New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

[Armoured]

I'm looking forward to hearing from those who get one of these new Macs next week, on the topic of what the real world performance is like. How does your daily workflow go and how much ram does get used ? How often do you tap the page file and does it slow down because of that ?

I'm choosing your post somewhat randomly because it's about ram...so forgive me.

I have a macbook air 11" that I quite like because it's tiny and easy to carry around. Except for occasional attempts to use it while travelling for photography, it's mostly a web/computer noodling/minor office tasks computer. But the thing is, because it's so tiny, I use it a LOT. It's really only painfully slow when using it for heavier tasks - which I try not to do because, well, see below.

Unfortunately it only has 4gigs of ram. And 128gig ssd. (It was a gift that ended up in my hands, so excuse the under-speccing.)

So I undertook a task of cleaning it up, removing a lot of the trash/random files (it's always been close to full main drive), removing some apps that I don't use on it, etc.

With the mojave update yesterday, the memory pressure got almost critically bad - constantly in the yellow zone and too often in red. Worse than it's ever been (was manageable before). [Side note I used to kind of mock the memory pressure graph as vague and unclear what it was measuring - but now I find it's the single best indicator of a problem, if it's in red, it's memory swapping and houston, there is a problem.]

Big surprise, at least I've never gone out of my way to do this before: cleaning/rebuilding the dyld-shared caches made a huge difference. Now it's comfortably in the green on memory pressure and way more predictable and better performance. AFter that I decided to run Onyx as well and clean out a lot of stuff. (I didn't do the more aggressive stuff like cleaning all browser caches and that - so it was somewhat conservative)

It also seems to have freed up (no idea how exactly) a pretty significant chunk of disk space too.

So wow, what a difference. Worth it. I apologise as this is probably well known to others - and probably there are reasons not to, my issue for having an old computer I've updated without a nuke-and-rebuild ever, but in my case was worthwhile.

 

[Clifton2]

Another thing I would be wary of is my MacBook Pro 2013 I7 is still going strong after 7 years (well apart from Big Sur (prise) breaking it) I suspect a Mac with an M1 apple chip will be unsupported within 4 years as they will have reached the M4 chip and not be interested in supporting earlier versions. I have a lovely coaster iPad 3 which half the apps dont support and I can't even watch Netflix on it, all contributes to our wasteful society, I dont care if it runs slowly but at least give me that decision..

 

[scottkendall]

I think this is correct. You'll be able to do more with less ram. Big Sur will be a lot more efficient in it's use of ram. When using ram hogs like the chrome browser though, it may limit the number of tabs you could keep open. Google could care less about how much ram their browser consumes. I really doubt they'll do anything to optimize the Mac version to perform better with Big sur.

I'm looking forward to hearing from those who get one of these new Macs next week, on the topic of what the real world performance is like. How does your daily workflow go and how much ram does get used ? How often do you tap the page file and does it slow down because of that ?

I use 3 to 5 tabs max except when I was writing a research paper and then I only maybe had 10 - 15. Keeping 70+ tabs open is excessive just use book marks. I also use chrome very little mostly when I need to look at sat images and street view for project I am working on. App developers need to stream line their apps and programs so they do not have so many side/background processes that use up memory and stay open even after your done using the app. Adobe is the biggest culprit of this behavior. I mentioned in another thread or maybe this one that just on boot adobe was taking up a gig of memory without me even opening one of their apps. I managed to get it down to 500 megs but I am going to do some more tinkering to see if I can get even more stuff to not load.

 

[pit512]

I mentioned in another thread or maybe this one that just on boot adobe was taking up a gig of memory without me even opening one of their apps. I managed to get it down to 500 megs but I am going to do some more tinkering to see if I can get even more stuff to not load.

Hi scottkendall,
I'd really like to know how you managed to reduce the memory footprint of Adobe apps.
Thanks and sorry for being off topic...

 

[inc]

I have a macbook air 11" that I quite like because it's tiny and easy to carry around. Except for occasional attempts to use it while travelling for photography, it's mostly a web/computer noodling/minor office tasks computer. But the thing is, because it's so tiny, I use it a LOT. It's really only painfully slow when using it for heavier tasks - which I try not to do because, well, see below.

