[Abishek_Muthian]

Also M1 owners, I would also like to know how much 8/16 GB memory has affected your workflow/productivity assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM?

e.g. Those who never closed their apps before, kept several browsers with several dozen tabs, Note taking apps, IDE, VM etc. all the time.

Is lighting fast opening of apps on M1 = Never having to close the apps in any machine with large RAM?

[photokandy]

My perspective: Going from a 2019 15" MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory to an 8GB M1 13" MacBook Pro

You don't start to feel the 8GB until you:

* have a lot of tabs open in Safari (like ~30+)

* have heavy web apps (GMail & Outlook, I'm looking at you)

* run a virtual machine (Only so much you can give a Parallels instance w/ 8GB)

* run some known performance & memory hogs (Slack, Teams, etc.)

* vpn seems to slow things down a bit

I generally will close down apps when I don't need them (but that's _always_ been my habit). I do find the M1 to be fully sufficient (and still faster than my previous MBP) when doing my day-to-day (including VS Code, JIRA, Slack, Xcode, Node, etc.). I also use my M1 for music performance and composition, and that's worked just fine for my purposes (but so did the previous MBP). I will (as I did before) switch contexts by closing apps I don't need, so it's hard to say if apps from development impact the apps for music or not; they rarely run side-by-side.

Things that have greatly improved my productivity:

* This thing is as cool as a cucumber, and absolutely sips its battery. This means I can be more comfortable taking my MBP to the couch, or to the patio (when it was warm) and not worry about watching the battery %.

* This thing _in general_ is much snappier. Native apps load quickly, and performance in the apps I use is about twice that of the previous MBP.

* I can type on this keyboard!

* Using a single external monitor is fine; I work from a couple of locations, and both my Dell P2415Q and my LG 24MD4KL-B 24" Ultrafine 4K work fine.

There are edge cases here where the M1 falls short:

* I can slow the poor thing to a crawl for a few seconds if I attach a 4K monitor and then try to AirPlay to another 4K display. It catches back up and is generally fine after, but you see the beachball for a while.

* Lots of tabs in Safari will cause slow tab switching, and some web sites just chew through CPU. Battery life is still _way_ better than the previous MBP, but it definitely impacts the feel of the device.

* Bluetooth mice -- ugh. I bought a Logitech MX ergo and had to switch to using the receiver instead because the MBP bluetooth felt so laggy.

* Most iOS apps just aren't well suited for the device. Apollo (for Reddit) works pretty well, but even that has its quirks where sometimes keyboard shortcuts will just stop working.

* VMs. If you run Windows in Parallels, you _will feel it_. I do not run VMs all the time for this reason, but spin them up and down as needed.

[Abishek_Muthian]

This is so far(04:13:32 UTC) the best answer to my question, just because most other comments seems to be 'I use 16GB, so it should be fine' disregarding 'assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM' part of the question.

Thank you for your time writing this detailed comment.

Few things which caused degraded performance were obvious e.g. tabs, VM.

But things which surprised me,

> * vpn seems to slow things down a bit

With great single core performance and WiFi-6 I would have expected networking to fine.

> Bluetooth mice -- ugh.

Digging further, Bluetooth/WiFi/USB issues seems to documented by others as well[1] unfortunately these gets buried under other reviews following a common narrative for M1 macs.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xyFIF9jA5w

[throw14082020]

That bluetooth lag was annoying me on my first day, but since then I haven't noticed it: either it was fixed or I got used to it. The cursor is quite responsive for me.

Maybe you should try install "Logitech Options", because I did that immediately on the first day, which might have fixed it.

[jondwillis]

I have noticed bluetooth lag apparent with first party keyboard, mouse, trackpad on an M1 Mini.

But that was also happening in different ways on my non-M1 MBP.

[1996]

I have laptops with 64 and 32Gb of RAM, but I found my best work happens with 8Gb of RAM.

I can't exactly explain how or why, but it seems to enforces discipline by reducing task (and context) switching - so much that I got myself another laptop with 4Gb.

