5 ms·

I haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB

by sspiff 7mo ago

I haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB device in 2026, but this device isn't targeted at either of us. For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy. I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.

pants2 7mo ago
You might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.
- teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
  Apple has a great zram implementation as well.
- serf 7mo ago
  the slowest DDR4 is capable of 12.6GB/s~ish per channel . nowhere near the same performance.
  - Dylan16807 7mo ago
    The ratio between RAM speed and SSD speed is unimportant. Useful swap just needs a fast drive.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
    I’ve never had an SSD crap out because of read/write cycle exhaustion, and I’ve been using SSD almost exclusively, for over a dozen years. I’ve had plenty of spinning rust ones croak, though. You don’t solder those in, so it’s not really a fair comparison. I did have one of those dodgy Sandisks, but that was a manufacturing defect.
    - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
      But how much RAM did you have? If you have 24GB of RAM and a 12GB working set then it's fine. Likewise if you have 8GB of RAM and a 4GB working set. But 8GB of RAM and a 12GB working set, not the same thing.
  - spacedcowboy 7mo ago
    Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors. A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following: smartctl --all /dev/disk0 ... Data Units Read: 1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB] Data Units Written: 154,244,108 [78.7 TB] ... Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 ... I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.
    - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
      > I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB. Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse. On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.

by sspiff 7mo ago

pants2 7mo ago

You might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.

teaearlgraycold 7mo ago
Apple has a great zram implementation as well.
serf 7mo ago
the slowest DDR4 is capable of 12.6GB/s~ish per channel . nowhere near the same performance.
- Dylan16807 7mo ago
  The ratio between RAM speed and SSD speed is unimportant. Useful swap just needs a fast drive.
AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  I’ve never had an SSD crap out because of read/write cycle exhaustion, and I’ve been using SSD almost exclusively, for over a dozen years. I’ve had plenty of spinning rust ones croak, though. You don’t solder those in, so it’s not really a fair comparison. I did have one of those dodgy Sandisks, but that was a manufacturing defect.
  - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
    But how much RAM did you have? If you have 24GB of RAM and a 12GB working set then it's fine. Likewise if you have 8GB of RAM and a 4GB working set. But 8GB of RAM and a 12GB working set, not the same thing.
- spacedcowboy 7mo ago
  Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors. A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following: smartctl --all /dev/disk0 ... Data Units Read: 1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB] Data Units Written: 154,244,108 [78.7 TB] ... Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 ... I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.
  - AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
    > I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB. Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse. On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.