Given that the current macOS tahoe runs perfectly fine on 8 gb of ram (same with iPadOS) 16 is plenty of a buffer.
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Vision Pro With M5 Chip Still Has 16GB of RAM, Ships With New Charger
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AI workflows will eat up 8gb of RAM to start with, so it's closer to 8gb of RAM, a downgrade compared to the M2 version that doesn't have AI.
Exactly! RAM is fairly cheap these days. There's no reason they couldn't have added a little more RAM to a $3500 device. Even if a device costs a little more up front, I'd still rather have more RAM than less for future-proofing.
This is actually supporting the point for more RAM (longevity).
You have to remember this runs a modified version of iPadOS which runs perfectly fine on 6gb of RAM
No reason to future proof a product that is dead on arrival!
Tahoe itself runs fine. Just don't try to do much with the Mac.
What are you talking about? Like seriously do you have firsthand examples?
Yes. I abandoned a M1 with 8GB because performance was awful due to paging. I'm on a MBP with 18GB and it's an entirely different experience.
I also was living with an M1 8GB (MBA) and don't miss it.
The AVP has a much faster SSD than the M1 and VisionOS. I have 64 gb of ram on my M4 Max Studio and regularly have several gigs of swap/paging. Don't even feel it.
Plus once again VisionOS is a derivative of iPadOS which runs on way weaker hardware and memory. Even the new iPad Pros only have 12 gb of RAM with the maxed out version at 16 gb.
There are so many apples and oranges in this reply, I don't know where to start.
I think the produce section makes the most sense.
This effectively kills off whatever microscopic temptation I still had to upgrade from the M2 Vision Pro as it basically dismantles the argument that the M5 model will receive "groundbreaking" changes down the road that the M2 won't.
Sure, the M5 will certainly get some probably big improvements in time that I won't, but it's the stuff that requires more RAM that I'd be concerned with.
Extremely happy to get the new Dual Knit band!
Sure, the M5 will certainly get some probably big improvements in time that I won't, but it's the stuff that requires more RAM that I'd be concerned with.
Extremely happy to get the new Dual Knit band!
In all seriousness, why the heck Apple keeps insisting iOS strategy of "lets kill the app instead of page out inactive pages" for devices like iPad Pro and Vision Pro? This made sense for early iPhones with pretty constrained storage, but todays top devices are way better than any Mac just a few years ago.
A mac from 20 years ago still manages memory better than iPad Pro M5 — no process is randomly terminated when the memory pressure builds up. A 10 year old Mac can access complex Google Docs and Figma (with Chrome and Safari) better than the latest iPad Pro M5 or Vision Pro M5 due to not killing the tab if it goes over arbitrary unpublished limit that is just couple of hundred MB. For reference, opening a 40 slide deck with some graphics on Google Slides often consumes 1GB and complex Figma designs run in several GB range.
Yes, BUT:
- High res AR/VR device need to allocate a significant amount of memory to textures even before the first app is opened
- Mac pages out inactive memory pages when there is memory pressure. visionOS, iOS, and iPadOS instead just terminate the app without a warning.
- Safari has a per tab RAM limits that is order of magnitude lower than system RAM
Add me to the list. I had a M1 Air with 8GB. If I had more than a web browser (with 5-10 tabs) and one or two other apps open (like Music, Discord for example), it would beachball occasionally and noticeably slow down due to memory pressure being high. I always had to keep everything to a minimum to keep below the ram limit to prevent swap and restart the computer at least once a week at least.
Since then I upgraded to a MBP M1 Max with 64GB of RAM (yeah a bit over kill with ram) and it's been a relief that I can actually have stuff open now without any slowdowns.
My Mom was another one who had an M1 Air with 8GB. She has a ton of tabs open at a time regularly and she'd get it to a point where it would actually freeze from over flowing page swapping. She has a MBA M2 16GB now and she hasn't had issues at all and still uses it identically.