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.