It’s possible that Apple Silicon has some hardware acceleration for doing this in-place memory compression, but otherwise it’s pretty old news, which makes this marketing shtick even more frustrating. 8GB was borderline not enough even back when memory compression was added to macOS (maybe ~10 years ago?).
So has Windows.
With multi-core CPUs, it’s easy to do so without impacting performance in most cases.
That's fine for a low-end laptop in 2023, and if you're upfront about that tradeoff.
For a ~$1500 laptop, that's just marketing bs.
It’s like AMD saying out megahertz are better than your megahertz. It may be true but people just look at standard numbers.
Like theregister puts it:
> There's a reason why we used to refer to Apple as the Cupertino idiot-tax operation.
It has been known for years that megahertz are a terrible metric to measure CPU performance. The peak of that discussion was during the launch of Pentium 4, where it was proven that the IPC was much worse when comparing to a previous Pentium even though it had a lot more the clock speed.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 (Microarchitecture)
I told him many times that he could have gotten a computer at one third the price that would have done essentially the same thing just as well, but he doesn't believe it. He thinks Apple is obviously better and obviously longer. Even though I'm tech geek using Apple hardware before he even knew Apple existed. He also has a fetish for Apple cables and chargers, because somehow, they are the only ones who know how to build those things (not that they are bad per se, but there are better options at half the price...).
It's really a lot like a religion or some sort of cult at this point. Unsurprisingly this guy has a lot of beliefs about many things; true Apple fanboys are very often like that.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple stuff is pretty good but the pricing just doesn't make sense, especially nowadays considering of the locked everything down...
This is amazing to witness as a Linux person that is apathetic to the Windows/Mac thing. Windows people never do this stuff.
The 16GB pc equivalent, especially for equivalent pricing of a mbp is going to have a video card with dedicated vram in addition. A $1549 dell xps has a 6GB Nvidia card, with options for 4GB-8GB cards.
8GB equivalent to 22GB is the real comparison we should be making and the answer is obviously no. Especially with all the other io performance cuts apple has been making.
Now you will say theres far more bloatware on the windows laptop, especially in a corporate environment necessitating all that ram, and thats true.
For light use 8gb would be plenty, but its not going to cut it for power users.
Im also curious what the "memory compression" they use is, i would imagine its similar to linux compressed in memory swap. Unless they are just talking standard gpu texture compression and such.