alt Hacker News> For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.
You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.
Replies
alwillis • today at 1:45 AM
> Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD
People always forget that Apple does realtime compression on data that's in RAM allowing more things to fit in RAM; it also effectively increases the bandwidth of the SSD.
➕ show 3 replies
Right, I mean even a fast SSD has an order of magnitude less throughput, and 2-3 orders of magnitude higher latency from RAM. No dispute there. If you are doing random access across 16GB of data and your machine only has 8GB of physical RAM, you're in the pain zone.
OTOH, if you are using multiple RAM-heavy apps that aren't actively hammering that RAM (e.g. an instance of Photoshop that is using 10GB but is just idling or whatever) then MacOS and their stupid fast SSDs handle that pretty seamlessly.
Most use cases are probably somewhere in the middle.