To be fair I had an 8Gb M1 Mac mini for about a year and never even once felt like it was lacking memory. I could open as many things as I wanted and it didn’t slow down, so I can kinda see where they were going with this. Not saying it makes that situation much better though.
I think the current base iPhones with 4Gb or 6Gb suffer way more from lack of memory than the 8Gb Macs, and people aren’t taking about this enough.
I needed a cheap laptop for audio, so i decided to pick up a second hand m1 air a couple months ago.
It is honestly pretty impressive for the price, I generally don’t have issues either. Everything is snappy, and it handles multitasking fine. Its even faster than my $2000+ PC at several things, which frustrates me greatly.
However… When running ableton live (or presumably anything that involves heavy image, video, or audio editing), 8gb of ram is honestly not enough. If you push it too hard, it hangs for a second, then the offending app will just close.
Also there is a weird delay in factorio, absolutely unacceptable.
Base 8GB MacBooks also tend to have base storage, meaning a single NVMe controller instead of dual. If you’re relying on virtual memory then it would make sense to get the Mac that has double the SSD bandwidth. I bought a base M1 Mac Mini for the kids and it’s pretty good for their needs, but they tend to prefer the old i3 win 10 PC connected to the same monitor. The M1 Mini could run Intel Civ 6 faster than my 32GB i7 MacBook Pro could, which surprised me.
I have a old HP Elitebook with 8GB ram with Windows 10 and even on Windows I don’t notice slowdowns for daily tasks. Yes the machine swaps but because of the SSD you don’t notice much performance decrease. However, because it’s constant swapping the lifetime of the SSD will decrease and that’s exactly the problem of 8GB machines these days. Yes the machine stays fast (Windows or OSX it really does not matter) but there is extra load on the SSD.
Don’t believe Apple marketing bullshit that 8GB is enough because of the “super duper advanced memory management” of OSX. If it really was enough then Apple would not release MacBooks with 16+ GB ram. The only reason that the 8GB MBP still exists is to sell more 16+ GB machines.
I have an old 8GB Toshiba laptop that I threw an SSD into and slapped Pop_OS! on for fun. There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros that can breathe life into older hardware if you want to tinker with them. If nothing else, my old Toshiba is good for just basic Internet usage.
The thing you didn’t notice is that you significantly decreased the service life of the permanent storage on the device, because it ABSOLUTELY dips into swap far more frequently than models with more memory, and all high-speed SSD technologies that I’m aware of have limited lifetime write capacity before performance and fidelity start to degrade.
The MBPs (MBAs too in my opinion, but that’s more debate as it’s the “entry level” laptop) should have a minimum ram config of 16gb. 8gb MBP is honestly a really dumb spec level to purchase anyways - if you want something with that little RAM in laptop form, get the MBA.
People have proven that this problem was massively exaggerated. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10-15 years the SSDs of the vast majority of these computers will be perfectly fine (but only time will tell)
I delivered a season of 4k animations for a network show using Motion, AE, C4D, Ps, AI…all using a base model M1 Mini (8/256), with zero problems.
Of course more would be better, but unless you’ve actually used one, it’s hard to imagine how well it works. I tried mentioning this in another post, but it’s all Apple hate all the way down here
To be honest, I can still do most of my work on my old Core2Quad 4GB DDR2 PC, when using Linux.
And as long as I setup my swap properly, I can also keep as many Firefox tabs open as I want , as I tend to forget tabs (running out of brain memory) before I run out of RAM.
Increasing swap on Linux is a great way to save money on cloud servers btw. One nice thing on Mac is that there is no swap file that you need to manage. System handles it transparently. Firefox (and really all modern browsers) require a ridiculous of RAM if you use them like you and I do.
Actually the opposite is true for a basic spec. like RAM. People may not understand CPU/GPU naming conventions. BUT they understand something simple like 16>8.
They also understand their “old slow” PC probably had 8gb and they want to UPGRADE so when they see this “new” mac with same amount of ram they immediately think slow whether it is or not…
Some of the YouTubers comparing the new MacBook found that the 16GB Air smoked the 8GB version for creative tasks and rendering, but they found no difference between 16 GB and 24GB. Seems like Apple could up the RAM to 12 GB and see a big improvement.
To be fair I had an 8Gb M1 Mac mini for about a year and never even once felt like it was lacking memory. I could open as many things as I wanted and it didn’t slow down, so I can kinda see where they were going with this. Not saying it makes that situation much better though.
I think the current base iPhones with 4Gb or 6Gb suffer way more from lack of memory than the 8Gb Macs, and people aren’t taking about this enough.
I needed a cheap laptop for audio, so i decided to pick up a second hand m1 air a couple months ago.
