8gb RAM in an M1...an error I've not seen in years
- Thread starter bunnspecial
- Start date
RAM on macOS and with Apple's M1 CPUs is a different animal if you're comparing to Intel-based, Windows PCs. Sure, more RAM is always better but 8gb on these machines is not a crippled, budget machine. You can buy a laptop at Walmart for $299, if not lower but a new MBA is what, $899 at the lowest ? No comparison between them either.
Apple's current machines have the CPU, GPU, RAM, etc all on a single 'chip'. That said, buying add'l RAM or disk storage up-front is basically a rip-off, but you have ZERO choice at least on the RAM side. They are NON-upgradeable. We used to buy iMacs with the standard RAM configuration and buy add'l RAM ourselves to install but even that's not possible anymore.
Yes, that is more like the HBM style architecture and it is expensive to make, so they "cheap out" a.k.a compromise because it is faster and can manage with swapping. The problem is their architecture really shines with iOS system but not OSX based one.
These days you can easily get 4GB eaten up with Teams, Outlook, Office, and Chrome. If you do any real work (which is what a laptop is for), it can easily go up to 500MB-1GB each application. I personally use 12GB just opening and searching documents and files that are 1GB or so each, and I'm pretty disciplined at closing them as soon as I'm done already.
I think eventually when CXL becomes standardized they will add that to the higher-end system, but it may take another 2 years at the minimum.
True and i know that its a unified package but apple uses two separate ram chips so its most likely a 4gbx2 and they combine together. but yeah i miss the upgradable apple computers of before.
I just checked that setting in my Firefox and it was set to "true", so yes it seems to be the default setting.What's the name of this plugin?
BTW, Firefox is supposed to be doing this by default, but I guess it doesn't work all that well.
Enable or Disable Tab Sleep feature in Firefox browser
Learn how to enable or disable Tab Sleep feature in Firefox. You can turn on or off Suspend tabs option using Advanced Preferences.www.thewindowsclub.com
I currently have 60 tabs open (many not being used) in Firefox on my Win10 laptop (16 GB of RAM) and total memory use is at 61%. Maybe the Firefox tab sleep function is working - ??.
If I close Firefox and reopen it, all the same 60 tabs will be there, and the starting level of memory use is then around 48~50%.
The big issue with browser RAM usage these days is not necessarily the browsers themselves but how heavy websites are. If you pull up RAM useage by tab, you'll probably find BITOG munching a lot of RAM-Xenforo is great software but it's a memory hog.
I refuse to install Chrome. I have had it installed in the past, but it buries itself too deeply for my liking. I do have Vivaldi for when I NEED a Chromium browser, although I rarely use it. I do use Safari some, which in general is the lightest on Macs, but it lacks the plug-in support I appreciate/enjoy on other browsers. Fortunately most sites handle Webkit well now given the popularity of iPhones, although in the past Webkit browsers(Safari is the biggest of them) didn't always play nicely with some sites. Given how popular Chromium is(between Chrome and now Edge about 75% of web traffic is on a Chromium browser) sometimes you just need it for software to work correctly.
Still, though, I like the security of Mozilla/Gecko browsers and even if I have to cope with higher RAM usage there's too many other benefits like in how I can configure them to my liking to give up using them.
This. We run CAD and Revit at work, and our IT manager recently upgraded the workstations from 16GB to 32GB ram. 8GB is not enough these days. I'm sitting on my computer with only firefox browser open and my home PC with 16GB is using 6.3GB of ram.
I really only use web browsers, Teams, Remote Desktops, VS Code (a code editor), but the files I work with can easily reach 1GB in the text each and I can easily open 3 or 4 of them at a time (log files). 16GB is OK for now but 8GB is really getting close to Chromebook or iPad domain, not enough for a laptop that is supposed to be "fast".
