I would prefer just one 6K or 8K monitor personally at a size of say 55" with a wide ratio. Simpler setup. No post in the middle. Something like this but bigger with higher resolution, and maybe a bit more height vertically (this one is a bit too wide for its height in my opinion): https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/gaming/super-ultra-wide-...

I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the future.

That said I am rocking the dual 4Ks on the Mac Mini M1 and it works great: https://twitter.com/BenHouston3D/status/1384693982249340935

I use a 55" 4K Samsung TV as a monitor. It cold boots quickly and has no latency or subsampling issues in the right mode. I can recommend it as a more cost effective alternative to multiple monitors.

The amount of available screen space at 1:1 is refreshing (not as crazy as imagined though), but it makes me realize how grainy "normal" monitors are. In some years 8K TVs might be cheap enough for an upgrade, but on that time scale I can see VR being a serious contender as well (it's really good already).

One thing about TV's is that they are grainy up close. Being a 55" you probably don't sit very close to it, but how does it overall feel e.g. in font quality? And I also wonder if it's good for your eyes to focus on something that's constantly far away. I would think a mixture of the two (normal distance to a PC monitor with frequent breaks) would be preferred.

> how does it overall feel e.g. in font quality?

> they are grainy up close

Hmm, maybe it's its "TV-ness", but the individual pixels look pretty sharp to me at a close look (no quantum dots or weird pentile arrangement, that should definitely be looked out for), but I have no other low DPI display to compare it to. My reasoning was always "it's just an LCD panel, why would it be different" and so far I feel proven right.

> I also wonder if it's good for your eyes to focus on something that's constantly far away

My appeal-to-nature-argument would be that the natural human mix would probably have been much heavier towards looking into the distance than it is now (see the massive rise of near-sightedness in cities), so it can only be better than what we're currently doing.

A year ago I was looking to get a big screen for my iMac Pro. I looked at many monitors in the 40" range, then on a whim I put my 55" LG OLED TV on my desk 30" from my face and hooked it up. Wow, it is better and easier on the eyes than any monitor I have had. I had planned to use it beside the iMac screen, but now I just mirror to the TV and have the iMac under my desk. I have used dual monitors for decades but I like one big one better.

I run it at 3840 x 2160 and use a trackball to get around. I like it a lot. LCD TV screens do not work well extremely close up but an OLED is fine even at 12" away. Text in the corner of an LCD TV is dim and poorly defined but on an OLED it is just like it would be on a 55" sheet of paper.

Of course I was concerned that the OLED screen would burn in, but it was an older TV so I took a chance.

Most days the computer and TV are on for about 12 hours. I have run them like this for 14 months now. There is no burn in at all. The overall brightness is slowly declining, but it has been doing that since I got it in 2016. (LG OLED55B6P)

It's best for your eyes to change focal distance. Staring off into infinity, staring at 75cm, and staring at 30cm are all bad for you. Find something else to look at every so often.

There are few differences between a 4K 42" screen and 4 1080P 21" screens: the smaller screens can be angled, they have bezels, and are probably more expensive in aggregate.

I use a 55" Curved Samsung 4K TV. The DPI is similar to a 24" 1080p in a 2x2 configuration. The curve provides a similar effect to turning 2 monitors toward the viewer. I don't use the height very often, as I have progressive lenses and have to really look up to see the top. But I can lean back for watching a full screen video quite comfortably. IMHO it's fantastic. For those that can still see a difference in Hi-DPI an 8K 55" would be for them. I really don't need it though and this thing costs about $600 at Wallmart.

> One thing about TV's is that they are grainy up close.

Most TV's have a "gaming" setting that doesn't try to "improve" the video feed and just passes it through.

How far back do you sit from this monitor? Do you use resolution scaling?

The last time I tried a large format display, I couldn't move back far enough to make it work but I really loved working in 4k without scaling.

I use a 4k 43" Dell monitor without scaling. I just measured and my "eyeball to glass" distance is 30 inches. Works great and gives me the real estate of about 4 smaller screens.

I have the same setup, no resolution scaling on macOS. And also, like the parent you replied to, sit about 70 cm (28 inches) from my display.

It's so big that I actually don't sit in the middle but to the left of the display. I use the right of the display as a second monitor.

As an aside, I have the Philips Momentum (model 436M6VBPAB) which is sold as a monitor but can double as a TV. It has HDR, which is very nice in a light office. I suspect it is no longer produced in any significant quantities. The price has been going up.

