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> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly. That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked t

> Pricewise, things start favoring PCs if you need more RAM, as Mac upgrades are costly. That's the position I'm in, along with some other people I've talked to recently, too. For our situations, the M4 would likely offer more than enough processing power, and the efficiency and physical size are attractive, but a maximum of 32 GB of RAM definitely isn't sufficient. The M4 Pro's 64 GB of RAM is somewhat better, but the cost of those upgrades are very hard to justify. I'd also prefer to use the system for at least 5 years, and likely up to 10 years, if not longer. Even if 64 GB is tolerable now, I can easily see it becoming insufficient for my needs before then. The lack of reasonably-priced internal storage, while easier to work around than the lack of sufficient and reasonably-priced RAM, doesn't help matters, too. Even if future Studio models, for example, might allow for a more ideal amount of RAM, I have to expect that unjustifiable upgrade costs will likely still be an issue, and then there's the wait on top of that. I can easily see myself and the others I've talked to settling for PCs, rather than making unjustifiably-expensive Mac purchases.

kamranjon 2y ago
For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.
- layoric 2y ago
  Not sure what you mean by 'efficient', they are faster for sure (amazing memory bandwidth thanks to on chip memory), but to my knowledge they would be the same for amount of data stored. So that same think pad will likely be faster at tasks that need 24GB for example, highly depend on the use case as always.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    Memory requirements for general-purpose desktop usage usually don't come down to a single task with a large working set that needs to fit in RAM in its entirety. It's more often a matter of the aggregate memory usage of many tasks, which means that in practice there's a wide gray area where the OS can make a difference, depending on the effectiveness of its memory compression, swap, signalling memory pressure to applications, suspending background tasks or simply having fewer of them in the first place.
    - layoric 2y ago
      Good points well made, macOS likely is more 'memory efficient' in that regards.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  I just struggle to believe this. What OS is the Thinkpad running and did you put everything there (i.e., no corporate crud?).
  - kamranjon 2y ago
    I run Ubuntu on my Thinkpad - I generally notice the biggest difference with video editing, but really multitasking anything is night and day because of the memory bandwidth. I use the same software on both machines for video editing, Davinci Resolve.
- Rohansi 2y ago
  With what kind of workload? If you need 32GB of RAM then the computer that actually has that much RAM should be almost guaranteed to be quicker.
  - kamranjon 2y ago
    Video Editing. Backend and Frontend development utilizing docker containers. Just browsing the web with tons of tabs. Streaming video while doing other stuff in the background. Honestly most things I'd rather do on my M1.
    - Rohansi 2y ago
      So probably nothing that actually needs more than 16GB of RAM then. And realistically comparing M1 to an i7 several years older than it. Having more RAM doesn't increase memory bandwidth and having more memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean better performance. You aren't even able to make use of all of the bandwidth your M1 is capable of in the real world [1]. Apple Silicon has good perf/watt but the gap probably isn't as big as you're thinking. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
      - kamranjon 2y ago
        When did I say having more RAM increased memory bandwidth? Are you having a separate conversation with yourself right now? I feel like you might have misinterpreted what I originally said and just ran with it.
        Rohansi 2y ago
        There is a lot of misleading information about Apple's unified memory out there so I mentioned it just to be clear.
      - jcelerier 2y ago
        I have a M2 pro with 32G and I hit memory limits just from web browsing.
- rwalle 2y ago
  Your comment might win you the argument on a random non tech forum but not here. much more efficient in what? mops the floor by what? which year's i7? Don't get me wrong, I 100% believe what happened, but if you mean "my macbook is faster than my i7 thinkpad" you should use those exact words, but not bring RAM into this discussion. If you want to make a point about RAM, you need to be clear about what workflow you were measuring, the methodology you were using, and what the exact result is. Otherwise your words have no meaning.
  - kamranjon 2y ago
    I'm talking about memory bandwidth - maybe your workloads don't take advantage of that but most do and that's why apple designed their new chips to take advantage of it.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      Bandwidth doesn't replace size, these are orthogonal parameters.
      - kamranjon 2y ago
        I never said it did.
        izacus 2y ago
        So why are you commenting in a thread about size?
  - ricardobeat 2y ago
    Repeating what I just commented elsewhere, but Mac uses several advanced memory management features: apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks, it will compress memory instead of paging out, better memory allocation, less fragmentation. Bandwidth for copying things into memory is also vastly faster than what you get on Intel/AMD, for example on the Max chips you get 800GB/s which is the rough equivalent of 16 channels of DDR5-6400, something simply not available in consumer hardware. You can get 8 channels with AMD Epyc, but the motherboard for that alone will cost more than a Mac mini.
layoric 2y ago
In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade. I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine with louder components, but the upgrade will likely be half the cost of anything close from Apple since I can take my existing GPU, PSU and storage at the very least along with me. And "upgrade costs" is highly misleading for most of the components. You are buying a different machine config that you can't change, up or down, later on. I get that most people don't want to bother opening up a PC to swap out components, but the easier they made it, the more people will do it, and Apple is running the other way.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Does your existing motherboard allow for more than 64GB ram? The 5950x itself supports up to 128GB: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x
  - layoric 2y ago
    Mine doesn't but yes I could move to a mATX or bigger board to unlock that extending its life. I tend to go for the 'smaller' ITX cases and boards, so currently have a x570-i setup maxing out at 64GB.
- ricardobeat 2y ago
  Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.
  - bnolsen 2y ago
    Compared to Linux that's flat not true. Someone has been blowing marketing up your ...

