Disappointing performance and memory issues M1 Macbook Air

[dmccloud]

I will agree with him that the unified memory architecture is more efficient, however the amount of efficiency is grossly over exagerated.

The issue with the UMA to "traditional" memory comparison (and to a larger extent the M1 to x86 comparison as a whole) is that there is no real way to quantify how much of a difference UMA makes compared to a traditional memory setup. It's not just that the RAM is on the SoC instead of on the other end of the system bus, but also the fact that the RAM is not partitioned. On any x86-based system with an iGPU, part of that system RAM is partitioned off for graphics. So if there is data that both the CPU and GPU have to work on, it is copied twice (once per partition), then the data is manipulated as needed and passed back through the system bus (at which point the two data sets are compiled into a unified set). It actually is at a minimum 2x the work of a unified architecture. With UMA, the data is copied to the system RAM once, and both the GPU and CPU can access that simultaneously. This speeds up the process in two ways: the system no longer has to pass data back and forth through the system bus, and since the CPU and GPU can handle the data simultaneously, there is no need to compile two versions of the same data into one unit.

The other factor that plays into the overall performance of the M1 is the speed of the SSDs Apple is now using. They are fast enough (near-DDR4 speeds) that using the swap file has a very minute impact on performance. In a way it's ironic that at the same time Intel is boosting core clock speeds of their CPUs to create the illusion of improved performance, Apple is boosting data transfer speeds on both the RAM and storage sides of the equation and achieving comparable (if not superior) performance to x86 systems at a lower clock speed, while also using significantly less battery in the process.

While the M1's RAM setup is definitely more efficient than the traditional model, it's hard to quantify that efficiency in terms of actual performance. For some apps, 8GB in the M1 may work similarly to 12 GB in an x86 machine. For other apps, that 8GB in the M1 could work identically to 8GB in an x86 machine. This variable is really dependent on how the app was coded to handle both RAM and swap space.

 

[Joelist]

Isn't slack M1 native? It shows as "Apple" architecture in activity monitor for me.

I need to check - when I installed it it wasn’t but they may have since released an AS update.

 

[OldCorpse]

FWIW, the apparent Safari & Apple TV+ combo memory leak I’ve written about previously, is still present in BS 11.2, sadly, and yes, after a time, the streaming still collapses due to lack of memory. Maybe it’ll get fixed in 11.3 /shrug/.

 

[retta283]

FWIW, the apparent Safari & Apple TV+ combo memory leak I’ve written about previously, is still present in BS 11.2, sadly, and yes, after a time, the streaming still collapses due to lack of memory. Maybe it’ll get fixed in 11.3 /shrug/.

notice this as well under 11.2 still. I haven't had any outright crashes, how far do you get before the stream fails?

 

[trifid]

8gb = planned obsolescence

I remember my Mac Mini 2.3 ghz i5 from 2011 came with just 2gb of RAM, which is really sinful from Apple to do that. Eventually it was slow as hell due to each macOS RAM-hungry update. Luckily I was able to upgrade it and got many more years of life out of it.

With soldered or "integrated" RAM, Apple is guaranteeing planned obsolescence, I really wished Cook would feel as passionate against this as he is with the privacy stuff.

EDIT: I remember there was also a Macbook Air 2011 with 2gb soldered ram, which is completely useless nowadays. It's a really interesting comparison to my 2011 Mac Mini which I was able to resurrect with a RAM upgrade.

Pure and simple planned obsolescence... all because of 1mm extra thinness.

Yes I'm passionate about this BS.

 

[Zazoh]

8gb = planned obsolescence

I remember my Mac Mini 2.3 ghz i5 from 2011 came with just 2gb of RAM, which is really sinful from Apple to do that. Eventually it was slow as hell due to each macOS RAM-hungry update. Luckily I was able to upgrade it and got many more years of life out of it.

With soldered or "integrated" RAM, Apple is guaranteeing planned obsolescence, I really wished Cook would feel as passionate against this as he is with the privacy stuff.

EDIT: I remember there was also a Macbook Air 2011 with 2gb soldered ram, which is completely useless nowadays. It's a really interesting comparison to my 2011 Mac Mini which I was able to resurrect with a RAM upgrade.

