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RE: 8Gb on a Mac is like 16GB on Windows is Apple Marketing…
Not totally. The battery on ThinkPad T480 died in August. I had upgraded it to 12GB RAM (4GB soldered, 8GB SODIMM). I wanted to wait for the next generation Intel chips to come out, before ordering a replacement and we had a MacBook Air M1 8GB in a cupboard gathering dust - we had bought it for an MDM project, but ended up using a different product, where the MBA wasn’t needed.
So I set it up to replace my ThinkPad. 90% of what I do has equivalents under macOS, but there are a couple of applications that are Windows only, so I ended up installing Parallels and WoA 11 on it as well.
On the ThinkPad, if we had a Teams conference with 5 or more people, I’d usually have to quit all other applications to stop it stottering as it was swapping heavily to disk. With the Mac, I don’t have that problem.
I currently have Firefox, Safari, Teams, Excel, Parallels, Swyx (VOIP system) and several Finder windows open on the macOS side, plus Outlook, TeamViewer Manager and TeamViewer on the Windows side running - all visible on a 4K 44" display. Everything is fluid and quick; quicker than on the ThinkPad and I don’t have to close all the other applications, when I am in a Teams call with several people.
To be honest, I feel no need to upgrade to a new Intel laptop with 16GB at the moment, I’ll keep with the MBA until it stops working.
From experience, 16GB is enough for such a Teams call to not require me to close everything on Windows (same list of apps, with Edge instead of Safari), but 8GB is more than enough on the Mac side for the same app load, so I’d say it isn’t just marketing speak.
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How does the storage speed compare on the T480 and MBA? Could it be the ThinkPad storage is slower, so paging has a bigger impact to performance than on the Mac?
So it’s more to do with that than the threshold that it has to start paging?
It has an M.2 SSD, but not as fast as the MBA, but even so, the MBA is doing hardly any swapping.
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Well it’s also an 8th gen Intel processor. It’s pretty hard to compare Intel and Apple Silicon.
It is the memory usage, not the processor speed that was the issue. The processor was at less than 60%, but memory was 100% and a good portion of swap. For the same workload, the Mac is using less memory and even less swap.
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Some news from Apple on RCS. Maybe they are trying to get ahead of issues in the EU by improving interoperability.
Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year - 9to5Mac
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Funny thing, I just turned off RCS on my Google FI phone because the only RCS messages I got was spam.
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Great, so now we’ll get yet another new colour bubble for people to complain about?
Gavin Free of The Slow Mo Guys just posted a video on their secondary channel all about how he uses an iodyne to edit the terabytes of slow mo footage they record for the channel, and how freeing it’s been for him (no pun intended).
He’d probably make a great guest for the show, or for Grey Matter even.
If Alex’s daughter ever posts a YouTube of their group, I sure hope it gets shared on TWiT.Community.
Seems it has now been said it will remain green. But I fear apple will make it so it’s still a second class citizen.
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