6 ms·

I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the

I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based. I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage. I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later. My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.

ksec 3y ago
I really wish Apple would put 12GB RAM by default instead of 8GB. We now have high resolution that uses more memory and sharing Memory with GPU. In reality this is less than 8GB with Graphics Memory.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work
- danpmurray 3y ago
  How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?
  - internetter 3y ago
    I can answer this. I have a very similar workload to OP. I've found myself with resolve, affinity photo, chrome, vscode, spotify, ect open simultaneously, and have had absolutely zero struggle on my 8gb air. If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping. The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      If it's really swapping then won't that reduce the lifetime of the (irreplaceable?) internal storage?
      - RussianCow 3y ago
        Modern SSDs are resilient enough that most people will never wear them out with anything resembling a normal workload. Unless you're constantly swapping for several hours a day, it just isn't going to matter.
        hackerlight 3y ago
        How many GB a day would be written with swapping? Modern SSDs have a lifespan of a few hundred to low thousands of TBW.
        foldr 3y ago
        That's a conservative estimation of the lifespan (how hard you can hit it while maintaining a very low probability of SSD failure). The more interesting question is "How likely after n years is the SSD to be the first non-replaceable component to fail on this laptop?" I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm guessing it's a good long while before the answer to it goes above 0.5. Apple have been shipping laptops with non-replaceable SSDs since around 2017. Anecdotally, we hear so much worrying about potential future SSD failure, and yet so few people saying things like "I bought an M1 Air two years ago and now the SSD has died".
        eimrine 3y ago
        Totally not, enshittification ate SLC.
        wtallis 3y ago
        SLC makes sense for almost zero use cases, even in a data center. It's simply the wrong tradeoff between capacity and performance. It's not enshittification that you can now have a cheap multi-TB SSD to hold a large collection of movies and games and still have an SLC cache for the small portion of your data that isn't mostly static.
  - piva00 3y ago
    My MacBook Pro M3 has 36GiB RAM and does all of the comment above + music producing (dozens of VSTs on some 1-2 dozens tracks) + projection mapping and can run some LLM models locally like the Mistral ones. I've only managed to hear the fan when chatting with a LLM, for anything else it's been an absolutely silent beast.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I have an M1 Max with 32GiB and similarly - never had it complain or noticed it unhappy about anything, or felt I needed more RAM or CPU. It's going to be hard to justify upgrading this thing for awhile.
    - varispeed 3y ago
      I have M2 Pro 16GB from a client. It's comfortable for typical dev work - tons of tabs open, Docker, VS Code etc. Though the swap is about 20GB now and sometimes it lags. Still it beats any Intel or AMD laptop I ever had in terms of performance. This machine is on a whole another level. My own machines are M1 Max 32GB and they fare slightly better.
    - nerdbert 3y ago
      Mine has 16GB and I regularly use some Mistral LLM as well as OpenHermes. The only things that ever seems to get my fan going are transcoding a video or a really long compile. Never once has the fan run during web browsing or any of the many everyday tasks that used to bring my previous one to its knees.
  - dividedbyzero 3y ago
    I have an M2 Air with 24gb and it has no problems running Brave with 800-ish tabs, development workloads (a bunch of VSCode projects, several docker containers, lots of iTerm terminals), low-end CAD and 3D printing apps, CaptureOne and a bunch of Electron apps in parallel with room to spare. I've found I can fit more into those 24gb than into the 32gb of the Intel Mac I had before that (however that's possible).
    - fdsfdsafdsafds 3y ago
      >800-ish tabs You're never going to read those, before the links rot.
      - DonHopkins 3y ago
        The browser should remember the date you last rendered a tab, and then if the link rots, it falls back to archive.org on that date.
        weikju 3y ago
        > The browser should remember the date you last rendered a tab, and then if the link rots, it falls back to archive.org on that date. Brave (by default at least) will ask you if you want to load the archive.org version when a page fails to load. Not 100% automatic but almost.
      - dividedbyzero 3y ago
        Almost all of them have already been read and are waiting for me to build something to pull the links out of Brave and download/archive/index them somehow. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but haven't yet.
        naikrovek 3y ago
        This may help. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611
        3y ago
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model. Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Honestly haven’t felt like it didn’t have enough RAM even once. My daily driver before this was a Ryzen 5700x desktop with 64GB RAM, so I know what a powerful processor + RAM combo feels like. Haven’t even heard the fan even once.
- bredren 3y ago
  What were the things that held you up from making the switch?
- skunkworker 3y ago
  I upgraded from a 2015 MBP with 16gb of ram to a M3 Pro with 36gb. It’s a night and day difference, the machine is much more responsive and I mainly use it 30 min a day, or sometimes for a few hours in a row. And charge about once per week, getting about 14hr battery life.
nine_k 3y ago
Good that it works for you and your daughter! I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with a window from a different app showing, etc. This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle. Of course, Windows is even worse in the GUI department, there's no comparison. So, sadly, a Macbook remains the most sane computer for non-technical people :(
- skydhash 3y ago
  > This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle. I read that Apple follows a document model, where the application is kinda a background thing a window is supposed to be for a specific task. Not like Windows where the main windows is the hub of interaction. So you use CMD + <backquote> to switch between these tasks and CMD + TAB for switching between applications. The menu bar is part of the application, but windows can modify it to suit the focused tasks. I've used Rectangle for quick window management, but in time I've come to understand the philosophy so it does not bother me as much. It's more leaned into the desktop analogy than other OS.
  - SamuelAdams 3y ago
    You can also use AltTab if you prefer windows tab styles. https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
  - baxuz 3y ago
    Yes, and this is the reason why there is a shared menu bar and why many early macos apps had a number of floating windows, like Photoshop. The desktop represents the active app, and a window is the active document in that app. This doesn't make all that much sense with today's screen sizes and multiplatform apps.
    - 3y ago

