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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, the latest Macbook Air has only 8GB of RAM. I've used it about 3 months now and haven't felt any issue with perf. I don't think my experience would have been any different with extra RAM.

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Bought the same machine for my daughter in a sort of emergency situation. I thought I’d be returning it and ordering a higher spec machine, but never did. She plays games, runs Discord, has browser tabs open, watches YouTube, edits her own videos, etc all without any issues. And the battery is crazy good. I’m actually a little dumbfounded. It seems Apple has found a good formula for entry level machines in the new MacBook Air.

I bought a 16GB M1 Air to try it out and I’ve barely touched my 32GB MacBook Pro since. It’s usually at 11-12GB, even with plenty of multitasking (including 3 browsers and Adobe PS/ID/AI). You get spoiled fast by the responsiveness/performance/silence. I can absolutely see the 8GB model being fine for the bulk of users, especially if they’re running mostly Apple Silicon-native software like MS Office.

I have been using the base model 8gb m1 Mac mini as my main work machine since it came out, the only time I have noticed a ram limitation was when I ran out of storage space and it couldn’t swap anymore. Pretty amazing since this computer cost $2000 less than my 2019 MacBook Pro and is noticeably faster (Clojure development and some hobby music production)

Maybe I’ll regret it in a few years if the ssd dies due to the extra load though… I do really wish the storage was easier to change

Both iOS and macOS support compressed memory pages which helps a lot with memory pressure. On modern hardware decompressing a memory page is orders of magnitude faster than swapping.

Even relatively modest compression ratios add up in aggregate. Swapping compressed pages is also more efficient (when it happens) because less data needs to be persisted to the disk.

That's not to say 8GB is enough for everyone but it punches a bit above its weight in a lot of use cases.

That’s probably because the storage is fast enough you can’t really tell when it swaps.

I think it depend on usecase, my main laptop at home is an 8GB MacBook Pro from 2013, and it’s completely fine for my use.

If non-technical friends and family ask for computer recommendation I just tell them to get the cheapest Mac. If they want a PC I noticed that they’re normally not to happy about the price if laptops I’ll recommend. You’ll still find Windows laptops with 4GB of RAM (and a terrible screen). The main selling point is the price, $1000 or less (note that’s Danish prices including 25% VAT).

Can confirm as another M-1 Macbook Air user that this thing seems pretty snappy with just 8 GB of RAM but my work provided thinkpad seems to be much worse with 16 GB.

Yeah I’m using the same machine. It depends what you do. I haven’t hit a memory pressure warning yet. 99% of what I’m doing is either on remote systems or in vim and safari. My MacBook is a futuristic portable vt terminal and iPod and 8gb is fine for a that!

I also didn't feel any issues on last 8GB MBA (pre M1) until I started feeling a year down the line. Everything was running slowly after couple of updates including Firefox.

Depends what you using it for I regularly get thrashing on my works 16gb dell and that's without any vms running and not using the full office suite.

If your a journalist tapping out a column and only using one application at a time yes 8gb will work for you.

In my anecdotal experience Windows/PCs require decently more ram than OSX/Macs for the same perceived performance. My Macbooks were always fine with 16gb but I had to upgrade my Windows machine to 32gb despite using the Macbooks for much more involved workloads.

I'm not a journalist. Compiling with npm, cargo, go - all of it works well. Also run Chrome in the background. But on this particular laptop, others have run video processing/other compute/memory intensive tasks and it's held up well.

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