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Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the ba
by sto_hristo 6y ago
Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.
- agilob 6y agoYup, I have 16Gb of RAM on macbook 2011.
- thefz 6y agoDon't forget the entry-level 256GB SSD. With 1TB drives around 90€ at retail.
- oblio 6y agoApple always nickel-and-dimes storage. Overpriced storage is how they make probably 5-10% of their hardware profits. iPhone still have 64GB as their base storage in 2021...
- martin8412 6y agoThe default is 128GB..
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoI don't disagree that 8GiB for $1700 machine is absurd, however, I feel compelled to point out that MacOS is significantly more aggressive with memory compression than other operating systems and they come with blazingly fast SSDs, allowing devices to get away with less available memory.
- runeks 6y agoA blazingly fast SSD is excruciatingly slow RAM.
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoI am trying to figure out where I said anything on the contrary.
- matkoniecz 6y agoYou mentioned "they come with blazingly fast SSDs" as part of what is "allowing devices to get away with less available memory"
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoI did indeed, I never said that SSDs are a replacement for RAM, I just said that having access to 2.5GiB/s RW operations allows you to offload many things into the SSD, yes, thrashing is an issue, but it is much more insignificant at those speeds than disks. I am not defending apple in any way whatsoever, I even mentioned in the first sentence of the comment. I stated that they are able to do that because they compensate with compression and SSDs, applications in the background can be thrown in the swap and the user will rarely notice.
- detaro 6y ago2.5GB/s isn't really all that extraordinary speed anymore.
- iSnow 6y agoI am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-powered machines is, tbh. I am a bit more extreme in that I am not buying any machine below 32GB given RAM is no longer upgradable, but even if my mom came and asked me about those iMacs, I'd tell her to not buy. It's a shame that Apple is so great at greenwashing and at the same time spits on every way they could help create truly sustainable products by just dropping a few percent of their bottom line.
- thefz 6y ago> I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-powered machines is, tbh The lowest and highest tier exist only to shift consumers towards the middle tier, where Apple profits the most and where lies less value for the consumer. It is a marketing strategy invented by Apple IIRC (it's been a long time since my marketing exam).
- MobileVet 6y agoThe strategy is called ‘anchoring’ I had no idea it was invented by Apple. That feels a little too recent...
- iSnow 6y agoI know, but AFAIK those new iMacs ALL feature just 8GB of RAM? There isn't really a middle-tier, that what makes it so weird. you'd expect one machine with top SSD and 16 GB (and space grey, lol). Probably going to be the next iteration of the 27" iMac, spanning from 8GB/256GB (LOL) to 16 GB/1TB or something.
- tempay 6y agoYou can upgrade them to 16GB. Having been developing heavy applications in a M1 Mac mini for since they were released they’re definitely adequate for most users. Obviously some people need ~100 cores and ~1TB of ram (myself included for other parts of my job) but that segment is always going to be better served by companies other than Apple.
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- gambiting 6y agoSo my sister does professional photography, and went from a 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram and I wouldn't accept any less.....so obviously it varies.
- cigaser 6y agoThat machine is using swap file a lot, in couple of years SSD will die.
- nisegami 6y agoPretty sure that Apple considers this a feature.
- Toutouxc 6y agoFunny. Except there are fully supported MacBooks from 2013 running the latest version of macOS, still on their first battery, still bringing people joy and productivity.
- asoneth 6y agoOr in my case, a 2012 MacBook Air. I hope they'll support Catalina for another three or four years or at which point it's more than a decade old and can finally mature into a laptop's final stage of life as a Linux machine.
- officeplant 5y agoThey tend to support OS releases for three years. Catalina EOL is likely to be sometime in 2022.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago> This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram. Facebook and Instagram is probably the upper bound on memory-hungry apps. (The average webpage consumes more memory nowadays than gcc -O3.)
- mrweasel 6y agoReally? I still use seven year old MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM. It’s perfectly fine for developing in at least Python, Go or Nim, with a Docker container or two and MariaDB in the background. Sure, when/if I upgrade I’d go for 16GB of memory, but one should be careful about projecting ones own needs onto other.
- arvinsim 6y agoWhat IDE are you using?
- mrweasel 5y agoNone, I use Vim or TextMate. But you have a point Xcode isn’t fast on my laptop. You use it, but if I where to use Xcode professionally I’d get a newer machine with more memory. I have been working on a TVOS app, and it works fine, but there is some waiting involved.
- oblio 6y agoYour web browser probably doesn't have many tabs open, and those that are open, are probably not web apps (think Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp, various internal corporate apps, etc.). I can't even remember a time when just my web browser used up less than 4-5 GB of RAM, on its own. Add at least 500MB - 1 GB for the OS itself, and we're talking about 2 - 3.5GB for apps. I'd immediately swap with just 8GB of RAM with an IDE and a DB running.
