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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

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Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#41

Post by replete »

porcc wrote: post #21
replete wrote: post #17

Horse shit. 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. 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 th…

Do you have a resource for us to do this for ourselves? Seems like a pretty good thing to do

(from my notes) Disabling swap: - Disable SIP (`csrutil disable` from recovery environment terminal) - `sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=2"` in macos terminal - reboot, confirm with `sysctl -a vm.compressor_mode`

`browser.cache.disk.enable` = false in Firefox `about:config` (I think there's more to this, but I can't recall, more research required)

I disabled spotlight altogether among some other services, for some reason I didn't finish my notes. It's a start though!.

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#42

Post by nullindividual »

timbo1642 wrote: post #12
ricardobeat wrote: post #9

This is not news, has been the case since Intel macs, though the rise of Electron apps has reduced the MacOS advantage. 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.

You don't know what you're saying. That's because of virtual memory and its much slower. Apple's claim is bullshit and they lie. Every modern OS compresses memory, not just the MacOS. And no 8GB is not equivalent to 16GB on a Mac. Apple says it so foolish people believe it, but its not true. Sure unified has advantages, but they're saying BS.

> You don't know what you're saying. That's because of virtual memory and its much slower.

All memory is virtualized by the operating system; applications don't 'see' physical address space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#43

Post by zarzavat »

tambourine_man wrote: post #22

This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium. There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit. 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.

Nothing to do with margins. It’s price discrimination. Anybody who has $200 more to spare will buy the upgrade because you’d be crazy not to. People on a budget, or who don’t know any better, will get the base model.

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#44

Post by dmvdoug »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #30
dmvdoug wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup. Our use cases likely vary.

> I have an 8GB M1 and I have never seen that popup. Does that mean 8GB M1 == 16GB x86?

No, it means that I have an 8GB M1 and have never encountered the low memory popup.

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#45

Post by tambourine_man »

flashback2199 wrote: post #37
tambourine_man wrote: post #22

This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium. There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit. 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.

It actually was true in benchmarks, but Mac OS was in such a bad state at the time that it didn't really matter. It didn't even have real multitasking!

It was true for some benchmarks. I’m sure you can find cases where memory pressure is significantly less on macOS.

But it’s not the “mine is twice as good as theirs” situation they try to sell.

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#46

Post by zarzavat »

justinator wrote: post #20

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!

Did you turn off swap, or is your disk almost full?

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#48

Post by Yizahi »

tambourine_man wrote: post #22

This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium. There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit. 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.

They also claimed that mAh in the iPhone are different than in all other phones, that's why packing shitty battery was alright.

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#49

Post by ac29 »

JohnFen wrote: post #7
nullindividual wrote: post #2

That's certain one of the statements of all time. 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.

Does Debian do this by default? If so, can I disable it for a performance increase?

No, but should you want to enable it, you can install systemd-zram-generator.

See also: https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator

As someone else mentioned, for many cases this will be a performance increase, not decrease. Compressing infrequently used memory frees up more memory to be used for filesystem caching among other things.

Re: 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

#50

Post by tambourine_man »

Yizahi wrote: post #48
tambourine_man wrote: post #22

This smells like the MHz comparison of the G4 vs Pentium, when they claimed that their 500Mhz was equivalent to a 1GHz Pentium. There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit. 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.

They also claimed that mAh in the iPhone are different than in all other phones, that's why packing shitty battery was alright.

Right. Also the same argument used with RAM in iPhones. If you’re not running Java all the time, you can save some Amps and RAM. But not that many for most cases.
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