Is 8 GB of RAM enough? macOS RAM management explained 

Not sure if you watched my entire video but I don’t recommend anyone buy one the new 8 gigabyte MacBook pros.

@@dmug I did, I was trying to make the comment "in agreement" with your statement

My 200 dollar 7a has 8 gb of ram

My 10 year old Lenovo has 16 GB.

@@joshm264 Gotcha, no worries

And besides of burning up the SSD, memory speed is easily 10 times higher when reading from a DIMM.

Exactly.

try 2gb ram that is painful

I wonder what the stans would say if it was only 4/6 GB. Their point should hold.

i am not saying 2 gb is good it bad vary bad it just it run windows 10 16 should be the standard amount of ram even more so due to having the gpu share system memory and they would most likely say how it is better some how @@KeithBoehler

The bus isn't a huge deal. One of the big advantages of Apple Silicon is absolutely bucknuts memory bandwidth, and the SSDs are direct lane to the CPU with the PCIe interconnect. The M2 has 100 GB/s memory bandwidth (which is more than DDR5 PCs at roughly 67 GB/s). M2 Pro had something like 200 GB/s, M3 Max 400 GB/s and M2 Max had 800 GB/s. The reality is, there's nothing that really can saturate an Apple Silicon's bandwidth. The limiting the factor is the SSD itself for the swaps.

😂

Now that's marketing

Thanks for the kind words!

Try to develop apps for this and youll se how bad it is

I have a 2gb RAM disk installed(in my 32gb of memory) that optimizes my browser cache and profile to make it much more responsive. And I still have plenty for everything else. On this Apple, that would leave me an entire 6gb for my system and it's programs(including other elements of the browser). Uh, no.

Yes, this is a common misconception. 8GB of memory will technically work for the average user, but just because it "technically works" doesn't mean it's an acceptable business practise. It's objectively a scam. The scam being "look, our laptops start at $999, isn't that a great value?" But the REAL baseline (as 16GB is the de facto standard industrywide) is $1199. Doesn't sound like a good value anymore.

their upsell strategy. you start at "8gb of ram isn't enough", follow it up with a "256gb of storage isn't enough either" and, with low volition, maybe end up at "this configuration is as expensive as the macbook pro, so i might as well take that one instead".

@@zedxcu the MacBook pro starts at $1600 and has 8gb of RAM with 512gb of storage...

That sounds neat on paper but doesnt work in real life. Fill ssd to 95% and use all 8gigs you ll see ur crawls.

@@Teluric2just to extend this: prefetching/demand paging has been used to amazing effect in not OS related functions. For Audio software, like large sample libraries with thousands of sound files for a single instrument, back in the 2000s you’d need to load all the samples into active memory. Now the first, say, 4096 bytes are loaded of a sound file as buffer, by the time the sound file needs to be played, the rest has loaded. It’s made it so multigigabyte single instruments can be loaded without much impact on system memory as not every note or expression will be needed for a song. This is an analogy of how this works, but at an OS level . There’s a way to do more with less. You aren’t wrong though, your performance will go to shit if you don’t have enough free space for a swap space and both limiting to 8 GB RAM / 256GB SSD is recipe for bad performance in this era of computing.

@@Teluric2 Well, the reason that Mac OS resorts fairly quickly to compressing these is actually to free up space to *reduce* swap usage and to improve efficient utilization of memory. The page cache isn't necessarily something you want to completely cannibalize either, though you don't want to get crazy with it and prioritize it over everything else either. (Linux systems will let you do this if you really want to. You could set swappiness values to 1, which basically means "do not ever use swap unless you absolutely have to". However, this would dwindle the page cache to the point that the OS would constantly be having to fetch code that is being executed back and forth from disk, worsening performance just as bad as the swap would have worsened it before. This is because the OS is still waiting on disk constantly to get things done, even though the swap usage is technically minimal.) It's all a balancing act. Swap usage is good to minimize as much as reasonably possible, but there are actually some scenarios in which the computer might actually perform worse, not better, if it were removed. Particularly when the data being swapped out isn't very frequently accessed (as throwing it in swap frees up RAM for other things). There isn't really a very consistent consensus on the best strategies for handling compressed memory. There are countless different opinions on the most optimal settings to use for operating systems like Linux (which let you tweak these things to your heart's desire). I've played around quite a bit with it, and on my systems, I generally had the best results with a relatively conservative swap strategy that didn't overuse it, but still swapped out quickly enough to prevent the page cache from being cannibalized either. I try to reduce swap usage wherever it's possible, but there are actually times when a little bit of modest swap usage helps more than preventing it completely. (In other words, the page cache is much more than just speculatively loaded files that might be used at some point in the future. It actually has some pretty important stuff in it too, such as files that are actively open and currently being used by programs running at any given time. Things like executable code for actively running binaries, files and images that are opened by applications and actively being used, and all kinds of other things in it. This stuff IS technically purgeable, they’re just copies of data that is on the disk. But it would be a very bad idea to cannibalize it completely, the OS would constantly be having to refetch the same data over and over again just to get anything done with any file or binary that is actively being run.)