- kolinko 6y agoI have four browser windows filled crazy number of tabs on M1. I’m yet to experience any slowdowns.
- mrweasel 5y agoYou’re right, I can’t mentally deal with more a few open tabs and I use none of those webapps at home. I might be an outline in the other direction, but there’s a lot of room between using maybe 4GB of RAM in total an using that for a browser alone.
- Someone 6y agoOn the other hand “16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram” is something to cry about. Programmers working on products with a billion users should realize that every kilobyte they save decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte.
- skohan 6y agoIt's also not true. I don't know if I'm the only person not doing fluid simulations all day on my laptop, but I don't understand where this idea comes from
- fouric 5y ago> decreases world-wide memory usage by a terabyte While true, that's not going to motivate anybody. Memory is not a very scarce resource, we're making more all the time, we can continue to make more, and it's reusable. Moreover, memory that isn't being used is almost completely useless - the only thing it does is act as disk cache. Better to use memory than CPU, as the latter actually consumes power (leading to climate change if not powered using renewables etc.) - although even better to use less of both. A more effective argument would be to look at the number of users on low-end devices, and point out that, the more memory you use, the less these users are able to run your applications. Not that I'm expecting companies like Slack to care - they design for the high-end user, and if your company forces Slack on you and you have an older device, there's nothing you can do, and they exploit that.
- Someone 5y agoDRAM refresh takes power. I don’t have the numbers, but I’m not sure that, in the average smartphone or tablet of today that energy usage is negligible compared to that of the CPU. Reason for that is that DRAM must be refreshed 24 hours a day, while the CPU is sleeping a lot of the time, even if the device is in use.
- jaytaylor 5y agoFor typical dimms it's about 2-3 watts per stick. Doesn't sound like much until you max out a SuperMicro (or other server grade) motherboard with 24 dimm sockets. :)
- refactor_master 6y agoSpace and specs are becoming more and more meaningless to me, as all programming work is offloaded to the cloud anyway. Yet I have a gigantic laptop that does nothing but produce heat from opening python scripts.
- raxxorrax 6y agoI have an M1 from work (which I now mainly use for private stuff...) and it does have 16gb memory. It did cost a bit less than $1700 (after taxes) I believe, although I am not sure. I know it has some upgraded gpu compared to the standard model in some form, but didn't know about the memory. As for the device: It is neat, but not revolutionary to any degree. I do paint and model and can run blender/krita just fine, it is even quite performant. This is through emulation, I don't have native builds for arm. Maybe those have become available in the meantime, but you don't notice the emulation at all. But it won't be the end of x86 in my opinion. Why would it?
- thehnguy 6y agoThe M1 isn't what kills x86 (if it ever does completely). ARM kills x86. Microsoft is working on the ARM transition. ARM has good control of mobile hardware. And Apple will be only selling ARM hardware (in the form of Apple Silicon) in another 12-18 months. M1 and Apple Silicon are just part of the trend.
- raxxorrax 6y agoThe main feature for me isn't the ARM, it is that the device is passively cooled and still very performant. If that isn't possible with x68, ARM might have a chance perhaps. But 99% of my time is still spend on that platform. I just wish I could install Linux.... If MS and Apple just provide their locked down environments, it will never be more to me than a neat device and I would still crosscompile instead of binding myself to a manufacturer.
- robthebrew 6y agohttp://vaibhavkaushal.com/ubuntu-focal-on-apple-silicon-m1/ http://vaibhavkaushal.com/ubuntu-focal-on-apple-silicon-m1/
- rswail 6y agoI ran Linux for years on laptops/desktops/servers, doing OLTP software that does millions txns/day. I adopted Linux back when Solaris was the way to go for backends. But moved to Mac (and OSX) about 8 years ago. I don't get the "locked down" thing. On my current macs (a 2020 iMac and a 2015 MBP) I run Macports that lets me install pretty much every bit of userland software that I want. I also get the advantages of the MacOS gui environment and the availability of most "user" software. Yes SIP and the new sandboxes lock down the MacOS part of the system, and things like VPNs (eg Wireguard) need to get a dev cert and distribution from Apple. But the "lockdown" is very lightweight. There's nothing I can't do on this devices that I used to do on my Linux environments. If I truly need a "native" Linux, then there are a number of VM and container environments also available.
- Draken93 6y agoThats the point, price/value does not fit for the majority of apple devices... But the M1 is amazing, I have to acknowledge that. I'll stay with AMD and wait for 5nm...
