I remember when the first MacBook Air came out someone, I think it was Jeff Atwood, posted about compile speeds.
The Air had no cooling and an underpowered little CPU so low power Apple had Intel make it just for them.
But you could pay a crazy amount of money for a teeny-tiny SSD instead of a tiny hard drive.
The SSD was so much faster than standard hard drives that machine could compile code faster than the normal MacBook Pros of the day, even though they could hold more ram and had better CPUs.
Gettin go things off disk to the CPU matters a lot. It’s OK if you don’t have enough memory if that pipeline is extremely fast.
The situation may have happened again with the M1 Macs. Not only were they faster than the Intel chips at most things but the on-package memory screams and the storage controller is fantastic.
People have reported those machines at 16GB anecdotally feeling amazing despite having half the ram of other existing machines.
The Air had no cooling and an underpowered little CPU so low power Apple had Intel make it just for them.
But you could pay a crazy amount of money for a teeny-tiny SSD instead of a tiny hard drive.
The SSD was so much faster than standard hard drives that machine could compile code faster than the normal MacBook Pros of the day, even though they could hold more ram and had better CPUs.
Gettin go things off disk to the CPU matters a lot. It’s OK if you don’t have enough memory if that pipeline is extremely fast.
The situation may have happened again with the M1 Macs. Not only were they faster than the Intel chips at most things but the on-package memory screams and the storage controller is fantastic.
People have reported those machines at 16GB anecdotally feeling amazing despite having half the ram of other existing machines.