It doesn't manage ram better than Windows. The memory management features described has also been part of Windows for over a decade. I'm sure there are differences but it isn't substantially better or worse. Keep in mind, there is only so much the OS can do. If an application requests a block of ram and uses it, it has to be persisted. So ram demands are mostly due to the applications you run and not the OS.

A community like this makes macOS fun

The problem is the small 256gb SSD in the base models has much lower endurance than a 1TB.

That's what I did. Got a good deal on 16GB

@@photoniccannon2117 I just traded in my M1 MacBook Air on an M2 15" MacBook Air. I bought the M1 from Apple Refurbished for $849 three years ago. Best Buy gave me $525 in trade on the new M2 (which was discounted by $250). So I paid $110 per year for three years to own the M1. No complaints here.

using VMs with 8GB RAM is the best way to slow down the system unfortunately

Shit mine runs out of memory with just 10-15 Safari tabs open

@@_DigitalguyI upgraded to a MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Much smoother and capable. !!

@@gregorydcollins512 yes, it's a shame that Apple is always so stingy with RAM...

To be fair, not all RAM created equal. The LPDDR5 multi-channeling Apple uses is higher than the DDR5. Apple Silicon starts at 100 GB/s of memory bandwidth at the M series, and with the Pro jumps to 200 GB/s and then the Max has 400 GB/s and the Ultra at 800 GB/s which is kinda absurd. The best non-workstations are at 67 GB/s. This also doesn't begin to touch the higher quality components like keyboard, display, touchpad, speakers, webcam, aluminum case, the much longer battery life and so on that the Apple computer offers. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to compare a $500 laptop against a $1200 laptop. Yes, it is stupid Apple sells 8 GB configs and yes, they vastly over charge for RAM and especially SSDs but they are serving up a unique value proposition. Ideally RAM upgrades would be priced in reality and the SSDs would use NVMe.

Thanks for understanding the Clickbait game, I tried to use the ethos of Clickbait for a good cause. What I mean is I make a click title so people will engage with it but the intent isn’t too to mislead or use lazy content.

All depends on what you do. I have a feeling that for my audience, a lot of people are probably in the 32 GB of RAM and above camp.

Depends if it’s a frame buffer or a texture etc. If it’s a frame buffered render like in Motion or After Effects, it’s pure VRAM. more or less the same with textures or models etc, where memory pointers are used, which isn’t the same as mirrored. With Direct storage and competing technologies, we don’t even need to buffer to RAM and transfer first. I didn’t want to bog this down as generally speaking, VRAM loosens RAM usage, often quite a bit. Unified memory is more efficient, that’s not in question but VRAM can also lessen the ram impact.

While it won't punish the RAM, if you want to hear your fans go brrrrrrr, use Stable Diffusion, (the draw things app is a good place to start). Made a tutorial about it if you haven't used it before. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cyFEvGJ0Khg.html If you're out eat gobs of RAM, Docker is the place to be especially if the implementation is absurd. A CMS site I worked on for years had a 10 Docker container setup to mirror the live environment. I had a 16 GB of RAM having MacBook Pro 2017 and it was absolutely hammered by it. I ended up with an M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM just because of that one project.

Unfortunately AI is a RAM hog and with Apple jumping into the fray, they have kinda shot themselves in the foot by not shipping with 16 GB. AI is the sort of high intensity computing even average people can use when it’s baked into the OS. I wonder if Apple will ditch 8 GB moving forward if it has strong AI ambitions.

