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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

It will do real work fine. But slack and a browser will bring it to its knees.

I have an older 8GB MacBook Air. This is false. I routinely have Slack, Chrome, iTerm, Visual Studio Code, and more open on it. It’s fine.

Those apps don’t need every single byte of memory you see in Activity Monitor to be active in RAM all of the time. The OS swaps out unused parts to the very fast SSD. If you push it so far that active pages are constantly being swapped out as apps compete then you start to notice, but the threshold for that is a lot higher than HN comments seem to think.

It really isn't. It is a capable machine but modern software has made it a lemon. And that is the only reason apple sells it. So that whoever buys it needs to buy another one prematurely, generating another sale.

Everything from apple to modern software is rotten to its core.

It really isn't.

…in reply to someone who just said their experience is fine, and included details. If you just want to rant about Apple, have at it, but you’re going to have to do better than “nuh, uh” if you want to be convincing.

Well I could say that it isn't enough for vscode alone. And I'd be right. It all depends on how and what you use vscode for.

8GB really shouldn't be an option in 2026, it is just shortsighted and an insanely uneven build.

I could rant about Dell too. Or most other manufacturers (surprise, greed isn't apple exclusive). But Apple at least tries to keep the appearance of a higher profile.

Well I could say that it isn't enough for vscode alone. And I'd be right. It all depends on how and what you use vscode for.

Fair enough; though experience says 8Gb will run VScode, it would very much depend on the use case, I agree. OTOH, I would argue that anyone working VScode that hard probably isn’t buying 8Gb machines, but OP did say they’re running it so it’s up for discussion.

I’m sick to death of this. It’s so devoid from reality in 2026 that I see it as a lowest common denominator populist political catchphrase more than any legitimate contributor to any conversation. My min spec MacBook Pro from 6 years ago doesn’t flinch at this, and it barely flinches at a whole lot more.

Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked if you’re legitimately still having these issues.

Trust me, so am I. And I am dead serious.

You don’t have an 8GB Apple Silicon MacBook, so you? So why did you post?

Only if you insist on running the standalone slack app for some reason. Why run one instance of Chrome when you can pay for two?

I've been finding it hard to wean myself off the standalone app but another major reason to do so is opening threads in separate tabs. I find as soon as I'm involved in two or more conversations on there it's super easy to start losing track of things.

Maybe if you have 100 browser tabs or something silly like that?

A couple YouTube tabs are enough if you leave them running for long enough. Just one YT browser process will easily take up 1-4GB sooner or later.

Or it won’t because Chrome and MacOS will know how much RAM is available and manage it effectively.

I am talking from experience with an M1 & 8GB RAM. I had to restart either the browser or the YouTube browser processes at least once every couple days to stop the whole system from lagging.

A couple Facebook Marketplace tabs that have videos of the item for sale would absolutely crush my 2017 MacBook Pro.

My M1 Air would slow down a little, but was still usable doing the same thing. And they both had 8GB of memory.

While I agree with your statement, I don't think judging one's way of working and using their computer was necessary.

I could have two browser windows open in the late 1990s. I have about a thousand times as much RAM now. So even with 10x more bloat in the pages, I should be able to open 200 tabs just fine.

yea that's just not true lol.

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