yeah its a bit of a stretch. to the extent that macos apps use garbage collection less than pc apps it would need less ram. but they are kinda hopping around a macos vs android comparison which makes no sense. I think mac enthusiasts trying to imagine why a max of 8 or 16gb is ok. it is ok for most people anyway.
It also would have no difference between the outgoing Intel ones and the incoming Apple Silicon ones. Same pointer sizes, same app memory management, etc... Some fairly minor differences in overall binary sizes, so no "wins" there or anything either.
All Swift/ObjC software has been doing ARC for ten (?) years. Virtual memory usage will be the same under M1. It will just pay off in being faster to refcount (ie as fast as it already is on an iPhone), and therefore the same software runs faster. Probably won't work under Rosetta 2 with the per-thread Total Store Ordering switch. And it's probably not specific to NSObject, any thread safe reference counter will benefit. There are more of those everywhere these days.
2 more points:
- All the evidence I've seen is gifs of people opening applications in the dock, which is... not impressive. I can do that already, apps barely allocate at all when they open to "log in to iCloud" or "Safari new tab". And don't we see that literally every time Apple launches Mac hardware? Sorry all tech reviewers everywhere, try measuring something.
- I think the actual wins come from the zillion things Apple has done in software. Like: memory compression, which come to think of it might be possible to do in hardware. Supposedly a lot of other work/tuning done on the dynamic pager, which is maybe enabled by higher bandwidth more than anything else.
Fun fact: you can stress test your pager and swap with `sudo memory_pressure`. Try `-l critical`. I'd like to see a benchmark comparing THAT under similar conditions with the previous generation.
all comparisons are appropriate, but the question here was whether the mac laptops memory limits were somehow made better by more efficient use of memory. they are not. these are laptops, not phones or tablets. memory is used as efficiently as in previous laptops.
