Well, it is the "latest" at Apple, but how far had Intel (and AMD) had gone forward since 1st M1 until latest M3? The last Intel Mac was with an i9 (9th gen), just before the M1 arrived. Now there's the latest M3, Intel has 14th gen processors, all with AI. Intel (and AMD) gets umpteen feedback from hundreds of computer manufacturers in the world, but who'd give performance feedback to Apple?
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16GB usage clarification and longevity
- Thread starter macman4789
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I had to piggyback off your post, just for the great Memory layout.
Base M1 MBA (Another user is also logged in with probably another 12 apps running - I don't know where that user's stuff goes when I'm logged in: cache? Compressed? Swap?)
safari - 6 tabs, including Google and Macrumors (both RAM hogs)
Apple Music app open
Mail app open
Messages open
Calendar open
Reminders open
Photos open
Apple maps open
Podcasts open
MSFT Edge (7 tabs)
Podcasts open
Numbers open
(I'm just going by whatever apps come up with Command+tab.)
8GB physical memory
7.12GB used
856MB cached
1.50GB app memory
1.9GB wired memory
3.3GB compressed memory
3.9GB Swapped
Memory pressure is yellow.
The machine is buttery smooth. I think I'm very squarely in the "The usual ‘casual/amateur/typical’ MBA user." camp the OP mentioned, and the kind of person for whom Apple makes the base MBA models.
Wait, that can’t be right. According to the many self proclaimed experts, with only 8GB of memory, the machine should be crawling, beach balls often, the machine almost trembling under the load, the SSD close to failing from swap use. /sarc
The real world is much more realistic than benchmarks and unfounded guesses.
Lol, I appreciate the pithy reply. I just hope my post will help someone who might be trying to decide what to buy.
(E.g. the only photo/video editing I do is in the Photos app, hence why it's open. However, I do regularly rotate between Safari/Chrome/Edge as web browsers. This MBA is almost 3 years old, too. Maybe the SSD will fail sometime?)
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What exactly was done here? What tabs? W/o more info this is not useful at all.
What happens if you closeI had to piggyback off your post, just for the great Memory layout.
Base M1 MBA (Another user is also logged in with probably another 12 apps running - I don't know where that user's stuff goes when I'm logged in: cache? Compressed? Swap?)
safari - 6 tabs, including Google and Macrumors (both RAM hogs)
Apple Music app open
Mail app open
Messages open
Calendar open
Reminders open
Photos open
Apple maps open
Podcasts open
MSFT Edge (7 tabs)
Podcasts open
Numbers open
(I'm just going by whatever apps come up with Command+tab.)
8GB physical memory
7.12GB used
856MB cached
1.50GB app memory
1.9GB wired memory
3.3GB compressed memory
3.9GB Swapped
Memory pressure is yellow.
The machine is buttery smooth. I think I'm very squarely in the "The usual ‘casual/amateur/typical’ MBA user." camp the OP mentioned, and the kind of person for whom Apple makes the base MBA models.
- edge (safari is enough)
- apple maps (after checking out something you can close it)
- photos (after editing your photos you can close it)
- Closing 3 Safari Tabs (Too many tabs will bring you out of focus)
- closing potcast (or do you listen to music and potcasts at the same time?)
- Close everything from the other user (Don’t think that multi user is common for the average user)
Now you can work focused on your numbers app while listening to music. Please give feedback about your Ram usage.
I doubt anyone thought that with the M1, Apple were making a forward step nobody else could catch up with. Chip design doesn't work that way, and Apple wouldn't have expected it to. All that Apple Silicon has done is produce a simple developmental progression, much the same as we've seen a dozen or so times before.
At to feedback - I'm not sure what your point is, because if you are assuming Apple don't get any, I think you're rather missed the point. They can't get feedback on products that don't exist, and I'd bet the feedback they do get from the M series processors has been widely positive. Plus, Intel? Really? At least Apple have actual customers.
