this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
326 points (95.3% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
7244 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My daily driver MacBook Pro has 8GB of RAM, and so far, that’s been perfectly sufficient for my needs. Some might argue that 8GB is inadequate for a 1,700€ device, but I don’t think most people would notice a difference. This focus on specs might make more sense with computers, but with smartphones especially, I never understood the obsession with performance. My mid-range Samsung handles everything instantly - I can’t think of a reason it would need to be any faster. Numbers on a paper seem irrelevant when it doesn't translate to everyday use.
MacOS, no matter what anyone says, has extremely efficient memory management. It's seriously impressive how efficient that OS truly is, and it's no surprise they stuck with 8GB for so long. The thing these clickbait articles don't really bring to light is that the 16GB increase is really for Apple intelligence. If that wasn't a thing these Macs would stick to 8GB.
It is "efficient" because they just dump everything on swap. If I cold boot my M1 air, it'll be using 7GB of RAM and 4GB of swap without anything running in the background. I have this ongoing bug as well where some background apps will stop responding and the system can't stop the process, so it starts a new one and it keeps doing this until I either stop the app manually, or my storage is completely full because swap is taking 80GB of my internal storage.
Not sure you know what swap is...I looked at my m1 after a night of gaming on GeForce now and filling out forms on Google Chrome. My swap was at 0, my used ram was at 4GB used out of the 8GB and didn't show down at all. I'm sorry you have had a terrible experience with your Mac, I love my Mac mini and will enjoy it as a really cool piece of tech.