For those of you who went with 16gb RAM on your new 14” or 16” MBP.

[armoured]

And you just proved my point I was trying to make. 16GB of RAM is FASTER than the 32GB in the older Intel models....THUS...now follow me here....leading to people saying "16GB of RAM FEELS like 32GB of RAM". We are not sprouting magic beans here....YOU just proved what we are saying.

Ummm, no, I'm not objecting to the comment that you find X faster than Y. I'm objecting to the (direct quote) explanation that it's faster because of the magic-bean explanations like "could just be Apple significantly changed how memory works with these new systems and new macOS that gets toggled when paired with Apple Silicon."

No. Unless your "significantly changed" just means "made it all faster."

And you are right, I did not need 128GB of RAM but I got it from "recommendations". I do 1080p video editing and even at 4k60 my M1 Mac mini smokes my Intel iMac.

Yes. Because you got bad advice, and your 1080p workload actually wasn't memory-bound at all, and 128gb was basically a waste of money.*

So of course a system that's faster with less memory and still not memory bound outperforms. Put 2tb of ram on your old pentium, it's not going to make it faster. Even if 'significant changes in how memory works' were made, it still wouldn't matter if the perofrmance constraint wasn't memory to begin with.

*Simplified considerably.

 

[Ethosik]

Ummm, no, I'm not objecting to the comment that you find X faster than Y. I'm objecting to the (direct quote) explanation that it's faster because of the magic-bean explanations like "could just be Apple significantly changed how memory works with these new systems and new macOS that gets toggled when paired with Apple Silicon."

No. Unless your "significantly changed" just means "made it all faster."

Yes. Because you got bad advice, and your 1080p workload actually wasn't memory-bound at all, and 128gb was basically a waste of money.*

So of course a system that's faster with less memory and still not memory bound outperforms. Put 2tb of ram on your old pentium, it's not going to make it faster. Even if 'significant changes in how memory works' were made, it still wouldn't matter if the perofrmance constraint wasn't memory to begin with.

*Simplified considerably.

BUT you would need much more memory on slower mechanical hard drives and slower SATA SSDs. Read the edit I made for additional comments regarding that.

And yes, significantly changed does include the hardware and everything in the chain. So the more memory channels, 400GB/s speeds. It ALL is significant and Apple Silicon made this happen.

 

[armoured]

BUT you would need much more memory on slower mechanical hard drives and slower SATA SSDs. Read the edit I made for additional comments regarding that.

Exactly what I wrote above. Faster/better SSDs compensate somewhat for insufficient memory. No change in how memory works, just that it works a lot better when the disk cache is ... faster.

And yes, significantly changed does include the hardware and everything in the chain. So the more memory channels, 400GB/s speeds. It ALL is significant and Apple Silicon made this happen.

But these are the changes we knew about! They were announced! And they mostly consisted of saying ... we made the memory and SSDs faster. That's not a change in how memory works, it's just faster. And to repeat: at some point, faster disk cache compensates for use of the disk cache from low memory. (And if disk cache not needed, faster disk is better than mo'memory).

And yet you keep referring to handwaving magic beans stuff, like some 'toggle'. What, did apple include a 'toggle' in software to make stuff go faster (or slower), that only works in apple silicon?

There's no magic bean-powered toggle, that's completely made up stuff to support the handwaving.

You're changing your story as you go along. Please just stop.

 

[Ethosik]

Exactly what I wrote above. Faster/better SSDs compensate somewhat for insufficient memory. No change in how memory works, just that it works a lot better when the disk cache is ... faster.

But these are the changes we knew about! They were announced! And they mostly consisted of saying ... we made the memory and SSDs faster. That's not a change in how memory works, it's just faster. And to repeat: at some point, faster disk cache compensates for use of the disk cache from low memory. (And if disk cache not needed, faster disk is better than mo'memory).

And yet you keep referring to handwaving magic beans stuff, like some 'toggle'. What, did apple include a 'toggle' in software to make stuff go faster (or slower), that only works in apple silicon?

There's no magic bean-powered toggle, that's completely made up stuff to support the handwaving.

You're changing your story as you go along. Please just stop.

I have not once changed my story. I am saying some people are reporting SOMETHING is different when comparing Intel macs with M1 Macs. And that 16GB FEELS like 32GB on Intel. SOMETHING is different. Oh what is different? More memory channels, with the M1 Max up to 400GB/s bandwidth, faster SSDs which makes swapping less noticeable. GPU cores have their own tile memory as well.

