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Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

Another anecdote: I have a M1 air and an m1 iMac both with 8GB and have never run into a problem.

I think 8gb is still the sweet spot for casual users.

Can you define "sweet spot" in this case?

Usually I see that term used when the thing being considered is a pricey upgrade, and you need to strike a compromise between price and performance.

In this case, we're talking about an extra 8GB of memory, which would add perhaps $10 in cost to the bill of materials for the machine (or maybe less in sufficient volume). Given that Apple is also overcharging by at least 3x current standard retail price for SSD upgrades, my guess is that there's some room to bump up the wholesale cost a bit.

Not doing so is, IMHO, insulting to users, and given the non-upgradable nature of these machines, bad for the environment, counter to all of Apple's talk about being environmentally friendly.

Majority of users are just going to be using web, email and photos.

There is simply no need for more than 8GB for those use cases.

my personal machine is an 8GB M1 Air. I don't usually do dev work on it, but always have dozens of Safari tabs, often a bunch of Chrome tabs, a bajillion Slacks, and other apps. And I'll do light dev work on it, mostly for personal things. I even play the occasional game.

In other words, I think I'm well beyond what you're even describing. And while I do wish I had bought the one with more RAM, but usually I don't notice it. The swapping is that good.

Why would you not want an extra 8GB? The point is that it's dirt cheap to add, and Apple's refusal to do so is an insult to its customers.

Also it makes it much easier for Apple upsell upgrades and increase their margin through market segmentation.

> There is simply no need for more than 8GB

I don't really agree. But let's say that the case. Will it still be the same in 2-4 years? Possibly not? Great Apple can just sell another mac.

Worth noting the M1 memory is MUCH faster and higher bandwidth than x86 options at launch (about 2x). That accounted for a lot of the difference in perception. At least for general usage... for Docker + containers, it definitely uses a bit more.

Did you intend to reply to a different comment? The speed of the memory has no bearing on the capacity, obviously, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said.

It's relevant because you are assessing value.

The original M1 (I assume that's what GP meant by "at launch") uses LPDDR4x DRAM modules, the same as many x86 laptops that have soldered RAM. You can literally look up the part numbers based on the photos of the M1 CPU package. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I'm not sure why it would be any more expensive than x86 laptops' memory, and it might even be less expensive just due to the volume that Apple is likely buying.

My point was the configuration with the M1 has much higher throughput (more channels) than typical laptop/desktop configurations. This allows for allocation/deallocation to go more quickly, so while working it is less noticeable for many workflows. It really depends on what you're doing though.

The pricing structure Apple charges for more memory and storage is F'd up... I was just making a point that one doesn't need as much as you might think depending on the bandwidth and workflow.

16GB M1 mini here. I've had memory issues exactly zero times. Current memory usage is at 15%.

I've had games running with full on tab-hoarded browsers and IDEs open among with any other crap I haven't bothered to shut down.

I have a 16gb m2 MBA. I’ve hit memory issues exactly once.

I had FF open with a ton of tabs, Capture One open, and I was stacking 400 frames in PixInsight.

The fact I had to push that hard was immensely impressive.

I doubt that. Almost every app out there uses at least 200MB of memory. I would say 16GB is a sweet for casual users. 32 a minimum for devs/tech people and 64 an optimum if you happen to be using a lot of k8s/docker stuff.

8gb might be okay for casual use on M1, given the higher memory bandwidth... but for Software dev, spot on. I've got 128gb in my desktop, and have gone over 64gb only once or twice with a lot of data loaded.

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