ksec 3y ago

I really wish Apple would put 12GB RAM by default instead of 8GB. We now have high resolution that uses more memory and sharing Memory with GPU. In reality this is less than 8GB with Graphics Memory.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work

danpmurray 3y ago
How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?
- internetter 3y ago
  I can answer this. I have a very similar workload to OP. I've found myself with resolve, affinity photo, chrome, vscode, spotify, ect open simultaneously, and have had absolutely zero struggle on my 8gb air. If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping. The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    If it's really swapping then won't that reduce the lifetime of the (irreplaceable?) internal storage?
    - RussianCow 3y ago
      Modern SSDs are resilient enough that most people will never wear them out with anything resembling a normal workload. Unless you're constantly swapping for several hours a day, it just isn't going to matter.
      - hackerlight 3y ago
        How many GB a day would be written with swapping? Modern SSDs have a lifespan of a few hundred to low thousands of TBW.
        foldr 3y ago
        That's a conservative estimation of the lifespan (how hard you can hit it while maintaining a very low probability of SSD failure). The more interesting question is "How likely after n years is the SSD to be the first non-replaceable component to fail on this laptop?" I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm guessing it's a good long while before the answer to it goes above 0.5. Apple have been shipping laptops with non-replaceable SSDs since around 2017. Anecdotally, we hear so much worrying about potential future SSD failure, and yet so few people saying things like "I bought an M1 Air two years ago and now the SSD has died".
      - eimrine 3y ago
        Totally not, enshittification ate SLC.
        wtallis 3y ago
        SLC makes sense for almost zero use cases, even in a data center. It's simply the wrong tradeoff between capacity and performance. It's not enshittification that you can now have a cheap multi-TB SSD to hold a large collection of movies and games and still have an SLC cache for the small portion of your data that isn't mostly static.
- piva00 3y ago
  My MacBook Pro M3 has 36GiB RAM and does all of the comment above + music producing (dozens of VSTs on some 1-2 dozens tracks) + projection mapping and can run some LLM models locally like the Mistral ones. I've only managed to hear the fan when chatting with a LLM, for anything else it's been an absolutely silent beast.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I have an M1 Max with 32GiB and similarly - never had it complain or noticed it unhappy about anything, or felt I needed more RAM or CPU. It's going to be hard to justify upgrading this thing for awhile.
  - varispeed 3y ago
    I have M2 Pro 16GB from a client. It's comfortable for typical dev work - tons of tabs open, Docker, VS Code etc. Though the swap is about 20GB now and sometimes it lags. Still it beats any Intel or AMD laptop I ever had in terms of performance. This machine is on a whole another level. My own machines are M1 Max 32GB and they fare slightly better.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    Mine has 16GB and I regularly use some Mistral LLM as well as OpenHermes. The only things that ever seems to get my fan going are transcoding a video or a really long compile. Never once has the fan run during web browsing or any of the many everyday tasks that used to bring my previous one to its knees.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  I have an M2 Air with 24gb and it has no problems running Brave with 800-ish tabs, development workloads (a bunch of VSCode projects, several docker containers, lots of iTerm terminals), low-end CAD and 3D printing apps, CaptureOne and a bunch of Electron apps in parallel with room to spare. I've found I can fit more into those 24gb than into the 32gb of the Intel Mac I had before that (however that's possible).
  - fdsfdsafdsafds 3y ago
    >800-ish tabs You're never going to read those, before the links rot.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      The browser should remember the date you last rendered a tab, and then if the link rots, it falls back to archive.org on that date.
      - weikju 3y ago
        > The browser should remember the date you last rendered a tab, and then if the link rots, it falls back to archive.org on that date. Brave (by default at least) will ask you if you want to load the archive.org version when a page fails to load. Not 100% automatic but almost.
    - dividedbyzero 3y ago
      Almost all of them have already been read and are waiting for me to build something to pull the links out of Brave and download/archive/index them somehow. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but haven't yet.
      - naikrovek 3y ago
        This may help. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611
      - 3y ago
- TMWNN 3y ago
  My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model. Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Honestly haven’t felt like it didn’t have enough RAM even once. My daily driver before this was a Ryzen 5700x desktop with 64GB RAM, so I know what a powerful processor + RAM combo feels like. Haven’t even heard the fan even once.
bredren 3y ago
What were the things that held you up from making the switch?
skunkworker 3y ago
I upgraded from a 2015 MBP with 16gb of ram to a M3 Pro with 36gb. It’s a night and day difference, the machine is much more responsive and I mainly use it 30 min a day, or sometimes for a few hours in a row. And charge about once per week, getting about 14hr battery life.

nine_k 3y ago

Good that it works for you and your daughter! I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with a window from a different app showing, etc. This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle. Of course, Windows is even worse in the GUI department, there's no comparison. So, sadly, a Macbook remains the most sane computer for non-technical people :(

skydhash 3y ago
> This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle. I read that Apple follows a document model, where the application is kinda a background thing a window is supposed to be for a specific task. Not like Windows where the main windows is the hub of interaction. So you use CMD + <backquote> to switch between these tasks and CMD + TAB for switching between applications. The menu bar is part of the application, but windows can modify it to suit the focused tasks. I've used Rectangle for quick window management, but in time I've come to understand the philosophy so it does not bother me as much. It's more leaned into the desktop analogy than other OS.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  You can also use AltTab if you prefer windows tab styles. https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
- baxuz 3y ago
  Yes, and this is the reason why there is a shared menu bar and why many early macos apps had a number of floating windows, like Photoshop. The desktop represents the active app, and a window is the active document in that app. This doesn't make all that much sense with today's screen sizes and multiplatform apps.
  - 3y ago