sense PC laptops are still 15 years behind the curve.
I have handled even $4000 north PC laptops of which all of them either had poor screens, casing, trackpads or all of the above, and even when you get a comparable OLED display, you tend to sacrifice all of the above.
Which really raises the pickle, that if you want to be able to run a render farm for audio or 3D editing, you have to build a desktop PC with an i9 CPU and bare the consequences.... Ruling out the same trashcan Mac because even if you install Windows or Linux, there are no internal GPU driver supports and sketchy EGPU comparability which would cost you at least $1000 on top to get any sort of decent performance...
Which leads to the middle road.... While not the fastest GPUs M1 Max, M2, and M3 performance is more than bearable and you have none of the poor design choices, except maybe the lack of expandability itself.
You act like it's the 1990s where you are swapping to a platter disk.... I suggest you reevaluate the position....
And I'm more proficient in using Photoshop CC than most people would be on this forum, and while not the best at Premiere know how to drive that as well as well as PageMaker and many other things...
You're talking like a dinousaur.
"scrolling through photos and photo previews in Lightroom" is not doing creastive work with images and should not be extrapolated to have anything to do with realities of working in Adobe Creative Suite or equal.
Note please that YouTube vids are made to get clicks, not to provide solid info. Learn elsewhere.
Regarding your budget donˋt buy new, but go for a refurbished machine M1 Macbook Pro/Air of any kind with 16GB RAM and at leat 512GB SSD. This will fly for years to come, has best battery life of all laptops around, and will cope with anything you throw at it. No Intel based Macbook comes close, even not the highest tiers.
Forget any Intel based Macbook, just do no longer think of them.
Don't buy any new mobile machine from Apple with 8GB RAM, you are overpaying buy a lot and loose performance buy hue margins. MacOS Sonoma is already taxing 8GB machines while using only daily activities and apps like Safari.
Forget any Intel based Macbook, just do no longer think of them.
Don't buy any new mobile machine from Apple with 8GB RAM, you are overpaying buy a lot and loose performance buy hue margins. MacOS Sonoma is already taxing 8GB machines while using only daily activities and apps like Safari.
There are people who know things on YouTube but they're few and far between. This is what happens when you monetise a platform. Every man and his dog says things for clicks...
Like our friend above that doesn't understand NVRAM is RAM itself. The current NVRAM drives in M1, and M2/M3 (non-base models) is around 6000mb/s at maximum performance, or around the same write speed as DDR3 RAM.
NVRAM by definition means non-volatile. It's sorta like the persistent RAM in older Mac's where the firmware sits but on a larger chip with more speed, on a better interconnect. You're writing to RAM.
When you talk about M1, M2 and M3 architecture you have to take the storage capacity as a whole as your RAM. Which, in turn factors in that while the first 16gb are faster by an order of about 8000mb/s the rest are more than fast enough to deal with real latency issues when it comes to swap space, to the point where in simple terms you can consider the "hard disk" as part of your RAM.
The concept of /swap (using the Unix term because Mac OS is Unix) being slow comes from the archaic days of "modern" computing between 1984 and the early to mid 2000s where people were still swapping to an actual drive... Be that on Aldus PageMaker or modern Photoshop/PageMaker or Premiere...
We're not in that world anymore where we have slow swap disks, and somebody needs to get the dude/ette above a time machine.... he/she/it doesn't understand how fast the unified memory is on Macs and how this allows the M1/2/3 architecture perform so much better than Intel on disk/memory heavy activities.
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It's not a SODIMM but it's still a memory chip. There's nothing special about it except it's on the CPU package.