I replaced my TBMBP 13" entirely with a 2020 iPad Pro and I do the vast majority of my photography work on that. Getting my workflow adjusted was a little tricky but the short version is I import off SD cards wherever I am and import my jpegs and raw photos into a Dropbox folder that my old Mac Pro slurps into Lightroom Classic and it's local ZFS storage pool and backs up to that house's NAS.

Then those images become available as Smart Previews taking very little space in Adobe's storage service (I'd do everything in cloud storage if Adobe let me use a different service like Dropbox/Google/iCloud but I'm not going to pay for a fourth cloud storage provider that is more expensive than everything else I already pay for ) and I do my triage/intake in Lightroom CC on my iPad and share online from there and when I need to have prints made I export from that Mac Pro of mine that I can get to from anywhere via Screens/NX.

Works great for me. I got the 13" 1TB flavor.

 

[scottkendall]

Hi scottkendall,
I'd really like to know how you managed to reduce the memory footprint of Adobe apps.
Thanks and sorry for being off topic...

I disabled Creative Cloud at start up thus disabling a bunch of other things that it caused to load at start up. There is still a lot of little helper apps starting but I am looking to disable them.

 

[bigclue]

The days of the Hackintosh appear to be numbered. I'd guess we have a few years of compatibility left, after which existing systems will continue to run existing software, but will be stuck there, eventually becoming obsolete.

As long as the new systems are fast enough and reasonably priced, I don't actually mind that much. I did not build a hackintosh because I love to fiddle with the computer. On the contrary, I'd rather focus on organizing photos, editing video, and so on. (Don't get me wrong: choosing, ordering and assembling the hardware was actually really fun. But randomly fiddling with kexts to fix glitches has been a nightmare.)

However, Apple simply refuses to offer a normal form factor that allows you to upgrade RAM, hard drives, NVMe flash storage and GPUs when you outgrow what you have. In fact, for years, Apple has not offered a single computer that you can put a hard drive in.

• Mac Mini: so tiny that it requires laptop RAM and storage, so you're paying a lot more for less performance.
• Laptops: Same thing. It's nice that they're portable, but I don't need that in my home office. I need raw power.
• iMac: Most likely what I'd choose, but when I built my rig, they only offered glossy (aka "high glare") screens, which I hate, and the latest ones solder in the storage, preventing future expansion.
• Mac Pro: Great if a company is buying you one. But they are insanely expensive, and you STILL can't put a hard drive in one. ($6K?? I think I'd rather send my kid to college, thanks.)

I bought a computer with 2TB NVMe storage, 32GB of RAM and a nice GPU for $1400. 8TB internal hard drive adds another $150. This lets me manage my 100,000 photos and 5TB of videos really fast, and edit video with multiple video streams very quickly as well. (It was the waiting for photo thumbnails to draw that drove me to upgrade my computer in the first place, and only NVMe storage is fast enough to do that right, and I need 2TB of it). I wish Apple offered a regular form factor with user-upgradeable parts.

All that being said, my Hackintosh will work fine for a while, and then it will break. When I upgraded one of my internal hard drives recently (not even my boot drive), I suddenly had 3 problems:

• Reboots on sleep and shutdown.
• Front USB ports stopped working (again).
• Desktop background picture keeps reverting to Mojave desert.

Can these be fixed? Probably, if I sacrifice an entire Saturday for it. I don't even know where to go to learn about how kexts work and such, so I just randomly try things that seemed to fix it for others, but this time none of them work. I may have to start over from scratch and do a fresh install, hoping I don't lose data in the process. What a hassle.

 

[scottkendall]

The days of the Hackintosh appear to be numbered. I'd guess we have a few years of compatibility left, after which existing systems will continue to run existing software, but will be stuck there, eventually becoming obsolete.

As long as the new systems are fast enough and reasonably priced, I don't actually mind that much. I did not build a hackintosh because I love to fiddle with the computer. On the contrary, I'd rather focus on organizing photos, editing video, and so on. (Don't get me wrong: choosing, ordering and assembling the hardware was actually really fun. But randomly fiddling with kexts to fix glitches has been a nightmare.)

However, Apple simply refuses to offer a normal form factor that allows you to upgrade RAM, hard drives, NVMe flash storage and GPUs when you outgrow what you have. In fact, for years, Apple has not offered a single computer that you can put a hard drive in.

