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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's swapping a ton, especially on machines with 8G RAM?

8G is pathetic for 2021 anyway. Would never go under 16G for a serious machine.

This might be the case, as my 8GB MBP M1 has seen a lot of wear on the SDD. With that being said, the machine has been super fast, and I’m running docker all day, emacs, Spotify, node, Firefox with 5-10 tabs. I’ve almost never run into issues, I just close apps when I’m not using them.

Perhaps not a "serious machine" (that's subjective), but is well-specced for it's intended audience, and reviews are generally very positive.

Have to agree, I am using a Thinkpad T420 released in 2011 with 16GB. My upgrade will hopefully have a 32GB capacity.

I have 32 GB and rarely use the second 16.

I have 16GB, I haven't done much today, I use Safari with 7 tabs and have Spotify and GitHub Desktop open.

Memory used: 10GB

Uptime: 1d

I don't know, feels like OP is right. 16GB is not enough in 2021, especially since I my computer is from 2013 and already had 16GB.

Unfortunately this is where Apple decided to make money, so we have brand-new 8GB $1000 devices in 2021. Thanks Apple.

With 24GB, I rarely needed it all, but a good portion was cache/buffer, I.e. 10GB. Of course you can just swap to SSD and get pretty much the same performance, until you don't..

So I have a MacBook with 16gb ram for work, and an M1 MacBook with 8GB Normal usage on the Intel MacBook, ~10GB, on the air with similar workload ~5GB Not apples to apples for sure, but there is some magic going on with the M1. Perhaps the different instruction set?

On the other hand, I bought into the hype that the 8GB was fine for pretty much everyone.

I had a M1 Air with 8GB of RAM and ended up having to buy a M1 Air with 16GB of RAM since the swapping during my normal workflow made the machine unusably slow. Dozen Chrome tabs, Angular 2+ application being served, Webstorm, GUI Git client, Messages, and a few other little things.

Both machines are from Apple, so I'm afraid that this time it indeed is an Apple to Apple comparison.

I wouldn't bet on it being just the instruction set itself but it is true that given the chance x86 compilers will often go mental with the SIMD extensions which can lead to lots of fairly long instructions rather than a lower throughput but much shorter block

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