I'd be curious about that too, once I sat in front of a 30" monitor and really hated it due to proximity (60-80cm) and size. A single 27" @4k is the sweet spot for me.

Currently around 70cm due to the size of my desk, but I'd like to eventually move back to something around 120 eventually, as that's what provides maximal comfort.

I have the exact same setup as you (samsung 55) and my monitor is 76 cm from the front of my desk.

Are you saying it's a 55" display?

How do you think you would feel about 65" vs 55"? I've been using dual 39" 4k monitors (no longer available on the market), and when I replace them I want to go to a single 55" or 65". The current area in square inches is almost identical to a single 55", so at 65" I think I need to lower the screen in order to have full visibility.

I do the same thing in my "living room" setup. I have the entertainment center with the television. Then a small desk in front of that.

I can slide the desk out of the way when I want things back to normal in my living room.

I've always wondered if a far-sighted person wouldn't be better off with a huge monitor at a distance.

Mind linking to the exact model you use?

>I think that dual 4K is the old way, single 6K/8K ultra wides are the future.

In the near future 16:9 8ks are going to be standard (too bad it won't be 16:10) but right now you can get a decent triple 4k monitor setup for half of what an 8k monitor costs.

IMO ultra-wide is great for productivity in a situational sense but it sucks for gaming and media consumption. Also getting proper support for ultra-wide to be standard is probably going to take another decade.

I think there's something to be said for each monitor being a separate entity. I think some people will still prefer multiple monitors over ultra-wide even when support for ultra-wide is a solved problem.

My personal setup now is a 28" 4k@60hz, a 32" 1440P@240hz as a primary and a 24" 1440p@144hz. I have my work computer, my desktop, a mac-mini, a switch, and a PS4 running off of them so having separate monitors is ideal for me.

Ultra-wides and super-ultrawides are cool, but IMO they aren't as practical yet.

I rock a 38" dell ultrawide. It's not HiDPI but it works fantastic for me. It's just about big enough to make me not miss dual screens, and it's awesome for games.

I’ve been playing games on an ultrawide since 2015 so I’m going to have to disagree hard with you. In the beginning ultrawide support was hit or miss but at this point I’d safely say 90-95% of games support ultrawide. There are also of plenty gaming specific ultrawide monitor options. I still have a second 16:9 monitor on the side because I do agree with your point of monitors being a separate entity. There are programs from dividing the space of monitors but if you’re used to multiple monitors I don’t think switching to a single monitor of any size will be a good replacement. I think it’s also worth throwing in that watching movies on my ultrawide is my favorite place to do it as the 21:9 aspect ratio means that movies stretch to the entire screen. It’s definitely an amazing experience.

>In the beginning ultrawide support was hit or miss but at this point I’d safely say 90-95% of games support ultrawide.

There's support, and then there's that support being so flawless that its the same quality of experience you would get with a standard aspect ratio. Each of us has our own standard of what's good enough. Its working out for you but the people I game with that were using ultra-wide monitors switched back due to the number of issues they were having, as recently as last year. I did some research myself when I was upgrading my monitor and some of the games I played would have had issues so or me personally it wasn't good enough.

Another thing to consider is a lot of game content is designed with standard aspect ratios in mind, so whether expanding the viewpoint makes it better is going to be a personal standard. It will be interesting to see if UW monitors do become a standard in a couple of decades whether game developers start specifically making content that utilizes the extra space to offer something that isn't possible with existing games.

That’s a fair point because there are definitely certain developers, blizzard is can think of, where most games don’t support UW and they don’t seem to have an interest in it. Even still, in the games where there are issues it’s easy enough to switch to 16:9 and not miss out on anything by having the UW. I’m not sure what issues they were having that caused them to switch back from having one but I can’t imagine ever going away from one as the advantages of them are just so great. If you don’t mind me asking, what games do you specifically play and what issues did you read about?

Do you have periodic weirdness on the thunderbolt monitor? Every so often, my m1 mini wakes or boots so that there’s a vertical misalignment by a pixel or two about halfway across. It’s like the desktop was cut in half and taped back together slightly crooked.

I haev this problem! For me it's a strip about 2 inches wide, down the middle, one pixel higher than the rest of the image. I am using an LG 5k monitor, and I have been unsure if it's a problem with the monitor or the machine. I'd love to know what kind of monitor you are using; this gives me hope that it might be an apple bug that will get fixed eventually.

