Comment by MYEUHD
11 hours ago
You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)
Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.
Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open
Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."
I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.
Indeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?"
Because OoM errors are oh so fun.
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do you also say that about hdd space? about money in the bank?
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because memory access performance is not O(1) but depends on the size of what's in memory (https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html). Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.
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No you don't work just fine with all that or you aren't doing much.
Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.
Just rust plugin in vs code uses 3gb of ram.
Add a browser, and you are already over 8GB.
> Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.
Just how quickly do you think the SSDs will die? Because there are a lot of 8GB M1 machines out there that have been getting daily use for five years, mostly with 256GB or 512GB storage configs. When do you expect them to fail?
In macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files"
I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.
In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
When you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about.
On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.
You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.
In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)
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Yes, the person you are replying to has explained that.
The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.
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How do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.
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I remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch just precaching commonly used programs to give better application startup times.
Ha, wasn't it windows vista that allowed you to plug an SD card to use for swap space/fake ram?
I found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.
After several days of usage, Activity Monitor will usually shows that "WindowServer" is using 6 GB of RAM.
Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If your machine isn't reporting memory pressure and/or the user isn't experiencing pageouts, then the machine is well-suited to the user's workload.
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Uptime of 13 days. My WindowServer is at 441Mb. ??? (32Gb RAM M2Max MBPro)
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
> I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine.
Most cool. Is it an M1?
Not the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP.
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Early 2020 i3 macbook air
M2
It also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.
Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.
I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
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What are you slicing?
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
I'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed.
There's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms.
I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
i think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue.
the keywords here are "depending on the workload".
edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.
> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip
i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
Put the M1 in your comparison - I think the A18 Pro compares favorably to it and it's a good baseline for people who bought in on Apple Silicon early and are still using it.
The single core performance difference is wild. Far more than I expected.
My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.
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Do we think the iPhone 16 with A18 Pro chips are going to be the same as the A18 in the laptop though?
When you are not confined to a iPhone body, you have a bit more flexibility in thermals, heat and power consumption.
Would there be any chance the A18 Pro in a Macbook clocks higher? or maybe clocks higher for longer?
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.
Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
I'm using a (fairly crappy) HP laptop with 16 gig, running Linux.
I find that the combination of FireFox and Visual Studio gets to the point where it fills up to the point where things get killed (with swap filled as well).
Mate system monitor hilariously reports code using 71MB and firefox-bin using 1.1GB because it has a tree view that doesn't show the usage of collapsed nodes beneath it.
Using smem shows each using multi GB and at my current level I've got 6GB of cache to eat up before it kills code again. Ordering by size Ghostty is the first thing that is not firefox or code at 78MB total. (and about 1GB of non-cache kernel use) . So essentially it's only those two apps that are the problem. Can Macs get by simply because Safari is better with RAM?
> Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
Well for starters MacOS version is currently 26.3 (Tahoe).
Apple ecosystem, if you are not using RAM then it is wasted RAM. So it always optimise to use as much as possible.
The main point however is you are not the target audience. Apple realised that the majority of users don't do anything beyond the power of what the phone supplies. That who this is intended for.
Thats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications.
Depends on which metric do you look, right? :)
Honestly, I don’t know which one to look at and was purposefully hand wavy. I just knew they were looking at the stone one…
My Debian (KDE) uses just under 1GB on startup. If one is not using animations and things syncing in the background and daemons monitoring file system changes and whatnot, can the stock MacOS memory usage be reduced?
What, in fact, is it doing? I'm of the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.
This is a Mac Chromebook. You use it for cloud stuff and every now and then you can run a real application in a pinch.
You can also develop locally which is significant.
Modern pcs use the ram given to them. Its not like a fixed quantity it requires.
For $300 more the base MacBook Air is a significantly better machine than the Neo.
It's $500 more. Basically double the price.
If you're concerned about the amount of RAM, this isn't the laptop for you. Grandma doesn't need 16GB to browse Facebook and look at family photos.
I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.
If your "market pressure" worked we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.