"I bought a machine too small for my needs and it's not working the way I like. Help."
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
8GB RAM is not for coding!
- Thread starter jake_the_tester
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I wish everyone would teach computer science students why this general statement is wrong. And they should do it in the first semester and not second or third. I tell my students in the first semester and keep repeating it until the leave with their master degree.
That is truly shocking, isn't it? Two tools reporting the same results when using exactly the same underlying mechanism... who would have thought.
Setups, work flows, and use cases differ. I am a developer in systems and tools programming using Go, Python, and C. The M1 Mac Mini that replaced my Mac Pro 2013 has been phenomenal.
"Your milage may vary."
The way the RAM is shared on the M1 works as though both the CPU and GPU have dedicated RAM. They have direct high speed access to the RAM rather than having to be accessed through a shared bus as with integrated memory.
Oh dear. But thankfully we have an expert to tell us.
I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air w/ 8GB and a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro w/ 32GB. I run 2 screens off my MBP and one off my MBA, both of which are 100% of the time running at a minimum phpStorm, vsCode, Navicat Premium, Mongo Compass, Chrome and multiple shells and my M1 MacBook Air consistently outperforms my MacBook Pro! I can’t even believe how well it handles the load and how fast it is.
p.s. IMHO people that use Wordpress aren’t real developers and at least the few I’ve had the unfortunate experience of knowing tend to not understand how any of the technology they use actually works, since none of them actually went to school for computer science but all of them think they’re engineers😂
p.s. IMHO people that use Wordpress aren’t real developers and at least the few I’ve had the unfortunate experience of knowing tend to not understand how any of the technology they use actually works, since none of them actually went to school for computer science but all of them think they’re engineers😂
Do you mean that the 8GB of RAM on M1 is devided into 2 dedicated parts (virtually or physically)?For example, 6GB for the compution tasks while 2GB for the graphics?
You just don't know the truth bro. I made my own Linux distro, optimizition of compilers and lots of people are using it. Wordpress is easy to drag and play while the machanism under the hood is cumbersome for the sacrifice of compatibility. Probably you can publish some popular frameworks better than Wordpress and gain people's trust. You words are meaningless.
Are there really professional developers out there that don’t understand the hardware?
If only Apple would let us know about this stuff... oh, wait...
https://www.apple.com/am/mac/m1/
Great.
I'm pretty sure many people who read this did as well: https://www.maketecheasier.com/6-tools-to-easily-create-your-own-custom-linux-distro/I personally prefer Arch for such things. For fun and playing around I find it more satisfying creating own operating systems as proof of concept. Maybe that's just me though.
I’m not jumping through hoops or altering the way I use my machine to “fix” a software or hardware flaw on my computer. It’s up to the manufacturer to fix any defects that cause issues with normal use.
The worst part about this thing is I don't actually use it every day. I have another Linux machine that I use cause I am hoping for some software fix for memory management. And when I am using it's not till I do anything intensive that it starts clobbering the drive away. It writes about 300 GB an hour (289TB/917 power-on hours) and you can definitely feel it when you're doing any work at all. If you can, return it and get a 16gb. As you install plugins it just starts dying and dying further.
I've been developing iOS and macOS apps on an M1 8GB with 3 4K monitors running, plus light gaming. Yes, it lags when running tons of simulators and always has some swap. But really, it's $600!!!!!. After six months of use I have 25.2 TB written or 1% of SSD life. That's fine. Not every developer is going to tax the machine like the OP. If I had that workload, I wouldn't have been so cavalier about the purchase. Know your tools. Do I wish I waited for a 16GB to ship, yeah, I'm probably not going to upgrade until the M2s because this was already a huge bump up... for the price, it's just too satisfying.
I see it as much less about the swap and the lag that the swapping creates. I have to say though Xcode(for my uncomprehensive experience with it) is quite efficient on m1. Like the machine doesn't even heat up(I am on an air). The problem is more when many applications are pulling from the swap and for some reason, both safari and chrome are slamming swap as well and everything just freezes up. After that sometimes the machine turns purple for a second and then crashes or (sometimes more annoyingly) will look like its idling for many minutes completely unresponsive but actually you can see after the fact that the machine is slamming the drive at something like 1.4GB/s for like half a minute and then it's slamming the rest of the system. While using video calls when the machine will freeze by doing this my camera will freeze and the machine will sometimes take forever to get to a desktop or mount a drive or start a monitor or EVEN freeze after plugging in the machine. I understand that 300 TB is a little excessive considering most people's usage but to think that this computer may only last 4 years but the real problem is the slowdown it causes. This would be totally wrong though if you guys arent experiencing these slowdowns.
I think there is a misconception regarding RAM when we compare old machines with newer machines (both Intel and Apple Silicon). As you can see in my signature, my first mac was a MacBook Pro from the year 2010, the last one with an Intel Core 2 Duo. Also, I have an (not so) old Mac mini from 2014, with an i5 also with integrated graphics. Those machines run pretty well with just 8GB of RAM. Specifically, the old Core 2 Duo needed less amount of RAM than the newer Mac mini, but still, I feel comfortable with those machines being only 8GB of RAM.
You cannot see them in my signature, but I had a 2015 Broadwell 13” MacBook Pro, and a 2017 Kaby Lake 13” MacBook Pro. I ended up selling or returning those machines, but I can assure you that 8GB of RAM didn’t feel as comfy as on my old macs. Increasingly, the integrated graphics needed more VRAM, and I want to believe that this is the main cause, but probably not the only one.
