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Thoughts on the 15" M3 and RAM?
- Thread starter tardman91
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I don't mean to sound like an ass, but I agree and I'm tired of seeing RAM posts every day everywhere. Even on reddit people ask this at least 3 times a day. Every single day. There are several articles on it on MacRumors.
Is 8GB of RAM Enough for a Mac in 2024?
The debate over whether 8GB of RAM is sufficient for a Mac has long been a topic of contention. The controversy goes back to at least 2012, when...
www.macrumors.com
the same way it works on your iPhone. does your iPhone have 16gb of ram? and likely has a whole load of tabs open along with likely a ton of apps too. so how is it that unless you have one of the latest iphone15pro you've managed to survive with less than 8gb of ram and in the same breath say you need at least 16 with a Mac?
On iOS the operating system closes applications when RAM is tight freeing all the memory they used, on macOS it starts paging just parts and reverts to swapping under much higher pressure. Plus I use many more apps simultaneously on my Mac than on my phone. Just to name two things. You still didn't explain why unified RAM specifically reduces RAM requirements.
Ordered the computer this morning since it's the start of the tax free holiday here in FL.
Got a 15" M3 with 256GB and 16GB of RAM. Got a killer deal on it.
-$100 education discount
-$150 Apple gift card (from a previous purchase for the wife, plus another $150 gift card from this one to be used for a new phone this fall)
-$93.68 tax savings
Came out to $1249.00 total. Can't beat that. Whether I need the RAM or not, I'll feel better having it well into the future. Even though I'll probably upgrade again in 3-4 years, this one will get passed down to one of my kids then.
Got a 15" M3 with 256GB and 16GB of RAM. Got a killer deal on it.
-$100 education discount
-$150 Apple gift card (from a previous purchase for the wife, plus another $150 gift card from this one to be used for a new phone this fall)
-$93.68 tax savings
Came out to $1249.00 total. Can't beat that. Whether I need the RAM or not, I'll feel better having it well into the future. Even though I'll probably upgrade again in 3-4 years, this one will get passed down to one of my kids then.
Awesome, congrats. You can't beat the deal. I am sure the 16gb will help you not feel like you need to stress as much about closing unneeded programs out and what all you have running. I seriously debated 16gb but ultimately I went with the base model on sale at Best Buy for $1049 last week during prime day deals. $250 off the 15" model
And there in your response lays the flaw in your argument . Your total lack of any understanding of what is going on. What do you think is meant by IOS freeing up memory. are you that brainwashed to think it is anything else other than just paging out parts to disk?
Let's spell it out in simple terms for you. Memory Page Swapping was a method to try and free up RAM resources that were in short supply. it was considered in older computers to be undesirable as the speed of the ram was far faster than the speed of what was being swapped out to. Back in the old days when you did storage onto a physical magnetic hard disk the speed of that hard disk was so slow it was painful when blocks of memory were being written to and read from the hard disk. This got much better when we moved to solid state in an SSD was many times faster so what was being one before in 4-5 seconds, could get done in 1 second. WOW a 5x improvement. It got even better when going from SATA to PCI NVME making the wait time now closer to the 0.5 second mark. less but still not nearly fast enough for it not to be noticeable. But the ram of the intel chip bus was still sitting on a special dedicated high speed bus that is thousands of times faster than the external IO PCI bus the external SSD drive was sitting on.
Now enter the Unified Memory. What Apple has done is effectively move the RAM onto the main processor giving you blazingly fast ram access, but it also frees up the IO bus. Now what has been done is the really fast solid state storage is sitting on a ultrafast bus that in the old intel world was used to communicate with ram so memory page swapping can be done in effectively 1/10 what you had before, to the point that the average person cannot perceive that it is even happening. Why pay for really expensive DDR6 ram when you can get the same perceived performance from a combined DDR6/NVME hybrid solution for far less cost.
Now if you are running huge programs that really are actively crunching huge blocks of memory all the time then having the extra ram is going to be faster and clearly worth it. But for most people, even with Chrome and 130 tabs open, that really only 5-6 will be actively used, the time difference for page swapping memory to work with them is in the milliseconds that you cannot perceive, vs in the nanoseconds that you also cannot perceive if you had everything in ram.
GET OVER IT. If you want to spend your money buying more ram then nobody is stopping you. Nobody is saying you cannot buy your MacBook with 16, 24 or 64gb of ram if that is what floats your boat. But for the average person that buys a laptop to surf the web, look at photos, write emails, do some spreadsheet work. They do not need the extra ram for the current version of MacOS 14.
I don't mind sounding like an ass, but do you really think that the average Mac user even knows what Blender is, let alone has a version installed and does rendering runs on it multiple times a day for it to even be a relevant benchmark?I don't mean to sound like an ass, but I agree and I'm tired of seeing RAM posts every day everywhere. Even on reddit people ask this at least 3 times a day. Every single day. There are several articles on it on MacRumors.
Is 8GB of RAM Enough for a Mac in 2024?
The debate over whether 8GB of RAM is sufficient for a Mac has long been a topic of contention. The controversy goes back to at least 2012, when...
isn't that like saying that you need to have the 275hp engine inside your car because it can get 0-60 in 3.1 seconds faster than your standard engine, like as if it would make any difference in your daily commute home stuck on a hightway in rush hour traffic. Sure, its fun to have but come on.
Well, iOS does not page or swap to disk, it closes applications when RAM is tight. That is one major low-level difference to macOS, which behaves like a normal Unix and starts paging and then swapping.
Apple did not move the RAM onto the main processor, they moved it onto the main processor *package*. That step saves space and perhaps power, but it does not make anything faster. This has been discussed previously. PCs can run their DDR5 at the same, or even higher, frequencies than Apple Silicon chips do.
Btw, the "unified" in unified memory refers to the CPU and GPU sharing the same RAM. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtldevice/3229025-hasunifiedmemory/
And what you write about faster paging does not make any sense. On both Apple Silicon and Intel machines reading from or writing to a modern SSD is done with DMA from PCIe to system RAM, or vice versa. Whether that RAM is on the same package as the SoC, or shared by the GPU, does not make *any* difference.
You should really look at the RAM bandwidth of a Skylake processor compared to PCIe 3, you'd be surprised.
I can agree with you that for casual users the 8GB entry level Macs will be fine. Today.
Would be nice if Apple would start the base model at say 12gb of memory. 16gb is probably not necessary for the average basic user, but 8 is most likely going to be long in the tooth very soon. An extra 4gb would not cost apple much, therefore keeping costs down and maybe being able to offer it at the same entry level price, but would give users just a wee bit more headroom. Wishful thinking I know
According to apple, it doesn’t close the application, more it snapshots the memory that is can store the running state. That is why apple has said it’s better not to swipe close an App when you’ve finished using it as it can take longer to reload and use more power than having iOS put it into the suspended state. But are you now just speculating how MacOS handles an application? I seem to see more memory states in the MacOs than just used and paged.