• Mac Mini: so tiny that it requires laptop RAM and storage, so you're paying a lot more for less performance.
• Laptops: Same thing. It's nice that they're portable, but I don't need that in my home office. I need raw power.
• iMac: Most likely what I'd choose, but when I built my rig, they only offered glossy (aka "high glare") screens, which I hate, and the latest ones solder in the storage, preventing future expansion.
• Mac Pro: Great if a company is buying you one. But they are insanely expensive, and you STILL can't put a hard drive in one. ($6K?? I think I'd rather send my kid to college, thanks.)

I bought a computer with 2TB NVMe storage, 32GB of RAM and a nice GPU for $1400. 8TB internal hard drive adds another $150. This lets me manage my 100,000 photos and 5TB of videos really fast, and edit video with multiple video streams very quickly as well. (It was the waiting for photo thumbnails to draw that drove me to upgrade my computer in the first place, and only NVMe storage is fast enough to do that right, and I need 2TB of it). I wish Apple offered a regular form factor with user-upgradeable parts.

All that being said, my Hackintosh will work fine for a while, and then it will break. When I upgraded one of my internal hard drives recently (not even my boot drive), I suddenly had 3 problems:

• Reboots on sleep and shutdown.
• Front USB ports stopped working (again).
• Desktop background picture keeps reverting to Mojave desert.

Can these be fixed? Probably, if I sacrifice an entire Saturday for it. I don't even know where to go to learn about how kexts work and such, so I just randomly try things that seemed to fix it for others, but this time none of them work. I may have to start over from scratch and do a fresh install, hoping I don't lose data in the process. What a hassle.

There will likely never be a real Mac in the future that allows you to upgrade the memory, or the hard drive, or the GPU. In fact as far as anyone can tell you can not even use a E-GPU with a M1 Mac. The memory is on the SOC, the hard drive is part of the board and not removable. I would wager to say the current base model Mac mini with 16gb of memory, T2 chip, and Neural engine with an external hard drive will stomp my computer into the ground with photo and video editing. Even my 2018 Mac mini with T2 chip will likely stomp my computer into the ground with photo and video editing. Based on early bench marks the M1 Mac mini and MacBook Air those systems are nothing too scoff at!

P.S. TB3 external drive is as fast as using an internal drive. 40Gb / 8 = 5000 MB and that is two times faster than Samsung EVO Plus drive.

As for your problems make your own thread where you can receive support for them.

 

[Sofronis]

There will likely never be a real Mac in the future that allows you to upgrade the memory, or the hard drive, or the GPU.

Demanding professionals and enthusiasts with heavy compute workloads, want flexibility and as much compute power as possible. You can't really offer that in a MacBook or a Mac mini. If they can't have it and they're not attached to macOS for some reason, they'll move to Linux/Windows (if they haven't already).

There will be a new -Intel free- modular Mac Pro, but it remains to be seen how affordable/upgradeable it'll be. But if the options are similar to what they are today (I expect even less freedom with only custom GPU cards) then… I don't know what to say.

For instance I find these Mac Pro upgrades crazy:

• Storage:

1TB modules (only contain memory; T2 is the controller) -> $600​

1TB Samsung 980 Pro (PCIe 4.0 controller and much faster) -> $230​

• GPU:

W5500X MPX Module -> $600​

Radeon 5500 XT (it's almost identical) -> $200​

•RAM:

You get the idea.​

Why do they do this? Because they can, and because people who love (or need) the Mac and macOS, are willing to -begrudgingly- pay this ridiculous premium.

I would wager to say the current base model Mac mini with 16gb of memory, T2 chip, and Neural engine with an external hard drive will stomp my computer into the ground with photo and video editing. Based on early bench marks the M1 Mac mini and MacBook Air those systems are nothing too scoff at!

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss your 9900K/Vega 64. The M1 will probably be faster (20-30%?) on single threaded tasks and maybe for apps specifically tailored to it, but a 9900K is faster in multi-threading and the M1 iGPU's 2.6 TFLOPS can't hold a candle to the Vega 64's 12.7 TFLOPS with its dedicated 8 GB of HBM2 memory.

TB3 external drive is as fast as using an internal drive. 40Gb / 8 = 5000 MB and that is two times faster than Samsung EVO Plus drive.

