8GB RAM is not for coding!

[apparatchik]

Still, I think the point here is, first, are this Terabytes written stats accurate, and second, are they meaningful? has there been any report about M1 Macs going busted because of SSD wear and tear? Surely with daily use some 6 month old M1 Macs would be breaking left & right after writing several Petabytes of data by now to disk.

Unless there's a definitive yes to both of these questions, it's all OCD for now.

 

[MBAir2010]

 

[Serban55]

Is this another tolling thread?
from the pictures, doesnt show is because of "coding"
So this could be a lie
We need more proof that 8gb ram is not for coding...or this thread can be close because is misleading

 

[iHorseHead]

4gb?! What machine is it? Does it have an empty slot? I don’t remember the last time I saw 4gb as an option!

You can install Big Sur by using patches. Even 4GB MacBook Pro mid 2010 can run Big Sur

 

[JMacHack]

I'm thinking the "disk swapping/excessive writing" issue is something that is actually "built into" the "unified memory" design of the m-series CPU, and that Apple doesn't want to discuss it. Hence, they've remained dead silent about it in the face of a long-running thread about it here at macrumors...

Probably because there’s been one non-confirmed SSD failure from a Twitter post and no other actual failures anecdotal or otherwise. There’s just a lot of anxiety.

 

[Toutou]

4gb?! What machine is it? Does it have an empty slot? I don’t remember the last time I saw 4gb as an option!

No slots, it's a 2013 MBP, officially supported by Big Sur. My GF is currently finishing her bachelor thesis on it.

 

[gigatoaster]

Maybe he is the type of “programmer” who always complains to his boss that he has no time, untenable deadlines, can’t clearly express himself and always ships buggy apps, even though we all know that nowadays nobody knows how to really code and everyone is using all these tools that spoon-feed developers or simply just do copy-paste from StackOverflow. Typical dev that will blame “marketing” or the horrible “sales people” that are mean and don’t understand “technology“.

 

[robco74]

I wouldn't make these sorts of blanket proclamations. Developer workflows can vary quite a bit.

 

[smal]

You can do coding with a simple text editor, such as Sublime, hell, even vim or nano can be used for this, in essence, coding per se is the most lightweight task you can perform on a computer.

If your dev environment is virtualized, you could be pushing commits to a remote and 2GB would be plenty.

For local VM's, emulators, dozens of tabs on multiple browsers, heavy IDE's, the sky is the limit, regardless of underlying architecture.

This is super misleading. If you have a remote on which everything is being tested then you need a powerful remote which is kind of the same thing. If you are testing things that require nothing but plain code not pulling in data and creating something with it or creating something users can access maybe that is possible but creating for example a website will require a lot of tabs, probably ssh open to another computer with more ram, an ide, some developer tools may be as basic as chrome but still something that will take more than 2gigs of ram. So yes you probably could code on 2 gigs of ram. But I doubt anyone can do anything productive.

 

[jdb8167]

Still, I think the point here is, first, are this Terabytes written stats accurate, and second, are they meaningful? has there been any report about M1 Macs going busted because of SSD wear and tear? Surely with daily use some 6 month old M1 Macs would be breaking left & right after writing several Petabytes of data by now to disk.

Unless there's a definitive yes to both of these questions, it's all OCD for now.

What would you accept as definitive? I can prove that on an M1 Mac, the SSD controller was designed by Apple. I can also prove that the data retrieved by the SMART monitoring tools is using Apple designed and approved APIs that are part of Big Sur. Is that definitive enough?

https://github.com/jamesdbailey/smartTBW

 

[apparatchik]

What would you accept as definitive? I can prove that on an M1 Mac, the SSD controller was designed by Apple. I can also prove that the data retrieved by the SMART monitoring tools is using Apple designed and approved APIs that are part of Big Sur. Is that definitive enough?

https://github.com/jamesdbailey/smartTBW

I'll take this as a yes for the first question, however Im still suspicious of how on earth could one be writting TB's of data on a single day by swap alone and if this is directly comparable to the previous architecture.

The second question you did not answer, I doubt Apple went ahead to sell system's that will die or break before the warranty is up or just around it, telling by the lifespan of ssd's.

 

[Mimiron]

yeah which is why i dont want to spend 2.5K EUR for a fricking 16gb of ram max.

 

[jake_the_tester]

Hey, man your absolutely right. For both development and video editing, the M1 machine writes terabytes and terabytes of data per day and it gets very laggy when coding. I understand the need to use a lot of chrome tabs because while developing I too use chrome even though I prefer safari. Both will be laggy no matter what. VSCode is almost always laggy. Funnily enough, the thing that isn't laggy is actually running the programs usually(for me that is). Web development is kind of painful cause it is really laggy and it's better even with like 8-year-old CPUs( I should know, I used one for years). Also if you do a smartctl -o /disk0 can you verify that this is close to normal as a developer. This is about 7 months old. Also, I regularly use close to 11 gigs of ram with just light development.

I feel you bro. I did an calculation about your SSD writes. You probably get 712GB writes per day in 7 months. This is crazy. Probably 2 or 3 years later your SSD will be broken. I got 2T writes in 1 day because I need to do some intense development on my M1 Mac. I do not even use IDE for the moment (I use PyCharm often). VSCode(ARM64) is laggy as well, ATOM only has x86 version. I use Vim for small scripts. But when I tried to setup some developing environment on my M1, it's catastrophic. For browser Safari is really good but not for debugging, chrome is much easier. My workstation i9 9900K 16GB is still a beast but I want to develop on the go, M1 Mac fails me. 16GB might be better but never enough. I am planning to change the Unified RAM (solder a new pair) after my M1 mac is out of warranty. It is possible according to some news in China. Maybe 16GB or 32GB...

