3 ms·

Most of the empirical comparisons I've seen of the 8GB vs. 16GB models show that you have to push the 8GB models pretty hard before they're noticeably slower. M

by foldr 3y ago

Most of the empirical comparisons I've seen of the 8GB vs. 16GB models show that you have to push the 8GB models pretty hard before they're noticeably slower. Most of the complaints seem to come from people who are obsessively checking memory usage and have a rather over-simplistic mental model of how RAM is allocated in a modern operating system. (For example, many apps, such as browsers, will happily use more RAM if you give them more RAM.)

melling 3y ago
Strange. I’ve got a 10 year old Intel MBP with 16GB of RAM. Even 10 years ago I didn’t think 8GB was enough. You don’t buy a Pro model and let it swap with only 8GB
- foldr 3y ago
  Yeah, I think a lot of people are assuming that 8GB will work as poorly on an Mx system as it would on an older Intel Mac. But it's widely reported that this is not the case. (The faster SSDs help, and I suspect that memory compression may work more effectively too.) See various anecdotal reports such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 in this very thread.
  - melling 3y ago
    I buy the extra memory with the hope that it extends the lifetime of my computer. I can still use my MBP 10 years later. I bought a 15” Air two weeks ago with 16GB and I expect I’ll still be able to use it a decade from now. Have barely used the Air because my software is set up on my Intel. Will transition soon and will be able to compare performance.
  - kup0 3y ago
    Why would you want RAM to swap to fast SSDs when you can avoid it with more RAM in the first place, though? Sure it's not a molasses-slow spinning HDD..... but SSDs are still far slower than RAM, and having swap hit the SSDs means unnecessary writes/wear... especially on systems where the SSDs can't even be replaced I think whether or not people always encounter it "feeling slow" is a different concern as to whether or not 8GB of RAM should ever even be offered by Apple on a system that will for sure eventually swap to disk for users. Adding Apple's huge margins on RAM upgrades on top of this just makes it even more disgusting... they should start their models at a higher baseline- it costs them next to nothing (8GB RAM vs 16GB RAM is not a cost-to-Apple issue, it's an extremely cheap component), but then of course they can't squeeze customers for ludicrous amounts of upsell margins (their cost-to-consumer RAM upgrade margins are absolutely appalling) Selling suboptimal hardware configurations might be a good business decision but I wish our standards weren't so low for companies, especially ones selling $1600 machines with 2013-amounts of RAM in them
    - foldr 3y ago
      I don’t really care if it swaps to disk if there’s no noticeable slowdown. I understand that some people just take it as axiomatic that 8GB isn’t enough, but I think it makes more sense to look empirically at whether the majority of users would notice a significant improvement for their workloads. Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model? That’s money Apple can spend on more important features of the base laptop (e.g high quality display, speakers, trackpad - all the stuff that 90% of plasticy Wintel machines at the same price point fail on). I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. It’s a natural consequence of virtual memory and is pretty much required for optimal exploitation of available RAM. Let apps allocate as much RAM as they’d ideally like to have, and then leave it to the OS to keep the most frequently used pages in physical RAM.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        > Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model? Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too? More RAM in the base-model Pro signals that it is a higher-end product. It raises the bar for the entire product category and makes it easier to not depreciate an entire year's worth of functional computers (you know how Apple is). It decreases the write pressure on the soldered SSD, and ensures that future MacOS releases, AI features and games don't get bottlenecked by a $15 component. It reduces the friction when casual users want to use their current Mac for more demanding workloads. It future-proofs against needing a newer machine and increases the value of said laptop secondhand. In every way, the old Macbook Pro 14" pricing model was a more sustainable, attractive and user-friendly. This spec drop is a sad excuse to direct would-be 13" owners to a more expensive alternative. > I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.
