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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who has and uses an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM, I agree it's not a lot but it's more than sufficient for any use case a Macbook Air would generally see.

This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?

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> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

4GB of RAM.[0]

It's the stupid websites that require GB of RAM to display a couple pieces of written text and the hundreds of MB of JS that tally up to the additional 28GB you may be thinking of. Oh and all the electron apps which add additional browser requirements where there shouldn't be any. I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular fault though, I would be curious to know how they accomplished it.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-...

> I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular fault though

MacOS isn’t, but Apple Silicon laptops sort of are. Seems the onboard flash and flash controller integrated into M1 and M2 chips are fast enough that disk paging doesn’t impact performance for most day-to-day task. I’ve personally been very surprised at how much performance Apple have squeezed out of 8GB of RAM, it’s certainly far more than I was accustomed to in the Intel era.

Truly, my M1 Air runs rings around my 16 inch i9 work laptop in day to day use

What websites are you visiting that download hundreds of MB of Javascript?

It's still stupid. It costs Apple a minimal amount extra to vastly improve the utility of their devices with 16GB RAM and 512/1TB drives by default. But they're cutting corners here in search of product segmentation and profit, so much so customers will genuinely be suffering because of their choices.

It's pain because not only the CTO option is quite expensive, but also CTO models aren't sold and discounted well at market.

Does it matter what it costs Apple? The locksmith only takes ~5minutes to open a lock and yet...

Well yeah, it does matter. People aren't buying them at the current price point.

They aren't buying other laptops either. It's a market problem.

Yes, the way consumers perceive your pricing matters. If you lose a key, you need to call a locksmith; it's rare that someone needs to buy a new apple laptop.

Is it rare? There are so many startups that come and go and they buy laptops (new) for employees...

Sure, and their options include literally everything else on the market, including older macbooks. You're missing the point by a mile.

What's your point? That it doesn't hurt Apple's bottom line so why not?

Cost of materials should not dictate the final price. There's always a lot more to it.

I bought a Linux machine a year or so ago, with 64G ram and 2T SSD (for less than Apple wants, obviously). I will say it is pretty much over spec-ced. I have a browser, use it for taxes and like city permit approvals and the odd pdf download/print. For a while I ran a bitcoin node. I use it for development of my open source go libraries, with eMacs and the associated ten stack overflow or GitHub tabs, but the only time I get make it use even a faction of its power is when like i test a “find all dup files on the dive” or rebuild gcc.

Hopefully it will work for a long time, but I think development could be good on a quarter of the mem/storage hardware. More cores would be nice, as always, but even there, go compile will light them all up but for far less than a second.

> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

wut. I have a 16GB Windows machine and it's fine.

I think he was being intentionally hyperbolic, alluding to the fact that Windows' published minimum specs are way to low (like Vista) and the actual specs needed to run are much higher because the bloat.

“Way too low” isn’t really true. I have RDP and Firefox and Word and Excel open, and Windows still uses just around 4 GB of RAM according to Task Manager.

It depends on the version. In Vista, the one mentioned, they certainly were. It you ran a computer using the minimum specs, it was almost unusable.

https://www.osnews.com/story/16675/vista-minimum-requirement...

The same could be said of Mac OS 10.4 at the same time. It was an absolute dog on systems without Quartz Extreme support.

Vista came out over 15 years ago, it hardly seems relevant today.

Yes, but I think Vista was an outlier in that respect.

It was certainly the most egregious I recall, but here's an article complaining about Windows 10 minimum specs too.

https://winaero.com/the-real-system-requirements-for-windows...

Here's one for Windows 11

https://www.makeuseof.com/is-4gb-ram-enough-for-windows-11/

Seems Windows 8 was ok

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2221048/will-windows-8-...

> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

Speaking as someone who has and uses a Windows laptop with 8GB of RAM, that's an absurd statement. The "new minimum" in terms of what you usually see for sale, is (still) more like 16GB.

You beat me to it. I'm still using 8GB on my Win10 desktop. I play games (of course not the newest ones with all bells and whistles on, especially as I have only 1060 GTX card), I develop stuff in VS or VS Code, I browse the net on multiple browsers, I edit graphics etc. etc.

I wish I had 16GB but 8GB is _still perfectly fine_.

I use an M1 Mini with 8GB at home, M1 MBP with 32GB at work. I experience pinwheels all the time at home, hardly ever at work.