It is honestly pretty impressive for the price, I generally don’t have issues either. Everything is snappy, and it handles multitasking fine. Its even faster than my $2000+ PC at several things, which frustrates me greatly.
However… When running ableton live (or presumably anything that involves heavy image, video, or audio editing), 8gb of ram is honestly not enough. If you push it too hard, it hangs for a second, then the offending app will just close.
Also there is a weird delay in factorio, absolutely unacceptable.
Yeah, audio and video workloads really need the ram. The base model is fine for content consumption though.
A 2k pc can game. You can’t really game on mac
tell me you run windows without telling me you run windows
Linux till I die, am I right.
This place is yawn at times.
Ya it’s kind of silly.
I dual boot if you were concerned
yes, actually. windows could be nice if they let us remove all the bullshit, but since they dont, you get a slow 2k pc.
still beats me how this is acceptable and windows users even hate to hear it, but it is what it is i guess.
You didn’t even ask which several things OP was referring to.
Base 8GB MacBooks also tend to have base storage, meaning a single NVMe controller instead of dual. If you’re relying on virtual memory then it would make sense to get the Mac that has double the SSD bandwidth. I bought a base M1 Mac Mini for the kids and it’s pretty good for their needs, but they tend to prefer the old i3 win 10 PC connected to the same monitor. The M1 Mini could run Intel Civ 6 faster than my 32GB i7 MacBook Pro could, which surprised me.
I have a old HP Elitebook with 8GB ram with Windows 10 and even on Windows I don’t notice slowdowns for daily tasks. Yes the machine swaps but because of the SSD you don’t notice much performance decrease. However, because it’s constant swapping the lifetime of the SSD will decrease and that’s exactly the problem of 8GB machines these days. Yes the machine stays fast (Windows or OSX it really does not matter) but there is extra load on the SSD.
Don’t believe Apple marketing bullshit that 8GB is enough because of the “super duper advanced memory management” of OSX. If it really was enough then Apple would not release MacBooks with 16+ GB ram. The only reason that the 8GB MBP still exists is to sell more 16+ GB machines.
I have an old 8GB Toshiba laptop that I threw an SSD into and slapped Pop_OS! on for fun. There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros that can breathe life into older hardware if you want to tinker with them. If nothing else, my old Toshiba is good for just basic Internet usage.
The thing you didn’t notice is that you significantly decreased the service life of the permanent storage on the device, because it ABSOLUTELY dips into swap far more frequently than models with more memory, and all high-speed SSD technologies that I’m aware of have limited lifetime write capacity before performance and fidelity start to degrade.
The MBPs (MBAs too in my opinion, but that’s more debate as it’s the “entry level” laptop) should have a minimum ram config of 16gb. 8gb MBP is honestly a really dumb spec level to purchase anyways - if you want something with that little RAM in laptop form, get the MBA.
People have proven that this problem was massively exaggerated. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10-15 years the SSDs of the vast majority of these computers will be perfectly fine (but only time will tell)
NO! No fair.
I delivered a season of 4k animations for a network show using Motion, AE, C4D, Ps, AI…all using a base model M1 Mini (8/256), with zero problems.
Of course more would be better, but unless you’ve actually used one, it’s hard to imagine how well it works. I tried mentioning this in another post, but it’s all Apple hate all the way down here
To be honest, I can still do most of my work on my old Core2Quad 4GB DDR2 PC, when using Linux.
And as long as I setup my swap properly, I can also keep as many Firefox tabs open as I want , as I tend to forget tabs (running out of brain memory) before I run out of RAM.
But I just like my 64GB RAM.
Increasing swap on Linux is a great way to save money on cloud servers btw. One nice thing on Mac is that there is no swap file that you need to manage. System handles it transparently. Firefox (and really all modern browsers) require a ridiculous of RAM if you use them like you and I do.
Core2Quad?
That thing is a space heater that can do some math.
My point being, “I can work on it”, can be used even on a space heater.
Same for the IBM R52, which I no longer turn on, because a Pi would be better.
People are, just not PC spec heads that like to compare numbers. Practical use is the only real comparison.
Actually the opposite is true for a basic spec. like RAM. People may not understand CPU/GPU naming conventions. BUT they understand something simple like 16>8.
They also understand their “old slow” PC probably had 8gb and they want to UPGRADE so when they see this “new” mac with same amount of ram they immediately think slow whether it is or not…
Some of the YouTubers comparing the new MacBook found that the 16GB Air smoked the 8GB version for creative tasks and rendering, but they found no difference between 16 GB and 24GB. Seems like Apple could up the RAM to 12 GB and see a big improvement.