[giantrobot]

Both iOS and macOS support compressed memory pages which helps a lot with memory pressure. On modern hardware decompressing a memory page is orders of magnitude faster than swapping.

Even relatively modest compression ratios add up in aggregate. Swapping compressed pages is also more efficient (when it happens) because less data needs to be persisted to the disk.

That's not to say 8GB is enough for everyone but it punches a bit above its weight in a lot of use cases.