I also have this problem--also an LG 5K. Disconnecting and reconnecting seems to fix it for now.

No idea if it's the monitor of the laptop, but it's the exact same problem and hopefully hardware doesn't glitch in such a consistent way and it can be fixed in software.

I have an LG 5k, too! And it only happens on that monitor - my LG 4k over HDMI is fine.

It's because the 5K monitor is actually two monitors taped together ("multi-stream transport").

It is two streams but it actually isn’t MST. It’s two independent HBR2 links; MST would have been two streams over one HBR2 link, which doesn’t have the bandwidth for 5k.

YES -- it's not just me! At first I thought my monitors were somehow broken (which is unfortunate as I paid a bit extra for name brand LG). I suspected something, as each monitor is plugged into an M1 computer (one's a Mac mini M1 and the other a MacBook Air m1). Both exhibit the visual problem you describe on a random basis.

pairing this with another comment by myself (about multi-monitor support beyond only one external monitor). I wonder if this is the main reason that Apple didn't support more than one external. Does the issue exhibit itself even more when additional monitors are connected? To be clear it never occurs with my main MacBook Air screen (only the external).

Just as a data point, I have an MBP M1 and an LG external monitor and this has never happened to me in almost 6 months usage.

I didn't mention this but it didn't happen initially, only after a couple months did the random screen errors happen. And power cycling, disconnecting/reconnecting/changing cables, etc to the monitor changes nothing.

I have an Acer Predator that has this issue (Whether using my Mac or PC attached.) Power cycling the monitor makes it go away. Basically the left side of the screen is shifted one pixel higher than the right side of the screen, making a vertical line down the middle where the shift changes.

in my case power cycling does not change anything, could be a separate issue for you. In my case it is also retaining a "ghost" of previous pages I've had open. It does eventually go away (and most of the time is not there).

I have zero weirdness at all. It just works perfectly all the time.

Neither monitor supports Thunderbolt. But I run off of a USB-C to Display Port cable and one is using the HDMI port. Both run at 60Hz as it is HDMI 2.

I run from display port to usb-c adapter -- I wonder if it is my adapter which is a simple Cable Matters adapter (which gets somewhat warm). Be nice if you shared what adapter you're using for comparison.

I don't have an M1 machine, but I have had periodic weirdness on external monitors (of every flavor) when waking from sleep on all the Mac laptops I've owned over the last 10 years.

that is ... bad luck. Or I have really good luck (having used mac's for over 20 years). This situation is a first for me (and in my case happens during normal usage, ie not upon waking) - though given Apple's recent track record screams buggy software

I have this happen on my Windows PC every now and again. It’s on the monitor that’s hooked up via DisplayPort.

I have run into poor quality DisplayPort cables in the past. I now only buy ones I know are brand name.

8k is 4x the resolution of 4k at a 16:9 aspect ratio. It would require supporting 4x 4k displays.

Example: https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/07toBDd6lpyucCyM0xWrcQv...

1000x this. For several years I've been eyeing the 49" ultrawides as a replacement for my current 34" ultrawide. It would definitely be a big upgrade, but I keep thinking that something high DPI must be around the corner in that format. The years just keep rolling by and it seems like display tech barely advances.

I purchased the Dell 49” ultra wide to replace a Thunderbolt Display and 27” 4K. It is effectively the same resolution as I was using. It is nice not having the break and being able to better center windows. Split window views are much easier to work with when being able to see the entire line of code.

> I would prefer just one 6K or 8K monitor personally

Sure but the Air and MBP already support 6k external displays.

They don’t support 2x4K.

I do agree. But what I am trying to say is that we should be pushing for 6K and 8K ultra wide monitors rather than the old hack of 2 monitors to one computer.

There are times I actually prefer 2 separate monitors. Allowing one monitor to quickly go full screen while continuing to use the other monitor is quite useful in my workflows.

Virtual desktops are also more useful with two separate displays, or at least lend themselves to different use cases.

it's not a hack though. i prefer 2x4k. i hate the curve (no straight lines) and UW is too wide to be comfortable (eye and neck angle). 2x4k, one straight on and one angled is ideal. i spent 2 weeks and spent $8000 on monitors to test this out. 34UW at normal desk distance is perfect, however 2x4k is better overall. I actually use 3, as I use the macbook screen as the 3rd.

that said, i have no issue with your choice. for some applications (eg video editing is the default choice for ads of UW monitors) it is really better.

i do have issue with you denigrating 2 monitors. it is not at all "an old hack".

