Poll: *** The official 2020 MacBook Air/13" MacBook Pro thread (it has the M1 chip and everything!) ***

[LiE]

Can someone with a good understanding of memory comment on whether this looks right? I'm trying to decide of 16GB would be worth it for me, the swap seems high? I've also noticed when I switch back to Safari and select a tab it sometimes takes a second to pop back.

 

[HACO]

Can someone with a good understanding of memory comment on whether this looks right? I'm trying to decide of 16GB would be worth it for me, the swap seems high? I've also noticed when I switch back to Safari and select a tab it sometimes takes a second to pop back.

That's a Safari feature which caches the page, for memory management. You can see a lot of swap and cache used, you'd benefit from more ram.

 

[LiE]

That's a Safari feature which caches the page, for memory management. You can see a lot of swap and cache used, you'd benefit from more ram.

That's what I thought, I'll get this returned for the 16GB version.

 

[Rilot]

Pulled the trigger on a Pro with 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM.
Cool. Now the wait begins.

I was trying to decide whether to get a new phone or not. I figured my XS Max can do for a couple more years and I'll have one of these instead.

 

[LiE]

Here's a quick video I did with WoW 9.0.2 on my base MBA.

Settings - https://imgur.com/a/Oe6I8vS

 

[TS7]

Can someone with a good understanding of memory comment on whether this looks right? I'm trying to decide of 16GB would be worth it for me, the swap seems high? I've also noticed when I switch back to Safari and select a tab it sometimes takes a second to pop back.

It's nearly using 6GB for RAM for the above?

Currently on my 4 year old Dell work laptop with 8GB of RAM:

35 Chrome Browsers
9 Teams Chats
6 Word Docs
2 Excel Docs
9 Outlook Emails
1 Internet Explorer

Then all the various background processes, Cylance, Citrix, VPN etc and it's using 6.2GB. (I'm not sure if is better or worse, actually - compared to your usage above).

I'll keep up to date with ongoing user experiences/reviews. I have the 8GB MBP M1 that arrived yesterday. I'm not really going to be putting it through its paces as yet, but my use case is likely to change within the next 12 months. So may consider swapping it for the 16GB.

 

[fez]

Memory management isn't a simple topic. If you have 8GB of RAM and you are not using a large chunk of it your OS is not doing its job properly in most cases. I had a mac mini with 32GB and I replaced that with a 16GB macbook pro. The Mini would routinely use 24GB+ yet I don't see much difference between the 2 performance wise. RAM is there to be used and if it isn't using it, its wasted. You don't want to be seeing issues that are associated with a lack of memory but people seem to think that hitting your memory limit is a bad thing. Its not.

I'm currently sitting here with 12gb utilised and 3gb of swap and 3gb of cache and I haven't noticed any issues with slowdown etc.

That being said, 8GB is not a lot. 16GB is the minimum I would go for now but I have a different use case to many being a programmer.

 

[Things change I've changed]

Came on here in inquire about the exact same thing, I've not had any Apple hardware for quite a while but this new MacBook has me very intrigued, but I wouldn't want to pay over the base price so I'm also wondering if 8gb ram is enough, how would it compare to a windows laptop, Marques Brownlee (from youtube) tried to give the impression that regarding the memory it's the same as comparing an Apple phone to an Android phone but I'm not so sure that works here, even with architecture and software being quite different sure memory usage will be quite similar, does 40 Safari tabs use up considerably less than 40 Chrome tabs?

 

[LiE]

I think for the extra peace of mind 16GB is the way to go.

 

[shiver]

Memory management on macOS really is excellent but agreed I think 16GB is the way to go here

I definitely am tempted by the MacBook Air, being fanless and still being mind-bogglingly powerful for a low power laptop. Unfortunately it looks like house purchase is going through so I'll hold off on unnessary expenses for now

 

[HACO]

It's nearly using 6GB for RAM for the above?

Currently on my 4 year old Dell work laptop with 8GB of RAM:

35 Chrome Browsers
9 Teams Chats
6 Word Docs
2 Excel Docs
9 Outlook Emails
1 Internet Explorer

Then all the various background processes, Cylance, Citrix, VPN etc and it's using 6.2GB. (I'm not sure if is better or worse, actually - compared to your usage above).

I'll keep up to date with ongoing user experiences/reviews. I have the 8GB MBP M1 that arrived yesterday. I'm not really going to be putting it through its paces as yet, but my use case is likely to change within the next 12 months. So may consider swapping it for the 16GB.

