Hacker News Reader

Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

The intel Mac Mini is still available with the same 8GB in its base model, but configurable up to 16/32/64. RAM is definitely the biggest weakness of these new Macs.

On iOS they can get away with less RAM than the rest of the market by killing apps, relaunching them fast, and having severely restricted background processes. On Mac they won't have that luxury. At least they have fast SSDs to help with big pagefiles.

With the heterogeneous memory, your 8GB computer doesn't even have its whole 8GB of main system memory.

When the touchbar MBP launched in 2016 people were already complaining that it couldn't spec up to 32GB like the competition. Four years later, and it's still capped at 16GB.

Hopefully they can grow this for next year's models.

View on HN

And the Intel Mac Mini had user-replaceable RAM. Tired of fan noise and slow response, I went from a 4 Thunderbolt 2018 MacBook Pro with only 8GB of RAM to a 2018 Mac Mini with 32GB of RAM (originally 8GB, bought the RAM from Amazon and upgraded it).

The difference was incredible

8GB ram is just soul crushing - even for basic office workloads. I need 16GB minimum.

What in a basic office needs 8GB RAM?! I used Word 6.0 under Windows 95 with 64MB of RAM!

Have you looked at Activity Monitor to see what is butchering your memory?!

Probably Chrome.

Well, for starters, the most obvious answer, which is Office 365. Have you glanced at the RAM use of those apps, ever?

Second: web browsers, which can easily grab 5-10GB by themselves or even more if RAM is available.

So in other words: everything.

I'm idling at 18gb right now and doing what I consider to be next to nothing.

That seems like a hell of a lot of RAM for next to nothing.

I'm not a mac user but that seems ridiculous. I'd be investigating what's hogging it all.

I build my desktops with a lot of ram.

I have chrome, Firefox, photoshop, vs code, docker and a few other things running. As a kid I had to manage RAM. As an adult, I buy enough RAM to not need to think about it.

I was committed to buying an M1 on day one. I won’t buy a machine with only 16gb of RAM.

I'm the same, my current desktop has 32Gb, but still I'd be pretty concerned about 18Gb in use with nothing running.

It doesn't make sense for the system not to 'grab' a big chunk of your RAM. That is what it is there for. You want stuff to be preloaded into RAM so you can access it quickly if needed. You only want to leave some of it free so that if you launch a new application it has breathing room.

For example Chrome will scale the amount of RAM it reserves based on how much you have available.

> It doesn't make sense for the system not to 'grab' a big chunk of your RAM. That is what it is there for. You want stuff to be preloaded into RAM so you can access it quickly if needed. You only want to leave some of it free so that if you launch a new application it has breathing room.

Cache is excluded from just about any tool that shows RAM use, at least on desktops. If the ram shows as in use, the default assumption should be that it's in active use and/or wasted, not cache/preloading.

> For example Chrome will scale the amount of RAM it reserves based on how much you have available.

Which features are you thinking about that reserve ram, specifically? The only thing I can think of offhand that looks at your system memory is tab killing, and that feature is very bad at letting go of memory until it's already causing problems.

The 2018 Intel Mac Mini has user-replaceable RAM. The 2014 mini has fixed RAM.

Another note on the Mini and MacBook Pro (in higher end SKUs) - these both used to have four USB-C ports, and now only have two. The Mini at least keeps its a pair of USB-A ports, but on the MBP you're back on the road to dongle-hub-land.

I'm betting this is due to Thunderbolt controller and PCIe lane capacity. They couldn't do four Thunderbolt ports with the M1 SoC, so they dropped the ports. Having four USB-C ports but only two supporting Thunderbolt would be a more obvious step back from the previous MacBook Pro. This way people can just blame it on Apple doing Apple things, instead of seeing a technical limitation.

Yes, based on my experience on a mac, I would not buy any mac with less than 32gb ram (I personally use 64gb and it's so much nicer)...

Yes, it seems crazy, yes it's a lot of ram, but I like to be able to run VMs locally and not have to boot up instances on AWS (insert provider of choice), I like to keep tabs open in my browsers, I like not to have to close apps when I'm using them and I like my computer to be snappy. 64 GB allows that 16 doesn't, 32 barely does.

Having read a bit more about the new M1 I really think it is designed and speced for the new Air. The RAM is on the package, which makes it very performant and 16G is a reasonable limit for an Air-like computer. The Mini got cheaper and more powerful, so it is not a bad trade off. I strongly assume, that there will be variations/successors to the M1 which are going to support more memory and also more IO (more USB-4 ports, more screens).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com