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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
- nullindividual 3y agoThat's certain one of the statements of all time. All major OSes compress memory at this point. I'd be curious to see how OoM acts on macOS -- I've seen it on Windows [NT4] and Linux over the years. I've not seen an OS handle it as well as NT does/did.
- JohnFen 3y agoDoes Debian do this by default? If so, can I disable it for a performance increase?
- stouset 3y agoCompressed memory is a performance increase. CPUs are fast.
- ac29 3y agoNo, but should you want to enable it, you can install systemd-zram-generator. See also: https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator As someone else mentioned, for many cases this will be a performance increase, not decrease. Compressing infrequently used memory frees up more memory to be used for filesystem caching among other things.
- amluto 3y agoIt’s like an analogy from high school. 1 is to 8GB as 2 is to 16GB. See, they’re analogous.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoDo they? What did nt4 do that was so great? Linux zram seems effective for marking some memory as compressed swap. Alas it doesn't play well with zswap, reportedly, which lets real swap drives also be compressed. But should be useful in many scenarios to quickly switch between compressed memories in a wide number of cases.
- Shekelphile 3y ago> All major OSes compress memory at this point. zswap won't compress pages until they're swapped to disk, so essentially only once you've run out of memory to use and have begun experiencing the horrid performance degradation that comes from swapping to disk. you can use zram instead and put swappiness to a high value so the kernel aggressively swaps pages to the fake swap device made by zram, but then you lose the ability to have on-disk compressed swap pages. i'm surprised that more work hasn't been done to fix this because memory management on linux is clearly lagging behind and affects a lot more than the minority of people using desktop linux systems, every android phone ships with 1.5x-2x more RAM than the equivalent iphone and performs worse when a bunch of apps are running in the background because of the poor memory management.
- IronWolve 3y agoI just upgraded my windows workstation to 128gigs so i could load larger language models for only $300. 8 gigs seems rather absurd of apple. Apple charges 200 bux for 16 gigs or 400 bux for 24 gigs.
- tryfinally 3y agoI just put 64 gigs of (fast) memory and a (very fast) 4 TB SSD in my laptop for a total of $600. In the MacBook Pro configurator the equivalent upgrades look like 36GB->64GB RAM: $400 1TB->4TB SSD: $1000
- Aeolun 3y agoMost people buying the entry level macbook pro are probably not loading 128GB language models.
- madjam002 3y agoHah, reminds me of when they tried to justify having a max of 16GB of memory
- nwmcsween 3y agoApple 100% knows Windows and Linux does memory compression, this is just a way of deflecting the actual issue of tiny amounts of ram.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- itg 3y agoWell most pc laptops allow you to upgrade the ram. Upgraded mine to 64gb for about $125. How much is that analogous to, Apple?
- ricardobeat 3y agoThis is not news, has been the case since Intel macs, though the rise of Electron apps has reduced the MacOS advantage. I do have an 8GB M1 mini I use for development and the only way to make it run out of memory is to run Docker, otherwise it's perfectly fine.
- timbo1642 3y agoYou don't know what you're saying. That's because of virtual memory and its much slower. Apple's claim is bullshit and they lie. Every modern OS compresses memory, not just the MacOS. And no 8GB is not equivalent to 16GB on a Mac. Apple says it so foolish people believe it, but its not true. Sure unified has advantages, but they're saying BS.
- nullindividual 3y ago> You don't know what you're saying. That's because of virtual memory and its much slower. All memory is virtualized by the operating system; applications don't 'see' physical address space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory
- Boatfaceing 3y ago[dead]
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoIt's perfectly fine for the Mac's primary use case these days: a thin client into a real computer for performing actual work. We should congratulate Apple for building the world's sexiest VT100 and Wyse WinTerm in one box.
- Onawa 3y agoI agree, I've been perfectly happy and even impressed with my 8GB M2 MacBook Air. I have never seen that pop-up but I also use it as a thin client as well. Any heaving lifting should be done on a desktop/server.
- replete 3y agoHorse shit. What Apple wants to happen is for you to eat into your soldered SSD's endurance (TBW) through virtual memory swapping out RAM to your storage volume so that you Buy More Stuff. I investigated my unexpectedly high disk writes and made a few changes, disabled some MacOS services, disabled write-caching for video in Firefox etc and this reduced my write volume by tens of gigabytes per day. By this point I think I'd written 50TB of the drives TBW in a year which was significant/ This is particularly relevant if you use a mac with a soldered SSD, because when you approach endurance ratings the drive will probably fail spectacularly and your computer will unrepairable by reasonable means.
- porcc 3y agoDo you have a resource for us to do this for ourselves? Seems like a pretty good thing to do
- golem14 3y ago+1. When there were still spinning HDDs, some of this fuckery was obvious, like spotlight indexing all the time like crazy. This might still happen, or happen again, but we sheeple would'nt know because SDDs are much quieter than HDDs.