Pure and simple planned obsolescence... all because of 1mm extra thinness.

Yes I'm passionate about this BS.

Apple became the first company to be worth $2 Trillion Dollars. Everything is planned and planned well. They know exactly what they are doing, they don't apologize and don't explain.

That being said, computers are disposable consumables. Expenses not investments. Buy Cheap, get out early, trade and repeat.

 

[OldCorpse]

notice this as well under 11.2 still. I haven't had any outright crashes, how far do you get before the stream fails?

Crashes - depends, usually it takes awhile, like over an hour. But I’ve had it happen sooner, like 40 minutes. But the warning message appears pretty fast, like within 20-30 minutes of starting the streaming of AppleTV+ content. What amazes me is that f.ex. HBO Max streaming on Safari doesn’t have this problem. But Apple TV+ is an Apple product, and is the worst in this respect.

The other thing - although this I am not sure about - is that streaming drains the battery on my MBP pretty fast, and I feel (but am not sure!) that Apple TV+ drains faster. This however, I have not verified with hard data, so I am not going to make any strong claims. Just a heads up. Otherwise, the battery life is awesome, particularly in the sleeping state. I wasn’t using the MBP for a couple of days and it literally didn’t drain the battery by even 1% - amazing! and completely different from my windows laptops.

 

[mi7chy]

Crashes - depends, usually it takes awhile, like over an hour. But I’ve had it happen sooner, like 40 minutes. But the warning message appears pretty fast, like within 20-30 minutes of starting the streaming of AppleTV+ content. What amazes me is that f.ex. HBO Max streaming on Safari doesn’t have this problem. But Apple TV+ is an Apple product, and is the worst in this respect.

The other thing - although this I am not sure about - is that streaming drains the battery on my MBP pretty fast, and I feel (but am not sure!) that Apple TV+ drains faster. This however, I have not verified with hard data, so I am not going to make any strong claims. Just a heads up. Otherwise, the battery life is awesome, particularly in the sleeping state. I wasn’t using the MBP for a couple of days and it literally didn’t drain the battery by even 1% - amazing! and completely different from my windows laptops.

Got around to testing Apple TV+ and Chrome browser with one tab over the weekend. What I'm seeing on MBA M1 16GB is upon running Apple TV+ 'memory used' jumps to near 8GB. Playing a stream causes it to peak up to 8.7GB then once the stream is done it drops down to 8.3GB. Seems like it's buffering the stream in memory then releases it when done. Memory usage rose from 8.3GB initially to 8.7GB after playing six episodes back to back or about six hours worth (increasing but too soon to categorize as memory leak). CPU utilization was in the low single digit and battery consumption at ~6% per hour at ~40% brightness.

Only explanation I can think of for why streaming battery consumption is worse for some is possibly due to having a device with only 8GB, running out of memory and swapping to storage where it consumes more power. To tell if that's the case take note of your disk data written before and after streaming. Mine was 2.5GB disk data written after watching ~12GB worth of streams if downloaded so it's not swapping to disk.

Would like to see if anyone experiencing this on 8GB device sees improvement after trading up to 16GB.

 

[Lræc]

I got my Macbook Pro last week and ran into many problems with 11.2.3. Network drops, freezing OS, sleep/wakeup with kernel panic, external display was not working properly, external soundcard had stuttering sound, ect.
With 11.3 Beta 8 it is now useable. I never had so many problems with a new Apple product. I personly think the MacOS developers did a bad job at their home offices. How can you release such a buggy, untested, OS?

 

[pshufd]

I got my Macbook Pro last week and ran into many problems with 11.2.3. Network drops, freezing OS, sleep/wakeup with kernel panic, external display was not working properly, external soundcard had stuttering sound, ect.
With 11.3 Beta 8 it is now useable. I never had so many problems with a new Apple product. I personly think the MacOS developers did a bad job at their home offices. How can you release such a buggy, untested, OS?