Out of curiosity, when did you last use a single monitor instead of your current dual monitor setup?

I’ve been using an ultrawide since 2015 but have almost always had a second side monitor with it. The period where I didn’t have a second monitor was short as having a separate monitor has always come in handy. All of the extra space on an ultrawide is great but when you’re doing something that takes the whole screen, it still leaves you in the same position you would be with a single 16:9 display.

Not the GP, and I really don't agree with their position, but I did switch from two monitors to a single UW last year.

TBF my old setup was a decade old so it was merely a 24" (1920x1200) and a 19" (1280x1024 in portrait).

Though my new display has a much larger logical size, the inability to put something fullscreen on one of the monitors (whether the small one or the large one, depending on the content) is definitely one of the drawbacks I had a hard time getting used to, not only can it be inconvenient, it actually wastes space as I can't get rid of window decorations, which putting e.g. a video player or browser window in fullscreen allowed.

I much prefer two monitors. I run each one as separate desktops, which means I can have "left screen apps" and "right screen apps" and cycle them independently. It also means I can switch desktops on my left screen while my apps on my right screen stay where they are.

Also, with two screens, I can adjust the angle between them to be more or less severe.

Yeah, I even actually kind of like the "post" between monitors that the GP mentioned (as long as the bezels are thin :) - it help as a kind of mental division between types of work.

Also, 2 monitors means more choice in layout; for example, my 2nd monitor is in portrait orientation.

Only if I can have a nice tiling WM.

I work on mac all day and on my 1440p widescreen I am constantly trying to put stuff so I can use everything I want to at the same time. `[Code|App|Docs]` is so common we ought to be able to split a wide screen 3 ways the way we do a normal 2.

Try out Rectangle.app. It saved my bacon mentally and can tile windows how you want. Just not automatically like a full tiling window manager.

https://rectangleapp.com/

+1 on Rectangle recommendation. Learn a few hot-keys (or rely on the menubar dropdown) and you can very easily get any layout of windows you want.

I was using Spectacle before, but I think the project died, and Rectangle is what I use now.

Rectangle was mentioned, but I'm currently using Amethyst: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst It was recommended to me here on HN, and it's been very, very nice.

Here's an old picture of how I use 2 4k monitors at home https://i.imgur.com/Wwr6G42.jpg (I've upgraded my desk and keyboard since)

I'd strongly consider getting a 6k monitor, or maybe a 5k2k ultrawide if I didn't already have two my two Dell 27inch 4ks.

> No post in the middle.

I personally prefer the visual break as I find it useful for creating fixed 'work areas': terminals/xterms, browser, mail, etc.

With a single screen, you can add any virtual (stripe of pixels) or physical divider (piece of tape) that you like. With two screens, there's no way to remove the gap.

I'd prefer two distinct monitors. I use one more expensive colour-calibrated one, and then a standard one for work where colour isn't as critical. A large colour-calibrated screen would be prohibitively expensive.

How do you deal with full screen video, games, etc on a single monitor?

Something like this... but a lot cheaper please. Like <500€ please.

The current RAM restrictions in the M1 are dumb restrictions resulting from the fact that you can't get LPDDR4X chips larger than 8GB in size (the M1 has two on SoC LPDDR4X chips).

This year we should see a lot of CPU manufacturers change to (LP)DDR5 for memory - high end Samsung and Qualcomm SoCs are already using LPDDR5. It's a safe bet Apple is also switching to LPDDR5 which would put the upper limit on 64GB for the M2. This is notably still lower than the 128GB you can put in the current 27" iMac (for an eye watering $2600 extra), but is an amount far more pro users can live with.

Samsung makes a very large 12GB module. I’m sure that offering would be taken advantage of by a lot of people if they’d just put it in the table.

The real issue is not shipping the M1 with LPDDR5 support. We already have tons of Qualcomm phones and even Intel processors shipping with since last year. If Apple had done the same, we wouldn’t be talking about this today.

> The real issue is not shipping the M1 with LPDDR5 support.

I brought this up before but it was pointed out to me that the only manufacturer of LPDDR5 last year was Samsung, which was producing not-completely-standardized LPDDR5 at the time and probably didn't have enough spare volume for Apple anyway. Having 12GB LPDDR4X modules from one vendor (24GB total) probably is not enough reason for Apple to switch up their supply chain either, not for the M1 at least.

