I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast.

I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating.

I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery.

Completely changed the way I work

How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?

I can answer this. I have a very similar workload to OP. I've found myself with resolve, affinity photo, chrome, vscode, spotify, ect open simultaneously, and have had absolutely zero struggle on my 8gb air.

If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping.

The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.

If it's really swapping then won't that reduce the lifetime of the (irreplaceable?) internal storage?

Modern SSDs are resilient enough that most people will never wear them out with anything resembling a normal workload. Unless you're constantly swapping for several hours a day, it just isn't going to matter.

How many GB a day would be written with swapping? Modern SSDs have a lifespan of a few hundred to low thousands of TBW.

That's a conservative estimation of the lifespan (how hard you can hit it while maintaining a very low probability of SSD failure). The more interesting question is "How likely after n years is the SSD to be the first non-replaceable component to fail on this laptop?" I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm guessing it's a good long while before the answer to it goes above 0.5.

Apple have been shipping laptops with non-replaceable SSDs since around 2017. Anecdotally, we hear so much worrying about potential future SSD failure, and yet so few people saying things like "I bought an M1 Air two years ago and now the SSD has died".

Totally not, enshittification ate SLC.

SLC makes sense for almost zero use cases, even in a data center. It's simply the wrong tradeoff between capacity and performance. It's not enshittification that you can now have a cheap multi-TB SSD to hold a large collection of movies and games and still have an SLC cache for the small portion of your data that isn't mostly static.

MacOS also employs memory compression, so it's not necessarily swapping to disk.

I have an M2 Air with 24gb and it has no problems running Brave with 800-ish tabs, development workloads (a bunch of VSCode projects, several docker containers, lots of iTerm terminals), low-end CAD and 3D printing apps, CaptureOne and a bunch of Electron apps in parallel with room to spare. I've found I can fit more into those 24gb than into the 32gb of the Intel Mac I had before that (however that's possible).

>800-ish tabs

You're never going to read those, before the links rot.

Almost all of them have already been read and are waiting for me to build something to pull the links out of Brave and download/archive/index them somehow. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but haven't yet.

This may help.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611

It would be quicker to manually move the URLs to a text file, then supply that as input to a tool like wget. However, you will almost certainly end up with either un-necessarily bloated files, or saved sites that don't quite work.

I still stand by the spirit of my original comment - there probably isn't enough information content in your 800 tabs to make this endeavour worthwhile.

The browser should remember the date you last rendered a tab, and then if the link rots, it falls back to archive.org on that date.

> The browser should remember the date you last rendered a tab, and then if the link rots, it falls back to archive.org on that date.

Brave (by default at least) will ask you if you want to load the archive.org version when a page fails to load. Not 100% automatic but almost.

How are you managing all these? What are you using to search them?

I'm using Vimium for general use and have an Alfred plugin/thing/extension but even that's a bit unwieldy. How many windows is this?

> running Brave with 800-ish tabs

Why am I not surprised that an apple fan uses Brave - a browser that offers literally nothing but 100% false claims of improved privacy and performance?

boring reply

My MacBook Pro M3 has 36GiB RAM and does all of the comment above + music producing (dozens of VSTs on some 1-2 dozens tracks) + projection mapping and can run some LLM models locally like the Mistral ones.

I've only managed to hear the fan when chatting with a LLM, for anything else it's been an absolutely silent beast.

Mine has 16GB and I regularly use some Mistral LLM as well as OpenHermes.

The only things that ever seems to get my fan going are transcoding a video or a really long compile.

Never once has the fan run during web browsing or any of the many everyday tasks that used to bring my previous one to its knees.

I have an M1 Max with 32GiB and similarly - never had it complain or noticed it unhappy about anything, or felt I needed more RAM or CPU.

It's going to be hard to justify upgrading this thing for awhile.

I have M2 Pro 16GB from a client. It's comfortable for typical dev work - tons of tabs open, Docker, VS Code etc. Though the swap is about 20GB now and sometimes it lags. Still it beats any Intel or AMD laptop I ever had in terms of performance. This machine is on a whole another level.

My own machines are M1 Max 32GB and they fare slightly better.

My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model.

Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.

Honestly haven’t felt like it didn’t have enough RAM even once.

My daily driver before this was a Ryzen 5700x desktop with 64GB RAM, so I know what a powerful processor + RAM combo feels like.

Haven’t even heard the fan even once.

What were the things that held you up from making the switch?

I upgraded from a 2015 MBP with 16gb of ram to a M3 Pro with 36gb. It’s a night and day difference, the machine is much more responsive and I mainly use it 30 min a day, or sometimes for a few hours in a row. And charge about once per week, getting about 14hr battery life.

Good that it works for you and your daughter!

I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with a window from a different app showing, etc. This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle.

Of course, Windows is even worse in the GUI department, there's no comparison.

So, sadly, a Macbook remains the most sane computer for non-technical people :(

> This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle.

I read that Apple follows a document model, where the application is kinda a background thing a window is supposed to be for a specific task. Not like Windows where the main windows is the hub of interaction. So you use CMD + <backquote> to switch between these tasks and CMD + TAB for switching between applications. The menu bar is part of the application, but windows can modify it to suit the focused tasks.

I've used Rectangle for quick window management, but in time I've come to understand the philosophy so it does not bother me as much. It's more leaned into the desktop analogy than other OS.

Yes, and this is the reason why there is a shared menu bar and why many early macos apps had a number of floating windows, like Photoshop.

The desktop represents the active app, and a window is the active document in that app.

This doesn't make all that much sense with today's screen sizes and multiplatform apps.

It depends entirely on what you’re used to.

My earliest exposure to computers was a Mac (though Windows, Linux, and BeOS also came into the picture fairly early on) and I don’t find the Mac model the least bit problematic. On the contrary, I find the Win9X model overly simplistic and unmanageable past a small handful of windows.

You can also use AltTab if you prefer windows tab styles.

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

I agree with your misgivings about window management in MacOS. The way Windows does it is so much more intuitive.

For window snapping, there are countless apps that will easy solve your problem. But I get why you would struggle - I still get frustrated at times with the way MacOS works.

> no way to align or snap windows

Just download Rectangle for free. I recently switched from Dell XPS to M3 Pro and that was my gripe to. One install and it's much better, moving windows with ctrl+opt+arrows is also close to Windows and makes it fairly usable.

I really wish Apple would put 12GB RAM by default instead of 8GB. We now have high resolution that uses more memory and sharing Memory with GPU. In reality this is less than 8GB with Graphics Memory.