Looks like they will have to switch to 16 or 24 gig RAM soon.

@@dmug well you can turn it off with a flip of a switch also apple ai is also been delayed too by the way.

Hurt ssd that is a smart move. Less ram more swap decreasing ssd life .

Yeah, I had 96 GB in my classic Mac Pro. I didn't notice any difference between 96 GB and 64 GB but hey, I had 96 GB of RAM and could launch like 10 VMs without worrying about memory.

@@dmug - It had 12 when I got it, and it's SO cheap to add ECC RAM to those I figured why not. And WinGag10 is sure happy when I bootcamp it!

Realistically no one will ever use an 8gb ram machine enough to write the many hundreds of terabytes necessary to kill the ssd anyway. I agree they should be replacable but come on, unusably slow computers will never see that much use.

Wow

That made me curious and the best info I could find: www.extremetech.com/computing/first-intel-meteor-lake-benchmarks-show-promise-no-paradigm-shift If you go to the Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks, the M2 Air has a sizable lead in both tests. It's also important to consider Apple has multiple stacks of it's iGPUs, there's absolutely nothing that Intel offers that comes close to the Pro, Max or Ultra variants of it's iGPU. It's great to see Intel getting closer as competition benefits us all.

2012 13 inch MBP here with 16 GBs, two ssds and Arch Linux 😎

You love it but lets see what you can do on a 2012 mac in a video..anybody can claim it works fine.

Agreed. It's bonkers Apple ships 8 GB of RAM Macs. I wonder if years of shipping RAM starved Macs will interfere with it's AI ambitions as running local models can be super RAM intensive.

I'm not sure what you mean, yes apple is a greedy company and very stingy by limiting the base model to 8GB. But this entire video explains how it's still being used efficiently.

​@@asinglefrenchfry No, the entire video explains how Apple's MacOS does the exact same thing every other OS (Windows, Linux, BSD) has also been doing since at least around 2005. There's nothing special going on in MacOS, and 8GB for "pro" usage is simply insufficient today, even if apple is using memory management techniques that have been standard for decades among all competitors. ;) The 8GB version exists to trick you into starting the up-sell train, since the prices for the upgrades are completely insane, you'll soon be on the next product category. (Where you can start the upsell train again. Alternatively buy the 8GB one and be back in the store soon for a new laptop.) 200 dollars for another 8GB of RAM. Those 200 dollars gives you 64GB of DDR5, retail price! 200 dollars to bump SSD space up by 512GB. That would give you 2TB of PCIe 4 nvme in the real world, retail, and considerably more performant than the SSD storage on the macbook. Etc. They're not stingy. They're manipulating the buyer into picking between extortionate pricing or an inferior, soon to need replacing, product. That "base model" is like the SD tier on Netflix: it's a marketing technique meant to make you spend more than you plaanned on upsells, through having established a tempting "starting from" price somewhere.

Wow, what insight. Apple is a commercial enterprise with shareholders, who knew.

@@asinglefrenchfry I own M1 macbook air 8gb, M1Pro 16 gb, M3max 48 gb. I tested a lot and on 8Gb machine, I was getting swaps just using Photoshop or basic video editing. It's great for simple light tasks and watching content. Swap wears out non replaceable SSDs and slows down the system. 8Gb in 2024 will never be "efficient" because modern apps and higher resolution content needs more memory vs 8 years ago. MacOS takes up 2Gb. Shared memory with graphics. That does not leave much for apps and data. 8Gb on a Pro machine is just terrible.

​@@asinglefrenchfrythe videos doesnt prove anything. Why the youtubers doesnt fill ssd to 95% and lets see if 8 is enough. No wonder most macs in ebay are 8gigs.

I don’t disagree, I recommend people not buy 8 Gb models new

Oh I agree that most people over estimate their RAM requirements, hence how I brought up my 32 GB MacBook Pro workings as well as my Mac Pro 2019 with 160 GB of RAM but the 8 GB of RAM MacBook Pros are held back performance wise against the 16 GB models. Is 12% performance reduction end of the world? Nah, but is it not a good look for a $1600 laptop? yes. www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/8gb-apple-m3-macbook-pro-crushed-by-16gb-config-in-cpu-benchmarks

you are probably tolerating it and dont realize. in my world, 8gb increased to even 12 is a huge speed improvement. Because of this, I will no longer work with 8gb in a computer I have to actually do stuff on.