And, to be fair, I think Apple did get away with shipping low memory computers by targeting only their cheapest computers.

16GB is not "low memory" for the vast majority of users.

It’s a deal with the devil (especially on the pro machines) where you trade 50% faster CPU for 50% less RAM.

Everyone raves about how 8GB machines feel, but the massive SSD usage and pitiful lifespan shows that there’s not a free lunch here. 16GB (or a 24GB option) goes a long way toward preventing early death. I actually suspect they’ll be launching a free SSD replacement program in the next couple years.

I’ve also heard claims from a couple devs that side-by-side comparisons with their x86 macs show a massive increase in RAM usage for the same app for whatever reason. I’d guess that’s solvable, but could contribute even more to the SSD problem. On the bright side, all this seems to indicate a great pre-fetch and caching algorithm.

> I’ve also heard claims from a couple devs that side-by-side comparisons with their x86 macs show a massive increase in RAM usage for the same app for whatever reason.

Partly because the GPU works differently, partly because some inaccurate methods of counting memory (Activity Monitor) have cosmetic issues displaying Rosetta processes.

> I actually suspect they’ll be launching a free SSD replacement program in the next couple years.

Not even the most alarmist estimates suggest that the SSDs on the 8GB machines will start dying after two years!

At the moment the SSD lifetime concerns are little more than FUD. Everything we know is perfectly consistent with these machines having SSD lifetimes of a decade, even with heavy usage.

I was going to say! People seem to get all paranoid whenever swap is brought up on SSD machines, but modern SSD lifespans are pretty awesome.

https://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experi...

700TB was the minimum that any drive in the above link managed. If you used 100gigs of swap per day it would take you two decades to hit that level.

You'd be surprised how quickly a regular user can eat that these days with electron apps and a browser. My MIL would pretty routinely get out of memory errors at 16GB and she's hardly a power user. Somehow her Facebook tab would clock in at over a GB alone.

I pretty regularly have Slack running while compiling Erlang in the background, running a Docker container, several dozen Firefox tabs, and a Microsoft Teams call going, and I do not have problems with 16GB on x86. Perhaps ARM Macs use more memory or something. My next MacBook will definitely have more than 16GB if it’s available, but that’s more for future need rather than present.

She has problems with 16GB on x86. A single docker container and compiling erlang really don't use that much. It's many tabs of office 365, google docs, and social media, and how every app is an electron app now that eats memory.

I think we as programmers have lost sight of how a single gif in memory is about the same size as a whole docker container.

I don’t think that’s accurate, because Docker on macOS involves virtualization. And Teams is the worst resource hog I’ve used. Though I don’t use Office or social media much (Twitter occasionally) so maybe that’s it.

> because Docker on macOS involves virtualization

Go check out the resource usage. Yes, it involves virtualization, but the stripped down virtualized kernel uses very little resources. Getting that information is a bit complicated by the fact that it's difficult to see the difference between the virtualized kernel and it's applications in a way that's consistent with the host OS, but it's really in the dozens of megabytes range of overhead for something like docker on mac.

I guess I should say I don't disbelieve that your mother in law was having problems with the memory in her computer, I just find it baffling because I use mine extremely heavily and my RAM usage rarely peaks like 12GB.

Just to check, I opened simultaneous projects in Logic Pro and Ableton Live, I have a Rust project open in VSCode (Electron), compiling Erlang again, I have Slack, Discord, Signal, and Hey running (all Electron apps), and I have Firefox open with Twitter, Hacker News, Facebook (a dozen tabs, just for good measure), Instagram, FBM, Techmeme, NYTimes, CNN, and MSNBC. This is a 15" 2018 MBP with a 6-core i7 and 16GB of RAM, and the CPU is working pretty hard but RAM usage is currently at just over 12GB.

Unless you turned off swap, out of memory actually means out of swap, so probably the machine was out of disk space.

Safari shows a memory warning when a tab uses ~2GB memory, and can be too aggressive about it.

Activity monitor showed that RAM was full. She did not use Safari, but instead Firefox.

Well that’s fine, RAM is supposed to be full. You’re wasting it if it’s not full. If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps. (which tends to come up way too late, but whatever)

> If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps.

Yes, she was getting both. To the point that I asked her to keep activity monitor running in the background so we could see who the problem applications were.

