If just one person can do something it is not impossible.
9to5mac.com
Why do you worry about this? Just do the work you need to do and let the OS handle the RAM. I just don’t get worrying about this stuff. I have the base Air with 8 GB. I always have iMessage, Mail, Brave with 5 tabs, terminal, Xcode, and Lightroom open while attached to an external and I never have any issues. Some I even open up Safari for google meet as well and everything is smooth.
No, it is using 15.91 GB. And only 10.8 MB swap. That's good, nothing much wasted and not much has been removed from memory to swap.
I worry cause it doesn't give me a piece of mind, seeing that memory graph turn to yellow. Why would 16GB of unified memory use so much RAM just with 18 safari tabs open, mail app, iMessages and FaceTime and I don't even have a photo editing or video editing app open at the same time. I mean, if 16GB of RAM does this, what's the point of 8GB?
And isn't that close to 16GB of RAM? I don't care about swap. The things I kept hearing about M1 RAM made it sound as if it would behave as 24 or 32GB of Intel RAM. Seeing that graph turn to yellow is just not what I expected for just browsing the web and having a few apps open.
If you were to ignore or turn off Activity Monitor - how is your machine actually running?
No it certainly does work flawlessly and yeah looking constantly at the activity monitor it bothers me seeing the memory going yellow so maybe I should ignore activity monitor or I guess wait for the bigger iMacs that will have 32 or 64GB of ram. But then again, I highly doubt I would have the budget to buy a machine like that especially if the ram won’t be user accessible and I won’t be able to upgrade it myself. ☹️
People need to stop thinking its 1999 still. What 15 websites are you using? All YouTube videos? Websites these days are way way WAY more intensive than they were in 1999. Web 2.0 added SOOOO MUCH javascript that basically, a poorly written website can make even a $2,500 custom built PC run horribly (I generated a proof of concept with a very large loop in javascript and my CPU on both my i7-10700k and i9-9900k was at 90% utilization).
These systems were not marketed to be true professional systems. Why do you think we still have 14"/16" Macbook Pro, 27"+ iMacs, and the Mac Pro/Mac Mini Pro still to come? Sure you can get a LOT of professional work done vs before. But like you said, if you are working on very large files and need 32GB of RAM or more, these systems were not meant for you to begin with.
Nope, implementation on memory management also matters.
Again, this isn't 1999 anymore. Websites are not just static text with some images. We have ads, a LOT a massive amount sometimes of Javascript running, videos auto-playing, and much more. WHAT are those 18 tabs? Are they ALL YouTube?
Hmm... Interesting!
Absolutely! Not only from a resource perspective, but I use an ad-blocker for security concerns too. I always pay the website (like Macrumors here) for the "ad-free" experience when offered.
But then what's the point in having such a fast and high performing CPU as the M1 which blows Intel higher processors out of the water and at the same time having a modest RAM to go with it? I think the M1 is more than enough for professional work but I see that the RAM is not performing on the same game-changing level as the cpu.
Well it gives everybody the ability to make some 4K videos or work on some images. I do a lot of graphics work with Photoshop, but most of my files are relatively small and can be done on a 4GB of RAM system. I also only do 1080p video editing and I tested it with only 8GB of RAM is fine.
It's complicated... and you should care about the swap. As someone said above, unused RAM is wasted RAM. That's doubly true today, when macOS uses the RAM as a fast cache disk (see the portion on Activity Monitor referring to "cached files"). We've all been conditioned to the days of the 1990's and early 2000's, when used RAM was RAM taken up by programs and the operating system, and consistently high usage meant you were probably nearing the limit of what you could do. Now the operating system tries to find a use for unused RAM to further speed up your computer's operations. It's still a potentially useful metric, but it's not as black and white as it used to be.
I suspect there's a reason why the 16" MacBook Pro, 27" iMac, and Mac Pro - all enthusiast or "professional" systems - have not yet been switched over the M1 chip. The point of the M1 was to show that even Apple's entry-level systems are highly competitive, and they're presumably not the best Apple could do.
Well that definitely makes me feel a little bit better about the high RAM usage, I hope that's the case with the 16GB iMacs that the machine is basically trying to utilize unused RAM for more efficient performance instead that it is running out of RAM.
