I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.
Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?
I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.
8 is way too low for desktop going into 2025. Your machine might scream a lot more with 16- you probably have a lot of memory pressure which means your Mac is compressing ram a lot and maybe paging in and out of disk a lot. Does newer Apple hardware do this well? Sure, but not having to do it at all is way faster and more efficient. Since an extra 8 gigs is cheap (probably like $10-$20) to apples bottom line, it’s kinda lame for it not to be a default, especially since shitty low end machines from other vendors do it.
I have 32 gigs on an m3 and kinda wish I went with 64 :/
My MacBook Air is a personal machine and I don’t run the crazy stuff we have to use at work like Slack, Teams, VS Code. All those apps are memory hogs and the M3 MacBook Pro I use for work has memory issues related to running these apps. They should be lightweight but no one wants to use native UI APIs these days.