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Introducing the next generation of Mac

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Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#911

Post by noisem4ker »

pjmlp wrote: post #871
BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

Because not everyone is on containers fashion running full blown clusters on their laptops and 8 GB are more than good enough for enterprise developers.

One doesn't even need to be a developer to fill up 8GB with just a browser, Teams and Slack in the background (or any other Electron apps of their employer's choice).

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#912

Post by my123 »

Asmod4n wrote: post #823
my123 wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because they don't want to support drivers for other OSes. See this WWDC session: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686 and this manpage: https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/RwcT8stYMY/

Can’t find anything in both documents which allows booting of non Apple signed Software. The only thing I See there is something like SecureBoot on PCs, where Apple would need to sign your boot loader in order to be able to boot it.

--permissive-security is the setting that you want. You are then able to enroll hashes of unsigned kernels with kmutil.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#913

Post by rusticpenn »

manquer wrote: post #909
rusticpenn wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance of the phones seem to be smooth compared to Android phones with similar ( or more) RAM. The difference comes from vertical optimization, so the raw numbers on RAM would not give us a full picture.

It is not straight comparison. The relative openness of Android means your are not always getting the most optimized ROM , a lot of vendors add custom crapware into their phone OOTB.

The vendors, who also design phones are not optimizing vertically, as you mentioned.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#914

Post by mantap »

foldr wrote: post #862
mantap wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about RAM. RAM usage is a direct function of how many apps you have open at the same time. For an iPad that number is a lot smaller than for a laptop.

I don't think that's the reason the iPad Pro performs well at video encoding (or else you'd be able to say the same thing for any Android tablet). It's a combination of dedicated hardware and a fast CPU.

What I'm saying is that just because the iPad Pro is good at video encoding it doesn't mean that it is capable of running a windowed OS with real multitasking. For that you need more RAM. The iPad is built for a specific workflow where you use one or two apps at a time, laptops are designed for a workflow that involves more multitasking.

What Apple appears to have done is transpose the hardware from iPad to Mac without thinking about the different requirements of each. There is a reason that RAM is not part of the package on laptop CPUs. This might work for casual users but people spending $$$ on a "pro" computer will wise up pretty fast.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#915

Post by vbezhenar »

saagarjha wrote: post #735
vbezhenar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that you need to find a vulnerability in bootloader and exploit it to break free from Apple secure garden. Linux works on ARM for years, so I'm sure that it won't be impossible to port it over, but whether enthusiasts will do it or not is another question, as you would need to write drivers for proprietary GPU and storage to make it useful.

You can turn off secure boot.

I don't think so.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#916

Post by ajharrison »

phaemon wrote: post #903
ajharrison wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously though what’s the connection between it being 2020 and there being more default RAM? Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? The goal shouldn’t be to increase ageing technology but to replace it with something better.

> Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? You can buy a Thinkpad P15 with 128GB of RAM today , so I'd expect more like multi-TB RAM by 2030.

Ridiculous. In 2030 I expect my laptop to be feather light and be powered by 2 chips.

You all are really exemplifying the famous Ford quote:

“If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!”

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#917

Post by ajharrison »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #833
ajharrison wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously though what’s the connection between it being 2020 and there being more default RAM? Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? The goal shouldn’t be to increase ageing technology but to replace it with something better.

> Are you suggesting that in the year 2030 we should expect 100gb of RAM? 100GB sounds like paltry for 10 years of technological advancement. In 2010 DDR4 didn't exist yet and DDR3 only supported up to 16GB per ram stick (8 on Intel at the time). Now we have ram sticks with capacities up to 256GB. The 2010 MacBook Pro only came with 4GB! But really "640K ought to be enough for anybody", am I right?

If I have to complain in 2030 that my device doesn’t have enough ram, technology will have failed.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#918

Post by jmkerr »

wukerplank wrote: post #802
BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

On paper the new Macs seem like Raspberry Pis with a fancy case and display.

