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Personally can’t wait to upgrade. The point about 16GB being on the low side was nice to get confirmed. There has been a lot of conspiracy on 16GB being plenty

Personally can’t wait to upgrade. The point about 16GB being on the low side was nice to get confirmed. There has been a lot of conspiracy on 16GB being plenty enough, but as a developer I know that to future proof my next machine I would really like 64GB. I already have 16GB of ram on my 8 year old MacBook Pro.

cataphract 6y ago
64 GB is already the minimum for building big projects like V8 on 16 cores (e.g. on the 3950X)
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  I'm curious about this, because I read some posts e.g. https://medium.com/computed-comparisons/garbage-collection-vs-automatic-reference-counting-a420bd4c7c81 https://medium.com/computed-comparisons/garbage-collection-v... that say memory management and bandwidth are so fast, you actually need a lot less memory than on Intel. Edit: not my opinion, just what I found on the internets, not sure why the downvotes if it invites discussion.
  - steipete 6y ago
    I’ve read the reports but I’m not seeing this. Normal workflow and already over 11 GB that swaps.
    - aledalgrande 6y ago
      Thanks for reporting! Bummer, for me I think I will have to wait for an M2.
    - chongli 6y ago
      I think the point is that memory bandwidth and SSD bandwidth and latency have improved so much that M1-based Macs are really fast at swapping. Combine that with compression (which macOS has done for a long time) and I could imagine iPadOS-like performance. For normal users (such as people not compiling V8), swapping may be virtually unnoticeable.
      - rsynnott 6y ago
        I do wonder if it’s taking advantage of the cheap CPU power and memory bandwidth to be much more aggressive about memory compression. That could reduce swapping for some workloads, though probably not a v8 build.
      - kllrnohj 6y ago
        Macs have had fast SSDs for a while and as you say compression has also been done for a long time. M1 made no difference whatsoever to memory usage. The posts similar to above seem to just be an attempt to fanfic-justify what's an actual regression for some. For many people 16GB is absolutely enough, and Apple had to start somewhere. But if 16GB wasn't enough for you yesterday, it isn't enough for you now.
        foldr 6y ago
        It's possible that M1 has enabled the use of better memory compression algorithms.
        chongli 6y ago
        The reviews of the M1 MacBook Air and Pro show a dramatic increase in SSD read/write speeds over the 2020 Intel models.
        kllrnohj 6y ago
        Do you have a link? MKBD just said it was "slightly faster" than his comparison system and the numbers for the M1 appear to be around 3GB/s reads and 2.7GB/s writes in disk speed test, which is pretty typical of a last generation NVME drive (current pcie gen4 drives are hitting 7GB/s reads & 5GB/s writes)
        chongli 6y ago
        which is pretty typical of a last generation NVME drive Those numbers are about 2-3x as fast as what my 2020 Intel-based MacBook Air gets.
    - shawnz 6y ago
      What do you mean exactly? It is normal for swapping to happen even if you are using less than the physical memory, so as to trade rarely-used RAM for frequently-used disk cache which improves overall throughput
  - fulafel 6y ago
    That article seems confused and/or misinformed on many points, on many levels. As for the GP cited use case, there's no plausible way in which the compilers involved in the V8 build process would start using less memory due to their memory management machinery getting magically transformed by the hardware from tracing GC to refcounting GC, even assuming LLVM had been using tracing GC in the first place. (Also the tracing GC memory overhead claims originating in Apple's marketing copy are way hyperbolic, modern tracing GCs don't require double storage used in "mark and sweep" GCs)
    - aledalgrande 6y ago
      Makes sense yeah! I guess anything non native would work like that.
      - fulafel 6y ago
        Many memory hungry apps on Apple - Web browsers, compilers, photo/video editing, games, dev tools like vscode/electron/Jave IDEs/emacs/databases - are in this category.
samcheng 6y ago
I suspect there are a lot of us in that boat, with 5-to-8-year-old Macbook Pros. Apple really missed the mark with the intervening generation, by removing useful features and replacing them with features unattractive to developers. Maybe this big leap in processor / thermal / battery life (and a revision back to proper keyboards) will be enough to get us to switch! I think 64GB (or at least 32GB) would be a nice sweetener.
- woahAcademia 6y ago
  That's pretty much how I feel too. Nothing enticing because my computer is lightning fast and this means having to use the Apple ecosystem. It's almost like Apple has a culture of forcing people to do things the hard way, just so it feels rewarding when it's done. Gamifying the experience?
- claudeganon 6y ago
  I upgraded to a high spec MacBook Pro 16 after the M1 model was announced. I need solid virtualization support for Windows and Linux now, plus Big Sur seems kind of a mess from the design and privacy side of things. I'll probably wait 3-5 generations until everything with Apple Silicon is worked out to upgrade again, maybe get an Air as a device for travel if things look stable sooner.
- alphabettsy 6y ago