kamranjon 2y ago

For what it's worth, the apple silicon machines are much more efficient on RAM than most - a 16gb m1 absolutely mops the floor with the 32gb of ram I have in my thinkpad with an i7. It's not really even close.

layoric 2y ago
Not sure what you mean by 'efficient', they are faster for sure (amazing memory bandwidth thanks to on chip memory), but to my knowledge they would be the same for amount of data stored. So that same think pad will likely be faster at tasks that need 24GB for example, highly depend on the use case as always.
- wtallis 2y ago
  Memory requirements for general-purpose desktop usage usually don't come down to a single task with a large working set that needs to fit in RAM in its entirety. It's more often a matter of the aggregate memory usage of many tasks, which means that in practice there's a wide gray area where the OS can make a difference, depending on the effectiveness of its memory compression, swap, signalling memory pressure to applications, suspending background tasks or simply having fewer of them in the first place.
  - layoric 2y ago
    Good points well made, macOS likely is more 'memory efficient' in that regards.
goosedragons 2y ago
I just struggle to believe this. What OS is the Thinkpad running and did you put everything there (i.e., no corporate crud?).
- kamranjon 2y ago
  I run Ubuntu on my Thinkpad - I generally notice the biggest difference with video editing, but really multitasking anything is night and day because of the memory bandwidth. I use the same software on both machines for video editing, Davinci Resolve.
Rohansi 2y ago
With what kind of workload? If you need 32GB of RAM then the computer that actually has that much RAM should be almost guaranteed to be quicker.
- kamranjon 2y ago
  Video Editing. Backend and Frontend development utilizing docker containers. Just browsing the web with tons of tabs. Streaming video while doing other stuff in the background. Honestly most things I'd rather do on my M1.
  - Rohansi 2y ago
    So probably nothing that actually needs more than 16GB of RAM then. And realistically comparing M1 to an i7 several years older than it. Having more RAM doesn't increase memory bandwidth and having more memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean better performance. You aren't even able to make use of all of the bandwidth your M1 is capable of in the real world [1]. Apple Silicon has good perf/watt but the gap probably isn't as big as you're thinking. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
    - kamranjon 2y ago
      When did I say having more RAM increased memory bandwidth? Are you having a separate conversation with yourself right now? I feel like you might have misinterpreted what I originally said and just ran with it.
      - Rohansi 2y ago
        There is a lot of misleading information about Apple's unified memory out there so I mentioned it just to be clear.
    - jcelerier 2y ago
      I have a M2 pro with 32G and I hit memory limits just from web browsing.
rwalle 2y ago
Your comment might win you the argument on a random non tech forum but not here. much more efficient in what? mops the floor by what? which year's i7? Don't get me wrong, I 100% believe what happened, but if you mean "my macbook is faster than my i7 thinkpad" you should use those exact words, but not bring RAM into this discussion. If you want to make a point about RAM, you need to be clear about what workflow you were measuring, the methodology you were using, and what the exact result is. Otherwise your words have no meaning.
- kamranjon 2y ago
  I'm talking about memory bandwidth - maybe your workloads don't take advantage of that but most do and that's why apple designed their new chips to take advantage of it.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Bandwidth doesn't replace size, these are orthogonal parameters.
    - kamranjon 2y ago
      I never said it did.
      - izacus 2y ago
        So why are you commenting in a thread about size?
- ricardobeat 2y ago
  Repeating what I just commented elsewhere, but Mac uses several advanced memory management features: apps can share read-only memory for common frameworks, it will compress memory instead of paging out, better memory allocation, less fragmentation. Bandwidth for copying things into memory is also vastly faster than what you get on Intel/AMD, for example on the Max chips you get 800GB/s which is the rough equivalent of 16 channels of DDR5-6400, something simply not available in consumer hardware. You can get 8 channels with AMD Epyc, but the motherboard for that alone will cost more than a Mac mini.

layoric 2y ago

In same boat, I have the 5950x with 64gb memory running PopOS and there are times I'm hitting swap a lot more than I'd like. 16 or 32gb of memory is just not feasible, and even 2TB of storage would likely cause headaches, I have a 4TB and a 2TB nvme at the moment which will come with me next upgrade. I'm leaning towards an upgrade next year to the 9950x3d if reviews pan out. Sure, it's going to be a bigger machine with louder components, but the upgrade will likely be half the cost of anything close from Apple since I can take my existing GPU, PSU and storage at the very least along with me. And "upgrade costs" is highly misleading for most of the components. You are buying a different machine config that you can't change, up or down, later on. I get that most people don't want to bother opening up a PC to swap out components, but the easier they made it, the more people will do it, and Apple is running the other way.

justinclift 2y ago
Does your existing motherboard allow for more than 64GB ram? The 5950x itself supports up to 128GB: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/ryzen_9/5950x
- layoric 2y ago
  Mine doesn't but yes I could move to a mATX or bigger board to unlock that extending its life. I tend to go for the 'smaller' ITX cases and boards, so currently have a x570-i setup maxing out at 64GB.
ricardobeat 2y ago
Memory usage is not comparable across Linux and Mac. MacOS is much better at avoiding swap, uses memory compression, shared frameworks etc. At the same time it tries to use all the memory available which makes direct system-wide comparisons not accurate. A good rule of thumb is that 8GB on Mac == 16GB on Windows/Linux.
- bnolsen 2y ago
  Compared to Linux that's flat not true. Someone has been blowing marketing up your ...