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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

I'd really love to see more memory in these devices. I have no need for a Mac, but everyone I know who uses one complains that RAM limitations come up fairly quickly with all of these devices. I even know a guy with a 64 gig iMac Pro who complains that he runs out of memory on a daily basis. I'm not sure if this is workflow-dependent or just a limitation of XNU's memory model (perhaps both), but giving people more memory options would be an easy fix and a big draw for programmers, sysadmins and creative professionals who are still using Intel Macs.

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    but everyone I know who uses one complains that 
    RAM limitations come up fairly quickly with all 
    of these devices

Everyone?

The initial 2020 M1 machines maxxed out at 16GB; however the 2021 M1 Macbook Pros are configurable with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB.

I'm not sure what to make of "RAM limitations come up fairly quickly." 16GB configs haven't been a problem for developers at any of the shops where I've spent time in recent years. Places where developers were not shy about complaining. Of course, I recognize that lots of workloads do require more! Working with big data, video work, etc.

My problem with the 16GB limit was more theoretical. If I'm shelling out $2-$3K for a machine, I'd like a more future-proof amount of RAM.

You're still screwed if you need a desktop though.

The (now discontinued) iMac Pro officially supports 256 GB of RAM. 3rd party RAM resellers claim it will work with 512 GB. I assume any M1 or M2 replacement would support at least the same amount.

He just needs more than 64 G. So yes, workflow dependent.

For example, i seem to use 24 G most of the time. A 16 G M1 won't do then.

What worries me is they talk about a M2 but also about the M1 Pro/Max making their way in more systems. Does this mean the M2 will replace just the M1, be still limited to 16 G and the Mac Mini will still be crippled?

It's reasonable to assume there will be Pro and Max versions of the M2 as well, and they'll have different capabilities across the line like the M1 variants do.

My guess is that there is going to be a Mac mini available with a Pro or Max chip at some point, but it's a weakly held guess. It's possible that we're going to just see the Mac mini as the "regular" headless desktop and a Mac pro as the more powerful one, so we get a matrix something like:

        |                  | Regular     | Pro         |  
        | ---------------- | ----------- | ----------- |  
        | Laptop           | MacBook Air | MacBook Pro |  
        | Headless Desktop | Mac mini    | Mac Pro     |  
        | All-in-One       | iMac        | iMac Pro    |

Would require the Mac Pro to get significantly cheaper on the low end. Starting price difference between M1 MacBook Air and M1 Pro MacBook Pro is 2x, but the difference in starting price between M1 Mac Mini and the cheapest x86 Mac Pro is 8.5x.

If not, the matrix would look something more like this:

        |                  | Regular     | Pro         | Corporate |
        | ---------------- | ----------- | ----------- | --------- |
        | Laptop           | MacBook Air | MacBook Pro |           |
        | Headless Desktop | Mac mini    |             |  Mac Pro  |
        | All-in-One       | iMac        | iMac Pro    |           |

I'm amused at your third column, and it's arguably not wrong currently, although it's almost more niche than "corporate" in its current form. :)

The "pre-trashcan" Mac Pro models were considerably less expensive, even adjusted for inflation, than what came afterward. (The first Intel Mac Pros started at $2299, and IIRC I bought a PowerMac G5 in the early 2000s for something like $1599.) So Apple might lower their introductory pricing down to something that, if not cheap, is at least less expensive than the current Mac Pro. I wouldn't bet money on that, to be sure -- but it's possible.

There's also the possibility of a "Mac Mini Pro," though, maybe? In a sense they kind of did that with the last update to the Intel model; I could see them making this a more deliberate bifurcation in the lineup.

That's interesting. I'd sure like to think that the M1's 16GB limitation (and the limitation of 2 displays) was an aberration.

But, now that you mention it, maybe they have a segmentation strategy there. The M2/M3/M4/etc will be limited and the M2X/M3X/M4X will not.

Hopefully that's not the case. I get the feeling that it's more of a tick/tock cycle like Intel used to do. Where they'd ship new architectures every ~24 months, and at the halfway point between major architecture releases they'd release interim models with beefed up cache / core counts / clock speeds.

But perhaps that's wishful thinking.

> maybe they have a segmentation strategy there

That's what I'm afraid of. I'd very much like to not have to pay 6k+ for a Mac Pro because ... I don't need one. But if they continue crippling the Mini I just might have to.

He either has a memory leak he hasn't spotted, or is really low on disk space (so it can't create swap files.)

My home Macs have all been 8gb for the past 11+ years and never wished for more ram. (MBP 17, MBP 13, Mini, MBA M1). I've done light dev on them, I even run a Windows ARM VM on my M1 Air and play Steam games through it.

That said, my work provided machines have always been much higher specced.

Not kinda true anymore with M series chips.

Look at other comments here, people are amazed how their 8gb MacBook Air works.

People have been saying this from the moment M1 came out, 8gb Air/Pro feels like 16gb.

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