m1 base ... 7 core vs 8 , 8vs 16gb .... mostly adobe stuff and web browsing.

[rui no onna]

Not a question of need to swap or not, the 16gb swaps a much

Unless Apple's being intentionally illogical when it comes to memory usage, the fact that there's more RAM means there's no need to swap as much given the same workload. I think on Lisa's video, it actually showed 0GB used for swap on the 16GB RAM MacBook.

 

[armoured]

I went with the 7/256 and 16 GB RAM. Why?
because of future proofing. When I bought the MacBook Pro 2011 4 GB RAM was enough for everything. But it got old very fast. The difference is that this one you can’t upgrade. I saw all the tests and yea 8 GB may be more than enough for now but will it be enough in 1-2 years? In 4 years? In 8? Just ask yourself: how long will you keep it. And then it’s simple math. I want to keep it at least for 6 years so 200€ / 6 is 33€ a year or 2.75€ a month. Now I don’t know you but I spent 33€ a year on so much crap that this is a no brainer...

I think you don't even have to go out to six years to make it work out. Let's say it costs $200 to go to 16gb - and spread that over just two years. That's $8.50 a month. I mean, I use my (now getting ancient) macbook air 11" for 2-3 hours a day, even though I have desktop computers as well - the air is just so light and convenient and I'm out at meetings, etc. To me that's worth it.

BTW that old 11" airbook still works fine, and about my only complaint about it? Too little ram and too small an SSD.

 

[enthawizeguy]

ya I got the 512gb with 16gb cause I could get it in 4 days but I wanted 1tb. I feel safer with 1tb but I also feel like maybe I dont need it since all my photos are in adobe cloud on my other laptop .

 

[dilutedq]

Too soon to invest so much into a first generation product when there are going to be such huge improvements in the next year or two in this product line. Plus 8gb is totally fine. You aren't going to future proof it.

I work mainly on ERP software that requires bloated all in one server software combined with Visual Studio for development. I run this on VM with 13gb of ram and my ram doesn't bottleneck me. If I can run what I run in that machine you can do all of what you require in 8gb for the next year or two while we see what the hardware improvements are going to be like on this new platform.

 

[jabbr]

that's the thing ^

I plan on getting the mythical 14" MBP next year and that's probably like 8 months away. Can I get by on 8GB as a holdover? I just want a snappy machine for learning programming basics and to do medium-ish projects in Logic.

 

[dieselm]

the 8gb is fine. if you have dropbox or other apps that keep 'helper' processes around, or are the type of person who runs lots and lots of browser tabs or adobe creative cloud apps, 16gb is wihtout a doubt smoother and more pleasant.

fwiw, if you're constrained on cash and from a performance perspective, you're mostly better off spending the extra $200 on a 16gb MBA vs an 8gb MBP. if you're going to trade it in by next fall for whatever new MBP apple releases, an 8gb MBA will tide you over and will hold most of its value.

 

[1240766]

that's the thing ^

I plan on getting the mythical 14" MBP next year and that's probably like 8 months away. Can I get by on 8GB as a holdover? I just want a snappy machine for learning programming basics and to do medium-ish projects in Logic.

Absolutely, the 8gb is a heck of a machine, I never faced a hiccup with it.

 

[mustdobetter]

I have a maxed-out 2019 16" MBP, and have always been disappointed with the performance. Unsurprisingly the huge issue is the thermals - the throttling means that I never get peak performance from the CPU, and in fact when connected to 2x LG UltraFine 5ks during summer when the temps rise it often throttles to such a degree that the CPUs limit to 1GHz and the laptop effectively crashes. It's also a noisy beast, with the fans running high often and loudly.

I've just purchased a 256GB/8GB MBA and have been using for just less than a week. The silent operation of the MBA is such a wonderful novelty, and the fact that my body temperate doesn't start rising from having a heat brick on my lap is also very welcome - the MBP 16" really is not meant for lap use, whereas the MBA lends itself perfectly for this.

As for desktop use, whilst it only supports 1 of the UltraFines, the performance is outstanding, and largely matches or surpasses the MBP. What I have noticed however is that when connected to the monitor, it can lag in some cases, and in fact I found I had to switch from Safari to Chrome, which seems to handle multiple tabs more efficiently. I'm guessing that the driving of the 5k display puts a lot more pressure on the memory as this is shared between graphics and system. I'm not convinced that the extra GFX core would make much difference, and as the swap storage seems to be capped at 4GB, the extra storage space also wouldn't be needed unless I start to use up the 256GB, which is unlikely. So in my case I believe that the extra 8GB would be a worthwhile upgrade.

