Maybe this big leap in processor / thermal / battery life (and a revision back to proper keyboards) will be enough to get us to switch! I think 64GB (or at least 32GB) would be a nice sweetener.
A new laptop isn't critical to my work at the moment, so I'm happy to wait for an M2, if that's what it will be called. Looking at Apple timelines a new chip tends to be 1-2 years apart, and I'm fine with that.
I'm also reluctant to give up Magsafe, or at least have to buy a magnetic USB C connector.
Maybe they will integrate wireless charging into the laptops soon?
When unplugged, it engages the performance cores as little as possible. You should be able to run `powermetrics` on an interval while running a high-intensity task to confirm; the performance cores pin first when on mains, then ramp up the efficiency cores, and the opposite happens on battery.
It's a big difference because the efficiency cores max out at about 2W draw, and the performance cores max out at around 18W. There's a big incentive in battery life to rely on that behavior.
I'm not sure yet if it's tunable, macOS doesn't make that a transparent behavior where you can just tweak it at will.
The Air will throttle if under full load long enough, but it's still mostly just ramping down the performance cores to stay cool.
With a true 'all day' battery, you'll probably only plug it in at a desk where tripping or knocking things over isn't an issue. While travelling, you just charge it at night or when you aren't using it. Much more like smartphone usage.
How many people are aching for a magsafe phone charger?
Just got a 16MB 500GB M1 Air and so far everything is at least as snappy as the 16" Pro, and battery looks like a full 8 hour day + so far... it's a keeper I think. I also find the keyboard a bit nicer to type on personally than on the 16", so accuracy is up.
I can't imagine how you got used to the performance you have right now. Either you are not doing anything with your device or you would hugely benefit of upgrading at least every 3 years or so.
With the 'touchification' of big sur, it seems pretty likely apple is going to release some sort of convertible macbook or maybe something iPad style. Or maybe iPads can start running macos?
Work laptop will get upgraded to an M1 one way or another anyway.
Nothing enticing because my computer is lightning fast and this means having to use the Apple ecosystem.
It's almost like Apple has a culture of forcing people to do things the hard way, just so it feels rewarding when it's done. Gamifying the experience?
I don't think expecting more than 16GB of ram for entry level Apple laptops should be expected.
The low amount of ram, energy inefficiency and plateauing performance are the exact reason why Apple is moving away from Intel and onto a platform where they can control their own destiny.
The 7200u supports 32GB or RAM. That chip is over 4 years old and nothing special. Not sure how long that's been supported, I didn't feel like looking further back.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95443/i...
The rated battery life of the Macbook Pro didn't change between 2017 and 2018.
I find myself scrambling for a power supply way more often than I ever did with my 2017 15" MacBook Pro.
Even with the older battery in the 2017, with more cycles, I get a longer battery life out of it than the 2019.
Pretty incredible to blame another company for a decision that was made inside Apple. Especially for a chip that was designed from scratch in apple, and therefore has no Intel constraints.
and how are the macbook pro or mac mini entry level laptops?
Every device with an M1 available today is Apple’s lowest-end (and least expensive) offering.
That is not true, example CPU I had in my old laptop: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/pl/pl/ark/products/78939/i...
Supports 32GB RAM, released in 2014.
The reason some older laptops didn't have more RAM was twofold: 1. Either the BIOS wasn't written with such support 2. There were no RAM sticks big enough (no 16GB in a single SO-DIMM) so you could have 2x16 - but there are currently since a year or two, SO-DIMMs with 32GB RAM, so you could easily reach 64MB in a laptop.
At the moment I have around 2 GB free on my 8 GB Linux machine with a webserver, MariaDB, a JetBrains IDE, Slack and Firefox running. It would be easy and dirt cheap to increase the RAM to 16 or 32 GB but I'm too lazy to even order it and open the machine up since I have never felt the need to have more.
I'm just saying this so that people like me remember that they're still professionals and their work is valuable even if they don't need 64 GB of RAM.