Not once am I, or others just waving our hands. They report something is different. Maybe they don't know all the details, but they KNOW something is different. How is that hand waving? Its like saying something is different between the RTX 3060 and RTX 3080. If you are not THAT INTERESTED, you don't know what is different. Is it the memory clock that impacts your games? More VRAM? Some people do NOT KNOW. But they know SOMETHING is different. Yet you and I how are really into tech knows the underlying difference there. Would my grandma? No. But is she effectively waving her hand? No. She notices a difference. Just because she doesn't know the technical differences doesn't mean she doesn't notice the difference. My grandma also noticed a difference from spinning hard drive and an SSD. But she could never tell me what the difference is. That doesn't mean she is wrong.

Where did I say there is a toggle? I never once said it. I said in broad terms SOMETHING is different.

Something includes the more memory channels and higher speeds.

And yes, I do not know if macOS operates differently on Apple Silicon....do you? You do know there are features exclusive to Apple Silicon macs that Intel macs do not have right? There are different binaries between x86 and arm64. Did you study those differences? I did not. If you did and KNOW Intel build of macOS is effectively equivalent to Arm MacOS build....GREAT! But that does not mean I am simply waving my hands. I never once claimed with 100% certainty that Apple Silicon macOS is different!!!!

Again, this is just leading to semantics/technicalities and a nerd war on who knows the most about the tech. People broadly state "16GB M1 Mac feels better than 32GB Intel". They are not wrong and they are not waving their hands thinking its "MAGIC!!!" Nothing in tech is Magic. There is some either hardware or software differences that changes how it works. And I really don't think its fair to get on all the other peoples case here when they are technically speaking the truth, just in a broad terms. 32GB Intel vs 16GB M1 does have differences.

And if you REALLY want to get on someone's case by saying "magic" all the time, you would really hate Steve Jobs and Apple in general because they say (past tense for Steve ) it....A LOT!

Like this one (its time stamp). You and I both know its not "magic", just code accepting user input in such a way.

 

[armoured]

I am saying some people are reporting SOMETHING is different when comparing Intel macs with M1 Macs. And that 16GB FEELS like 32GB on Intel. SOMETHING is different.

Yep. It's faster. That's the whole story.

Not once am I, or others just waving our hands.

The toggle. Complete nonsense.

Where did I say there is a toggle? I never once said it. I said in broad terms SOMETHING is different.

Direct quote: "That could just be Apple significantly changed how memory works with these new systems and new macOS that gets toggled when paired with Apple Silicon."

Hand-waving plus magic bean toggle.

 

[Ethosik]

Yep. It's faster. That's the whole story.

The toggle. Complete nonsense.

Direct quote: "That could just be Apple significantly changed how memory works with these new systems and new macOS that gets toggled when paired with Apple Silicon."

Hand-waving plus magic bean toggle.

Its not hand waving. You do realize there are some drivers, software and operating system optimizations that are platform specific right? .NET for example. It goes through an optimization phase after you install it to match your specific system and architecture. Windows during install whether its AMD or Intel optimizes for those platforms. So it is really not a major leap to think that macOS can optimize for Intel on Intel systems or Apple Silicon on Apple Silicon systems.

 

[armoured]

You do realize there are some drivers, software and operating system optimizations that are platform specific right? ... So it is really not a major leap to think that macOS can optimize for Intel on Intel systems or Apple Silicon on Apple Silicon systems.

Oh yeah, the compiler optimization toggle that turns 16gb into 32, and only works on apple silicon and no other ARM. I forgot about that.

 

[Ethosik]

Oh yeah, the compiler optimization toggle that turns 16gb into 32, and only works on apple silicon and no other ARM. I forgot about that.

Uhhhhhh are you even reading my posts? I clearly said EXPLICITLY that people on this forum are NOT suggesting 16GB == 32GB in terms of SPACE. That is 100% purely unrealistic. The entire discussion is "16GB M1 feels much better than 32GB on Intel". I think you are leading this down a whole technicality war here. This type of discussion is like saying with a wave of my hand my car that seats 4 people can now seat 14. NOBODY on this forum is saying this.