[ATsch]

This reads like an apple user parody.

[xwdv]

I feel there’s some rationale to it. I used to have a lot of sprawling monitors, but I found I’m just much more focused with a single laptop screen and being able to just switch panes.

[TheOperator]

I know exactly what he's talking about as somebody who ran a win7 and Linux VM on a 4gb MBA. I had to be incredibly choosy about what I kept open at any given time or my system would keel over. It enforced discipline that I just didn't have normally which helped keep me organized.

[fortran77]

https://www.reddit.com/r/LOLHackerNews/comments/jrrz46/not_a...

[1996]

This is serious. A constrained environment helps me focus and think more creatively.

The only think I'll never skimp on is storage. In 2018 I standardized on 2Tb SSDs in raid0.

I'm currently upgrading to 4Tb (as I can't find much larger)

[ratww]

My favourite development machine is still my 9 year old Air with 4GB. I mostly do frontend, a bit of Rails and some of GameDev with C++. It forces me to use lightweight tools (like Sublime) and it works like a charm.

One advantage of having it is that the company I work for has a very international and diverse user base, but gives us developers super modern machines. Some developers tend to overgineer and cause performance issues on slower computers. With an older laptop I can understand better how the app will be perceived by users.

[1996]

> Some developers tend to overgineer and cause performance issues on slower computers. With an older laptop I can understand better how the app will be perceived by users.

Exactly this. It forces me to optimize instead of taking shortcuts.

But the #1 effect is on focus: I can't have many tabs open and procrastinate.

8Gb is ideal for me. I'll see how it goes with 4Gb.

[throwaway888abc]

Offtopic, but same apply to internet usage. Limit your self and you will be more productive.

[blunte]

TL;DR: 16GB is enough for most use cases on Intel Macs, so it should be as good or better on M1 Macs.

In my experience with 16GB Intel Macs for years, I have never had memory problems. I'm sure there are some large data migration cases which could make it a problem, but for my typical development (1-3 instances of a JetBrains IDE open, PostgreSQL and MySQL servers running, Docker running, sometimes even VirtualBox running, half a dozen or more terminal sessions, 1-5 Rails apps running - all of these simultaneously) I have been fine with 16GB.

If anything does start to create memory pressure, it's usually Chrome or Firefox after they've been open for weeks (since my laptop uptimes are usually 30-90 days), with far too many tabs open.

[zebnyc]

Have a 2019 2.6 GHz 16 GB Macbook pro. Between Chrome / Docker the machine can barely keep up. I notice that after Slack / Google hangout calls my laptop overheats and becomes generally unusable. Sometimes requires a reboot. Zoom calls don't cause same issues though.

[blunte]

Strange. My work laptop is a 2019 13" pro with only an i5 and 16GB RAM, and I very rarely have any problems. On the rare times I do, it's usually because some app went nuts and needs to be killed. Google Hangouts, however, is a pig.

But then, when on a Hangouts (now Meet, I guess) call, I typically won't be pushing any of the other apps; they'll be idling.

[jayd16]

You also lose any dedicated VRAM. That's an extra 4-8 gigs the Intel Macs have.

If you don't need it, you don't need it but to say 16 gigs on an M1 is somehow "better" seems silly to me.

[blunte]

In the developer use cases I described, video memory should not be a big concern. (Edit - also, my described scenario is on my 2019 13" MBP with 16GB RAM, i5 CPU, and puny Intel GPU.)

[Abishek_Muthian]

They key is whether you come from a workflow > 16GB intel mac, if you already had your workflow tuned for 16GB or lesser then you'll not find any issues w.r.t lack of memory.

[nickjj]

While I don't have an M1 and I use Windows I did make a video the other week around the topic of what it's like doing full time web development / ops work / 1080p video creation with 16GB of RAM.

That video is at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/for-the-time-being-16gb-of-ra...

The TL;DR is 16GB holds up really nicely in most cases. That's also with running WSL 2 which is something you wouldn't need to do on macOS so in theory memory usage should be even more efficient on macOS.