Maybe I'm an extreme case, typically running all the time: phpStorm, Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Excel, Terminal, TextMate, WhatsApp, Messages, Calendar, MS RDP Client, Mail, Notes, Reminders.

Also kind of a trip, I installed Stats at home to troubleshoot bottlenecks. Just noticed I didn't install it at work.

You don’t need 32GB of RAM to run Windows…

No, but you do to run the things you're running Windows for.

My daughter’s laptop is 8GB, my son’s is 16gb, my desktop is 16gb. I’ve never had a problem with any of them.

Lightroom Classic on my desktop uses less than 8GB of RAM.

By that reasoning the new minimum is now 128GB for Ubuntu, just because I need that.

If you need 128GB of RAM, you need 128GB of RAM. Nothing unfair about that.

Personally, my newest main machine has 64GB of RAM (for now) simply because I never want to run out of RAM ever; RAM is cheap (when it ain't coming from Apple) and I hate dealing with swap thrashing.

Speaking more generally, I sincerely wouldn't suggest any lower than 32GB to any person asking for advice on a Windows setup today. Far too many programs demand far too much RAM now, with Chrome being just the leading example.

My laptop has 128GB RAM. It's sweet, no regrets.

I'm typing this on a Macbook M2 max with 32 GB RAM.

Not all that much open and the memory usage is at 27 GB. Chrome, Teams etc. messaging apps, Xcode and other SW dev stuff.

Kinda regret I didn't go for 64 GB.

I wouldn't take this at face value. Modern OSes are great at managing RAM, which means RAM only gets cleared as needed. A lot of that 27 GB can likely be cleared, but the OS finds that there isn't any reason to.

I somehow doubt that. Look at Cached files and subtract that number from Memory used, and tell us please that number.

No "free" command. With "top" command I got this:

MemRegions: 1744370 total, 5771M resident, 234M private, 4726M shared. PhysMem: 31G used (2888M wired, 15G compressor), 74M unused.

A bit confusing even for someone who is comfortable dealing with low level kernel stuff...

I guess I'll need to install Homebrew, MacPorts or something.

Edit vm_stat says this. Looks like more reasonable output:

  % vm_stat
  Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes)
  Pages free:                                4070.
  Pages active:                            387530.
  Pages inactive:                          385599.
  Pages speculative:                          241.
  Pages throttled:                              0.
  Pages wired down:                        185222.
  Pages purgeable:                              2.
  "Translation faults":                 458286513.
  Pages copy-on-write:                   18032218.
  Pages zero filled:                    230111374.
  Pages reactivated:                      9982494.
  Pages purged:                           4086524.
  File-backed pages:                       197104.
  Anonymous pages:                         576266.
  Pages stored in compressor:             2007280.
  Pages occupied by compressor:           1062310.
  Decompressions:                         6355861.
  Compressions:                          10204603.
  Pageins:                               13150790.
  Pageouts:                                252630.
  Swapins:                                     52.
  Swapouts:                                 30380.

Better to use Activity Monitor, as simple as that might be.

FWIW, with only Chrome (several windows, multiple tabs, rebooted a few weeks ago) open I'm at:

Physical Memory: 32,00 GB

Memory Used: 21 GB

Cached Files: 10,45 GB

Swap Used: 0 GB

You can look at any number of videos demonstrating that a base model MacBook Air is more than capable of running Chrome with a few tabs open. Modern browsers (and operating systems) opportunistically use free RAM for caching.

SW dev stuff tends to take a lot more RAM than consumer/productivity apps though. I would want at least 16 and ideally 32 for software dev. But for general usage I think that would drop to at least 8 ideally 16.

> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

I use both MacOS and Windows, both in a VM using Linux as the host OS, on a laptop with 64GB of RAM, and honestly Windows 11, not considering the fact that it tries to run ads on the start menu, feels lighter and snappier than MacOS.

Of course if you give it a lot of of RAM it will try to use as much as it can to aggressively cache stuff, but not differently from what MacOS does.

8GB of RAM is unusable for even basic 1080p video editing. I would think a Macbook air's use case included that, because there are a wide range of $700 Windows laptops that will provide the 16GB minus the extortionate markup.

I'm using 14.79GB of ram with just imessage, signal and 3 edge tabs open on Mojave. With 8gb you're almost certainly constantly swapping.

A little while ago I asked on HN if an M1 with 8GB of ram is enough for major 4k editing in FCPX and multiple people chimed in to say they're using that exact setup and it's smooth as butter...

