[windowsrookie]

Because 8GB still works fine and will continue to work fine for at least the next 6-7 years. Cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks still come with 4GB ram.

I'm currently typing this on a 2008 MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHZ Core 2 Duo and 6GB RAM. It's playing a 1080P video on a second monitor and has 5 browser tabs open in two browsers. Currently using 4.7GB RAM and 60% CPU.

[tinus_hn]

It may work ‘fine’ but really, a system with more memory works better. 5 browser windows/tabs and one video is not really a demanding workload and that’s already using over half of the machines resources.

[windowsrookie]

No it is not a demanding workload. If you have a demanding workload I absolutely recommend purchasing more than 8GB of RAM, And Apple will gladly sell you a machine with more RAM if you need it. But for the vast majority of people 8GB is plenty, so that is what they offer on their base machines.

[KptMarchewa]

You must have a very different definition of "fine" than me. Only getting OOMkilled several times per hour is OK?

[runjake]

My company has tens of thousands of non-technical users using M1 MacBooks with 8 GB RAM and they don't have any OOM errors regularly, if ever.

It sounds like your use case requires more than the baseline. You may be the outlier.

[iamwpj]

The commenter didn't say they were getting hit with OOMs. Is this something that is happening to you?

[Macha]

I used to hit OOMs on my 16GiB Macbook Pro pretty regularly, but that was IntelliJ + Docker + MySQL + Chrome + Debuggers + Google Meet + Slack

Someone using Chrome + Facebook or even a dev writing e.g. Python in VS Code to run locally is probably less likely to hit that.

[sjs382]

I have one of the first set of M1 MBPs with 8GB.

All day I run Chrome with 3 profiles (as many as 5) and 40+ total tabs (sometimes a much higher number), VS Code, SourceTree, 8 docker containers running various services for dev (7 native, one emulated x86_64), iTerm, Photoshop CC and XD CC.

I run everything I can in the browser including Slack, GMail, GCal, our PM tool, etc.

With all of that said, I don't even know what a "OOM" looks like. The only real performance issues I have deal with an inherited codebase (which does stuff it really shouldn't be doing) and docker-specific filesystem slowness (which is a known issue).

[Macha]

OOM on OS X looks like the OS popping up a modal dialog asking you which application you'd like to kill because you're out of memory.

OOM on Linux looks like the OS just killing the heaviest application if you have no swap, or grinding to a halt if you have swap and actually need to use it as working memory.

OOM on Windows looks like your system grinding to a halt because you're paging all the time.

[captainbland]

Yeah, Docker in MacOS and Java are particularly memory hungry as a combination. We stand up our whole k8s cluster in docker desktop as a matter of course and I fear for my 32GB work MacBook.