Every 8gb mac I’ve used before was fine, and that was with running Xcode, Firefox, photoshop, mail, terminal, and other programs.
The only situation I ever ran into where it was a problem was in trying to run multiple VM's at once.
Otherwise it's just a non-issue. Programs often reserve a lot more memory than they actually use (zero hit in performance) so memory stats are misleading, and the OS is really good at swapping memory not touched in a while to the SSD without you noticing.
Yes, sometimes it takes a couple seconds to switch to a tab I haven't touched in Chrome in days because it's got to swap it back in from the SSD. Who cares?
I'm not claiming anything of the sort.
My point is that memory consumption seems to be greatly reduced in Big Sur, and that might make 8GB machines much better to use than before. All of my testing is on Intel machines. It's not exclusively an M1 phenomenon.
I would still recommend 16GB to anyone, and if the extra $200 was a factor, I would recommend that they buy last year's Intel with 16GB of RAM.
You kind of did:
> (a) every 8GB Mac I've used in the past has been unusably slow
Personally, I stick to 16GB+ as well. Though my wife's Mac likely has 4GB since it's something like 8 years old and it runs just fine.
Usually if I'm running Safari, Firefox and my 4GB Linux VM, that's 16-18GB used up in those. At the moment I have a few other things open, PDF viewer, Word, iTerms, Emacs etc, but nothing huge.
Most of the time this level of usage is ok, but I've had times where I've had to wait 30+ seconds for the UI to respond at all (even the Dock or switching workspaces) and wondered if the system had crashed.
For that reason I'm generally waiting for the next 32GB model before committing, that's assuming I stick with Apple instead of switching back to Linux (which I used for ~20 years before trying the MBP).
If you have multiple browsers with hundreds of tabs, the majority of those tabs are probably swapped out to your SSD already.
With swapfiles and SSD's, physical memory is less and less relevant except when you're performing very specific computational tasks that actually require everything to be simultaneously in memory -- things like highly complex video effects rendering.
How do you measure "running out" of your 24 GiB? And what happens when you do "run out"?
So I put on my engineering hat and pull up Activity Monitor and further observe (a) high memory pressure, (b) high memory consumption attributed to Chrome or Firefox, (c) high levels of swap usage, (d) high levels of disk I/O attributed to kerneltask or nothing, depending on macOS version, which is the swapper task.
I close some tabs. I then observe that the problems go away.
Swap isn't a silver bullet, not even at 3Gbytes/sec. It is slow. I haven't even touched on GPU memory pressure which swaps back to sysram, which puts further pressure on disk swap.
It's slow.
It makes it unrepresentative and doesn't contribute anything useful to the conversation about memory requirements for normal operation.
A bigger desk is not the solution to this problem.
You can run 4GB if you're fine with having most of your applications swapped out, but the experience will be excruciating.
Physical memory is still as relevant as it was 30 years ago. No offense but if you can't see the problem, you probably have never used a computer with enough RAM to fit everything in memory + have enough spare for file caching.
I may be not average, but just my Safari can take up >20GB—at least that's how much my "free" grows in MenuMeters when I quit it.
The stats are absolutely reliable because no physical memory page is allocated until it is actually used to store something. So allocating a large chunk of unused memory wouldn't show in the (physical) memory usage stat.
Nah, sorry, but you're wrong. I had to upgrade my laptop because I wanted to run Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA and an Android emulator on the same machine. Nothing else. This was not possible on 8GB ram.
So it's not like multiple VMs are needed and above scenario is pretty average for a common mobile developer (but still not an average user, I admit)
Second thing is, lots of games require 16 GB RAM. Maybe gamers are still not average users, I don't know.
Well, that's one (largish) VM.
I did and performance was horrible. For just iOS or macOS dev, 8 GB could be fine though.