In 2012, the same Mac mini case held a cooling system for a 45W chip, 2x2.5" storage bays (or one storage bay and a DVD-Drive), 2 RAM slots, and had three more ports and a card reader. They really used every last corner.

The new one is apparently half empty: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22027513/m...

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#919

Post by foldr »

mantap wrote: post #914
foldr wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the reason the iPad Pro performs well at video encoding (or else you'd be able to say the same thing for any Android tablet). It's a combination of dedicated hardware and a fast CPU.

What I'm saying is that just because the iPad Pro is good at video encoding it doesn't mean that it is capable of running a windowed OS with real multitasking. For that you need more RAM. The iPad is built for a specific workflow where you use one or two apps at a time, laptops are designed for a workflow that involves more multitasking. What Apple appears to have done is transpose the hardware from iPad to Mac witho…

I used to run a Windowed OS with real multitasking on a 33MHz 486 DX with 4MB of RAM! Sure, apps are a little more resource hungry these days, but there's nothing about multitasking or windowing that inherently requires tons of RAM. An iPad could for sure enable full multitasking without any problems. Apple has made millions of laptops that ran OS X perfectly fine with less than 6GB of RAM. It's just that iPad users aren't accustomed to having to manually manage which apps are open at any given time.

I have a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM and it runs OS X fine for dev work. RAM compression and fast SSD storage make a big difference. The newer Macbooks will have even faster SSDs.

I think the main reason Apple don't want to add lots of RAM to the base Macbook models is that it's the wrong compromise between battery life and performance for most users. They are probably betting on continuing gains in SSD performance obviating the need for additional RAM.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#920

Post by BatteryMountain »

tekkk wrote: post #880
m12k wrote: post #876

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots and lots of people use their laptops in a way where there's little to no noticeable difference between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Why should those people pay extra for something they don't need? I think the HN crowd - with 4 docker VMs, 3 electron apps, 50 Chrome tabs, ML training, long compile times, etc - need to realize that their workloads and needs are not representative of the majority of users. It's ok for Apple t…

Uhm. Adding 16GB RAM instead of 8GB costs almost nothing and which by far and large, is useful to all users. The only reason why they ship 8 GBs is because they want to sell you upgrades, similar to why Apple products come with miniscule SSD hard drives. Certainly, only professionals would need something like 512GBs right?

Yes but those certain professionals can now only upgrade to 16GB on a MacBook Pro in 2020 which is shameful. Oh and it's soldered so you have to buy the beefed up version today, cannot upgrade the RAM 6 months from now.

Go look at a non-techie webbrowsing habits alone: they have 50 tabs open in chrome, some of which are months old. And they install all sorts of other crappy software, anti-virus, browser extensions. Some of them use Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer at the same time. And/Or if they use Slack/Steam/Spotify/VS Code/etc they are running another 300MB RAM per app.

If you are a programmer, try all that, with Visual Studio or Eclipse running, sometimes at the same time as Android Studio with an emulator running, maybe with a local postgres or sql server etc... it easily eats up that 16Gb. Oh lets sprinkle some docker/vagrant ontop..

Good luck if you are into video/image editing, 3d modeling, illustrating, CAD etc... then MacBook Pro's are basically the wrong tool for the job today, where it became very famous for being the right tool for the job in ~2010.

Same problem with Intel CPU's...they've been riding the wave of success of their initial chip redesign for 10 years and now AMD seems to be wrecking them every 6 months.

My problem with the RAM situation is that we've been paying ~$100 for 16GB for 5 years now.. instead of getting scale up to ~$100 to 64GB and down to ~$25 for a 16GB dim. The RAM companies riding the wave too at the moment. Luckily SSD's forced HDD manufacturers to up their game else we would've still paid ~$200 for 500GB hdd with 8mb cache, so now we at least have 10TB+ drives avail for consumers.

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