        foldr 3y ago
        >Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too? At a guess, because varying the number of physical ports between models complicates production more than varying which RAM chips are soldered to the board. (Apple has generally shunned having physically identical USB-C ports with differing capabilities.) >If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap. All modern multitasking desktop OSes rely on swap and have since the mid 90s. SSD lifetime concerns are way overblown in my opinion. The first MacBooks with soldered SSDs came out in 2016. I'm sure there are individual instances of SSDs failing, but the much-heralded SSD lifetime apocalypse seems not to have materialised. What you really want with an SSD isn't the theoretical highly-conservative estimate of its lifetime write limit, but the probability that it is going to be the thing that fails on your laptop after n years, in comparison to all the other things that could fail. My guess is that by the time the SSD has a significant probability of failing (which is going to take many years, even with heavy usage), then many other components are going to have a higher probability of failing.
filterfiber 3y ago
Honestly I think a decent chunk of the complaints are from people who are used to windows which would be using 4-6gb of that ram just on the desktop. That said I still wouldn't recommend 8gb to anyone.
- sagarm 3y ago
  SSDs and zRAM help too, but seriously 8GB of RAM on a $1600 laptop is ludicrous.
- foldr 3y ago
  I agree, I'd recommend 16GB if someone asked for my advice (not that they ever do!) My only quibble here is that I think people are a touch too cynical about Apple's motives for putting 8GB in the base models. I suspect the reason is just that their research shows that most people wouldn't notice any difference from the extra 8GB of RAM. That makes it difficult to justify putting it in the base model. We tend to focus a lot on specs on HN, but the money saved from the 8GB potentially frees up additional resources for features that a typical user might well care about much more (e.g. speaker and microphone quality – often neglected by competing manufacturers).
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    I doubt people would have as much of a problem with the base model were it not for the large prices on each tier of RAM. Each 8 Gb is somehow $200. It seems like a scam to list at $1,600, but then, surprise, you need an extra $200 to get to the level of RAM you expect in a professional device. I assume you are right if they only go up to 24 max, but they should explain better why 8 Gb is acceptable.
  - znpy 3y ago
    I had 16gb on my work laptop (dell latitude 7390) four years ago… The thinkpad x220 from 2012 could host 16gb ram already. I really can’t understand why 8gb ram is still so common. A lot of performances issue would just disappear with more ram.
nunez 3y ago
I thought the same until I noticed a lot of choppiness one day while my Mac was running a bunch of containers, OBS, Krisp, Zoom and Safari windows and saw on htop that nearly all of my physical memory was reserved and the memory manager was working overtime to prevent swap from being hit. Things have been much better after updating to an M2 with 16GB of RAM.
znpy 3y ago
MacOS swaps aggressively to keep up the performances. Which is fine, but this wears out the disks quite a bit. So of you’re pushing past the 8gb memory size… your macbook will die earlier. And since the flash chips are not replaceable… you get the point.
- foldr 3y ago
  The M1 macs came out three years ago, and the predicted SSD lifetime apocalypse shows no sign of materialising so far. I suspect that it won’t turn out to be a problem, though we’ll have to wait and see.
theshrike79 3y ago
Yep, these are the same people who dig around iPhone internals to check the amount of RAM and compare it to a similar Android model. Then they are all O_o when iPhone doesn't have 32GB of RAM. They completely forget that the OS memory management is _totally_ different. iOS doesn't need multiple gigabytes of RAM, because only one piece of software can be active at a time, the rest are suspended and can just get limited activations - and the OS decides when.