- igammarays 6y agoX cores + X gigs of RAM does not mean better performance for higher values of X. That is the fundamental innovation of Apple Silicon, which people still struggle to grasp. The M1 upended how we think about CPU performance. It's not even a CPU, it's a unified memory architecture with hardware-level optimizations for macOS. You can't even cleanly compare the performance benefits of having memory and CPU on the same chip, because the time spent on copying operations is far less. The plain fabulous joke is that we've spent 30 years thinking that increasing cores and increasing RAM is the only way to increase performance while the objective M1 benchmarks blow everything out of the water. The proof is in the pudding.
- sto_hristo 5y agoBut we still live in a physical universe where there are voluminous things some of us need to put into ram. Things like big projects, application servers, database servers, IDEs, and for some of those - multiple instances of them. On top of that, browsers with tabs open, productivity tools. Can't benchmark out of that.
- hiq 5y ago> Can't benchmark out of that. You still have to try it out and see. I'd welcome an article detailing a dev setup where the M1 isn't suitable because of performance reasons. So far we've seen mostly praise.
- micv 5y agoApple have done things to mitigate a lack of RAM (consistently using the fastest SSDs they can with a controller integrated into their custom chips and now into the M1 presumably, memory compression, using very fast RAM in the new M1, etc.) but yeah at some point you just need more room. 16GB has been enough for me for a while thankfully.
- thehnguy 6y agoRight. People are comparing Apples to Oranges. The salient question is: how long does each machine take to execute the processes I use on a daily basis?
- nojito 6y ago> This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram. You'd be shocked looking at any telemetry data which says that the average ram is 8gb and average ram use is ~50% or so.
- GordonS 6y agoI'd believe that - because the average user likely doesn't do anything more than Facebook, Instagram, general browsing, word processing etc. I'd also believe it, since the number of laptops available with only 8GB of RAM is ridiculous - I swear it's because more prevelant in the past few years, presumably because of RAM prices.
- astrange 6y agoRAM use should always be 100% for reasonable definitions of "use". There's always more disk pages to be cached unless the machine has just booted. If they're not all being used, it means something temporarily flushed all the pages which is actually a bad thing.
- runeks 6y agoI think it’s reasonable to assume that OP was talking about user space applications, not kernel disk cache.
- astrange 5y agoAdding up the memory use of apps isn’t actually a good way to calculate RAM needs though. It undercounts (because file caching matters too) and overcounts (because many things are fine swapped out).
- Tehnix 6y agoI just went from a 32GB RAM Macbook Pro to an 8GB RAM M1 Macbook Air...the difference is insane, I don't know what the hell the MB Pro is doing with its RAM, but it just felt like RAM was never enough on Intel Macbooks. Here on the M1, I don't feel my system crawling to a halt like I did on the MB Pro, and I'm doing the same workloads.
- thehnguy 6y agoExactly. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. 8GB of M1 RAM is very different than 32GB of standard DIMM-like RAM. Sort of like when people compare nm of processes on the chips. You can't just say "oh, their number is smaller, it must be better." To be sure a device with 16GB of M1 RAM should be more competent than 8GB of M1 RAM, but now that's apples to apples.
- runeks 6y ago> 8GB of M1 RAM is very different than 32GB of standard DIMM-like RAM. Go on... What’s the nature of this great difference?
- danaris 5y agoAt this point, I don't think that's entirely clear. Something to do with the way Apple has tightly integrated the SoC parts and the OS's memory management lets them get massively more performance out of much lower-specced machines, and at least from what I've seen, no one has yet managed to truly unravel all that makes this possible.
- bredren 5y agoI'm interested in this because I have a maxed 2018 intel mac mini and loaded it to 64gb of RAM. I want to ditch my eGPU and go to Apple Silicon on the next release. I wonder if the memory performance should be so surprising. Because haven't people been bemoaning the "low" amount of ram in iPhone / iPad? iPhone had 4GB on XS, and 11. And only went to 6GB on the Pro models. Yet the performance and benchmarking on these devices has seemed to garner praise with each successive generation. https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/14/how-much-ram-iphone-12-pro-has/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/14/how-much-ram-iphone-12-...
- Toutouxc 6y ago> 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram Just stop.
- pjmlp 6y agoThis laptop does Visual C++ and C# development in Web, UWP and Win32 just fine with 8 GB. Ah, and I also do stuff in Java/Eclipse/Nebeans, D and Rust equally fine.
- simonh 5y agoI bought a new machine last year that came with 8GB and ordered a 16GB upgrade for it which didn't arrive for a few weeks. I literally just now remembered I've never got round to installing it.