- replete 3y ago(from my notes) Disabling swap: - Disable SIP (`csrutil disable` from recovery environment terminal) - `sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=2"` in macos terminal - reboot, confirm with `sysctl -a vm.compressor_mode` `browser.cache.disk.enable` = false in Firefox `about:config` (I think there's more to this, but I can't recall, more research required) I disabled spotlight altogether among some other services, for some reason I didn't finish my notes. It's a start though!.
- vGPU 3y agoI don’t think the “Buy More Stuff” theory actually applies here. The average purchaser of the 8/256 model just uses it as a Chromebook with a fancy logo. By the time they hit the TBW limit they’ll likely have upgraded anyways because the battery will be completely degraded. On the other hand, the average person who purchases a computer with the knowledge that they need to perform data-intensive tasks will likely also understand that 8/256 is not sufficient for their needs. Thus, the amount of Mac owners that will realistically actually run into premature SSD failure is probably pretty low. Apple is just running a multi-pronged strategy here: a “good enough” model for 90% of people, and then a “squeeze every last penny out of them” approach for the people who require performance and are willing to pay the Apple tax. The actual downsides of this approach are pretty limited, as the swap is fast enough that it won’t create a class of newly disgruntled Mac owners annoyed that their Mac “got slow just like a pc”. Miserly from their side? Sure. But I’m certain the beancounters weighed every aspect and decided that their RAM budget per board was $2, so 8gb it was. Spending an extra $1.30 for a 16gb LPDDR4X chip would break the bank. Those are actual, current spot prices on those chips. A 150x profit margin on that upgrade from 8 to 16gb makes for some nice fat CEO bonuses. Where do you think the money to pay Tim Apple his 99 million dollar compensation last year came from?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justinator 3y agoI have a 16G M1 and that popup about the system running out of memory comes up frequently. I would do terrible, terrible things to be able to upgrade the RAM. My 2014 Macbook Pro had 16G!
- dmvdoug 3y agoI have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup. Our use cases likely vary.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup. Does that mean 8GB M1 == 16GB x86?
- dmvdoug 3y agoNo, it means that I have an 8GB M1 and have never encountered the low memory popup.
- paulddraper 3y agoAre you running a VM? That's the only way I can use 17,179,869,184 bytes of memory.
- justinator 3y agoNo. The largest memory hogs are FireFox, Photoshop, and Lightroom Classic.
- piva00 3y agoThat's rather odd to be eating all your RAM, I use my personal M1 16GB with Firefox, Affinity Photo and Capture One all the time to process RAW, never had issues running out of memory. Neither when producing music on Ableton Live and/or Bitwig.
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- tambourine_man 3y agoThis smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium. There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit. Only this time they put themselves in this position. They should own it, either admit that they couldn't keep their margins otherwise or take the US$ 50 or so profit hit and avoid the bad press on an otherwise great machine.
- zarzavat 3y agoNothing to do with margins. It’s price discrimination. Anybody who has $200 more to spare will buy the upgrade because you’d be crazy not to. People on a budget, or who don’t know any better, will get the base model.
- flashback2199 3y agoIt actually was true in benchmarks, but Mac OS was in such a bad state at the time that it didn't really matter. It didn't even have real multitasking!
- tambourine_man 3y agoIt was true for some benchmarks. I’m sure you can find cases where memory pressure is significantly less on macOS. But it’s not the “mine is twice as good as theirs” situation they try to sell.
- Yizahi 3y agoThey also claimed that mAh in the iPhone are different than in all other phones, that's why packing shitty battery was alright.
- tambourine_man 3y agoRight. Also the same argument used with RAM in iPhones. If you’re not running Java all the time, you can save some Amps and RAM. But not that many for most cases.
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- tracerbulletx 3y agoThere is something to this though I don't have benchmarks, I use an 8gb M1 air and it has never been an issue. I also have a 64gb desktop with a 4090 with 24GB of VRAM, and a MBPro M2Max with 32 and an old intel macbook with 16, and I do a lot of random stuff like video editing and running random docker containers, and what have you, and the MBAir is solid and never has any problem with it.
- nottorp 3y agoMarketing assholery. Apple is good at memory compression but that's not physical ram. They compress like crazy but you can still run out of it. I have. On a 16 Gb M2. It had 7 Gb of compressed ram at that moment.
- sva_ 3y ago> Starting at $1,599, [...] 8GB of unified memory. [...] Users can opt for 16GB or 24GB at checkout, but these configuration options cost an extra $200 and $400 at purchase, [...] That's insane. I could upgrade my $1200 laptop, which came with 32GB, to 96GB DDR5 ram for about $300.
- Yizahi 3y agoPathetic clowns. 1600$ laptop with 8Gb memory (actually less, because it is shared with GPU) in 2023 is a fucked up thing. Any laptop more than 1000-1200$ with such memory is trash. The ones labelled "pro" especially.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoEvery Apple announcement makes me glad that my employer pays for my MBP