 

[mustdobetter]

UPDATE: Just received the following "out of memory" message for the 1st time. Odd, as the memory pressure was low - so this suggests that memory for applications is possibly limited - so a subset of the 8GB is allocated based on GFX use? In any case this is a little worrying considering I didn't have much running. Also my previous assertion that 4GB was the max swap seems to be incorrect. There seems to be a number of reports of this happening with the M1 MPAs if you search Google, so seems like it's not just an issue for me. I'm considering returning the MBA and getting a 16GB version.

 

[AdamInKent]

UPDATE: Just received the following "out of memory" message for the 1st time. Odd, as the memory pressure was low - so this suggests that memory for applications is possibly limited - so a subset of the 8GB is allocated based on GFX use? In any case this is a little worrying considering I didn't have much running.

Am I correct to understand that Chrome is using more than 50 GB of memory address space?!

 

[mustdobetter]

Am I correct to understand that Chrome is using more than 50 GB of memory address space?!

You know I didn't even notice that! That can't be right, and doesn't match what Apple is showing in the 'Force Quit' dialog - not even close. So I think we can assume that's an error with the iStat Menu reporting. Although I will keep an eye on that!

 

[Coheebuzz]

You know I didn't even notice that! That can't be right, and doesn't match what Apple is showing in the 'Force Quit' dialog - not even close. So I think we can assume that's an error with the iStat Menu reporting. Although I will keep an eye on that!

Those processes on the Force Quit message are just over a gigabyte, they don't explain the out of memory error, this must be some app or system process not releasing memory back.

 

[armoured]

You know I didn't even notice that! That can't be right, and doesn't match what Apple is showing in the 'Force Quit' dialog - not even close. So I think we can assume that's an error with the iStat Menu reporting. Although I will keep an eye on that!

I wouldn't assume that's an iStat error - it may be that iStat's picked up/reporting something the apple force quit isn't showing. Would still suspect chrome in that particular case, wouldn't be the first time a browser had a memory leak.

(Would have been interesting to know how much swapping was going on)

 

[Krevnik]

You know I didn't even notice that! That can't be right, and doesn't match what Apple is showing in the 'Force Quit' dialog - not even close. So I think we can assume that's an error with the iStat Menu reporting. Although I will keep an eye on that!

I have to agree with armoured here. Chrome uses multiple processes, which can add up quick if you use a lot of tabs. The memory usage of Chrome winds up not being attributed to Chrome directly, but those extra processes, when you look at Activity Monitor.

I just checked my servers that use iStat Menus for monitoring, and it does combine the memory usage of child processes with the parent. So my VMs are using 16GB of RAM, while VMWare itself is only using 150MB. iStat Menus reports >16GB used by VMWare, which is accurate in the sense that if I quit VMWare, my memory usage will drop by that >16GB.

It’s possible that the Force Quit dialog doesn’t currently count the memory of sub-processes while iStat Menus does (as demonstrated above). I’d even go so far to say that it is likely.

 

[mustdobetter]

That's all really interesting - thanks for the insights @Coheebuzz, @armoured, @Krevnik. I know that Chrome can be a memory hog, and this would suggest that there was a memory leak somewhere. What I'm not clear on though, is that out of that 50gb, given that obviously there is not that much RAM, the rest would be presumably in swap? The swap space readout from iStat is showing 6.62GB, so what explains this discrepancy do you think?

 

[Krevnik]

That's all really interesting - thanks for the insights @Coheebuzz, @armoured, @Krevnik. I know that Chrome can be a memory hog, and this would suggest that there was a memory leak somewhere. What I'm not clear on though, is that out of that 50gb, given that obviously there is not that much RAM, the rest would be presumably in swap? The swap space readout from iStat is showing 6.62GB, so what explains this discrepancy do you think?

Memory management is not a simple topic, unfortunately. So I don’t think you’ll get a certain or adequate explanation here. Especially without the ability to inspect your machine when it hits this state. How many tabs is this 50GB? What websites? How resource heavy are they? Are they web apps potentially keeping lots of data resident in the JavaScript virtual machine? Which tabs account for the memory in Activity Monitor (since they do each get their own process, it is possible to get some idea how the memory is spread among them)? I think Chrome even has a built in “task manager” tool that lets you see which tabs are eating what memory.

