[remix2000]

Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the Earth in back in mac os Mojave) caking on, at some point I just gave up on trying to fix it with continuously reinstalling and balancing it. My current portable has quarter the amount of workmem and is just incredibly snappy esp. compared to that mac book. And I don't even use portables for anything too heavy, I have an actual PC for that.

[simonh]

The stress tests with multiple Youtube windows open simultaneously, editing 4K video, and doing heavy duty image editing tasks, in some cases doing stuff like that all at the same time have been very impressive. It does have to fall back on swap, but even then seems to soldier on really well considering. Are you better off with more memory? Absolutely, but it still seems perfectly capable of managing even many low to medium duty pro workloads if you don't mind a performance hit.

MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.

A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.

https://box.co.uk/blog/macbook-air-memory-usage-macos

[remix2000]

My macbook was UMA and memory compression has been used everywhere for dozens of years now. Symbian had memory compression. Is it just apple users catching up to what a snappy computer actually feels like…? (Doubt, since as I said I used Apple before) The article doesn't address the world outside apple either, and Darwin is objectively slow by its obsolete architectural design, down to the kernel. And not a single objective measure was brought up in replies, so it's my experience vs theirs. Not helpful.

[trvz]

I used a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of RAM for a while. It was fine; much better than Intel Macs or any other setup with low RAM.

[remix2000]

Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P

Either way, I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.

[kergonath]

> Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P

That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity?

Either way, I agree with them, FWIW.

> I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.

Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.

In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory thanks to a misbehaving app that was taking 70 GB out of 64 GB physical RAM. Overall, almost 120 GB were used, most of it was compressed and a lot of it was swapped. It had absolutely zero effect on how useable the computer was, there was no unusual lag. Either Windows or Linux would have shat the bed long before that point.

[remix2000]

> Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.

That's why you usually want a userspace early oom service. Most preconfigured distros ship one by default. Linux is mostly focused on embedded targets, not servers or workstations. There is not a notion of mobile-style app lifecycle either, not in freedesktop environments that is, but XDG portals are working on addressing that sometime in the near future.

> In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory

Windows does that at since like XP and likely earlier. BeOS did that before Darwin based macOS was a thing. On Linux, I don't know which distros do that, but you're definitely much more likely to see an app die rather than be asked whether to kill it. Freezing, once again, is a result of not having a [working] early oom service.

Linux is not that bad, but traditional freedesktop model kind of is.

It's still much better than mac OS.

Also those replies just look like bots, they were really fast and not providing any value, that's what I meant.

[Rexxar]

> four random letter names

So probably very old accounts

[pdpi]

And here's yet another four-lowercase-letter-name for you, then. Dunno about the other two, but I've been using this handle for over twenty years, it was originally the auto-generated username I got assigned on one of my university's servers (generated from my initials).

Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.

[grosswait]

One is a four letter set of characters without a vowel, the other spells a word with 5 letters. And so what?

I’ll add on that the change to Apple silicon was an amazing improvement, even in the same OS version. Maybe these anecdotes mean your experience in this regard is dated. (I say this as someone who came reluctantly to Mac, and looks forward to returning to Linux)

[prawn]

Have you used any of the Apple silicon machines? In discussions about modern Apple devices and RAM, I don't know that pre-Apple-silicon experiences are all that relevant?

My first was underspec'ed and I used Resolve, Lightroom and Photoshop on top of the usual other stuff and it was quite impressive. The relationship of performance to RAM for earlier machines felt incomparable.

[znpy]

> Source…?

Real life?

My macbook neo with 8gb memory is faster and snappier than my shit-tier thinkpad X13G1 even when the X13 is not swapping at all.

I have 8c/16t Ryzen 7 along with 32GB ram over there, running GNU/Linux.

And somehow my macbook neo running a phone chip is much more usable (and battery lasts longer, and suspend actually works).

[kstrauser]

With a 2015, is that a HDD or SSD?

[remix2000]

Nvme SSD, user-replaceable.