It's not like they ditched them for x86 devices. If people said that 8GB M1s were more capable than their x86 machines, it can be logically consistent with them going for even more power as more M* series chips released.

The first gen went up to 16GB, so anyone buying 8GB was just price-chasing.

I do find it a bit odd they even offer the 8GB version. It truly does not feel like enough. 16 GB feels like it should be the entry point for MacOS.

For someone that frequents Hacker News, maybe. My spouse has an 8GB M2 Air and has no complaints.

> just price-chasing

This is not the problem. You can find comments here how people literally said what 'it were running better than x86 Macs with 16+GBs'.

ADD: and 'nobody needs more than 8GB, because it works so fine'. Just to clarify.

I have one, and it did/does. Those statements were not untrue.

Idk if it swaps fast or what, and I don't care.

'Unified memory' access on M1 is allegedly almost as fast as CPU cache, and I believe the SSDs are extremely close to the SoC as well. Swap might be faster than most x86 computers' actual RAM.

This is the exact kind of PR bamboozlement I was alluding to - literally none of the above is correct:

M1 memory latency is 100ns, which wasn't really competitive with amd/intel at the time (70 something nano). Any SSD read be an order of magnitude slower than reading from ram - something to the tune of 5gb/s version vs 70gb/s for the SOC ram. For comparison, the intel trashcan mac pro clocked in at 60gb/sec a decade prior.

Reference:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

> This is the kind of PR bamboozlement I was alluding to - literally none of the above is correct

I'm basing my knowledge on discussions with other developers on rwkv.cpp because we were talking about how performance scales with the number of tokens per iteration. Memory speed/bandwidth came up and some things about M1 were said. Sorry about that.

See, this is the thing about M1: I don’t care about your numbers (which I have no doubt are true), I care about my personal experience with the magic cold $999 aluminum slab that runs circles around everything I owned before.

Reading these always feels like winning an F1 race, then being gaslit about how that’s not possible because of inferior cylinder design.

And all it takes is some Apple PR magic to make you disregard objective measures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Not Apple PR magic, but true firsthand experience. Objectively, this is the computer that makes me happiest and most productive. It could run on a 6MHz slime mold processor for all I care.

This.

I distinctly remember the reality distortion field that permeated the discussion ("Apple silicone doesn't need as much memory", "MacOS is more efficient than windows" and similar such idiocies) when those things first came out. Whoever Apple retained for this PR sure managed to bamboozle a lot of gullible people.

I don’t think there’s a reality distortion field. I have a 10 year-old MacBook Pro (the very first Retina model) with 8GB of RAM. I often find myself with VSCode, two dozen Chrome tabs, some terminal windows and Adobe Illustrator (2022) running simultaneously. Somehow, it manages to cope with all of that without an issue. Of course, it doesn’t work as fast as new computers, but the UI remains fluid and responsive. I’ve never had a Windows machine offer that kind of practical longevity.

macOS is much more memory efficient than Windows. Not hard to do.