But one possible answer to your question is that not everything needs to be put into swap if it doesn’t fit in RAM at the time. If a RAM page is not writable, or is marked purgeable either by the process or the system, then it doesn’t need to be written out to swap. Especially in the HDD era, this sort of optimization by avoiding writing to swap helped keep the machine feeling performant. Today, it’s important to avoid writing data to an SSD that already exists there to reduce TBW and extend the life of the drive.

While I’m not familiar with modern browser code (let alone Chromium specifically), it’s possible that browsers lean on purgeable memory. Images, HTML, and CSS are all things that can be re-fetched from the local disk, or the network in the worst case. There’s some intermediate forms that are slower to generate from those raw resources, though, so I can’t be certain here.

But the fact that you got the “kill processes to free memory” dialog at all pretty much means something related to the memory manager was reaching exhaustion and refused to keep going. It’s hard to say what exactly. I generally never see this dialog myself these days. I used to see it with Xcode which in that case certainly was a leak (it would happen if I left Xcode idle for 2-3 days with a single project open in the background).

 

[BATman.Berlin]

ight room , photoshop, illustrator , in design -> 16GB is a must. I learned it the hard way. The 8GB is OK as long as you only have one and only one single app open. My mini ran fine but it is a difference now working on a 16GB with multiple apps open. If you can afford, max the air out and do not worry.
I originally thought I would be good with a base mini, but my hobbies developed. Buy nice or buy twice ...

 

[Significant1]

That's all really interesting - thanks for the insights @Coheebuzz, @armoured, @Krevnik. I know that Chrome can be a memory hog, and this would suggest that there was a memory leak somewhere. What I'm not clear on though, is that out of that 50gb, given that obviously there is not that much RAM, the rest would be presumably in swap? The swap space readout from iStat is showing 6.62GB, so what explains this discrepancy do you think?

Yeah, things doesn't add up. I know nothing about memory allocation on macOS and how Chrome specific handle it. But maybe Chrome has been trashing/fragmenting its memory so much, it is running out free continuous memory to allocate and/or hitting the limit of a pointer-structure tracking memory-allocations. But then again, I would imagine Chrome giving the error og the system specifically terminating Chrome. 🤷‍♂️

 

[Krevnik]

Yeah, things doesn't add up. I know nothing about memory allocation on macOS and how Chrome specific handle it. But maybe Chrome has been trashing/fragmenting its memory so much, it is running out free continuous memory to allocate and/or hitting the limit of a pointer-structure tracking memory-allocations. But then again, I would imagine Chrome giving the error og the system specifically terminating Chrome. 🤷‍♂️

If an allocation fails, the app has so little address space available that it couldn't display an error dialog. Most apps will simply crash (and arguably, should simply crash). That said, because Chrome uses multiple processes, and the fact that we are talking about a 64-bit only platform, address space exhaustion is unlikely.

That said, page tables are a finite resource. The Force Quit dialog is triggered by system resource exhaustion, which could very well be the page table.

 

[pugxiwawa]

Make sure you use Chrome beta for M1. But in any case if you are relying on mba for day to day work as main computer you should get 16GB.

 

[CheesePuff]

Make sure you use Chrome beta for M1. But in any case if you are relying on mba for day to day work as main computer you should get 16GB.

Why? The public releases have been Apple Silicon native since November

 

[awsom82]

Reviewers say iMacs 7core underpowered, in WoW game produces 30fps-40fps vs 8core iMac which runs 60fps

 

[Coheebuzz]

Reviewers say iMacs 7core underpowered, in WoW game produces 30fps-40fps vs 8core iMac which runs 60fps

That doesn't sound right as WoW is largely single core, are they sure they aren't running into the graphics issue which appeared in 9.0.5 and is affecting every platform?

Here's what happens when you face certain elements, note the FPS counter...

 

[The_Interloper]

Reviewers say iMacs 7core underpowered, in WoW game produces 30fps-40fps vs 8core iMac which runs 60fps

Is that not down to the iMac's 4.5k screen? That's a lot of pixels the GPU is pushing.

 

[mlykke]

I see that there is still a lot of incorrect information going around about the memory handling in the M1. The simple answer is to get 16 GB. There is only one reason to not get 16 GB and that is if your budget is so super tight you can't afford it. And between memory and an extra core, the memory is MUCH more important.