Lightroom is an 8Gb minimum app, so the user in this case is setting the thing up to fail, since Lightroom doesn't relinquish RAM it doesn't need.
If it's the review I recall, there were dozens of browser tabs open, and dozens of RAM images open in Lightroom too. Plus a few other background tasks - all at the same time.
About as fair and balanced as a test as dumping a 4-door Chevy in a Formula One race, and complaining it can't keep up, particularly since nobody actually suggested that an 8Gb MBA was the right system for a Lightroom user.
Lightroom is an 8Gb minimum app because photo data is magically smaller, just because you have an Apple logo. The app doesn't hold on to ram it doesn't need, why would it do that, that would be a memory leak.
The test is simple, 20 tabs open, then export 50 high res photos in lightroom. Without the tabs open, it performs almost as fast with 8GB. As soon you make apps compete for memory, it slows to a crawl.
Thank you all for the replies, your experiences have been very insightful. Sharing your typical uses and the memory pressure is really showing how efficient MacOS handles RAM usage and shows how far 16GB can go even with heavy workloads!
A couple of questions:
Can anyone explain what cached memory is? e.g. where does it go? Is it cached on the SSD?
An observation I’ve made from this, (probably obvious to many of you) is that it seems the more Apple native apps used the further the RAM seems to go… I assume this is optimisation etc but worth noting to someone who is maybe buying a base spec and will generally only use Safari, Photos, Apple Music etc.
A couple of questions:
Can anyone explain what cached memory is? e.g. where does it go? Is it cached on the SSD?
An observation I’ve made from this, (probably obvious to many of you) is that it seems the more Apple native apps used the further the RAM seems to go… I assume this is optimisation etc but worth noting to someone who is maybe buying a base spec and will generally only use Safari, Photos, Apple Music etc.
I like 'magically', but actually, Lightroom runs at a fraction over 4Gb (in my 8Gb system) with no images open. With 50 RAW images as the reviewer had open.... well, I don't know because there seemed no point as isn't intended for that use on this kind of system.
The only real point (and which my response was specifically aimed at) was that Lightroom is not intended for use on an 8Gb MacBook Air. Even then, in reality it works - the user just has to not be a complete idiot in order to prove it doesn't.
Yeah and those models of retina MBPs... I think the iGPU units were either underpowered or throttled. My (loaded) 13" late-2013 MBP (16GB RAM and 1TB SSD) never really performed all that great. Maybe the biggest disappointment of an Apple purchase I've ever had. Maybe it would have been better if I had gotten the 15" with the dedicated GPU.
Still, I held on to that machine until the 2018 Mac minis came out, which was immediately so much better. I can't imagine your 2013 still handling any of that stuff well today - 11 years old at this point, Mavericks was probably pre-installed on that thing!!
Hmm… try once more… perhaps read before responding? I said no such thing…
but instead of just trolling, let me spell it out: 8Gb is 1GB… thus categorically not 8GB
Agreed. I used Lightroom on an 8GB 2015 Macbook Pro 13” for many years and it was quite usable. I’m just an amateur, not paid, and some of my content was too/from NAS, so speed wasn’t critical. But when the time came for a replacement I went with 16GB knowing that with Lightroom it would be worthwhile. I could have got by with 8GB, but 16GB gives some extra headroom if you know you need it.
It always pays to spend a bit of time to understand how you’d use a machine before purchasing.
I have the 15” with the dedicated GPU, it was plenty capable when new but started to suffer around 2020 and truly became useless this year. Stuffed it in my closet and picked up a Mac Studio. Now it feels like I’m taking my McLaren grocery shopping
At this stage of my life, my iPad Pro with MK handles my mobile tasks better, and it’s fun to use - something about Face ID and poking your laptop screen.
Yeah I need to just give it to apple, the time to invest in the battery was 4y ago. For 3-400 bucks you can get used Silicon MBA now which would be a screamer comparatively.
