The 16GB RAM limit is unfortunate. Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP. Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.
Which is real weird considering the Intel 13” (which is still on sale) has a 32GB BTO option.
I don't see this issue having IntelliJ, Xcode, VSCode, Slack, Discord, and more open simultaneously on a continuous issue...with 16 GB of RAM. I'm somewhat impressed by some of these stories about RAM usage - what are people doing?
Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.
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Didn't they revert the keyboard to the previous version? (Magic vs butterfly)
The low end Air only has 7 GPU cores compared with 8 on the one with more storage. So they must be disabling a bad core and selling it the cheap model. Other than that all these machines use the exact same CPUs. Which means that an iMac or 16" MBP are probably going to use a M1X or something with more cores.
> So they must be disabling a bad core and selling it the cheap model. I really don't know much (anything) about the hardware manufacturing world. Is this a common practice?
Yes. Chip fabrication is super sensitive to the condition of the silicon wafer used. Chip companies talk about yields, because some percentage of chips can't, for example, be run at the highest clock rate. Indeed, some can't run reliably at all. If there is a microscopic flaw on the wafer that ends up being where one of the cores is located, disabling that core altogether is an option to keep that silicon marketable.
You can charge from either side though. You just don’t get all the bandwidth that USB4/TB4 normally provides.
You can’t charge from either side if there are only ports on one side, which, if I understand the design and Gp’s comment correctly, is the case for the ARM macs. Which would be those GP meant as “this generation”.
I assumed they had 4 ports like the current non-base model 13's, my bad.
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…
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 :-)
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…
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.
No they don't. It starts compressing pages when the memory pressure goes up and then it starts running like dog shit.
Lots of comments from people complaining about the lack of 32GB of RAM. Can someone explain to me the need for 32GB of RAM as a developer? Is it the IDE or your particular application area? As for me, I do all my professional development (C++17/Linux, Vim, EDA industry) on a five year old T450s with 12GB of RAM. For me the limiting factor is CPU power for sure. I only run out of RAM running some of the larger custome…
4 gb for Chrome tabs, 6 gb for your docker WM, 2gb or whatever slack requires, 2gb because your music is now streamed and the app is just a few html pages rendered through Chrome. Plus a couple of gb for your IntelliJ IDE.
If you are writing C++ in Vim for an embedded platform, you are limited by CPU power because C is so heavy to compile, but you are most likely also not likely to be the typical HNer.
The 16GB RAM limit is unfortunate. Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP. Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.
I used a MBP with 4 GB of RAM up until 2018 for rather heavy duty data science workloads. Wasn't ideal, but one thing I learned was that you really can't infer the amount of swapping and performance degradation that occurs just by looking at how much RAM is in use vs. how much you have, because the OS will eat up whatever it gets. The little memory pressure graph you can see in Activity Monitor is quite good, and on my current machine with an "unfortunate" 16 GB of RAM, memory's always full but I have no complaints about speed whatsoever.