- ironman1478 5y agoLooking at core count and ram size isn't how to measure performance. You test and measure. But, the cores are just better on the m1 as has been shown through tons of benchmarking. Also, if the interconnects and busses are smarter (better cache coherency impl) then you'll be better in multithreading cases. Also because it's an SoC it has a way better implementation for the ddr interface (that's what they claim at least). I wouldn't be surprised if the latency hit for accessing RAM was way better than on x86 where you have to cross a long bus. For the workloads that people run on iMacs, light photoshop, some video editing, etc. We already know the new macbooks are amazing at it and this machine will have the same hardware, but with a dope screen (and cool colors. I want yellow >.>).
- ghshephard 5y agoThe 8 gigabyte machine is fine for 90% of people. I've recommended just getting that platform to a number of people, and none of them have had issues. I've got an 8 Gigabyte MBAir, and it never stutters. Meanwhile, on my 16 GByte Dell XPS (Ubuntu 20.04) - I routinely live in fear of exceeding my chrome tab quota because I know it will bring the system to a crashing halt. Somewhere around 45 is the point it all comes down. Meanwhile, I don't even think about how many safari tabs I have open (hundred+) - and 8-10 applications open at the same time. Different operating system has different models of swapping and degrading performance. Apple has nailed it.
- intergalplan 5y agoSafari vs. Chrome (or Firefox) is one part of why I can get so much more mileage out of a Mac's memory than I can under Linux or Windows. It's wildly more respectful of system resources, across the board—memory, processor cycles, and battery. The rest of their software's mostly like that, too, with the possible exception of Xcode. I often forget Preview with a half-dozen PDFs is open, and Pages with a document, and Numbers. I wouldn't forget a single tab of Google Docs under Chrome, left open for weeks, because it would make itself known in system responsiveness and battery use. Ditto MS Office. Mac Terminal's got notably lower input latency than most other terminal emulators, especially featureful ones. Apple, seemingly almost uniquely among major software vendors, gives a shit about performance, and it shows. I really, really wish they had competitors, but in so many ways they're the only ones doing what they do, to the point that they can make periodic serious blunders and I'm left going, "yeah, but what else am I gonna buy, that won't have a 'normal' that's overall-worse than Apple's 'broken'?"
- neximo64 5y agoWent from 64GB to 8GB. Didn't notice a difference - infact it is better. I kind of get your mindset but they have done some fuckery somewhere to get it to work so good.
- intergalplan 5y agoMy M1 Air with 16GB feels way more responsive and behaves better under load than my 64GB hex-core beast of a desktop I built late last year. It's like the old days when I could put BeOS on a Pentium with two-digit MB of memory and it'd feel as good and responsive in actual use as a newer desktop clocked 6-8x higher and with 8x the memory, running Windows or Linux.
- agloeregrets 5y agoI mean, that price tag is being swung in a kinda silly way. The Mini with 16GB of ram is like $899. At that price the CPU has 8 Cores but 50% greater single core performance than basically anything in the price range. In lightly threaded or thread-racey tasks the M1 will outperform any chip on the market for most people working on their machine. In my case, we build, run, and run tests on a very large typescript app in half the time of any single Intel chip we have ever tested, including desktop i9. I'm not defending the pricing of their ram or storage upgrades, those are nuts. But the pricing you are comparing with here is for machines that include a LOT of gravy in the build sheet intended to draw your point such as a 4.5K Display or TBs of PCIe SSD. Did I mention that the case I was mentioning was in the very base Macbook Air with 8Gb ram cross-compared with an i9 64Gb machine? You are kinda making a blanket statement that is a little unfaithful to the intent of any of these machines. None of these machines are intended as 'pro' machines, even the 'Macbook Pro' is just the low end model and it is three times as powerful as the outgoing model. Sure you can spec one to the moon to make a price point, but that's the story of anything.
- paulpan 5y agoI wonder if Apple's strategy is to push macOS developers to optimize for certain SOC cadences, rather than having to traditionally target every system configuration possible. Therefore they opted to only have limited SKUs of the M1: only differentiated by RAM and GPU cores. Analogy is gaming consoles - the hardware is fixed for X years so game developers know exactly what to target and make better looking & performing games over the cycle of that console. Compared to, say, Windows 10 that has to run on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations. This is actually similar to their approach to iOS and iPhones - iOS versions span across multiple iPhone cycles, but they are limits. For example, iOS 13 was supported on iPhones 6S thru iPhone 11, or the A9 thru the A13 SOCs. There's probably some correlation between good performance and the tight SOC-to-OS coupling. We'll likely see similar, limited configurations for future Apple M* SOCs.