And you know very well there are more types of memory optimizations that just more space. Could be Apple Silicon is more aggressive on swapping? More intelligent in that regard utilizing the neural engine to learn behavior of the user? Not entirely "magic" is it? That is what Superfetch does on Windows, learns what the user uses most and caches them in memory up front. Not a giant leap to suggest Apple could implement a learning mechanism for learning when to swap and what to swap based on what the user is doing.

 

[UBS28]

It is better to get 32 GB of RAM because I saw that the GPU can eat 24GB of VRAM.

On normal computers, GPU’s have their own dedicated VRAM, but on these things it is shared.

 

[UBS28]

Uhhhhhh are you even reading my posts? I clearly said EXPLICITLY that people on this forum are NOT suggesting 16GB == 32GB in terms of SPACE. That is 100% purely unrealistic. The entire discussion is "16GB M1 feels much better than 32GB on Intel". I think you are leading this down a whole technicality war here. This type of discussion is like saying with a wave of my hand my car that seats 4 people can now seat 14. NOBODY on this forum is saying this.

And you know very well there are more types of memory optimizations that just more space. Could be Apple Silicon is more aggressive on swapping? More intelligent in that regard utilizing the neural engine to learn behavior of the user? Not entirely "magic" is it? That is what Superfetch does on Windows, learns what the user uses most and caches them in memory up front. Not a giant leap to suggest Apple could implement a learning mechanism for learning when to swap and what to swap based on what the user is doing.

These MBP’s need more RAM actually because the GPU eats alot of RAM, which is an issue which you do not have with a dedicated GPU that PC’s have.

The GPU on my 16” M1 Max can draw more VRAM than 16GB RAM (which is kinda impressive since the RTX 3080 only comes with 16GB of VRAM I believe)

 

[Jason32]

What about editing 8k footage with tons of effects and colour grading? Surely 16gb won’t be enough?

 

[iDron]

Thinking of upgrading from my current 2015 13" MBP with 8GB of RAM. It's constantly lagging, recently. I have to run a VM with 1-2 simple Windows programs for work often, and started to do some ML analysis of measurement data, which often takes a few GB in VS Code or just a few tabs of Colab (which are really memory intensive).

I've had this MBP for close to 7 years now, and more RAM would have been beneficial in the past 2-3 years already probably. Now I'm wondering again, base 14" config, or update RAM to 32GB or CPU to 10 cores.

I've installed a Windows 11 VM on my girlfriends's M1 Mac mini (with 8GB RAM) a few days ago, and I could feel the machine getting a bit slower and memory pressure going into yellow.

As said, I'm not doing any crazy video/audio/rendering stuff, however I do need a Windows VM often, and do some (smaller scale) data science with ML, which would be nice to run locally. All along dozens of Safari tabs and regular office stuff running. Should 16GB be fine, or should I better upgrade to 32GB and/or 10 cores?

 

[Shirasaki]

Idk what to say about it, but 16GB I thought would be enough for a long time when I jumped the gun prematurely to get the 13” MacBook Pro. Not long after that, only 3 month of use, the memory pressure is always yellow (with a stable 6GB of swap usage) after I finish launching all applications I need, and macOS in general already feel a bit sluggish. Maybe M1 is just not that good enough. Maybe 16GB memory just can’t cut it. Either way, despite my definitely not heavy use (I don’t do daily video editing, 3D modeling etc), 16GB memory already shows it’s age, which surprises me a lot. How on earth M1 is already this bad (comparatively. By no means I compare it with any x86 processor)?

I mean, yes, I can close the program and such, but damn, who pushes me to buy those extremely expensive 32GB RAM MacBook Pro… I don’t think people should break their bank to get 32GB memory machine, but to say 8GB memory is enough nowadays based on “those tests” isn’t really that genuine to me anymore.

 

[anshuvorty]

Idk what to say about it, but 16GB I thought would be enough for a long time when I jumped the gun prematurely to get the 13” MacBook Pro. Not long after that, only 3 month of use, the memory pressure is always yellow (with a stable 6GB of swap usage) after I finish launching all applications I need, and macOS in general already feel a bit sluggish. Maybe M1 is just not that good enough. Maybe 16GB memory just can’t cut it. Either way, despite my definitely not heavy use (I don’t do daily video editing, 3D modeling etc), 16GB memory already shows it’s age, which surprises me a lot. How on earth M1 is already this bad (comparatively. By no means I compare it with any x86 processor)?