  I keep seeing this, but the performance gains and real-world, Docker and all, battery life are significant in the 16 inch MacBook Pro‘s more so than even my 2017 15”.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  I'm still running a late 2013 Macbook, now on Big Sur. The battery life is now about 3-4 hours even if I'm doing dev work, but otherwise it's still pretty good otherwise, for a 7 year old laptop. I had a Sony Vaio back in the early 00s, and it started with running XP 'ok', and then... Vista, which made it dog slow. My point being that I'm surprised that a 7 year old laptop is still "good". A new laptop isn't critical to my work at the moment, so I'm happy to wait for an M2, if that's what it will be called. Looking at Apple timelines a new chip tends to be 1-2 years apart, and I'm fine with that. I'm also reluctant to give up Magsafe, or at least have to buy a magnetic USB C connector.
Toutouxc 6y ago
I don't know. I did what I'm currently doing (Ruby on Rails dev) on a 4 GB MacBook Pro until last year and it was fine. At the moment I have around 2 GB free on my 8 GB Linux machine with a webserver, MariaDB, a JetBrains IDE, Slack and Firefox running. It would be easy and dirt cheap to increase the RAM to 16 or 32 GB but I'm too lazy to even order it and open the machine up since I have never felt the need to have more. I'm just saying this so that people like me remember that they're still professionals and their work is valuable even if they don't need 64 GB of RAM.
- lumost 6y ago
  IDEs such as IntelliJ can easily consume 8GB of memory on a moderately sized project of 100k loc. If one has to open multiple such projects or work on a very large project in the million loc scope then you’ll run out of 16 GB really fast. Folks working with data intensive applications often need to trade off writing code to page data in and out of memory during development with larger dev boxes.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    100k LOC would be, let's be generous, about 8 million characters (80/line average, which is high). 8GB of RAM for 8MB of input seems excessive to me. What's going on with that IDE that it needs so much for something so small? Even if that were 8 million distinct tokens/symbols in the input, that's still 1KB/token of memory consumed.
    - CapsAdmin 6y ago
      I would assume code analysis. 8gb still sounds a bit excessive but given how long java stack traces can be maybe it's not so strange.
    - z3t4 6y ago
      For every key stroke a new immutable string is created with the content of the file/state. Plus data structure for AST/static analysis of every file in the project including dependencies. Plus another copy of the file for rendering with syntax highlight. One would think all this copying of data is very inefficient, but computers are good at moving data around. The most costly is rendering the glyphs.
rsynnott 6y ago
I mean, it depends what you do. I have 16GB on my personal laptop, and essentially never swap, but the 16GB on my work machine is painful for large Scala projects. As always, for some people 16 GB will be fine, for some it won’t.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  If Virtual Machines are essential part of the workflow then 16GB is out of question IMO, could get away with Tiny Core Linux/Lubuntu on a VM to some extent but when getting some serious work done on both host and guest; 16GB would be a bottleneck for VM.
- melling 6y ago
  I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t want more in 2021. I might have my next laptop until 2028. As always, more RAM extends the usefulness of a computer.
- wsc981 6y ago
  8 GB when using Android emulator and Xamarin has been a pain for me, but my iMac doesn't have a SSD drive (it's got an Apple Fusion drive). The machine was swapping all the time, e.g. when alt-tabbing between Android emulator and Xamarin. After upgrading to 24 GB the machine became very usable. I wouldn't ever want to go back to 8 GB. Perhaps 16 GB might be usable for iOS and Xamarin development, especially if the Android emulator can run in some kind of HAXM [0] mode, but for ARM processors ... not sure if that's possible right now. I'm sure the SSD also makes a big difference compared to my Fusion drive right now. Still it feels safer (more future-proof) if the machine has a bit more memory than 16 GB. --- [0]: https://github.com/intel/haxm/wiki/Installation-Instructions-on-Windows https://github.com/intel/haxm/wiki/Installation-Instructions...
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    FWIW on Windows a simple Flutter project in Android studio + the emulator + a couple browsers open and I'm hovering around 14 to 16 GB of ram. There's no way I'm buying a 16 GB computer now, 32 GB is a minimum to be future proof.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jcelerier 6y ago
> There has been a lot of conspiracy on 16GB being plenty enough I bought a computer with 16GB in 2011 and around 2015 it was already lagging quite a bit due to swap - switching to 64GB in 2016 was day and night, I don't have to fear launching arbitrarily many jobs anymore.
- beowulfey 6y ago
  RAM speeds have also increased quite a lot since 2011. Do you find yourself hitting 64GB of memory use often?
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    not 64, but I'm regularly hovering in the 40-45 gigs pool
    - square_usual 6y ago
      That seems like a very specific use case. I've had 8GB until 2016 and 16GB since and I've never had to deal with that much memory use.
      - AzN1337c0d3r 6y ago
        Anyone who runs a couple of VMs or a ton of docker containers is going to run into memory problems. And that's not an uncommon use-case amongst the developer crowd which has a lot of overlap with HN.