I'm not a fan of Big Sur on Intel. Which is why I'm on Mojave (one system is on High Sierra because that's the last supported version). But I've used the M1 for basic things and I think that it's great for basic stuff. I do my real work on a bit desktop and I'd expect to do it on a well-configured Apple Silicon model; hopefully they release one tomorrow. I would like to see a 14 or 16 inch MacBook Pro or a big iMac. I'm expecting to see a small iMac launched and not really expecting any other Macs.

 

[jdb8167]

I got my Macbook Pro last week and ran into many problems with 11.2.3. Network drops, freezing OS, sleep/wakeup with kernel panic, external display was not working properly, external soundcard had stuttering sound, ect.
With 11.3 Beta 8 it is now useable. I never had so many problems with a new Apple product. I personly think the MacOS developers did a bad job at their home offices. How can you release such a buggy, untested, OS?

New Operating System and new SoC (both CPU and GPU) means lots of things can go wrong. If the problems you are seeing aren't something you can deal with you probably shouldn't be an early adopter. I realize that Apple doesn't make a distinction but they should. Things should get better rapidly now as they work through the backlog of bugs.

Having said that, I am surprised at some to the problems that slipped through to release. For example, the many problems with external displays. That doesn't seem to be particularly dependent on the OS or the SoC. It's really just a QA problem with a lab with a large number of third-party displays. Maybe this one can be put down to no access to a QA lab because of quarantine.

 

[Lræc]

But than don‘t name it Macbook Pro! It is a professional notebook and I use it with all possibilities. I like the M1, but why is it so difficult to test the system with some possible external devices, before you release the OS?

 

[Toutou]

why is it so difficult to test the system with some possible external devices, before you release the OS?

They did test the machine with lots of different accessories and their pre-production machines spent gazillions of hours running all kinds of software in many different configurations.
That's why only a tiny minority of users is experiencing any problems, and the overwhelming majority are happy with their M1 Macs (just like I am with my Air workhorse that runs like a dream, 10 hours a day, every day).

The thing is, the amount of all possible accessories and all possible combinations of software, drivers and states the OS can be in is so mind-blowingly high, that it's literally impossible to release a product that would be entirely bug-free.

 

[pshufd]

But than don‘t name it Macbook Pro! It is a professional notebook and I use it with all possibilities. I like the M1, but why is it so difficult to test the system with some possible external devices, before you release the OS?

It's their low-end MacBook Pro and I think that it's a much better system than the machine that it replaced. People used to slow systems likely consider it a revelation while those of us with monstrous systems don't think so as much. We aren't really the mainstream customer.

 

[pshufd]

They did test the machine with lots of different accessories and their pre-production machines spent gazillions of hours running all kinds of software in many different configurations.
That's why only a tiny minority of users is experiencing any problems, and the overwhelming majority are happy with their M1 Macs (just like I am with my Air workhorse that runs like a dream, 10 hours a day, every day).

The thing is, the amount of all possible accessories and all possible combinations of software, drivers and states the OS can be in is so mind-blowingly high, that it's literally impossible to release a product that would be entirely bug-free.

Their approach to beta testing is part of the issue as well. They want to keep everything secret so they can't do the kind of field test where you provide systems and software to testers (that agree to do a given amount of testing or they lose their status to test in the future).

 

[darngooddesign]

Their approach to beta testing is part of the issue as well. They want to keep everything secret so they can't do the kind of field test where you provide systems and software to testers (that agree to do a given amount of testing or they lose their status to test in the future).

I mean... MR published a story about how the new iPP might be 5mm thicker so the simple fact is that Apple has to be secretive about their hardware and software.

 

[pshufd]

I mean... MR published a story about how the new iPP might be 5mm thicker so the simple fact is that Apple has to be secretive about their hardware and software.

In the really old days, beta testers honored their commitment to secrecy. You didn't have the internet either so you didn't have the instantaneous propagation of news.

 

[darngooddesign]

In the really old days, beta testers honored their commitment to secrecy. You didn't have the internet either so you didn't have the instantaneous propagation of news.

The infamous iPhone 4 reception issue, which mine had, was caused by Apple only testing it in a case so no one in the wild noticed it was a new iPhone design.

