3 ms·

M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM as well. However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps

by barrell 1mo ago

M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM as well. However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day. Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB. I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.

bayindirh 1mo ago
But we have AI now! We can just write better software with a single prompt, right? /s
- lynx97 1mo ago
  How is this comment helpful or interesting?
  - fauigerzigerk 1mo ago
    I mean, you could make a better comment about it, but in my opinion the sarcasm is justified. AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless). And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis. Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all? I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code. Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
    - thewebguyd 1mo ago
      > Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming? I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently. The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt. Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work. When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.
ant6n 1mo ago
I don’t get it either. What are these people doing that keep saying that Mac OS is snappy. It’s the same slow garbage as windows. One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either). I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
- sznio 1mo ago
  main difference is that Mac OS can actually use swap. With Windows you can as well just restart the whole machine, once it touches swap it won't stop thrashing ever.
- unsnap_biceps 1mo ago
  I live with safari and finder and all my office ware is native (mail.app) or web based (Google Docs). Chat is via slack, but I use the website and not the native app. I've adapted to the quirks and I'd bet that's a lot of the reason why it doesn't feel slow to me. I feel I have plenty of windows open at once but likely less than you do. Different folks different strokes as they say.
  - ant6n 1mo ago
    If you have to use specialized software to make your system snappy, then it is, as a system, not snappy. The attitude about the MacBook is that it never slows down … what, unless you use MS office?
    - unsnap_biceps 1mo ago
hochmartinez 1mo ago
It's not obsolete at all. Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows). I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18. ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management. It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs. I use it as daily driver.

by barrell 1mo ago

bayindirh 1mo ago

But we have AI now! We can just write better software with a single prompt, right? /s

lynx97 1mo ago
How is this comment helpful or interesting?
- fauigerzigerk 1mo ago
  I mean, you could make a better comment about it, but in my opinion the sarcasm is justified. AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless). And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis. Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all? I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code. Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
  - thewebguyd 1mo ago
    > Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming? I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently. The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt. Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work. When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.

ant6n 1mo ago

I don’t get it either. What are these people doing that keep saying that Mac OS is snappy. It’s the same slow garbage as windows. One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either). I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.

sznio 1mo ago
main difference is that Mac OS can actually use swap. With Windows you can as well just restart the whole machine, once it touches swap it won't stop thrashing ever.
unsnap_biceps 1mo ago
I live with safari and finder and all my office ware is native (mail.app) or web based (Google Docs). Chat is via slack, but I use the website and not the native app. I've adapted to the quirks and I'd bet that's a lot of the reason why it doesn't feel slow to me. I feel I have plenty of windows open at once but likely less than you do. Different folks different strokes as they say.
- ant6n 1mo ago
  If you have to use specialized software to make your system snappy, then it is, as a system, not snappy. The attitude about the MacBook is that it never slows down … what, unless you use MS office?
  - unsnap_biceps 1mo ago

hochmartinez 1mo ago

It's not obsolete at all. Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows). I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18. ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management. It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs. I use it as daily driver.