cataphract 6y ago

64 GB is already the minimum for building big projects like V8 on 16 cores (e.g. on the 3950X)

aledalgrande 6y ago
I'm curious about this, because I read some posts e.g. https://medium.com/computed-comparisons/garbage-collection-vs-automatic-reference-counting-a420bd4c7c81 https://medium.com/computed-comparisons/garbage-collection-v... that say memory management and bandwidth are so fast, you actually need a lot less memory than on Intel. Edit: not my opinion, just what I found on the internets, not sure why the downvotes if it invites discussion.
- steipete 6y ago
  I’ve read the reports but I’m not seeing this. Normal workflow and already over 11 GB that swaps.
  - aledalgrande 6y ago
    Thanks for reporting! Bummer, for me I think I will have to wait for an M2.
  - chongli 6y ago
    I think the point is that memory bandwidth and SSD bandwidth and latency have improved so much that M1-based Macs are really fast at swapping. Combine that with compression (which macOS has done for a long time) and I could imagine iPadOS-like performance. For normal users (such as people not compiling V8), swapping may be virtually unnoticeable.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      I do wonder if it’s taking advantage of the cheap CPU power and memory bandwidth to be much more aggressive about memory compression. That could reduce swapping for some workloads, though probably not a v8 build.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      Macs have had fast SSDs for a while and as you say compression has also been done for a long time. M1 made no difference whatsoever to memory usage. The posts similar to above seem to just be an attempt to fanfic-justify what's an actual regression for some. For many people 16GB is absolutely enough, and Apple had to start somewhere. But if 16GB wasn't enough for you yesterday, it isn't enough for you now.
      - foldr 6y ago
        It's possible that M1 has enabled the use of better memory compression algorithms.
      - chongli 6y ago
        The reviews of the M1 MacBook Air and Pro show a dramatic increase in SSD read/write speeds over the 2020 Intel models.
        kllrnohj 6y ago
        Do you have a link? MKBD just said it was "slightly faster" than his comparison system and the numbers for the M1 appear to be around 3GB/s reads and 2.7GB/s writes in disk speed test, which is pretty typical of a last generation NVME drive (current pcie gen4 drives are hitting 7GB/s reads & 5GB/s writes)
        chongli 6y ago
        which is pretty typical of a last generation NVME drive Those numbers are about 2-3x as fast as what my 2020 Intel-based MacBook Air gets.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    What do you mean exactly? It is normal for swapping to happen even if you are using less than the physical memory, so as to trade rarely-used RAM for frequently-used disk cache which improves overall throughput
- fulafel 6y ago
  That article seems confused and/or misinformed on many points, on many levels. As for the GP cited use case, there's no plausible way in which the compilers involved in the V8 build process would start using less memory due to their memory management machinery getting magically transformed by the hardware from tracing GC to refcounting GC, even assuming LLVM had been using tracing GC in the first place. (Also the tracing GC memory overhead claims originating in Apple's marketing copy are way hyperbolic, modern tracing GCs don't require double storage used in "mark and sweep" GCs)
  - aledalgrande 6y ago
    Makes sense yeah! I guess anything non native would work like that.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Many memory hungry apps on Apple - Web browsers, compilers, photo/video editing, games, dev tools like vscode/electron/Jave IDEs/emacs/databases - are in this category.

samcheng 6y ago

I suspect there are a lot of us in that boat, with 5-to-8-year-old Macbook Pros. Apple really missed the mark with the intervening generation, by removing useful features and replacing them with features unattractive to developers. Maybe this big leap in processor / thermal / battery life (and a revision back to proper keyboards) will be enough to get us to switch! I think 64GB (or at least 32GB) would be a nice sweetener.

woahAcademia 6y ago
That's pretty much how I feel too. Nothing enticing because my computer is lightning fast and this means having to use the Apple ecosystem. It's almost like Apple has a culture of forcing people to do things the hard way, just so it feels rewarding when it's done. Gamifying the experience?
claudeganon 6y ago
I upgraded to a high spec MacBook Pro 16 after the M1 model was announced. I need solid virtualization support for Windows and Linux now, plus Big Sur seems kind of a mess from the design and privacy side of things. I'll probably wait 3-5 generations until everything with Apple Silicon is worked out to upgrade again, maybe get an Air as a device for travel if things look stable sooner.
alphabettsy 6y ago
I keep seeing this, but the performance gains and real-world, Docker and all, battery life are significant in the 16 inch MacBook Pro‘s more so than even my 2017 15”.
DrBazza 6y ago
I'm still running a late 2013 Macbook, now on Big Sur. The battery life is now about 3-4 hours even if I'm doing dev work, but otherwise it's still pretty good otherwise, for a 7 year old laptop. I had a Sony Vaio back in the early 00s, and it started with running XP 'ok', and then... Vista, which made it dog slow. My point being that I'm surprised that a 7 year old laptop is still "good". A new laptop isn't critical to my work at the moment, so I'm happy to wait for an M2, if that's what it will be called. Looking at Apple timelines a new chip tends to be 1-2 years apart, and I'm fine with that. I'm also reluctant to give up Magsafe, or at least have to buy a magnetic USB C connector.