You can't compare Windows/Linux with this at all. macOS and iOS use automatic reference counting for memory management instead of trance garbage collection, i.e. ram amount/usage comparisons with other platforms are 100% irrelevant on iOS, and only very loosely relevant on macOS.

Came on here in inquire about the exact same thing, I've not had any Apple hardware for quite a while but this new MacBook has me very intrigued, but I wouldn't want to pay over the base price so I'm also wondering if 8gb ram is enough, how would it compare to a windows laptop, Marques Brownlee (from youtube) tried to give the impression that regarding the memory it's the same as comparing an Apple phone to an Android phone but I'm not so sure that works here, even with architecture and software being quite different sure memory usage will be quite similar, does 40 Safari tabs use up considerably less than 40 Chrome tabs?

Safari will use considerably less ram. This is because of how memory management works on the Apple ecosystem, which Chrome doesn't respect. So Safari Vs Chrome on macOS, Chrome will need considerably more ram for the same task. I'll write up something more detailed about how this works and why this is later tonight.

 

[HACO]

Memory management on macOS really is excellent but agreed I think 16GB is the way to go here

I definitely am tempted by the MacBook Air, being fanless and still being mind-bogglingly powerful for a low power laptop. Unfortunately it looks like house purchase is going through so I'll hold off on unnessary expenses for now

I wouldn't say it's excellent. It's just a different approach to memory management with different trade-offs. Apple went all-in on automatic reference counting while everyone else in the industry went for trace garbage collection, which means Apple needs considerably less ram, but there's a performance hit at every retain and release call (trace garbage collection's performance hit comes at garbage collection periods).

What Apple has done with Apple Silicon is that they made those retain/release calls 5x faster compared to Intel.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1326238785181376512

That's why iOS always needed less ram than Android while remaining incredibly fast. And that's why macOS will be similar with Apple Silicon, as long as you use apps that respect Apple's memory management principles.

Benefits of making your own silicon!

 

[Things change I've changed]

You can't compare Windows/Linux with this at all. macOS and iOS use automatic reference counting for memory management instead of trance garbage collection, i.e. ram amount/usage comparisons with other platforms are 100% irrelevant on iOS, and only very loosely relevant on macOS.



Safari will use considerably less ram. This is because of how memory management works on the Apple ecosystem, which Chrome doesn't respect. So Safari Vs Chrome on macOS, Chrome will need considerably more ram for the same task. I'll write up something more detailed about how this works and why this is later tonight.

Ok, interesting, so is this more about memory management rather actual total memory usage? Does for example a web page on Mas OS actually use less ram than the same webpage on Chrome for example?

 

[LiE]

Ok, interesting, so is this more about memory management rather actual total memory usage? Does for example a web page on Mas OS actually use ram than the same webpage on Chrome for example?

From what I can see, there are a lot of processes called Safari Web Content (Cache) which I believe means the website isn't actively in memory. If you open that tab, there is a split second where it fetches it and loads before you can interact.

 

[Matrix]

I'd suggest posting here -> https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/apple-silicon-arm-macs.227/

Thanks for pointing me there very informative forum from what i've looked at .
Someone tested Unity for me and it worked fine .

Now to decided base model 8 core 7 core GPU or the base model on the 8 core 8 core GPU.

 

[Feek]

Now to decided base model 8 core 7 core GPU or the base model on the 8 core 8 core GPU.

8/8/16/512

 

[Rilot]

Definitely go 8/8/16/512 if you intend to use it as a proper computer.
Anything less is just saving a few quid which will hurt you down the line.

 

[LiE]

The difference between 8 and 7 GPU cores from what I’ve seen so far is negligible. Not sure if Unity is a RAM hungry app.

 

[Feek]

The difference between 8 and 7 GPU cores from what I’ve seen so far is negligible.

14%?

 

[LiE]

14%?

I mean sure, but when you look at these numbers I don’t think it’s as straight forward.

Post in thread 'Can we compare Macbook Air with 7 vs 8 core GPU ?'
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ir-with-7-vs-8-core-gpu.2269674/post-29273802

Also
Thread 'Any benchmarks showing 7 vs 8 GPUS in the Air ?'
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/any-benchmarks-showing-7-vs-8-gpus-in-the-air.2269090/

Then we have the base MBA doing this kind of madness.

Post in thread '8gb vs 16gb RAM comparison article'
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/8gb-vs-16gb-ram-comparison-article.2269816/post-29276085