The 8G on my wife's last Intel MacPro was definitely not enough for her light browsing and email reading, it just ground to a halt swapping browser memory. Admittedly she visited web sites with a lot of crap on them, but still.

The experience across different architectures with the same amount of memory is not identical. The M1 machines can swaps orders of magnitude faster.

ublock origin

> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

98% of users can live with 8 just fine, and 16 is great. 32 is a waste for most folks.

My vibe from people my age is that for personal and mixed personal/business devices that aren’t particularly “tech-minded” is that they feel they don’t need a full laptop anymore and are going for more portable devices. Meaning iPad.

Generally 8 works for me but I do sometimes end up needing more. At which point I curse my financial situation when I had to purchase my computer which I am otherwise happy with.

Yeah but they can also live with a computer that costs 500$.

I just wish the Baseline for Computer in 2023 could be 10GB, or even 12GB. It doesn't need to double to 16GB, but there are lots of situation where 8GB would cause paging. And macOS doesn't really optimise for paging speed.

Also remember, the GPU also uses memory. 8GB isn't even the same as 8GB when iGPU wasn't a thing.

A lot of developers and video editors use Macbook Air and 24GB is what is considered sufficient for them. They buy into Macbook Air for portability reasons.

Windows laptops on the other hands hold incredibly well at 16GB of RAM. There are also windows laptops with the same weight as Macbook Air at half the cost and double the specs.

Windows also does perfectly fine with 8GB. Hint, being a developer doesn't require using Docker all the time.

Mid-sized Java project would balk at running tests with that amount of RAM. Hell, I had problems with 16GB.

I was running Websphere and IBM RAD IDE in 2005 with 4GB...

It tells a lot regarding how that application is written.

>This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

That's BS. I ran Win 11 on a 8GB tablet PC just fine (although I wouldn't recommend it, get 16 instead).

I get it, we all hate windows, but can we please stick to reality and stop spreading FUD on HN?

I actually like Windows, despite all its faults, and blame the wider Windows ecosystem (and especially Chrome) for demanding and wasting so much RAM.

With that said, I can easily break past 16GB just running Windows and Chrome. 32GB is the new minimum if you want an enjoyable time; swapping into the page file even with PCIE4 and PCIE5 SSDs is still miserable.

Unless you plan to run Bloomberg and a full trading setup 16gb of ram in windows is heavy user spec.

Opening task manager and checking if windows is using more than 16gb is not a method to tell how much you should spec, my PC has 128gb ram with page file disabled and regularly sits at 40gb ram, because windows will allocate ram if there is ram to allocate.

I run 1000s of users on vdi 4/16 is more than enough for 99% of users.

I was using a 16GB RAM Windows machine as a daily until last year, I upgraded that to 32GB because I was routinely capping out and thrashing the page file.

I've since upgraded from that machine to a new build with 64GB of RAM simply because so many programs demand too much RAM now, and I hate even the mere thought of hitting swap.

>With that said, I can easily break past 16GB just running Windows and Chrome

I find that hard to believe since Chrome now sleeps tabs. I have Chrome with 60+ tabs open right now (yes, I'm one of those hoarders) and only eats 2,7GB RAM with a total system usage of ~9GB including all my other apps I have minimized right now (Signal, Torrent, Weather, PotPlayer, etc).

So I seriously doubt you're blowing past the 16GB just with Chrome alone.

Chrome eats a stupid amount of RAM even if it tries to not; just earlier I closed Chrome on one of my machines which immediately released 10GB of RAM. Combine that with however much Windows generally consumes and that's close to or even past the 16GB mark.

That’s a massive cope.

I’m still running Windows on a PC with just 8 GB without any trouble. Of course I don’t do 4K video editing or similar.

The Pro starts with 16 GB of RAM.

Which is equally dumb for a Pro as 8GB for a non-pro at this price.

It would be ok if the upgrades would not be so freakishly expensive. RAM is on an all-time low, still Apple wants 460€ !!! for 16 GB RAM more here in Europe.

The worst thing about that upgrade pricing is that you know it’s basically pure profit for Apple. Sure, there’s an Apple tax that gets you build quality, aesthetics, better iOS integration, no OS licensing etc, but that’s already been priced into base model. RAM and SSD upgrades are just priced like Diet Coke in a fancy restaurant.

The 13 inch starts with 8.

Which starts at lower prices. But you're right, I forgot about this model because I do not consider it a Pro model anymore.

That 13" model is so confusing. It's such a bad buy in many ways compared to the 14"

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