by foldr 3y ago

melling 3y ago

Strange. I’ve got a 10 year old Intel MBP with 16GB of RAM. Even 10 years ago I didn’t think 8GB was enough. You don’t buy a Pro model and let it swap with only 8GB

foldr 3y ago
Yeah, I think a lot of people are assuming that 8GB will work as poorly on an Mx system as it would on an older Intel Mac. But it's widely reported that this is not the case. (The faster SSDs help, and I suspect that memory compression may work more effectively too.) See various anecdotal reports such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38103103 in this very thread.
- melling 3y ago
  I buy the extra memory with the hope that it extends the lifetime of my computer. I can still use my MBP 10 years later. I bought a 15” Air two weeks ago with 16GB and I expect I’ll still be able to use it a decade from now. Have barely used the Air because my software is set up on my Intel. Will transition soon and will be able to compare performance.
- kup0 3y ago
  Why would you want RAM to swap to fast SSDs when you can avoid it with more RAM in the first place, though? Sure it's not a molasses-slow spinning HDD..... but SSDs are still far slower than RAM, and having swap hit the SSDs means unnecessary writes/wear... especially on systems where the SSDs can't even be replaced I think whether or not people always encounter it "feeling slow" is a different concern as to whether or not 8GB of RAM should ever even be offered by Apple on a system that will for sure eventually swap to disk for users. Adding Apple's huge margins on RAM upgrades on top of this just makes it even more disgusting... they should start their models at a higher baseline- it costs them next to nothing (8GB RAM vs 16GB RAM is not a cost-to-Apple issue, it's an extremely cheap component), but then of course they can't squeeze customers for ludicrous amounts of upsell margins (their cost-to-consumer RAM upgrade margins are absolutely appalling) Selling suboptimal hardware configurations might be a good business decision but I wish our standards weren't so low for companies, especially ones selling $1600 machines with 2013-amounts of RAM in them
  - foldr 3y ago
    I don’t really care if it swaps to disk if there’s no noticeable slowdown. I understand that some people just take it as axiomatic that 8GB isn’t enough, but I think it makes more sense to look empirically at whether the majority of users would notice a significant improvement for their workloads. Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model? That’s money Apple can spend on more important features of the base laptop (e.g high quality display, speakers, trackpad - all the stuff that 90% of plasticy Wintel machines at the same price point fail on). I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. It’s a natural consequence of virtual memory and is pretty much required for optimal exploitation of available RAM. Let apps allocate as much RAM as they’d ideally like to have, and then leave it to the OS to keep the most frequently used pages in physical RAM.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model? Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too? More RAM in the base-model Pro signals that it is a higher-end product. It raises the bar for the entire product category and makes it easier to not depreciate an entire year's worth of functional computers (you know how Apple is). It decreases the write pressure on the soldered SSD, and ensures that future MacOS releases, AI features and games don't get bottlenecked by a $15 component. It reduces the friction when casual users want to use their current Mac for more demanding workloads. It future-proofs against needing a newer machine and increases the value of said laptop secondhand. In every way, the old Macbook Pro 14" pricing model was a more sustainable, attractive and user-friendly. This spec drop is a sad excuse to direct would-be 13" owners to a more expensive alternative. > I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.
      - foldr 3y ago
        >Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too? At a guess, because varying the number of physical ports between models complicates production more than varying which RAM chips are soldered to the board. (Apple has generally shunned having physically identical USB-C ports with differing capabilities.) >If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap. All modern multitasking desktop OSes rely on swap and have since the mid 90s. SSD lifetime concerns are way overblown in my opinion. The first MacBooks with soldered SSDs came out in 2016. I'm sure there are individual instances of SSDs failing, but the much-heralded SSD lifetime apocalypse seems not to have materialised. What you really want with an SSD isn't the theoretical highly-conservative estimate of its lifetime write limit, but the probability that it is going to be the thing that fails on your laptop after n years, in comparison to all the other things that could fail. My guess is that by the time the SSD has a significant probability of failing (which is going to take many years, even with heavy usage), then many other components are going to have a higher probability of failing.

filterfiber 3y ago

Honestly I think a decent chunk of the complaints are from people who are used to windows which would be using 4-6gb of that ram just on the desktop. That said I still wouldn't recommend 8gb to anyone.

sagarm 3y ago
SSDs and zRAM help too, but seriously 8GB of RAM on a $1600 laptop is ludicrous.
foldr 3y ago
I agree, I'd recommend 16GB if someone asked for my advice (not that they ever do!) My only quibble here is that I think people are a touch too cynical about Apple's motives for putting 8GB in the base models. I suspect the reason is just that their research shows that most people wouldn't notice any difference from the extra 8GB of RAM. That makes it difficult to justify putting it in the base model. We tend to focus a lot on specs on HN, but the money saved from the 8GB potentially frees up additional resources for features that a typical user might well care about much more (e.g. speaker and microphone quality – often neglected by competing manufacturers).
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I doubt people would have as much of a problem with the base model were it not for the large prices on each tier of RAM. Each 8 Gb is somehow $200. It seems like a scam to list at $1,600, but then, surprise, you need an extra $200 to get to the level of RAM you expect in a professional device. I assume you are right if they only go up to 24 max, but they should explain better why 8 Gb is acceptable.
- znpy 3y ago
  I had 16gb on my work laptop (dell latitude 7390) four years ago… The thinkpad x220 from 2012 could host 16gb ram already. I really can’t understand why 8gb ram is still so common. A lot of performances issue would just disappear with more ram.

nunez 3y ago

I thought the same until I noticed a lot of choppiness one day while my Mac was running a bunch of containers, OBS, Krisp, Zoom and Safari windows and saw on htop that nearly all of my physical memory was reserved and the memory manager was working overtime to prevent swap from being hit. Things have been much better after updating to an M2 with 16GB of RAM.

znpy 3y ago

MacOS swaps aggressively to keep up the performances. Which is fine, but this wears out the disks quite a bit. So of you’re pushing past the 8gb memory size… your macbook will die earlier. And since the flash chips are not replaceable… you get the point.

foldr 3y ago
The M1 macs came out three years ago, and the predicted SSD lifetime apocalypse shows no sign of materialising so far. I suspect that it won’t turn out to be a problem, though we’ll have to wait and see.

theshrike79 3y ago

Yep, these are the same people who dig around iPhone internals to check the amount of RAM and compare it to a similar Android model. Then they are all O_o when iPhone doesn't have 32GB of RAM. They completely forget that the OS memory management is _totally_ different. iOS doesn't need multiple gigabytes of RAM, because only one piece of software can be active at a time, the rest are suspended and can just get limited activations - and the OS decides when.