I'm not sure why this is in question.

Because "physical memory" being high in Activity Monitor doesn't actually tell you things that cause that dialog to appear. (Unfortunately.) That and a 1GB Firefox tab isn't quite enough to do it.

If "compressed" or "swap space" approach 32GB+/64GB+ (depends on amount of physical memory installed) that can do it, but running out of disk space is a more common problem.

Of course, quitting the top app in the memory list probably is going to fix the issue.

I literally just confirmed that she was getting force quit messages.

I had to have her leave activity monitor open in the corner because it was running so slow it wouldn't open.

Just to side note, the 27" iMac RAM is the rare component that is upgradable by the user. You should be able to get 128GB for under $700 if you do not buy the RAM from Apple.

My current almost 2 year old 16" has 64gm ram already. Is this new version faster despite lower amounts of storage?

It’s faster ram, and a faster CPU. Memory only really gives you “number of active things that the CPU can switch to” (meaning, open idle programs) and cache.

If the nvme drive is fast enough, the filesystem cache is not as noticeably effective, and if you have aggressive “suspend” of processes (like iOS) then lack of RAM capacity does not really impact performance at all. But memory latency, speed and the CPU do.

very cool thank you!

for me video cache would be really helpful, but after effects and especially premiere right now seem absurdly slow.

premiere especially i can hit play on a non-edited clip in preview and it takes multiple seconds to start... maybe i have a wrong setting somewhere

That could make an M2 Mac Mini into a scary on prem machine.

I suspect that the MacBook Pro 16 will probably one of the first M2 offerings and it already offers up to 64g of RAM, so hopefully you’ll get your wish.

This is exactly what I've been waiting for!

> have an option to buy 32 gigs of ram.

I think it's quite likely that M2 will have a 128-bit lpddr5 interface. Using widely available modules, this would allow them up to 64GB ram.

I would love that! I got an M1 MacBook Air - unfortunately it was so good I found it could run the games I like perfectly well, which I hadn't planned on doing. It ran everything just fine except for Cities:Skylines. I have way to many mods and assets for 16GB of RAM to be reasonable, so it was with much reluctance I took it back on the last day of my return window. Being able to drop my Windows gaming PC and consolidate everything onto one machine will be very nice though! And I may spring for a larger size screen if I am going to have to abandon the MBA class of machine.

Returning it still hurts. I was really hoping for something that would take more than 32GB of RAM but am not surprised that it's still going to be later this year. The guts in the new iMac would be perfect for my Mom if they just offered a 27" replacement too.

Oh well. A few more months won't kill me.

Really hoping for 128-256gb ram limit, perhaps on a separate ddr. E.g., any sort of serious data science work is now impossible on m1s simply because of ram limits.

You would probably need to wait for the 3rd level of M SOCs predicted for the Mac Pro. The M1 is for the lowest performance tier machines like the Air, the low end iMac, the low end MacBook Pro. This next chip M2/M1X is for the middle tier like the 16” MacBook Pro and the 27”/30” iMac. It will probably take a third tier to handle the large RAM and GPU needs to the Mac Pro.

Yep, that's exactly what I've heard as well, and it makes perfect sense. I'm actually silently hoping 128gb would fall into the 'mid tier' - like it currently does with the old Intel iMac 27''. You don't always need a $15k cheese grater when all you're looking for is just a bit more memory on a Mac platform...

In a laptop?

Maybe the commenter has a very interesting use for it, but why would you buy a 256 GB RAM machine (which isn't a lot of memory for this arena either) to develop the model, instead of using something smaller to work on it and leasing a big cluster for the minutes to hours of the day that you'll need to train it on the actual dataset?

I don't do this kind of thing any more, but back when I did, the one thing that consistently bit me was exploratory analysis requiring one-hot encoding of categorical data where you might have thousands upon thousands of categories. Take something like the Walmart shopper segmentation challenge on Kaggle that a hobbyist might want to take a shot at. That's just exploratory analysis, not model training. Having to do that in the cloud would be quite annoying when your feedback loop involves updating plots that you would really like to have in-memory on a machine connected to your monitor. Granted, you can forward a Jupyter server from an EC2, but also the high-memory EC2s are extremely expensive for hobbyists, way more than just buying your own RAM if you're going to do it often.

I think there are studies showing that one hot encodings are not as efficient as an embedding, so maybe you would want to reduce the dimensions before attempting the analysis.