You can check how much ram your computer is using if its always full you maybe should upgrade. For most people 8gb is enough and getting faster memory would be a more usefull upgrade

Keep in mind this isn't an entry-level machine for doing basic work. It is a premium pro-level machine. I run multiple virtual machines and development systems that require quite a bit of ram. A pro-level system should handle that just fine but 8GB of RAM cannot.

We're talking about professional, flagship devices in the CURRENT DECADE. 8 gigabytes of ram on a device like the MBP is over a decade out of date. I myself used to run 512 megabytes of ram before getting a large upgrade 3 years ago and still technically got by. But that doesn't mean those kinds of specs are remotely acceptable on a new machine.

We can only hope, and it’d be a be cooler if they raised the ram prices higher. When you pay more for something that means you value it more. It’ll make people love the Mac even more.

8GB is the limit. 4GB would be below average, you can still use it, but the OS doesn’t like it. It’s probably why most of the 4GB MAC models were dropped from OS upgrades a few years ago.

I don't know man.. I had a 32gb iPhone 6s, made it work, never felt limited. Then got a 128gb iPhone 7, never filled that thing. Got a 64gb iPhone 11, after 2 years there's still 34gb free. Got a base model m1 Mac mini, never swapped more than 1.5gb at rare times and frankly never felt limited. I am doing music recording and production and office work. Managed to keep my old MacBook Pro 13" base model from 2014 until 2020... did the same workflow as I mentioned above, made it work.

Thats why apple is not premium.

They pretty much employ variations. Apple beat MS to compressed memory by about 2~ years (but MS also beat Apple back in the day to Protected Memory by several years. MS is a bit less RAM compression happy. Windows gives users control of the disk swap too. Windows has an app napping analog but its called UWP and isn't as widely supported. Linux has all the things but as someone who almost exclusively uses Linux virtualized in Docker or elsewhere, I don't know off the top of my head what Linux does in the desktop environment or what the various distros employ.

Memory compression existed for Linux before it was added to OS X and windows. Not sure when distros started using it by default exactly though modern linux systems have been using either zram or zswap for quite some time. The actual idea goes back to the early 90s though but cpus back then and there even existed third part apps that implemented it for windows but cpus weren't fast enough for it to be of much use at the time outside of specialized hardware.

​@@olnnnthe purpose is making apple users think they made it first.

Historically speaking, this is accurate, but there’s a few things here. CISC today uses instruction decoding to break apart instructions to fragments that’s more like RISC. It’s pretty blurry and one of the reasons why Intel can best Apple Silicon in raw single core scores in benchmarks. It is true that a CPU instruction on a RISC platform can take more cpu cache, but they’re also more efficient per instruction which can eliminate the need for further instructions. Also, RAM isn’t used for CPU instructions as that’s a function of CPU caching. RAM usage is far more a function of the OS than the cpu architecture when comparing modern ARM and modern x86. If you have sources that suggest otherwise I’d be interested as I’m always learning but as I understand it it’s not really an issue.

If you’re not using chrome ;)

@@dmug true my 16 gb air barely manages chrome

cheap apple is cheap

I agree about the ram. I’d argue the Fusion Drive was an interesting band aid solution as it debuted when SSDs were really expensive. In 2012, ssds were well over $1 a gigabyte, vs $0.05-0.10 per gigabyte for HDDs according to Ars Technica. Other companies like seagate experimented with hybrid drives too. It’s just they kept making them for far far too long in iMacs. They shouldn’t have been in a thing in 2017 and after.

This is what I've been saying man, 8 gigs is at a least decade out of date on pro machines and software cannot change that unless literally everybody else agrees to lower ram and system requirements as well. Which has never ever happened.

Oh it’s an upsale for sure, it’s even more gross seeing how much a 4 TB drive costs to upgrade to, vs how much NVMe ones that are often faster cost.