 

[jake_the_tester]

You can do coding with a simple text editor, such as Sublime, hell, even vim or nano can be used for this, in essence, coding per se is the most lightweight task you can perform on a computer.

If your dev environment is virtualized, you could be pushing commits to a remote and 2GB would be plenty.

For local VM's, emulators, dozens of tabs on multiple browsers, heavy IDE's, the sky is the limit, regardless of underlying architecture.

I use Vim and Atom/VSCode as the editor. But these are not enough for a full project.

Yes, I use virtual environments often. I tried Parallels ARM64 VMs and Qemu x86 VMs. They are ram eater. But for this post I didn't use VMs, I just set up some development environments on my M1 and tried to develop a little while I need to search on the Internet for resources.

8GB of RAM on M1 mac is shared by the CPU and the GPU, we are fooled by Apple. That dedicated RAM to dedicated devices is important. I don't feel much lag on my i9 9900K 16GB workstation.

 

[apparatchik]

I feel you bro. I did an calculation about your SSD writes. You probably get 712GB writes per day in 7 months. This is crazy. Probably 2 or 3 years later your SSD will be broken. I got 2T writes in 1 day because I need to do some intense development on my M1 Mac. I do not even use IDE for the moment (I use PyCharm often). VSCode(ARM64) is laggy as well, ATOM only has x86 version. I use Vim for small scripts. But when I tried to setup some developing environment on my M1, it's catastrophic. For browser Safari is really good but not for debugging, chrome is much easier. My workstation i9 9900K 16GB is still a beast but I want to develop on the go, M1 Mac fails me. 16GB might be better but never enough. I am planning to change the Unified RAM (solder a new pair) after my M1 mac is out of warranty. It is possible according to some news in China. Maybe 16GB or 32GB...

Or just buy an M2 Mac in a few months, those are the higher-end half of Macs (even the high-end Mini is still on Intel), as they should support 32 & 64 GB configurations, if not more.

 

[Scipster]

Has Apple published the TBW for their M1 SSDs? 2TB/per day might not be an issue if Apple's TBW is in the petabytes.

 

[jake_the_tester]

What would you accept as definitive? I can prove that on an M1 Mac, the SSD controller was designed by Apple. I can also prove that the data retrieved by the SMART monitoring tools is using Apple designed and approved APIs that are part of Big Sur. Is that definitive enough?

https://github.com/jamesdbailey/smartTBW

I tried your codes and result is the same. Good job.

 

[jake_the_tester]

yeah which is why i dont want to spend 2.5K EUR for a fricking 16gb of ram max.

Maybe Hackintosh is still good option for now. Apple is getting more and more greedy...

 

[neuralengine]

Just to offer a counterpoint, my main computer is an 8-core 2020 iMac with 32GB of RAM. I’ve been using the base-spec M1 MacBook Air 256 GB / 7-core GPU / 8 GB of RAM for most of my web development since I got it and I honestly have not noticed a difference (other than the screen size, obviously). That’s Vim, Webstorm, VS Code, Sublime, CLI tools, lots of tabs open in lots of different browsers, Sketch, Pixelmator, Photoshop. The iMac is a tiny bit faster than the MacBook Air.

So, I think it really depends on the specifics of your set up. 8GB is definitely viable for me for doing professional web dev work.

 

[plinden]

I tried your codes and result is the same. Good job.
View attachment 1774295

You've shown that Apple's SMART controller is reporting that you have used 2% of your SSD life. Since that number's rounded, that could be anywhere between 2-3%.

That means you have 33-50x more SSD writes available before you reach Apple's reported lifetime, or about 1200-1870TBW. You don't say how old your Mac is so we can't say how long that is in years.

Whether that's reported figure is accurate, we don't know. I know such a high number seems unlikely.

But it makes no sense for Apple's bottom line for its controller to report either too high or too low a figure. If it reports 1000TBW but your SSD actually is 150TBW, then Apple will be inundated with disk failures long before the reported end-of-life. If it's too low, e.g. reporting 150TBW but actual number is 300TBW, SMART tools will be reporting end-of-life long before they should and again Apple will be inundated with service calls.

 

[awsom82]

Done many projects on them. 8GB sufficient.

 

[Xak444]

No slots, it's a 2013 MBP, officially supported by Big Sur. My GF is currently finishing her bachelor thesis on it.

Crazy! I did not think they did a 4gb since around 2010!

 

[apparatchik]

Maybe Hackintosh is still good option for now. Apple is getting more and more greedy...

Good luck matching the performance of the $679 Mac Mini or the $899 MBA (edu) with a hackintosh, not to mention form factor, battery life, quietness, warranty or customer service. Maybe a Wintel system with 64GB of RAM will suit you better.

It sounds like anybody worried about TWB should just get Apple Care before the first year runs out, though all of this being an issue is ATM pure speculation.

 

[Spindel]

Pfff… thats nothing.

I have to run both MS OneDrive AND MS Teams at the same time for work.

 

[macsound1]

I can't believe that no one mentioned he's running Avast Antivirus!