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Comment by coverband | Hacker News Reader

And still starting at 8GB of RAM… Disappointed.

and yet at this point pretty much expected. So obnoxious and odious - the reality is for any C/C++/rust or similar compilation you need a minimum of 1gb per compilation core for compilation alone, before you consider the rest of the OS :-/

You're saying people shouldn't be able to buy 8GB RAM Macs, which is crazy. I had to check how much memory my laptop has, and it's 8GB and I've never noticed.

I guess you're just complaining about what you get for the lowest price.

The lowest price is still a very high price that justifies the low end being 16. This is not a baseless complaint.

And no, it's almost 2024, people should not be able to buy 8gb RAM computers when they're soldered in and 1k+ in price.

For the price and a supposedly "Pro" model, having 8GB of non-replaceable RAM is ludicrous.

Seriously.... My 16gb MacBook pro M1 work machine runs out of memory constantly. I had a MacBook air 8gb and it was useless, it would freeze constantly and have crackly audio. I found that 24GB ram is really the minimum that is usable on M-series when doing any type of basic work.

Likely an output of so many electron based apps which are memory hungry, but if the memory is supposedly "really fast" then I would expect better performance. Never had the issue with Intel.

But with a nice bit or memory, the performance is really nice.

A contrasting data point: I have an 8gb M2 and haven’t noticed any problem yet that made me wish I had more memory. I’m not using it for work, though.

You are only person in thread that says this. I still have one laptop is a M1 air 16gb. Still fastest computer I have ever owned outside of my MBP, I really only mbp for AI training everything else runs great on air still

I'm on 16GB which seems plenty - running many JetBrain's IDE's at the same time, browsers, VM's etc. I know people with the 8GB version and they are fine too. Could be that your machine is faulty somehow and that it's not the RAM but something else.

I'm using Unity (uber wasteful) and Rider (Java) and an M1 air with 8GB is fine, no slowdown whatsoever* (compared to my desktop with 32GB on Windows). RAM is not the bottleneck in *NIX OSes, unless you do something that specifically requires a lot of RAM (eg machine learning)

*compiling is slower, but the desktop has a much faster CPU

> 24GB ram is really the minimum that is usable on M-series when doing any type of basic work

M1 Air with 16 GB RAM. I have RubyMine (JetBrains IDE), an application server running Rails, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Slack, Safari and Apple Music running, and DxO PhotoLab 7 loaded on the non-work desktop space and clicking through some photos I took yesterday. Memory pressure green, laptop chilling at 30 °C.

Not sure what workflow you are on but I have a few IDEs, simulators, electron apps, etc. on my 16gb m1 pro. I haven't ever had memory issues.

You might want to get that checked out

I’ve got a 8GB Mac mini, 16GB iMac and a 64GB MBP, all on Apple Silicon. In 99% of the cases I can’t tell a difference in responsiveness or use and my main use is app development in Xcode and high resolution photo and video editing.

Even when actively monitoring things I mainly see a difference in memory compression, not so much in swap.

As for Intel, before Apple Silicon I had the most tricked out Intel MBP and I’d rather chop my left arm off and be stuck in a bunker for a year with just the 8GB Mac mini than have to use that the Intel MBP is had. Unless perhaps the bunker has no heating, in which case I might have to reconsider.

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