Kicking learns off on a cluster is surely a thing as well. And in some fields, as you correctly mentioned, memory requirements may be measured in terabytes. It's more of a 'production use case' though - what I meant is the 'dev use case'. For instance, playing with mid/high frequency market data, plotting various things, just quickly looking at the data and various metrics, trying and testing things out often requires up too 100gb of memory at disposal at any time. It's definitely not only about model training. And 'something smaller to work on' principle doesn't always work in these cases. If the whole thing fits in my local ram, I would of course prefer to work on it locally until I actually need cluster resources.

(But seriously though... what is 16gb these days? Looking at process monitor, I think my firefox takes over 5gb now since I have over a thousand tabs in treestyletab, clion + pycharm take another 5gb, parallels vm for some work stuff is another 10gb; if doing any local data science work that's usually at least a dozen gb or a few dozen or more)

>Maybe the commenter has a very interesting use for it, but why would you buy a 256 GB RAM machine (which isn't a lot of memory for this arena either) to develop the model, instead of using something smaller to work on it and leasing a big cluster for the minutes to hours of the day that you'll need to train it on the actual dataset?

A 128GB of a ram in a consumer PC is about $750 dollars (desktop anyway, laptop may be more?). That's less than a single high end consumer gaming GPU. Or a fraction of a Quadro GPU.

So to the extent that developers ever run things on their local hardware (CPU, GPU, whatever) 128GB of RAM is not much of a leap. Or 256GB for Threadripper. It's in the ballpark of having a high-end consumer GPU.

I have 128GB in my desktop, which is the same amount of ram that our cluster compute nodes have. I use it for Python/pandas forecasting work.

The extra ram in my machine means I can work on the same datasets we use in prod locally, which is a huge productivity boost. Most of our developer time is actually spent building datasets. loading a random sample doesn’t really work when doing time series or spatial transforms and using a time or space limited subset makes description (graphs, maps) a chore. More ram is a huge productivity enabler when working with in memory tools like pandas.

The same M chip is used in 4 product lines so I'm going to assume a Pro version of the iMac or Mac Mini is what the parent means, but if you need that much memory, setting up a VM should be worth it. Same if you need a GPU.

I really want Apple to actually support external monitor properly.

Here's an incomplete and continuously updated list of monitors (not) working with Apple hardware: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors-mac/

I finally bought an external graphics card bay for my i9 15", and now it's obsolete. =)

I'm no silicon architect but isn't this why performance is so good? They can cut out all those extra pcie lanes and extraneous stuff and focus on performance. If you start adding back big I/O won't you just be back down to Earth with everyone else?

Not really. The main reason the M1 doesn't have good IO is that it's a beefed up ipad CPU. This was the first generation where they were putting the chips in systems that can use IO, so they probably are just behind on the design for those parts of the chip.

What do you mean the M1 doesn't have good IO?

A 1 Tb Mini with all the SSD write lines benchmarked at

Write: 2,983 MB/Sec Read: 2,710 MB/Sec

That's as fast or faster than Intel Macs, and way higher than most PC SSDs.

Chip I/O as in having lots of memory channels and lots of PCIe lanes.

That said, Intel mobile CPUs don't have fantastic I/O either, this will matter more when Apple has to scale up to iMac Pro/Mac Pro territory.

"SSD performance" is a very high-level view of I/O, and depends more on the size and configuration of flash chips used than the CPU design.

> The main reason the M1 doesn't have good IO is that it's a beefed up ipad CPU. This was the first generation where they were putting the chips in systems that can use IO

Could you explain what you mean by this? I don't think I understand.

All of Apple’s prior ARM experience comes from iOS devices. They had no need to develop io capabilities for iPhones and iPads with a single port. Now they put the chips in computers but most likely haven’t fully yet developed extended io capabilities.

Hmm, but wouldn't features like wifi, all the cameras, the touchscreen, Cellular data, NFC, touch ID, speakers, bluetooth, and so on all come in via IO as well? You're right that they only have one port, but they still connect to a lot of different components.

The problem with this analogy is that NFC, touch ID, speakers, and bluetooth are all in the MB/s or less range. On the desktop side, you have to deal with 10gb/s ethernet and 50-100gb/s for ram. It's just a whole different ballgame.