40 Gbps is the aggregate (data+video or just video) bandwidth of a TB3 controller, which is often split into multiple TB ports. For just data, it uses 4xPCIe 3.0 lanes, which gives it a theoretical bandwidth of ~3.9 GB/s (if you only use one port).

But if you account for the extra latency of the controller, wiring/connector signal loss, protocol overhead, etc; a TB3 SSD will always be slower than the same internal SSD. How much slower will depend on the workload, but e.g. Samsung's X5 external TB3 drive (it contains a 970 evo), is ~30% slower in sequential reads (~2.8 GB/s), compared to an internal 970 Evo (~3.6 GB/s).

 

[scottkendall]

Previous generations had upgradeable storage and RAM within the same volume. I remember upgrading a 2012 Mac mini to a 2.5" SSD and 16GB of RAM and it "flew". This isn't a form factor limitation, but a conscious decision from Apple.


Demanding professionals and enthusiasts with heavy compute workloads, want flexibility and as much compute power as possible. You can't really offer that in a MacBook or a Mac mini. If they can't have it and they're not attached to macOS for some reason, they'll move to Linux/Windows (if they haven't already).

There will be a new -Intel free- modular Mac Pro, but it remains to be seen how affordable/upgradeable it'll be. But if the options are similar to what they are today (I expect even less freedom with only custom GPU cards) then… I don't know what to say.

For instance I find these Mac Pro upgrades crazy:

• Storage:

1TB modules (only contain memory; T2 is the controller) -> $600​

1TB Samsung 980 Pro (PCIe 4.0 controller and much faster) -> $230​

• GPU:

W5500X MPX Module -> $600​

Radeon 5500 XT (it's almost identical) -> $200\​

Maybe we will have to wait and see but the person I was replying to would not be one of those Mac Pro buying people they clearly said that. And with the removal of the EGPU support I am not sure how long they will continue to support ATI cards. As previously mentioned by people maybe next year we get an M2 chip and the year after a M3 chip. The current chip is super small if the chip was say the size of a Xeon they could likely get much more video threw put, and way more memory.

•RAM:

You get the idea.​

Part of the SOC jump was placing he memory on the SOC "Unified memory" maybe they will back peddle but at this moment there is no reason to think they will.

Why do they do this? Because they can, and because people who love the Mac and macOS, are willing to -begrudgingly- pay this ridiculous premium.

I do not find any of the products they released to be ridiculous in cost even with the 16GB memory upgrade! And the Mac mini actually was reduced in cost. Thats not to say they do not have some very expensive products. Keep in mind if you buy a dell workstation totally specked out like the top end Mac Pro fully maxed you will spend roughly the same amount.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss your 9900K/Vega 64. The M1 will probably be faster (20-30%?) on single threaded tasks and maybe for apps specifically tailored to it, but a 9900K is faster in multi-threading and the M1 iGPU's 2.6 TFLOPS can't hold a candle to the Vega 64's 12.7 TFLOPS with its dedicated 8 GB of HBM2 memory.

My Mac mini routinely beats my main desktop in video encoding. But you're also forgetting about the neural engine and the T2 that increases stuff when it comes to photo and video editing. Lets also not forget the apps that people who buy Mac Pros use will be tailored to it.

40 Gbps is the aggregate (data+video or just video) bandwidth of a TB3 controller, which is often split into multiple TB ports. For just data, it uses 4xPCIe 3.0 lanes, which gives it a theoretical bandwidth of ~3.9 GB/s (if you only use one port)

But if you account for the extra latency of the controller, wiring/connector signal loss, protocol overhead, etc; a TB3 SSD will always be slower than the same internal SSD. How much slower will depend on the workload, but e.g. Samsung's X5 external TB3 drive (it contains a 970 evo), is ~30% slower in sequential reads (~2.8 GB/s), compared to an internal 970 Evo (~3.6 GB/s).

In the past when I ran tests the 970 EVO Plus gave me the same speeds over TB3 as it did in the internal m.2 slot and I doubt the person I was replying to is doing such hard core tasks they would even notice. You say 30% slower but I think you forget that due to the TB3 controller being on the SOC with the CPU, Memory, Neural, video, and increased memory pipe if it is slower it is maybe 5%.