Folks working with data intensive applications often need to trade off writing code to page data in and out of memory during development with larger dev boxes.
8gb still sounds a bit excessive but given how long java stack traces can be maybe it's not so strange.
You're not opening a TXT file with 100K lines in it.
Sound more like a Jetbrain ( IntelliJ company ) problem. Used to develop on PHPstorm ( another Jetbrain ) product ( same software in the background ) and the slow startup's, 2GB+ memory eating for relative small projects, crashes way too much, expensive as hell for what it does ( especially with the license change years ago ) ...
Eventually switched to Visual Studio Code and while people whine how Electron is memory inefficient, its like 1/6 the memory usage of PHPstorm, with only a few features missing.
Even on a 32GB PC system, i barely use 16GB ( and WSL2 is eating up a lot with a lot of docker images. And its not really docker, just Linux cache eating up memory ). Not a issue on a Mac that does not need a VM like layer.
Its about priorities sometimes. If people keep upgrading their memory, developers/companies simply push the responsibility to the clients and do not bother with spending time on optimizing.
If people start leaving software product on the way side for being just horrible inefficient messes, then maybe a bit of focus will come back to actually optimizing products! You will see Jetbrain change tune, when VSC etc keep eating its market share.
Certainly some devs need more than 16gb, but they know who they are. And you know who they are because, well, they love telling you :).
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=8192
$ mkswap /swap
$ swapon /swap
$ echo "/swap swap swap defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstabI use swap files all the time with things like raspberry pi's and such because I don't want to mess with the sd card partitions, but still from time to time it's good to have that swap fallback since the memory onboard is limited.
Swap files are super easy to set up, take up no "brainpower" and disk space is cheap these days.
If it works, is it impression or reality?
Jetbrains that fits in 8GB of memory with slack and Firefox leaving 2GB free it's not happening
I used to code on 800×600 monitors professionally
If I say today that they are more than enough to work, I expect to be taken to a mental institution
As always, for some people 16 GB will be fine, for some it won’t.
After upgrading to 24 GB the machine became very usable.
I wouldn't ever want to go back to 8 GB. Perhaps 16 GB might be usable for iOS and Xamarin development, especially if the Android emulator can run in some kind of HAXM [0] mode, but for ARM processors ... not sure if that's possible right now. I'm sure the SSD also makes a big difference compared to my Fusion drive right now.
Still it feels safer (more future-proof) if the machine has a bit more memory than 16 GB.
---
[0]: https://github.com/intel/haxm/wiki/Installation-Instructions...
There's no way I'm buying a 16 GB computer now, 32 GB is a minimum to be future proof.
As always, more RAM extends the usefulness of a computer.
Edit: not my opinion, just what I found on the internets, not sure why the downvotes if it invites discussion.
As for the GP cited use case, there's no plausible way in which the compilers involved in the V8 build process would start using less memory due to their memory management machinery getting magically transformed by the hardware from tracing GC to refcounting GC, even assuming LLVM had been using tracing GC in the first place.
(Also the tracing GC memory overhead claims originating in Apple's marketing copy are way hyperbolic, modern tracing GCs don't require double storage used in "mark and sweep" GCs)
For normal users (such as people not compiling V8), swapping may be virtually unnoticeable.
For many people 16GB is absolutely enough, and Apple had to start somewhere. But if 16GB wasn't enough for you yesterday, it isn't enough for you now.
Those numbers are about 2-3x as fast as what my 2020 Intel-based MacBook Air gets.
But 2-3x won't change swap from grinding to a halt to perfectly smooth, either. It's still over 20x slower than RAM.
More significant for swap usage though is random reads and read latency, neither of which are going to be particularly impressive on the M1's SSDs. You need something like Optane to make that a compelling case.
I bought a computer with 16GB in 2011 and around 2015 it was already lagging quite a bit due to swap - switching to 64GB in 2016 was day and night, I don't have to fear launching arbitrarily many jobs anymore.
And that's not an uncommon use-case amongst the developer crowd which has a lot of overlap with HN.