 

[WillGranzier]

For everyone that writes on this forum telling us how our work load is to much for 8GB of ram..... this machine is a pile of poo.... A 2014 MACBOOK AIR with 4GB of ram can do what this machine could never dream of doing. How the hell do you run out of Ram using 2 or 3 apps...... Word, Adobe reader and Safari ? My Gigabyte Netbook with 2 GB of memory outdoes that.. Its pointless having a blazing fast processor in the class, but you can hardly get any work done

 

[pshufd]

For everyone that writes on this forum telling us how our work load is to much for 8GB of ram..... thus machine is a pile of poo.... A 2014 MACBOOK AIR with 4GB of ram can do what this machine could dream of. How the hell do you run out of Ram using 2 or 3 apps...... Word, Adobe reader and Safari ? My Gigabyte Netbook with 2 GB of memory outdoes that..

My Late 2009 iMac has 16 GB of RAM. So do my 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pros. This is my production system. It's nice to know that you'll never swap.

 

[WillGranzier]

While I do agree that 8 gigs of RAM is simply 8 gigs of RAM and the "ooh but it's more like 323213 GB on x86" raving is mostly BS, I also think that what you were doing should NOT be enough to bring the machine down. I have a 2013 machine with 4 GB of RAM that works just fine for my GF with two browsers and other apps open. It's not lightning fast and swaps a lot, but it certainly doesn't crash.

This is absolutely not what I'm seeing with my Air, I have it connected to a 4K display and it's snappy and smooth, even in Firefox and with UI heavy pages.
I'd maybe investigate further, there seems to be something off about the machine. I don't know how computer-savvy your wife is, so I'm not pointing fingers, maybe the hw is a lemon. Or maybe it's just a memory

My Late 2009 iMac has 16 GB of RAM. So do my 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pros. This is my production system. It's nice to know that you'll never swap.


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I agree.... Weird thing is my 2019 MBP i5 and my 2019 Mac mini i7 both have 8gigs of ram.... I run FCPX, with Google suite, Photoshop, and Safari at the same time while editing 4K video.... Never had this issue. My 5K iMac has 64 Gigs of Ram and that just clunks along. Surely one could expect more from Apple with the M1.... At least get it to a point where it works at least without wanting to fail when you run 2 programs

 

[pshufd]

I agree.... Weird thing is my 2019 MBP i5 and my 2019 Mac mini i7 both have 8gigs of ram.... I run FCPX, with Google suite, Photoshop, and Safari at the same time while editing 4K video.... Never had this issue. My 5K iMac has 64 Gigs of Ram and that just clunks along. Sure one could expect more from Apple with the M1.... At least get it to a point where it works at least without wanting to fail when you run 2 programs

I don't do video editing. I do a lot of market analytics using Think or Swim and Active Trader Pro. I also run a couple of virtual machines.

My CPU usually runs around 26-33 degrees and my GPU around 39-43 degrees. There's a massive air cooler on the CPU and five case fans keeping everything running cool. This is also driving 3x4K and 1xQHD.

 

[jdb8167]

For everyone that writes on this forum telling us how our work load is to much for 8GB of ram..... this machine is a pile of poo.... A 2014 MACBOOK AIR with 4GB of ram can do what this machine could never dream of doing. How the hell do you run out of Ram using 2 or 3 apps...... Word, Adobe reader and Safari ? My Gigabyte Netbook with 2 GB of memory outdoes that.. Its pointless having a blazing fast processor in the class, but you can hardly get any work done

I'm pretty sure that if you are running 11.4 and that happens frequently (hell, even infrequently), Apple would like to know about it. Have you contacted them? I guarantee that is not normal for macOS on any modern Mac.

 

[MrGunny94]

8GB is fine especially if you using M1 optimised apps with native support... However if you juggle around with Teams and a couple of nasty Rosetta 2 Electron apps like Discord you will end up without memory and battery lol.\

Check below my Memory usage, as you can see if it wasn't for Teams, HDB Studio I would be fine.

 

[Budgiemac]

Honestly, i been using my 16 gb version Macbook pro and I'm getting spectacular performance. I use Ableton Live I movie garage band many many tabs open, youtube playing.. Not had one instance where my memory was full.