This is an interesting line of inquiry. In the gaming console world, a similar principle has been explicitly espoused by Sony in the decision to only go with 16GB of RAM (a smaller factor increase than any previous generation) for the Playstation 5, as the speed of its custom SSD architecture should in theory make that 16GB go a lot further than it would have with a more traditional design.

PS5 shares memory with the GPU, doesn't it? Which is different to just using RAM to load games.

I play modern games with RX 5700XT 8GB video card and 8GB RAM machine without issues.... So maybe there's not much need for more memory...

And then PS5 load times are worse than Series X. Whoops.

That's when playing backwards-compatible games (PS4 games on PS5, and Xbox / 360 / One games on Xbox Series X) as Microsoft spent more time optimizing their console to play old games. PS5 loads next-gen titles significantly faster than the Xbox Series X due to the 2.5x faster SSD.

"significantly faster than the Xbox Series X"

You have every right to support your Sony stocks, but blatant lies though ?

That's for reasons that I would expect the technical readership of this site to understand.

Please take this shallow retort back to Kotaku.

mmmmm yeah, I will let you all be the guinea pigs here and check back next month.

I am very curious about the performance.

If the macbook air is editing 6k videos and scrubbing smoothly, I am optimistic.

Heh, I have no intention of being in the initial round of beta testing! I explicitly upgraded to an ice lake machine this summer in order to get the best Intel Mac while waiting for the dust to settle.

But I do believe the dust will settle, and I'm optimistic about the future of Apple Silicon.

While a valid workload for a segment, I would be a bit skeptical of generalizing the extraordinary video editing capability to general purpose computing, as those things are facilitated heavily by hardware decoders.

Agreed, but they did mention what sounded like impressive code compilation times in the presentation too, which is pretty salient for most of us here.

Of course, we'll need to wait for third party verification in the end.

Totally--was not diminishing <strike>A14Z</strike>M1 at all--just to moderate expectations from the quite astonishing video editing capability to "measly" ~2x. Even two year old iPad Pro A12X kicks ass on Clang benchmarks (see Geekbench), although I am not sure how sustained the performance is in that thermal envelope.

out of curiosity, were we saying thermal envelope before the Apple presentation today

I don't want my SSD being killed by being used as a swap device, especially as it's not replaceable anymore. My 16GB MBP can write 200-300GB a day if I'm pushing it hard. It doesn't bother me too much because I can just replace it with a bog standard NVMe drive. But if I'm going to buy a new Mac, I want lots of RAM.

I’ll believe that when I see it. For like ten years now marketing gremlins have been breathlessly saying “these SSDs will be so fast they can replace RAM!” and it’s never even close.