They charge too much for 8gb, but so many articles are coming out that just fundamentally either misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent memory utilization and memory utilization metrics, and they’re really muddying the waters around whether or not the average person needs more than 8gb. I still believe the answer is “no” at least when using Apple Silicon. That doesn’t mean I think it’s sensible to pay $1600 for a computer with only 8gb of RAM, but let’s focus the discussion around the right thing: Apple charges too much for 8gb of RAM. The fact that the option is there is not a bad thing, and in fact would be actively a good thing if they priced more reasonably, because it would mean that there is a more affordable entry point for those people who do get by just fine on 8gb.
Even relatively casual users who load up on browser tabs and inefficient Electron apps (household names like Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.) can find performance compromised by running out of RAM.
Based on what? I have never found this to be true on personal machines. Perhaps if you load up on browser tabs and actively use all of them frequently then you’ll run into issues. That isn’t what most people who use a lot of tabs do, though. The tab is left open as a sort of lower-commitment for of a bookmark. The number of tabs actively used is generally not anywhere near equal to the number of tabs open. Swap handles this beautifully, and additionally, modern browsers are increasingly incorporating tab sleeping to help make both memory and power utilization of a lot of open tabs more efficient. Tab hoarders on desktop are probably tab hoarders on mobile, too, and you don’t often hear complaints about how iPhones don’t have enough memory because of all the tabs.
Electron apps are not as easily dealt with, but I don’t buy that the average user has more than one or two of those running at a time. If you do, then yes, you’ll need more RAM. That doesn’t mean the lower-RAM option shouldn’t exist, though.
As I write this, with just a handful of browser tabs open, Slack, and a distraction-free writing app (iA Writer—it’s great), I’m consuming just about 11GB on my M2 MacBook Air.
Apps will use it if it’s there. That doesn’t immediately mean you’ll notice performance degradation if it’s not. I’m using about double that RAM with roughly the same set of open stuff, not because what I’m doing right now demands 20gb of RAM, but because the RAM is there and isn’t needed for anything else, so the system can’t be bothered to care, and neither can the apps. A lot of modern software is garbage collected, meaning technically unused memory just sits there as long as more memory is available, because there’s no reason to take the compute hit of cleaning stuff up if it’s not hurting anything by being left behind. Software will intentionally bloat its memory utilization to fill the available memory, that is not the same thing as you “needing” that much RAM.
I would be really curious to see what the conversations would be if the current MacBook Pro were actually just called the MacBook, but was otherwise the same machine offered for the same price. My guess is we’d all be having the real discussion, which is that the 8gb base is actually just fine but the base price is too high (just like we did when the M2 MacBook Air launched, still with just 8gb of RAM, but for $200 more than the outgoing M1 MacBook Air).
MacBook Air M2 is worse than M1 in almost every way, because now you actually have to pay $200 extra to upgrade to 512GB storage just to get the same speed as the old M1 256GB!
It actually highlights just how much slower is swap compared to the main memory once they made swap slightly slower, and how little is 8GB, causing swapping very easily.
In normal usage you’d never notice the speed difference. The 256GB chip is still fast. When swapping, latency of the underlying storage device is what really makes the difference and latency is pretty much the same for these chips.
I recorded my band’s whole album in Logic on a base model M1 Air and never once noticed a slowdown or lag or it swapping to disk or whatever. And usually I’d have a few Safari tabs open in the background while I did it.
Would I complain if I had 16 GB of memory? Nope, but I also don’t feel the need to complain about 8 because it literally hasn’t affected me, even when doing more than browsing Reddit or watching videos.
They charge too much for 8gb, but so many articles are coming out that just fundamentally either misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent memory utilization and memory utilization metrics, and they’re really muddying the waters around whether or not the average person needs more than 8gb. I still believe the answer is “no” at least when using Apple Silicon. That doesn’t mean I think it’s sensible to pay $1600 for a computer with only 8gb of RAM, but let’s focus the discussion around the right thing: Apple charges too much for 8gb of RAM. The fact that the option is there is not a bad thing, and in fact would be actively a good thing if they priced more reasonably, because it would mean that there is a more affordable entry point for those people who do get by just fine on 8gb.
Based on what? I have never found this to be true on personal machines. Perhaps if you load up on browser tabs and actively use all of them frequently then you’ll run into issues. That isn’t what most people who use a lot of tabs do, though. The tab is left open as a sort of lower-commitment for of a bookmark. The number of tabs actively used is generally not anywhere near equal to the number of tabs open. Swap handles this beautifully, and additionally, modern browsers are increasingly incorporating tab sleeping to help make both memory and power utilization of a lot of open tabs more efficient. Tab hoarders on desktop are probably tab hoarders on mobile, too, and you don’t often hear complaints about how iPhones don’t have enough memory because of all the tabs.
Electron apps are not as easily dealt with, but I don’t buy that the average user has more than one or two of those running at a time. If you do, then yes, you’ll need more RAM. That doesn’t mean the lower-RAM option shouldn’t exist, though.
Apps will use it if it’s there. That doesn’t immediately mean you’ll notice performance degradation if it’s not. I’m using about double that RAM with roughly the same set of open stuff, not because what I’m doing right now demands 20gb of RAM, but because the RAM is there and isn’t needed for anything else, so the system can’t be bothered to care, and neither can the apps. A lot of modern software is garbage collected, meaning technically unused memory just sits there as long as more memory is available, because there’s no reason to take the compute hit of cleaning stuff up if it’s not hurting anything by being left behind. Software will intentionally bloat its memory utilization to fill the available memory, that is not the same thing as you “needing” that much RAM.
I would be really curious to see what the conversations would be if the current MacBook Pro were actually just called the MacBook, but was otherwise the same machine offered for the same price. My guess is we’d all be having the real discussion, which is that the 8gb base is actually just fine but the base price is too high (just like we did when the M2 MacBook Air launched, still with just 8gb of RAM, but for $200 more than the outgoing M1 MacBook Air).
MacBook Air M2 is worse than M1 in almost every way, because now you actually have to pay $200 extra to upgrade to 512GB storage just to get the same speed as the old M1 256GB!
It actually highlights just how much slower is swap compared to the main memory once they made swap slightly slower, and how little is 8GB, causing swapping very easily.
In normal usage you’d never notice the speed difference. The 256GB chip is still fast. When swapping, latency of the underlying storage device is what really makes the difference and latency is pretty much the same for these chips.
What matters is IOPS, and IOPS is half.
Literally even the YouTube reviewers noticed M2 256GB was slower! Even those who claim 8GB is enough!
I recorded my band’s whole album in Logic on a base model M1 Air and never once noticed a slowdown or lag or it swapping to disk or whatever. And usually I’d have a few Safari tabs open in the background while I did it.
Would I complain if I had 16 GB of memory? Nope, but I also don’t feel the need to complain about 8 because it literally hasn’t affected me, even when doing more than browsing Reddit or watching videos.