There's a tiny nugget of truth surrounded by mostly bullshit.
Only this time they put themselves in this position. They should own it, either admit that they couldn't keep their margins otherwise or take the US$ 50 or so profit hit and avoid the bad press on an otherwise great machine.
But it’s not the “mine is twice as good as theirs” situation they try to sell.
All major OSes compress memory at this point. I'd be curious to see how OoM acts on macOS -- I've seen it on Windows [NT4] and Linux over the years. I've not seen an OS handle it as well as NT does/did.
zswap won't compress pages until they're swapped to disk, so essentially only once you've run out of memory to use and have begun experiencing the horrid performance degradation that comes from swapping to disk. you can use zram instead and put swappiness to a high value so the kernel aggressively swaps pages to the fake swap device made by zram, but then you lose the ability to have on-disk compressed swap pages.
i'm surprised that more work hasn't been done to fix this because memory management on linux is clearly lagging behind and affects a lot more than the minority of people using desktop linux systems, every android phone ships with 1.5x-2x more RAM than the equivalent iphone and performs worse when a bunch of apps are running in the background because of the poor memory management.
Linux zram seems effective for marking some memory as compressed swap. Alas it doesn't play well with zswap, reportedly, which lets real swap drives also be compressed. But should be useful in many scenarios to quickly switch between compressed memories in a wide number of cases.
See also: https://github.com/systemd/zram-generator
As someone else mentioned, for many cases this will be a performance increase, not decrease. Compressing infrequently used memory frees up more memory to be used for filesystem caching among other things.
I do have an 8GB M1 mini I use for development and the only way to make it run out of memory is to run Docker, otherwise it's perfectly fine.
Every modern OS compresses memory, not just the MacOS. And no 8GB is not equivalent to 16GB on a Mac. Apple says it so foolish people believe it, but its not true. Sure unified has advantages, but they're saying BS.
All memory is virtualized by the operating system; applications don't 'see' physical address space.
We should congratulate Apple for building the world's sexiest VT100 and Wyse WinTerm in one box.
Our use cases likely vary.
Does that mean 8GB M1 == 16GB x86?
That's the only way I can use 17,179,869,184 bytes of memory.
That's insane. I could upgrade my $1200 laptop, which came with 32GB, to 96GB DDR5 ram for about $300.
Apple charges 200 bux for 16 gigs or 400 bux for 24 gigs.
In the MacBook Pro configurator the equivalent upgrades look like
36GB->64GB RAM: $400
1TB->4TB SSD: $1000
What Apple wants to happen is for you to eat into your soldered SSD's endurance (TBW) through virtual memory swapping out RAM to your storage volume so that you Buy More Stuff.
I investigated my unexpectedly high disk writes and made a few changes, disabled some MacOS services, disabled write-caching for video in Firefox etc and this reduced my write volume by tens of gigabytes per day. By this point I think I'd written 50TB of the drives TBW in a year which was significant/
This is particularly relevant if you use a mac with a soldered SSD, because when you approach endurance ratings the drive will probably fail spectacularly and your computer will unrepairable by reasonable means.
On the other hand, the average person who purchases a computer with the knowledge that they need to perform data-intensive tasks will likely also understand that 8/256 is not sufficient for their needs.
Thus, the amount of Mac owners that will realistically actually run into premature SSD failure is probably pretty low.
Apple is just running a multi-pronged strategy here: a “good enough” model for 90% of people, and then a “squeeze every last penny out of them” approach for the people who require performance and are willing to pay the Apple tax.
The actual downsides of this approach are pretty limited, as the swap is fast enough that it won’t create a class of newly disgruntled Mac owners annoyed that their Mac “got slow just like a pc”.
Miserly from their side? Sure. But I’m certain the beancounters weighed every aspect and decided that their RAM budget per board was $2, so 8gb it was. Spending an extra $1.30 for a 16gb LPDDR4X chip would break the bank.
Those are actual, current spot prices on those chips. A 150x profit margin on that upgrade from 8 to 16gb makes for some nice fat CEO bonuses. Where do you think the money to pay Tim Apple his 99 million dollar compensation last year came from?
`browser.cache.disk.enable` = false in Firefox `about:config` (I think there's more to this, but I can't recall, more research required)
I disabled spotlight altogether among some other services, for some reason I didn't finish my notes. It's a start though!.
Apple is good at memory compression but that's not physical ram. They compress like crazy but you can still run out of it. I have. On a 16 Gb M2. It had 7 Gb of compressed ram at that moment.
