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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

When I started my current job they gave me an M1 Mac with 8GB because it’s what they had on hand. I could barely run my IDE and a web browser. At least 1GB was for video memory, and it was swapping constantly. I couldn’t run docker containers because of how much input lag I would get. 8GB is barely usable and shouldn’t even be an option for a Pro machine.

I used it for a week before switching to a personal desktop with 64GB.

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Did the company have various agents and other things installed? My company installs so much garbage on systems that they can make anything suck. Any time I have issues, it has nothing to do with what I'm trying to do, and has everything to do with the monitoring/management software. Windows, MacOS, more ram, less ram, doesn't really matter. They've found ways to destroy every system ever deployed.

My M1 MacBook Pro has actually handled it the best. My old Intel MacBook Pro would constantly be ramping up the fans, at one point burning through the whole battery in less than an hour if I unplugged it. No such issues with the M1 so far. There are still issues, but mostly crashes, not performance issues, which is a first in nearly 18 years of various desktops and laptops at the company.

I prefer my 8GB M1 Air to my 64GB Intel iMac for basically all of my Node/Rails/Swift development, with Docker running almost 100% of the time.

The only time I’ve seen the iMac be “better”, was when I had a Java project that had around 20 different packages that you needed to have open IDEs for.

How many silicon process nodes ahead is the M1 vs your intel iMac?

A few, 14nm i9-10910 vs 5nm? M1, but that's an implementation detail. The main point is that the amount of RAM is not the limiting factor.

There is no reality where that 8gig heap machine will outperform a 64gig heap machine in any objective measure. I'm sure you will hedge with your statement with something like "well it feeels faster" or some such nonsense.

Not only does it feel faster, but it also beats the iMac at single-core performance, looking at bundle build times. If I could fully utilize all the RAM + cores of the iMac, it would obviously come out ahead, but that's not the case for most frontend dev work. Not to mention it cost about 1/3 of the iMac and the battery lasts forever.

What kind of comparison is that 8 to 64. 8 GB for windows also sucks as well or Linux (save with tiling manager), software just bloats over time.

Imo 8gb is not enough as baseline, today's 8gb is 16.

I remember 4GB being good in 2015.

4gb was good in 2005. 16gb was good in 2015.

Personally I won't use a computer (as a daily driver) without 64gb of RAM today. Everything eats memory like it's going out of style.

Yeah it depends what you use it for ofc. At that time I was just working on LAMP stuff with Kate or Bluefish as my editor on Linux Mint ha.

I like leaving computers running for months (sleep at night) with a bunch of (context grouped) virtual windows the issue is when the OS resumes (windows or Mac) the stuff shifts around it's annoying (multi monitor).

I use Office/Safari/Photos/Whatsapp/VLC and sometimes Chrome on my 2015 MacBook Air with 8GB, and it seems to work OK.

> What kind of comparison is that 8 to 64.

Apple charges $200 to add 8GB, but you can get 64GB for less than $200.

I see

You can get 64gb for less than $100 if you can use DDR4.

mehhhhh you don't need a tiling window manager; lxde, lxqt, xfce are all fine "regular" window managers for low memory machines as long as you don't load a bunch of garbage that you don't have to have.

I work at apple and i use a m1 mac with 8gb for all my work

How? What apps are you using? As soon as I plug in an external monitor it turns into molasses. If I try to do a screen share for a video call, it lags. My memory pressure graph was always maxed out. If I ran the test suite for one repo the system became unresponsive. Docker would eat 4GB with only two containers (just redis and postgresql for local dev) I had to manually tune docker to use a little as possible. It was a nightmare.

You're clearly a dev who requires at least 16GB. For many office workers, 8GB is fine.

I supposed if you only used your $1800 MacBook Pro to use the web browser, then yeah, 8GB would be fine.

I wouldn't buy the $1600 M3 14" MBP if that's what you're referring to.

I can get an M2 Pro with 32GB for $1800 used easily. That's what I'd spend my money on if I had to get a laptop with $1800.

Docker on Mac runs a VM, which can't ballon (inflate/deflate memory usage), so it's no wonder 8 GiB isn't enough for you. For those who don't need to use docker and don't that fixed overhead, they're not going to have the same problems. Chrome, Slack, and iTerm can still fill 8 GiB, but you need many more tabs to get there than if you had to run docker.

I am now certain you've never used office 365.

The market for people who bought 13" MBP was college kids or adults, "pro-sumers" who didn't want an air. Few of them need more than 8GB of memory, but the additional battery life, storage, HDMI, SD, display support, speakers and XDR display make the base 14" M3 worth the extra few hundred to them over the air.

The M3 Pro is the base for actual "professional" users.

I had an old job give me a bottom of the barrel, refurbished HP Desktop. I popped in some RAM I had laying around and bought a $75 SSD, my machine was then the envy of the office.

haha, I remember doing the same thing with various garbage laptops I got years ago at work, it was worth it to just spend like $50 of my own money to not have headaches and finish my work much faster...

I don't think memory was the main issue. It sounds like there was some software installed that was using up the CPU -- some background utility run amok.

I've got an 8 GB M1 MBA and run Chrome and an IDE effortlessly, even when connected to a 4K monitor, and with tons of tabs open.

I'm not saying 8 GB is enough for everybody, but it's perfectly fine for an IDE and web browser. I'm pretty sure your issue was something else.

Idk what you've done with that laptop but my m1 8gb is running fine with IDE, multiple chrome tabs and docker

8 Gb is fine, running docker on a dev instance is not

"You're holding it wrong"

> running docker on a dev instance is not

Why? This is what Docker is for.

The point is, this is not what the lowest-end Mac laptop is for.

If you know you're going to be running Docker, and you buy a computer with 8GB of RAM, I'm afraid I have very little sympathy for you. You should know exactly what you're going to get.

This thread was started with "When I started my current job they gave me an M1 Mac with 8GB...", which is the main point, in a professional environment the person responsible for purchasing new machines might not even know about these requirements, or will likely believe that the developer just wants a nicer machine for no reason, when others in the office use the base model without a problem.

Then I sympathize, but it's no more Apple's fault than it would be Google's if the people responsible for purchasing new machines had bought them a Chromebook.

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