8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
macrumors.comThis 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.
It 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!
It 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.
They also claimed that mAh in the iPhone are different than in all other phones, that's why packing shitty battery was alright.
Never seen this claimed, but apple absolute does trounce qualcomm and everyone else in terms of perf/w. iPhones with 3300mah batteries are getting longer sot than android flagships with 5000mah (and greater) batteries. The state of the android ecosystem is a complete joke and has been for years.
Of course they don't, it is simply not possible, outside of some awful models maybe. For instance in the current gen, iPhone 15 Pro with 3300 mAh gets 86 score at GSMArena, and S23 Ultra with 5000 mAh gets 126. A dramatic difference. S23 non-plus, which is a better opponent to 15 Pro as they are the same size, has 3900 mAh and scores 101 at that site. So all is quite proportional to the battery size. Or we can throw in for comparison newest Sony 5 5, with the same 6.1" form factor and 5000 mAh battery (shame on all other vendors, not fitting such batteries in flagship phones), it has a score of 130!
So, anyway, iPhone has a just a little bit better optimizations in some specific usage modes and that difference is mostly long gone. Today if we see 3300 battery in a phone it will definitely have a shitty autonomy.
Taking those scores on GSMArena at face value is bullshit (if anyone is wondering, that's 86h and 126h on their 'endurance rating').
The S23 Ultra only gets 126h 'endurance' because it can do 40 hours of phone calls, a lot more than the iPhone. How many phone calls do you make? It has worse battery life for things you actually do on a phone.
From their data, S23 5000mah vs iPhone 15 3300mah:
- games: 8h44m vs 8h16m
- video playback: 15h47m x 18h20m
- web browsing: 10h51m x 11h43m
Comparing against the iPhone 15 Max (still a smaller battery at 4400mah) it's a lot worse.
Max is better, but non-Max is bad. Call duration metric is actually good and useful. For example new Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have crap call score. What does it mean in real life - some people say that their pixel 8 has ok autonomy but after some investigation they admit that they use it at home/work on wifi. And then people using it on a cell network, especially in the bad reception zone, report atrocious life time, due to bad modem or something in that area. So it is important metric too.
Basically optimizations of the iphones can compensate maybe a few hundreds of mAh, but not 2000, that's not possible.
Remember that time they removed the headphone jack and claimed it was better without one?
remember when that was back in 2016 and the faithful have bought airpods in the 7 years since, and realized they were right?
Did airpods only work on iphones without a jack?
Right. 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.
Nothing 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.
That'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.
> 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.
It’s like an analogy from high school. 1 is to 8GB as 2 is to 16GB. See, they’re analogous.
Do 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.
Does Debian do this by default? If so, can I disable it for a performance increase?
No, but should you want to enable it, you can install systemd-zram-generator.
See also: 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.
Compressed memory is a performance increase. CPUs are fast.
Depends on what sort of performance you're optimizing for, does it not?
There might be an energy hit… but there are a LOT of compute cycles available between cache fills: https://www.blosc.org/pages/blosc-in-depth/
This 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.
You 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.
> 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.
It'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.
I 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.
Interesting, curious what you're connecting to: a more powerful mac pro, a Windows box, or a Linux box (and is it in the cloud or in your office).
A camouflaged Windows laptop with 16GB no doubt.
Well most pc laptops allow you to upgrade the ram. Upgraded mine to 64gb for about $125. How much is that analogous to, Apple?
I 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!
I have a 16G M1, and have never ever seen it in those 2 years I have it. I do programming and video editing, and run VMs headless to which I give like 2-4G.
Lucky. I have to restart perhaps once a day/every other day as the UI becomes unresponsive. Sometimes putting the computer to sleep means it restarts by itself, or I have force power it back on.
With headless VMs with a few GB, or some huge-ass VMs?
Could it be something unrelated, like Spotlight getting stuck, or some hungry app? I guess you've consulted Activity Monitor and such
I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup.
Our use cases likely vary.
> I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup.
Does that mean 8GB M1 == 16GB x86?
No, it means that I have an 8GB M1 and have never encountered the low memory popup.
Did you turn off swap, or is your disk almost full?
Are you running a VM?
That's the only way I can use 17,179,869,184 bytes of memory.
No. The largest memory hogs are FireFox, Photoshop, and Lightroom Classic.
That'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.
That's surprising.
36 megapixels RAW is like 50 megabytes.
> 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.
What laptop are you using? just curious
Elitebook 845 G10 with Ryzen 7840HS
Apple 100% knows Windows and Linux does memory compression, this is just a way of deflecting the actual issue of tiny amounts of ram.
There 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.
I 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.
I 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: $1000
Except you can't upgrade Macs anymore, you need to buy a completely new one.
Same goes for PCs sadly. Soldered on RAM is becoming the norm -- even Lenovo does that on their high-end ThinkPads.
Most people buying the entry level macbook pro are probably not loading 128GB language models.
Pathetic clowns. 1600$ 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.
Every Apple announcement makes me glad that my employer pays for my MBP
Horse 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.
I 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?
Great points. Obviously its about maximum profit, and it's 8GB only because they can get away with it with virtual memory and 3GB/s SSDs making swap mostly unnoticeable to the end user - the side effect being for heavy users in a few years needing a whole new board because the SSD endured prematurely. I don't care much for imagining a typical user as a technology person isn't a typical user. Most normal people I know expect a computer to last 5-6 years and will just take it to a repair guy to replace the battery or whatever if its out of warranty. Except what repair person can desolder and replace SSD chips on a motherboard? Buy More Stuff I guess!
Do you have a resource for us to do this for ourselves? Seems like a pretty good thing to do
(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!.
+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.
Hah, reminds me of when they tried to justify having a max of 16GB of memory
Marketing 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.