I assumed it was an M1 as all of the other MacBooks at my store were M1. I wish the stores had 16/500 Airs myself.
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I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM
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I assumed it was an M1 as all of the other MacBooks at my store were M1. I wish the stores had 16/500 Airs myself.
If you add a modern GPU you can enable HVEC encoding and run macOS versions newer than Mojave using OpenCore. Follow the relevant threads on the Mac Pro forum. There is even a preconfigured version posted that is quite easy and reliable.
16GB was not base RAM for the 15” unless you bought a particular configuration with the RAM upgrade as part of its cost. Sort of how the 1TB iPad Pro includes 16GB RAM.
They're called MacBook PROs for a reason. The 15s came with 16, the 13s had 16 as optional. A lot of computers came with 4 GB of RAM a few years ago and we have a 2018 Mac Mini with 8 GB. 32 GB is still rare in laptops.
He wasn't incorrect. Apple did bump the base 15" model to a 16GB baseline prior to a spike in ram prices. They reverted it on the next refresh and have stayed with a baseline of 8GB since then. It was only 1-2 generations, so you probably missed it.
Anyone who uses their computers for more than just youtube, facebook and emails was using computers with 16 GB already back then already. Also the computers from work, all had 16 GB of RAM atleast.
Heck, my 2010 MBP from 11 years ago was even equipped with 8GB of RAM.
The 15s didn’t always come with 16 GB as the base model. My 2012 15” rMBP had 8GB, and I had to specifically choose 16 when I upgraded to the late 2013 15”.
Fair enough, but that anomaly
Yep. Thats why it's misleading the say that 16GB used to be the standard just because one or two 15" MBPs came with it.
I think its pretty clear depends on what you do with your computer. Me? Not a power user. Just basic stuff and using a 2015 MBA with 4GB RAM running Big Sur and its just fine.
There 2 things that I personally believe mislead a lot of people into thinking they need more RAM:
1. The Mac will use as much RAM as you throw at it. Whether it's 4 or 64 the Mac will put all of it to use. That's what it's there for, to be used. It isn't meant to sit there in reserve. I think this dupes people into thinking if they didn't have exactly as much as they have that it would perform worse and that's simply not the case.
2. Safari's overall terrible performance with any amount of RAM. People are likewise afraid of downgrading the amount of RAM they use because they think Safari will actually perform worse than it does. Don't worry. It can't perform worse than it already does.
1. The Mac will use as much RAM as you throw at it. Whether it's 4 or 64 the Mac will put all of it to use. That's what it's there for, to be used. It isn't meant to sit there in reserve. I think this dupes people into thinking if they didn't have exactly as much as they have that it would perform worse and that's simply not the case.
2. Safari's overall terrible performance with any amount of RAM. People are likewise afraid of downgrading the amount of RAM they use because they think Safari will actually perform worse than it does. Don't worry. It can't perform worse than it already does.
A little off topic sorry but as you raised the subject of Safari's performance why does it just suck the life out of batteries (as well as consuming RAM)?
Even for light usage I found that 4 GB RAM occasionally caused the rainbow beachball to appear on our aluminum MacBook, even back 3 years ago, and yes this machine has an SSD. This is just a kitchen machine, that's used for light surfing, email, occasional Word, and recipes.
Luckily this older MacBook could take memory upgrades. After I upgraded the machine to 8 GB, the beachball never came back.
Was it usable on 4 GB RAM? Sure. Was it ideal, even for light usage? No. 8 GB is the sweet spot for light users IMO, and heavy users usually should go for more.
I still believe if you are the kind of Mac user that opens an App all day long working needs the 16g! If you keep less than ten tabs opened all day you might need 16g too!
Maybe it's just me (and old age), but I have NEVER had 10 tabs open, probably 3-4 at most.
Usually 1-2 regularly (on my iPad pro).
I would lose track of what's what otherwise....
I use Favicons that indicate what the tabs are. I have six pinned tabs and typically two or three others.
Opening up a lot of YouTube videos uses a lot of RAM. It's more efficient to save the URLs in a Notes entry and then click on the links as you want to watch them.
I just ordered 64 GB of DDR4 3200. I'm thinking about a 27 inch iMac. I just plan to use it in whatever my next system is. Ideally the M1X iMacs will have a couple of DIMM slots that are user-accessible.
My current 27" iMac has 48GB of RAM and the swap file is constantly zero! Performance is very good, but my M1 MacBook Pro is faster in every task. I had to remotely support a customer of mine this weekend, and used Citrix Receiver (Workspace) to connect to the client's infrastructure. Using the iMac was fast, but sometimes you could notice a small delay when typing with the Apple Magic keyboard. Using my M1 13" MBP for the exact same task was much better..
I don't need CPU intensive apps, but for my usage, the M1 is better than the current iMac 27". Even with 16GB of RAM. My MBP generates a 5GB swap file and my iMac uses no swap, but the M1 is faster for the things I do. It is pretty impressive.
My current trading setup is 3x4K + 1xQHD. The iMac could get me to 1x5k + 2x4k which is pretty good. I don't think that any of the M1s could get me there.
One of the programs that I use runs poorly on the M1 as well. It even doesn't run all that well on macOS Intel.
We have an Air/M1 16/1 and it's nice, light, portable and fast. But it wouldn't make a great trading station.
Favicons are the little things in the squares. The green W is for Marketwatch.com. The blue square is The Weather Channel. The next is Fidelity Investments. The blue bird is Twitter. The gray apple is Apple.com. Websites often have small graphic icons that are displayed in the tabs. In the pinned tabs on the left, all you see is the favicon. In normal tabs, you see the Favicon and the title of the page.
... wouldn't make a great trading station - and I'm quite sure it was never intended to! These first couple of M1 MacBooks are just the beginning, right? Your setup (3x4K + 1xQHD) sounds like it would challenge most laptops and desktops.
I expect that over the next couple of years we'll see these M1 (and M2, etc) powered computers in much more powerful and capable configurations, and it won't be much longer until you could drive that setup with one of them.
I'm using a custom-built rig right now but I'd prefer macOS for office and one of my trading platforms. A lot of people are asking that the program that runs poorly on M1 be rewritten but it was written a very long time ago and I imagine it would be quite expensive to rewrite. Apple's got a great future but I'd like something for right now.
I also like to be able to run Windows Virtual Machines and I always have one running on my custom rig. I don't think that there will ever be a solution on Apple Silicon. One workaround would be the ability to run a macOS VM on Apple Silicon. I'm not aware of anyone getting that to run.
You can use Windows for ARM in a Vm, running Parallels, but I guess your software will have its issues with Windows on ARM..