Only the Air and 13” Pro (which is a glorified Air with a fan) cap at 24 GBs. The 14 and 16” Pro models cap at 96 GB. The 13 inch is a bit of a lame duck product that is likely to be phased out at some point or otherwise be replaced, so while the headline is factually true it is not really indicative of the situation.
I will also say, Apple devices across the board are significantly better at memory management than both Android and Windows. Where on a Windows machine I feel I need 32 GBs, 16 GBs feels adequate on MacOS. And my understanding is the situation is similar between iOS and Android.
Ha no, I'm using 9.98Gb of ram with literally just a single tab browser window open in Mojave. You'll be swapping constantly with anything resembling a normal workflow.
It's memory management, not memory minimalism. I'm always hovering about 12 GB out of my 16 GB MBA, but never have any issue opening a project or opening 10–20 tabs (rookie number) and I have a few apps that are always running. I believe that macOS uses the RAM for caching files, so the reported usage is not really tied to the number of apps running. There are memory-heavy workflows, but these are outliers. Even 8 GB would be fine for most of what I do.
Did you just say Mojave? Because I have extensive experience with Mojave and it does not use swap whatsoever. Instead, you have overcommit and memory compression. That application that the OS says uses 10GB of RAM does not actually.
It doesn't - that's exactly why people have workstation with a ton of ram. As soon as you have to hop over the pci bus, you're looking at 1/10th of the speed.
I was quite amused hearing how people (probably the same who singed praises) ditched the first gen M1s with 8Gb, because 'not enough memory', merely a year later.
I distinctly remember the reality distortion field that permeated the discussion ("Apple silicone doesn't need as much memory", "MacOS is more efficient than windows" and similar such idiocies) when those things first came out. Whoever Apple retained for this PR sure managed to bamboozle a lot of gullible people.
I don’t think there’s a reality distortion field. I have a 10 year-old MacBook Pro (the very first Retina model) with 8GB of RAM. I often find myself with VSCode, two dozen Chrome tabs, some terminal windows and Adobe Illustrator (2022) running simultaneously. Somehow, it manages to cope with all of that without an issue. Of course, it doesn’t work as fast as new computers, but the UI remains fluid and responsive. I’ve never had a Windows machine offer that kind of practical longevity.
It's not like they ditched them for x86 devices. If people said that 8GB M1s were more capable than their x86 machines, it can be logically consistent with them going for even more power as more M* series chips released.
'Unified memory' access on M1 is allegedly almost as fast as CPU cache, and I believe the SSDs are extremely close to the SoC as well. Swap might be faster than some computers' actual RAM.
Pretty simple: software devs have good hardware, and use all the resources they have.
It goes like this: new hardware comes out that is more powerful, people buy it because it feels good and everything is fast. Then new software uses all of it, and the cycle starts again with new hardware.
> software devs have good hardware, and use all the resources they have.
This.
It's not that people make their programs unacceptably slow on purpose. It's that they test their programs on incredibly and unrealistically powerful hardware.
I used to know someone that said they optimized their DOOM port or something like that for cheap old netbooks, and as a result, get hundreds of thousands of FPS on any vaguely modern system. And there's a video series on YouTube where someone is optimizing some voxelized game engine and uses the Intel iGPU - yes, the nearly-useless one you get on most of their Core-series CPUs - to vastly outperform a CPU implementation of a bunch of voxel algorithms anyway, because optimizing for such a weak GPU allows you to focus only on things that GPUs are actually fundamentally good at, as anything else will run unacceptably slowly. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was called.