As the machines are newer, the RAM needs of the machine seem higher (I’m talking from my experience, both on general use and performing benchmarks) just by looking at the pressure of the memory and the swap disk used. On my old macs, the pressure is usually pretty low, on the newer macs, however, is noticeably higher.
And the epitome of this experiences is the M1 MacBook Air, which screams at you that it needs more than just 8GB of RAM unless you give it a very light usage. Sure, even if you stress it you barely notice a performance drop, but looking at the memory pressure levels and the swap memory, you can see the system (with my usage) asks for at least 16GB of RAM, which should’ve been the minimum with this new generation.
I hope we will have 16GB of RAM as a base configuration with the newer generations, such as M2 and M3, and not only on the Pro-focused M1X chips.
I agree that 16 GB should be the minimum memory option in 2021. Well, 12 GB at the very least, but that’s not a memory size Apple has ever used. I think it’s ridiculous that Apple is still shipping 8 GB. I wouldn’t be as bothered if 16 GB models were also sold in retail stores, but they are only available from Apple.
My memory pressure was often in the red on my 8 GB M1 mini, which I ended up returning. On my 16 GB M1 Air, it almost never gets to that point.
My memory pressure was often in the red on my 8 GB M1 mini, which I ended up returning. On my 16 GB M1 Air, it almost never gets to that point.
I think I may have missed something here. What do we mean by "Coding"?
I 'code' writing Fortran either in BBEdit or an IDE. I never have problems with any sort of 'lag'.
Are we talking about an interpreted system, like Basic, Java or the like?
What language are we talking about, what programming environment (IDE) and what sort of program?
And yes, turn off that Bl**dy Chrome and Anti-Virus. Every time you run a build, it will see it as a new application and scan it.
It's like taking a small truck, filling the tray with 5 tons of bricks, and then complaining that it has no acceleration.
I 'code' writing Fortran either in BBEdit or an IDE. I never have problems with any sort of 'lag'.
Are we talking about an interpreted system, like Basic, Java or the like?
What language are we talking about, what programming environment (IDE) and what sort of program?
And yes, turn off that Bl**dy Chrome and Anti-Virus. Every time you run a build, it will see it as a new application and scan it.
It's like taking a small truck, filling the tray with 5 tons of bricks, and then complaining that it has no acceleration.
Seriously. I bought a laptop, and was planning on doing light programming, so I got it with 8gb. Had I been using it professionally, or on heavier projects, I absolutely would have bought the 16gb model.
That was 7 years ago.
16 GB as base would be great, now, as you can tell by this very thread, some people, enthusiast, techies, developers, decided to jump onboard with the most basic, lower-end of the Mac transition to ARM machines, we were eager to test the new architecture and all the advancements that have come with it.
But, have a hard look at the current state of the transition, all the mid-range and higher-end configurations are still on Intel, some developers in this thread didn't even wait for the 16GB option to ship, in other words, the 8GB M1's are perfectly capable and excel for what the lower-end of the Mac line has always been about: writers, editors, media consumption and light media creation, photo editing, etc.
There's a reason the higher-end Mac Mini is still on Intel, as is the entire upper-half of the line-up, 16 GB should be the minimum you choose when configuring M1's, better yet, wait a few months for the transition to be completed if you will use the machine to make a living, then you can buy what any developer using multiple VM's, simulators, browsers would do, pick a mid-upper range M1X / M2 machine with the amount of RAM you please.
Apple decided to start from the bottom, a Celeron/i3/i5 Intel 8GB machine wouldnt fare any better, and most probably a lot worse in every metric.
But, have a hard look at the current state of the transition, all the mid-range and higher-end configurations are still on Intel, some developers in this thread didn't even wait for the 16GB option to ship, in other words, the 8GB M1's are perfectly capable and excel for what the lower-end of the Mac line has always been about: writers, editors, media consumption and light media creation, photo editing, etc.
There's a reason the higher-end Mac Mini is still on Intel, as is the entire upper-half of the line-up, 16 GB should be the minimum you choose when configuring M1's, better yet, wait a few months for the transition to be completed if you will use the machine to make a living, then you can buy what any developer using multiple VM's, simulators, browsers would do, pick a mid-upper range M1X / M2 machine with the amount of RAM you please.
Apple decided to start from the bottom, a Celeron/i3/i5 Intel 8GB machine wouldnt fare any better, and most probably a lot worse in every metric.
I have to agree with you in that Coding is kinda a very blanket statement. The problem is usually having a lot of tools that you need open and running when you are editing. For example, if you are running a monitor(which does use ram because GPU and CPU are shared) with VScode, a terminal, discord for working with team members(or slack), chrome for development with at least a few stack overflow tabs, probably some remote machine may be open with VNC or just SSH and actively emptying and trying your website out in different form factors and running test scripts to see if new changes are running well you can run into problems with ram very quickly. These lead to slowdowns so large that I just switched computers for editing and am just editing on a super old mac which can be annoying but at least its consistently slower and not GOD AWFUL slow for like 10% of the time.
Another thing about M1 is the lack of display outputs. I don't know if this is true for others but when developing I really prefer to use larger monitors to have everything I need at a glance without always switching. The single-monitor limitation kinda sucks. I really wanted to love this machine but the slowdowns of an 8gb air are enough to make the beefy CPU just feel like unpolished junk.