I mean, yes, I can close the program and such, but damn, who pushes me to buy those extremely expensive 32GB RAM MacBook Pro… I don’t think people should break their bank to get 32GB memory machine, but to say 8GB memory is enough nowadays based on “those tests” isn’t really that genuine to me anymore.

Electron/Chromium apps are notorious for hogging huge amounts of ram…

Most likely this is the reason why your memory pressure is constantly yellow?

 

[Shirasaki]

Electron/Chromium apps are notorious for hogging huge amounts of ram…

Most likely this is the reason why your memory pressure is constantly yellow?

Umm maybe. The startup Memory pressure isn’t that high. But I need those applications for work. So don’t really have much choice there.

 

[darngooddesign]

One interesting thing I found, comparing performance of Lightroom Classic on my 2020 iMac (with 32GB RAM) and Lightroom Classic on my 14" MBP M1 Pro (with 16GB RAM), and doing the same editing workflow on the same batch of DSLR RAW photos, with similar other background programs running, is that:
LR on the MBP uses about twice the RAM as on the iMac, despite having half the actual amount of physical RAM.
For example:
14" MBP LR memory usage = ~10GB, Total physical RAM = 16GB
27" iMac LR memory usage = ~5GB, Total physical RAM = 32GB

I'm not sure why or what this means, or whether it is just an anomaly, but is the opposite of what I expected. Perhaps because the RAM on the MBP is shared with the GPU? (My 2020 iMac has 8GB VRAM.)
I am happy with 16GB on my 14" MBP, but I thought I would report this for others to consider.

Yeah I think you’re onto the reason in your last paragraph, how much RAM + VRAM is your iMac using? I’m not saying they’re the same, but probably similar total RAM usage.

When I tested an M1 MBA against my old 13” 2014 MBP, both with 16GB RAM, if found the RAM usage to be similar.

 

[throAU]

Do you find it enough, or did you return it and re-order with more RAM?

What was/are you using your new MBP for, and at what point did you realise that 16gb was, or was not enough for you?

Its fine.

I run a heap of browsers, remote apps, office, games, blender, network admin tools, etc. and it doesn't even break a sweat.

I'm not doing a bunch of graphics or video stuff, I'm sure if you're doing that you may want more, but I have no doubt this will handle hobbyist video editing no problem at all.

The only issue is currently Monterey 12.01 memory leaks. Normally its fine, but occasionally memory will leak a HEAP.

I've seen Windowserver using 18 GB of Ram, memory pressure orange, and the only way I noticed was to look at activity monitor.... machine was still 100% responsive.

In general use this thing just doesn't slow down.


Unless you're doing severe, high end video editing workloads, or high end 3d, the M1-Pro is fine. Ditto for 16 GB. I mean people have been able to do that on an M1 Air - unless you KNOW you have a high memory intensive workload and how much RAM specifically you need, you probably don't need any more. Those who do are most likely edge cases.

They certainly exist - but unless you've essentially crippled any prior laptop machine ever made with your work - you'll be fine is my bet.


That said, if you want more and can afford it - go nuts.

 

[throAU]

And the "my SSD is so fast I don't mind when my computer pages or swaps" is the opposite fetish of 2021. I sure as hell won't buy a machine that needs to constantly use a couple of GB of swap space on the day it is purchased AND can't upgrade it's RAM for later.

See... with modern storage and memory management (now we have SSDs instead of spinning disks - since about Lion) this is how things work:

• You load apps
• The machine keeps them in ram
• when stuff is INACTIVE, it is (after being compressed) proactively swapped to storage (but kept in cache) in case a large memory allocation request comes in - it can be instantly dropped (rather than having to wait for it to be paged out AT THAT POINT. if it becomes active - if it is still in cache, its already in memory, but if required for something else, the cache can be immediately evicted for memory allocation.

Your machine is NOT stressed as soon as it starts touching swap. Your SSD will NOT rapidly wear out from lightly touching swap.

Now, if you've got barely any Ram left as "cached" in addition to none free (the "cached" figure is the real indication that things have really gone south, as "cached" is essentially idle free memory) and memory pressure beyond orange then maybe you should worry about it.

But this whole notion of "OMG MY MACHINE HIT SWAP I NEED MORE RAMS" is bollocks.


