I'm guessing that since the RAM is now on the SOC instead of on separate chips creating models with more RAM becomes more difficult not only from a space constraint on the die but a cost to manufacture more variants?
The iPad Pro has a mere 4GB of RAM and is faster at almost every task AND multitasking than any of my other beefy machines. I wouldn’t discount this yet.
I think it depends what they've done with Big Sur.
Take a look at your activity monitor and see how many background tasks you laptop is running right now (I currently have 481 and I only have 4 apps actually running).
Compare that to iPad which can run 2 apps max and apple controls all the background activity.
Hitting a wall how? The machine stops working properly? Or you see all the RAM allocated in Activity Monitor? Because MacOS aggressively allocates RAM even under a normal workload.
Well when you start getting memory pressure you start losing cycles to compressing and decompressing pages which makes everything run like complete shit.
That’s not how MacOS works. It “keeps the pressure on” so to speak to try and have as much in-memory before you need it. Have you experienced actual issues with specific software?
Blows my mind, I do most of the same on a 2013 MacBook Air with only 8GB RAM. I’ve never had a perf hiccup unless I try video editing or gaming. But I just don’t really have a want to do those things, hence why I’m still getting by on this thing. I was going to upgrade once for the hell of it but all the keyboard issues kept me seated.
I expected you to say you did something with graphics/media. I guess the VMs could be the difference. I don’t use. But I have 100 chrome tabs open at most times lol.
All these things work with 8GB RAM. macOS uses all available RAM aggressively, so if you have 32GB RAM it will appear as what you are doing requires 32GB RAM, which is not the case.
On my machine, if it goes more than 5G into swap it starts to become less responsive.
It really depends on your usage patterns. VM abusers and people who need to keep an eye on more than one project at the same time (as in multiple IDEs) can't do with 16 Gb.
And please don't tell me to start closing software, I'm willing to pay for more ram to have everything handy. Except... I can't.
Right now I have 6GB for VMs (for ~12 docker containers) and 8GB for various IDEs and editors. Probably typical for those on my development team. Surprisingly Chrome isn't even the top ten for memory footprint on my laptop.
So far 16GB has been fine on this 2017 MacBook. Wouldn't turn down 32 though :-)
Could be true. But I get instant feedback from all apps, so what's the measure of "reduced performance" that would matter? I'm actually curious, if nothing lags, would I notice a difference by upgrading?
My view into your comment is that you think I'm used to the lag. That's not the case. It's not my only device just my only Apple laptop. My newest device, a iPhone 12 Pro, is an upgrade from my 6s that I surely noticed and knew I would. I had been frustrated by the 6s for a while but held out for 5G.
Yeah, I found running all my dev environments in Docker/VMs made everything too slow. So I've just installed everything natively and have my own little docker-compose style runner to simplifying running our in-house microservices. I would definitely appreciate decent Docker performance, but it was actually surprisingly painless to set this up.
I did some benchmarking on that public taxi rides dump (~600m records) and could run through it all in under 15 seconds directly from SSD. No way in hell your CPU will keep up with anything close to memory bandwidth or beyond 3GB/s.
The only thing could be some really aggressive swap disk situation offloading anything not needed that second. But that won't work for things where you need all the ram right now, video editing for example.
But you don’t have background services on the iPad and apps are hibernated to disk if they aren’t active and iOS needs more ram. It’s possible that Apple is doing the same thing on macOS, but we don’t know (it would break a ton of apps).
This is a good point and begs an interesting question: will they continue using the same ARM chip across the whole line when the 16" MBP and the other iMacs make the switch, and if so, will all Macs of the same generation always have the same amount of RAM? Or will they branch the chips (M2 and M2S, or something)? Is RAM becoming less relevant when you have smart integration of software and hardware components, to a point where stratification is no longer necessary in most cases?
> Is RAM becoming less relevant when you have smart integration of software and hardware components, to a point where stratification is no longer necessary in most cases?
If they intend these things to run software development, audio/video editing, CAD, or any other resource-intensive workloads, there will absolutely be demand for more.
I could see the M2 coming with 32GB across the board, at which point the only current outliers (setting aside the Mac Pro as a special case) would be the 64GB configuration for the 16" Macbook Pro and the 64GB and 128GB configurations for the iMac. I could imagine Apple's optimizations closing the performance gap with the current 64GB offerings, and then perhaps they just leave 128GB customers to go all the way for the Mac Pro. I would be surprised to hear that they sell very many 128GB iMacs right now anyway.
