This right here. Why have all that ram if the system can't use it? As the poster I quoted mentioned, memory pressure is what you care about.
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.
M3 Max MBP Excessive RAM Utilization
- Thread starter Mity
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
This right here. Why have all that ram if the system can't use it? As the poster I quoted mentioned, memory pressure is what you care about.
not a noteworthy complaint/issue imo. why pay for all the ram only to underuse it? lol
if anything im more worried about memory pressure/swap memory as that would poke the internal ssd. which is why most would spec up ram.
if anything im more worried about memory pressure/swap memory as that would poke the internal ssd. which is why most would spec up ram.
I think one should try to find out what is RAM (as in Intel/AMD computers) and what is Apple's unified memory, and how that unified memory works in Silicon M chips. I saw an interesting video yesterday.
The video is not a good benchmark, and it doesn't explain anything about unified memory. The Mac Pro has more RAM, but the MacBook Air has a faster SSD and faster CPU cores. What exactly is being measured?
How about giving the Mac Pro an equally fast SSD? Or running the test twice so that the repetition on the Mac Pro has everything come from the buffer cache? Are the machines even running the same OS version?
Unified memory is nothing new. Apple's implementation is a bit more flexible, but with the same main advantage (passing data without copying) and disadvantage (the bandwidth is shared) it had decades ago.
I didn't say that, only that I saw an interesting video, how 8GB of Apple's unified memory works with a heavy usage. I was searching for why Apple is still making 8GB MacBooks, so was also looking for how unified memory works. It looks like 8GB unified memory can take a lot!
In other words, it is not the same as the 'old' 8GB RAM, but works even better than 'old' 16GB RAM (or more).
There surely must be many more such videos.
Last edited:
And I'm saying that without taking into consideration the SSD and CPU speed the results are pretty worthless. You can't just measure performance, change multiple things, measure performance again, and then attribute the performance difference to one specific change. A meaningful comparison is hard. Why not use two machines with the same amount of RAM and compare the number of page-outs over the whole test run? Are ARM binaries on average smaller than Intel binaries? Just two things I'd look into beyond what the video does.
It is just a video by someone. All that guy wanted to prove is, I assume, that 8GB unified memory in the M chip series pretty good at carrying heavy loads. He was actually using a M1 MBA. So, the 8GB M2 15" MBA is quite good enough for small office work, which includes some slight photo editing, web page creation and such work. The 15" M3 MBA, I suppose comes with 16GB unified memory.
That guy did a stress test with the following,
I'm not going to edit videos, open 800 photos, run Chrome web browser at all, open 16 docs each Pages and Numbers, or won't use Premiere Project, DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop, launch News, Music, or TV at the same time. Sure, I'd be opening quite a few Safari tabs, that I use an external monitor keep tract of them, sometimes few Excel sheets, some few Word docs (they can be also opened in the web in Safari), lot of work with Preview, editing images and pdfs, but won't be doing them at the same time.
At the moment, I'm using an Intel 15" MBP, (which has MS Office LTSC 2021, that will not work in a Silicon Mac) the memory pressure stays in the green all the time, more or less as below.
I'm thinking of buying a 8GB M2 15" MBA, for some unopened ones (unsold ones) are available at very good prices. My present Intel 15" MBP doesn't allow me to do that yet, as it is refusing to die. 😊
Here's the same guy giving a torture test to his M1 MBA.
Last edited:
That point is well made. A MacBook Air with only 8GB RAM performs surprisingly well under heavy load. It's the conclusions that go beyond that point that are too far fetched. I would expect the faster SSD to play a large part, but I haven't tested it so I can't say more than "I expect".
Some posters are so weird. Why buy so much extra ram and then get upset that OSX utilizes it? This is how OSX works! Give it more RAM, it will use it, give it less RAM, it’ll still use it plus SWAP.
I have a 15 with 8 GIGs, and it does fine. It does dip into ‘yellow’ territory, but rarely slows down. You’d have to watch process monitor to really notice it.
What might be the apps you are using (running at the same time) when the "15 with 8 GIGs" dip into ‘yellow’ territory?