Any modern SSD will be good for TERABYTES of data written per day, every day for several years and unless you're generating terabytes of data or terabytes of changed data per day, every day you're unlikely to wear out the SSD before the machine is totally inadequate for your workload and should be upgraded to the new one anyway.

 

[Appltsla]

Having used a 16gb M1 pro for a month now, I’m going to return it when my 32gb one arrives.

It was fine when used on just the macbook screen itself. However, when I plug it into my work setup of 2 5k ultra fine monitors, memory pressure goes to yellow and red most of the time. Swap disk used has been increasing and at almost 10gb now. I wasn’t even doing much of any intensive usages yet like running multiple docker services.

So it seems like 64gb might not be necessary, but 32 gb would be really good to have if you are running on multiple high res external monitors.

 

[BATman.Berlin]

16GB PRO 10/16 core with 1TB. Use it for microcontroller coding, design of 3D parts, slicing for 3D prints, cutting 4K drone footage. No problems at all with 16GB RAM.

Started with a 8GB mac m1 mini for the same purpose. Figured out the memory and SSD was too tight. Went to a 16G/1TB M1AIR and felt the improvement. But the real improvement came through the CPU and the setup I have serves me very well.

 

[throAU]

It was fine when used on just the macbook screen itself. However, when I plug it into my work setup of 2 5k ultra fine monitors, memory pressure goes to yellow and red most of the time. Swap disk used has been increasing and at almost 10gb now. I wasn’t even doing much of any intensive usages yet like running multiple docker services.

Maybe check to see you're not impacted by the Monterey memory leaks in Windowserver (and controlcenter, and who knows what else) first (most likely), i.e., if you can hold off for macOS 12.1 to confirm.

A 32 GB machine won't fix that (because it will just leak more until memory pressure is red again), but a software update will. Your machine also shouldn't be seeing that memory usage from that light usage.

I run two external displays off mine, most of the time things are fine, but when one of the memory leaks gets triggered things go south (I had window server alone using 18 GB of RAM itself the other day which is clearly ridiculous - normally well under 1GB, normally 500-600 MB, but only noticed due to the memory pressure graph in activity monitor. others have seen window server using 30, 40 GB of RAM or more when it leaks). A reboot fixed for me, it but your combination of software may be triggered the leaks more often. It's a bug, hopefully fixed in 12.1.

 

[techishi]

Maybe check to see you're not impacted by the Monterey memory leaks in Windowserver (and controlcenter, and who knows what else) first (most likely), i.e., if you can hold off for macOS 12.1 to confirm.

A 32 GB machine won't fix that (because it will just leak more until memory pressure is red again), but a software update will. Your machine also shouldn't be seeing that memory usage from that light usage.

I run two external displays off mine, most of the time things are fine, but when one of the memory leaks gets triggered things go south (I had window server alone using 18 GB of RAM itself the other day which is clearly ridiculous - normally well under 1GB, normally 500-600 MB, but only noticed due to the memory pressure graph in activity monitor. others have seen window server using 30, 40 GB of RAM or more when it leaks). A reboot fixed for me, it but your combination of software may be triggered the leaks more often. It's a bug, hopefully fixed in 12.1.

I'm seeing this come up more and more. Just to echo, I've actually ran issue I've run into as well (memory leaks with window server). I have a base 14" running with 2 external 4k monitors. Started to see my memory pressure & usage creep up in iStatMenus. Usually window server sits around 600-800mb but it has crept to 7gb! Like you mentioned, a restart fixes it no problem. From what I can tell the compressed memory that is growing. But for the cause who knows, it can be an amalgamation of things...

I personally haven't run into any performance issues yet due to the memory leak but it's something I wish Apple would at least address, it seems to be a pretty high priority issue.

 

[randolorian]

Does anyone know where we can see how much memory the GPU is using?

 

[Internaut]

Do you find it enough, or did you return it and re-order with more RAM?

What was/are you using your new MBP for, and at what point did you realise that 16gb was, or was not enough for you?

I should have been fine with 8GB on my M1 MacBook Air but found I had yellow memory pressure anxiety*. BTW, it only ever went red when running Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time. Even running Windows was fine! Anyway, the unopened base 14" is currently sat on my bed (letting the package warm up a bit, before I unbox - it arrived like a block of ice ten minutes ago). I expect 16GB to be more than adequate.

* Yes, I make my claim to fame in naming a new form of anxiety.