Ah, that makes sense. Do iPhones connect to their RAM differently? I know it’s physically different than desktop RAM (for obvious reasons), but I don’t really know enough about hardware to know how it connects.

Those usually connect over serial-esque busses, and they connect via a security chip. (Akin to the t2 chip but much lighter)

A far cry from the kind of tolerances and sustained high throughput of PCIe.

Does it support two 4K monitors now?

I have an old Macbook from 2013 that runs Linux now with an Intel integrated GPU and it supports dual 4K monitors at 30Hz. I use the Thunderbolt ports as Mini DisplayPort outputs and connect to two 4K monitors with DisplayPort and it works fine.

M1 laptops can only support one external display at 6k and 60Hz. The other video goes to the laptop's own display. Even if you use the laptop closed in clamshell mode you can't connect or daisy chain to more than one external display.

The mini can support two external displays. One via thunderbolt at that same 6k and 60Hz and the other a 4k at 60Hz through the HDMI port.

Note that the restriction on external monitors can be worked around by using a DisplayLink compatible dongle/dock, since it uses a custom driver (I assume it does something in software that would otherwise be limited in hardware).

I use the Dell D6000 and I run three (1080p) external monitors in addition to the built in monitor.

I've been trying to find a DisplayLink dock that can output video via USB-C or Thunderbolt. Everybody's shared solutions always involve HDMI connections, never USB-C.

I have two Thunderbolt/USB-C monitors that I was hoping to daisy chain with one wire from my Mac. Alas it's not possible.

My hope is power into a dock. Thunderbolt from dock to laptop to power laptop. Thunderbolt/USB-C from dock into first monitor. Second Thunderbolt/USB-C from dock using the DisplayLink tech to second monitor.

You won’t find a Displaylink adapter that supports Thunderbolt monitors. It just won’t work from a technical aspect.

Three 1080p displays add up to 3/4 the bandwidth of one 4k display, at the same framerate.

I use a Wavlink 4K dock to drive 2 4K monitors on my Mac.

I've got a Caldigit TS3

Sansibit MM4 for me

Compared to M1? Because my Intel MBP has done that for years.

I now use an M1 mac mini with two 4k monitors (not from one cable though)

I have a 2018 Mac Mini driving two 4K displays with Display Port over USB-C cables. I previously was driving 2 x 24" 2K displays (same cables) and had no performance problems. Once I upgraded to the 4K displays I've observed very noticeable display draw performance issues. It's not enough for me to give up the 4K displays but I'm wondering if this is improved on the current M1 Mac mini?

I haven’t noticed any display lag on my end. But I don’t do latency sensitive things like gaming.

1 monitor (Dell P2715Q) is hooked up using DisplayPort. The other (LG 27” IPS 4K) is using HDMI 2.0. Both are running 4K retina at 60Hz without any issues.

I had so much trouble finding this out before I bought it which is why I am vocal about the fact that it works.

Thanks for the information! I am tempted to upgrade my 2018 when the next revision (M1X or M2?) Mac mini comes out to improve the display refresh rate issues.

The M1 MacBooks can only drive 1 external monitor because they're already driving the internal display.

> buy 32 gigs of ram

Even their Mac mini doesn't offer a 32 gigs of ram. One of the reasons I had to go with Intel version instead of M1 because at least I could upgrade to 32gb ram myself (plus was cheaper). There is no reason why they can't offer 32 gigs ram on non-laptop lines.

or 16gb high speed on die and another pool of DDR4 memory outside.

My current MBP drives 3 4K monitors and has 64 gigs of ram. Perhaps I’m not clear on the point you’re trying to make.

They're talking about M1 or better. My M1 13" MBP with 8GB RAM is far superior to my 2015 MBP (with more RAM) when it comes to video editing, etc. First in my wishlist would be re-adding two external displays, then more RAM.

Me too

You can achieve that and even more if you do the right thing and stay with the x86-64.

The latest Macbook Pro 16" supports 32GB or 64GB RAM [1]. It's been that way for a few generations. I have the 2018 model and it has 32GB. I think that might have been the first generation where that much RAM was supported.

[1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/specs/

edit: oh right, that's not M1 brainfart

Those are intel based Macs. This being an article about the M1 going into mass production, it's probably fair to say the parent comment was referring to those specs in an M1 Mac, not an intel Mac.

Yea but that one uses the intel cpu. The problem with M1 is that it only supports up to 16 right now. And no eGPU. :/

yeah but they want that with apple silicon