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Comment by vonseel | Hacker News Reader

If they are unrelated to the work your team does, how can you be sure they really need more than 8Gb of unified memory?

I'm on an 8Gb M1 Macbook Air and really don't notice it swapping often, unless I'm running something heavy in addition to browser + terminal + IntelliJ IDEA.

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To me it sounds like GP was implying someone not on his team was trying to purchase the under-specced laptops for his team.

Correct, and sorry for being unclear: somebody unrelated was trying to buy under-specced hardware for new members of my team in order to save money.

I’ve managed to soft lock 16gb machines with inefficient libraries I needed to use to pull data, whereas a 32gb machine would have just barely survived.

I feel the real use of high amounts of memory is to run bad software.

The M1 is absurdly better than Intel Macs about swapping, I think because of the giant caches. I never have memory issues on my 8gb M1 Mac Mini, but my work 16gb Intel Macbook runs into memory slowdowns as soon as it launches Slack, a browser, and an IDE at the same time.

I have a 16GB M1 MBP. I can easily get it to slow to a crawl if I'm not careful. This is with Intellij Idea and other tools I use regularly. It's the worst thing about Macbooks, limited RAM.

Hahah I'm glad I got the 16GB M1 Macbook Air because I can run Stable Diffusion on it! I'm having so much fun generating images for free to my hearts content.

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