That is a fair point and I wondered if someone would infer that I was asserting macOS was somehow different. I probably should have had a quick mention that other OSes employ similar techniques. I didn’t compare to other operating systems as it’d muddy the conversation. Explaining UWP vs App Napping, or which OS implemented what first (windows having protected memory long before Apple, Apple beating MS to RAM compression), MS preferring to compress RAM less aggressively, Windows giving users control of the paging system’s swap space size vs Apple’s dynamic swap could be interesting to some people but would likely cause others eyes to glaze over. Toss Linux in the mix and I’d have a 3 hour video.

@@dmugThis is my knee jerk reaction when it comes to this subject, not a critique of your video. Today's OSes really have some clever tricks in how they deal with memory, and that is a good thing, and you are right, comparing those across three major ones would have been a three hours long video. I, as many others here, just wanted to point out that it is borderline criminal what Apple does, to put an 8GB of RAM in a pro laptop and claim it to be enough because of a "few" nice software optimizations (okay and some hardware ones as well). We should be calling out on them (and other companies) whenever they do this kinds of stunts.

@@nowave7, a page-flipping MMU, similar to this of modern CPUs, could be found already in 80386DX from 1985, the easier but inefficient segment-swapping in 80286 from 1982.

@@nowave7 No problem. I'm always trying to cut down a video as opposed to make it longer. Sometimes it means leaving things out that might have been put in. I agree, just because Apple _can_ ship an 8 GB Mac doesn't mean they should, hence the jabs. Future vids I'll probably lay off as I don't want to become a broken record on the subject after a few videos that have been critical of Apple.

The cult say: " never had a problem"

I have 64 GB in my studio, but just have the entry level 8 on my M1 macbook air. For simple day to day use it doesn't at all feel different from my 64gb studio.

Most people don't do anything that needs that much memory for some office work and web browsing you don't need much power. But still given the option I would go for 16gb at least just for future proofing when you can't upgrade your memory it might be an issue in the future.

This is a regressive thing to say. Technically, the average person can manage on less than a single gigabyte of the stuff, but that doesn't mean that it's gonna be great, or that the software we use will just stop getting larger and more resource intensive. The fact is that someone such as Apple has no business shipping 8 gbs of ram in a current pro flagship. No matter how much ram management you do is going to change how outdated those specs are on such a laptop. Especially when you can't *just* replace the ssds on these things when they inevitably toast themselves due to swap because of it's weird firmware design. In this case the loud minority can only help the vast majority by calling this mess out.

Maybe, but it cost less than an ipad pro with a keyboard and it weighs less in my bag. After the trade in on my first gen ipad pro I paid like $600 for a new macbook air, got ten times more functionality and my bag is lighter.

Yeah that’s great but…. Other laptops have 16gb and better storage so why limit yourself.

I think you misinterpreted the video, it isn’t answering “why” Apple sells 8 GB Macs, as it’s pretty blatantly clear why. Why can be summed up in one word “money”. Instead the video is “how”they are able to get away with it, which is far more interesting.

Totally correct. I cannot speak for Linux but Windows has been doing these things for over a decade. But there is only so much the OS can do. What applications you run and how they work have a much larger impact on ram usage. For a pro-level computer, it better be able to handle demanding applications.

@@username7763 The real scary one in this video is: did anyone else notice more than two gigs being hogged as "Wired" - as in, the OS absolutely needs this, no questions asked, can't even compress? Not even Windows 10 is that hungry. :P (W11 I wouldn't know, I've never used it.) I just checked on my work-issued macbook and... HOLY SHEIT that is a weirdly RAM-hungry OS indeed. Funnily enough, this explanation of the terminology used in their little app just means Apple should STFU even more than before about their operating systems' supposed memory awesomeness... I have Linux boxes that provide the same OS functionality at a tenth of the "wired memory" load, and BSD boxes that do it on a twentieth... And neither of those had the advantage of vertical integration of the hardware. Yikes.

And apple sheeps say samsung needs 12gigs The dumbest line" unused ram is wasted ram" but if windows does that is bloated and non optimized.

I’m not sure if this was directed at me but the conclusion here was “you can get away with it but you shouldn’t buy an 8 GB of ram Mac” as it puts wear and tear on the SSD.

@@dmug It was not directed at you. Sorry I did not make that clear. There are a LOT of people trying to make excuses for this computer.

No worries, I had one or two people think that I was defending Apple when just explaining how they are able to get away with it.