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Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough (www.xda-developers.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple's claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won't be able to use it. There's a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it's the closest thing we'll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn't really enough for a new Mac in 2024.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I actually bought a m1 mini for a linux low power server. I was getting tired of the Pi4 being so slow when I needed to compile something. Works real well, just need the Asahi team to get TB working. And for my server stuff, 8gb is plenty.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

You wouldn't happen to run a jellyfin server on that mac mini would you? Currently looking to find something performant with small form factor and low power consumption.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.

That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.

Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn't optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).

TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air. Or even better, consider an iPhone with Linux in a virtual machine - https://getutm.app/ - though I'm not sure how optimsied ffmpeg will be in that environment... the processor is certainly capable of encoding video quickly, it's a camera so it has to be able to encode video well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.

Depending on codec and settings, this might be super fast and super slow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

No I do not, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work though. I have PiHole, Apache, email, cups, mythtv and samba currently.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

I’ve run Plex servers on Mac Minis (M1). Docker on MacOS runs well finally — the issues that were everywhere a couple of years ago are resolved.

It ran very well on the hardware. The OP of this post is right, 8gb is not enough in 2024; however I would also wager that the vast majority of commenters have not used MacOS recently or regularly. It is actually very performant and has a memory scheduler that rivals that found on GNU/Linux. Apple’s users aren’t wrong when they talk about how much better the OS is than Windows at using memory.