This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium.<p>There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit.<p>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.
That's certain one of the statements of all time.<p>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.
This is not news, has been the case since Intel macs, though the rise of Electron apps has reduced the MacOS advantage.<p>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.
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!
> 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, [...]<p>That's insane. I could upgrade my $1200 laptop, which came with 32GB, to 96GB DDR5 ram for about $300.
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 $300. 8 gigs seems rather absurd of apple.<p>Apple charges 200 bux for 16 gigs or 400 bux for 24 gigs.
Pathetic clowns. 1600$ 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.
Horse shit.<p>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.<p>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/<p>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.
Marketing assholery.<p>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.