Toutouxc 6y ago

I don't know. I did what I'm currently doing (Ruby on Rails dev) on a 4 GB MacBook Pro until last year and it was fine. At the moment I have around 2 GB free on my 8 GB Linux machine with a webserver, MariaDB, a JetBrains IDE, Slack and Firefox running. It would be easy and dirt cheap to increase the RAM to 16 or 32 GB but I'm too lazy to even order it and open the machine up since I have never felt the need to have more. I'm just saying this so that people like me remember that they're still professionals and their work is valuable even if they don't need 64 GB of RAM.

lumost 6y ago
IDEs such as IntelliJ can easily consume 8GB of memory on a moderately sized project of 100k loc. If one has to open multiple such projects or work on a very large project in the million loc scope then you’ll run out of 16 GB really fast. Folks working with data intensive applications often need to trade off writing code to page data in and out of memory during development with larger dev boxes.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  100k LOC would be, let's be generous, about 8 million characters (80/line average, which is high). 8GB of RAM for 8MB of input seems excessive to me. What's going on with that IDE that it needs so much for something so small? Even if that were 8 million distinct tokens/symbols in the input, that's still 1KB/token of memory consumed.
  - CapsAdmin 6y ago
    I would assume code analysis. 8gb still sounds a bit excessive but given how long java stack traces can be maybe it's not so strange.
  - z3t4 6y ago
    For every key stroke a new immutable string is created with the content of the file/state. Plus data structure for AST/static analysis of every file in the project including dependencies. Plus another copy of the file for rendering with syntax highlight. One would think all this copying of data is very inefficient, but computers are good at moving data around. The most costly is rendering the glyphs.

rsynnott 6y ago

I mean, it depends what you do. I have 16GB on my personal laptop, and essentially never swap, but the 16GB on my work machine is painful for large Scala projects. As always, for some people 16 GB will be fine, for some it won’t.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
If Virtual Machines are essential part of the workflow then 16GB is out of question IMO, could get away with Tiny Core Linux/Lubuntu on a VM to some extent but when getting some serious work done on both host and guest; 16GB would be a bottleneck for VM.
melling 6y ago
I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t want more in 2021. I might have my next laptop until 2028. As always, more RAM extends the usefulness of a computer.
wsc981 6y ago
8 GB when using Android emulator and Xamarin has been a pain for me, but my iMac doesn't have a SSD drive (it's got an Apple Fusion drive). The machine was swapping all the time, e.g. when alt-tabbing between Android emulator and Xamarin. After upgrading to 24 GB the machine became very usable. I wouldn't ever want to go back to 8 GB. Perhaps 16 GB might be usable for iOS and Xamarin development, especially if the Android emulator can run in some kind of HAXM [0] mode, but for ARM processors ... not sure if that's possible right now. I'm sure the SSD also makes a big difference compared to my Fusion drive right now. Still it feels safer (more future-proof) if the machine has a bit more memory than 16 GB. --- [0]: https://github.com/intel/haxm/wiki/Installation-Instructions-on-Windows https://github.com/intel/haxm/wiki/Installation-Instructions...
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  FWIW on Windows a simple Flutter project in Android studio + the emulator + a couple browsers open and I'm hovering around 14 to 16 GB of ram. There's no way I'm buying a 16 GB computer now, 32 GB is a minimum to be future proof.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jcelerier 6y ago

> There has been a lot of conspiracy on 16GB being plenty enough I bought a computer with 16GB in 2011 and around 2015 it was already lagging quite a bit due to swap - switching to 64GB in 2016 was day and night, I don't have to fear launching arbitrarily many jobs anymore.

beowulfey 6y ago
RAM speeds have also increased quite a lot since 2011. Do you find yourself hitting 64GB of memory use often?
- jcelerier 6y ago
  not 64, but I'm regularly hovering in the 40-45 gigs pool
  - square_usual 6y ago
    That seems like a very specific use case. I've had 8GB until 2016 and 16GB since and I've never had to deal with that much memory use.
    - AzN1337c0d3r 6y ago
      Anyone who runs a couple of VMs or a ton of docker containers is going to run into memory problems. And that's not an uncommon use-case amongst the developer crowd which has a lot of overlap with HN.