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Did you try cleaning the fans? This eventually happens, when they are filled with dust. The system then throttles the CPU to prevent overheating.
True, but even the base default MacBook Air M1 is still plenty for office computing. It's great that for once since I don't know when, I find that all the Macs on the lineup are powerful.
I don’t understand this graphic. What task was the machine trying to do. Catch edits twenty high res photos?
I would render 4K 8 minute movies and barely saw a significant difference in times between 8&16gb ram setups
If that’s MaxTech, please use anyone but them. They are not to be trusted. Their testing is hardly scientific and prone to error and bias. They buy houses and cars based on how much outrage they can manufacture each product release cycle.
EDIT: ArtIsRight on Youtube is a credible photographer and Mac hardware tester. This video shows that in a 1000 photo export test in Lightroom Classic, the 8 GB model is half the processing speed of the 16 GB model, so 2x slower.
Which is significant and why I recommend at least 16 GB for anyone doing creative output. So I agree with you overall. But note that its 2x slower and not 5x slower like MaxTech is saying.
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I think that screenshot (if correct) is deceptive without the right context. Basically macOS + GPU needs 2 GB, so an 8 GB Mac only has 6 GB of available memory, and a 16 GB Mac has 14 GB of available memory—for apps to use. 20 tabs open in Chrome/Safari takes up approximately 2.5 GB of RAM. That means the 8 GB Mac now has only 3.5 GB of available memory left and the 16 GB Mac has 11.5 GB of available memory left. If you then open up Lightroom and perform a large export that saturates RAM, its going to be much slower on the Mac that only has 3.5 GB of available memory compared to the Mac with 11.5 GB of available memory because that's 3x more available memory.
If testing was done to an equal and scientific standard and results are accurate, the 8 GB Mac is 5x slower. While I can accept that result (I'm no fan of 8 GB defaults) that feels deceptive to use in a debate if we're not explaining the context. By understanding the context, we can infer that the solution for anyone with an 8 GB Mac is to close the browser so that Lightroom can have all available RAM, in which case the 8 GB Mac is up to 2x slower in a large Lightroom export (as seen in the video results above)—but not 5x slower.
And yeah, 2x slower is bad, but not 5x bad. And what is bad is relative. A person who exports once per day, or only works on Lightroom projects occasionally because its a hobby or occasional job task maybe doesn't care if its 2x slower. A person who exports 30 times per day should care.
I do think theres education value in knowing that "hey, if you're web browsing during an export, and you bought the lowest RAM config, your exports are going to be slow so maybe get the 16 GB model"—but it really should be explained that its not simply 5x slower. I mean how deceptive would it be to open 100 Chrome tabs and say, "Look how slow the 8 GB model is at Lightroom!"?
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Nope but a few folks just brought that up to me in this thread, I bet it would make a difference, I’m sure that’s what’s happening now that I think about it.
Exactly, line up is all screamers.
Just close the computer completely, than you’ll be 100% in focus… 🤦♂️
In simple terms, the operating system's buffer cache is a portion of RAM to keep data that was recently accessed on any HDD or SSD.
As long as there is free RAM any data that any application ever uses will be stored there, which means that reading the same data again is very fast because it's already in RAM.
Once the physical RAM is all used shrinking the buffer cache is one of the things the operating system does to make more RAM available to applications that are requesting it.
When data is thrown out of the buffer cache and an application then does need it again then it has to be read from the HDD or SSD again, which is slower.
Other things the operating system can do to free up some RAM is throw away read-only pages from demand-paged executables and libraries, compress memory, write some memory pages to the swap file (paging), and if things are really bad write entire running applications to the swap file and suspend them (swapping).
I would assume that is because Apple shares more (operating system included) libraries across its applications. Shared libraries only need to be in RAM once even when used by multiple applications at the same time. On the other hand, code isn't usually what makes applications use huge amounts of RAM.