News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked. Parent comment

Re:MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked by coldtea on Monday February 22, 2021 @10:01AM (#26225280)
>The other thing is RAM. Apple still has delusions of gimping it's buyers into 16/32GB for "Pro" level machines.

I'm pretty sure Apple knows what machines it sells, including to video and audio pros, and knows how many of them buy the 32GB options where they're available (in Intel).

Besides "Pro" is just a branding, not a class of machines designed for specific tasks with any specific guarantees.

Up until now, "pros" did just fine with 16GB or up to 32GB max on their Intel Mac laptops, so I'm not sure how "twice as fast" machines, at lower price, with the same 32GB RAM (but much more efficient use of it, closer to the CPU) will suddenly be a problem.

Especially if hardly any buy PC laptops with 64GB of RAM anyway -- and Apple doesn't, and has never, competed with custom tower PC rig makers, but to people looking at the sweet spot of portability, power, battery life, size, weight.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked by totalZero on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:21PM (#26229158)
> "Pro" is just a branding, not a class of machines designed for specific tasks with any specific guarantees.

I agree, and to be fair, there are plenty of professional use cases that are totally serviceable with one external monitor and 16GB of RAM. Not every professional is a YouTuber or big data engineer.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I do like it when the name of a product actually means something, because it gives me confidence in the honesty of the vendor.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked by washadjeffmad on Monday February 22, 2021 @06:41PM (#26232147)
Memory latency often has a bigger impact on performance than capacity. Your CPU spends a lot more time waiting around than you'd expect.

With NVMe, I'd rather have 16GB LPDDR4X than 64GB low-JEDEC, high latency DDR3 memory. More RAM is still good in many cases, but it's not vital like it was 15 years ago when you'd end up in swap hell or OOMing constantly over a GB or two.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked by kevstev on Monday February 22, 2021 @08:10PM (#26232749)
When I first got a laptop with 8gb of ram 10 years ago, I thought it was an absurd amount, and to be honest it was- ever since I have never wanted for ram on my personal computers.

I'm not quite sure where why people seem to be clamoring for more RAM, it seems like a non issue these days. I don't really game these days, and when I do it's on older "steam sale" titles so maybe gamers need it, but even for dev stuff, I just don't see the issue.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked by washadjeffmad on Friday March 05, 2021 @05:20PM (#26362937)
We have a lot of artists who ask for MPBs with 64GB RAM, and when I ask for work samples, there's not even enough memory pressure to swap on their 16GBs. When I ask why they need it, and they always give some variation of "it renders too slowly".

It's not my job to help people pick out computers better suited to do the work they were hired for, but I really enjoy seeing the characteristics of and where the bottlenecks are in new generations of hardware.

[ Parent | on HN ]