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by wrldos 1250 days ago
16Gb is minimum on M1 I found. I hit problems on my 8Gb machine regularly. It’ll work fine but you do get heavy pauses.

The thing to be careful of is if your custom config breaks then the turnaround to fix it can be a couple of months. Ergo only buy stock configs. That makes the market somewhat less friendly.
2 comments
NavinF 1250 days ago
Agreed, 16G on my 2021 M1 Pro macbook is just enough for software development. I'm definitely upgrading to 32G when the M2 Pro is released so I can have more headroom.

Also worth mention that 64G is pretty cheap on desktop and that's what the Mac Mini should be compared to.

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smoldesu 1250 days ago
Same here. I've heard people argue that 8gb is enough for web browsing, and while that is true, I genuinely struggle to imagine a use-case that doesn't max out the memory within 30 minutes of usage.
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jeffbee 1250 days ago
I have the 8G M1 and my typical use-case is building huge notebooks in Observable, including one I’m looking at right now that has over 100 million datapoints loaded from a USGS web service into hundreds of separate plots and it’s fine. I’ve never run into the supposed limits.

I also have over 200 PDFs loaded in preview in the background, related to a law suit I’m researching. Still no issues.

ETA: I’m likely to replace my m1 with the m2 since the m2 gets +30% scores in common web benchmarks and heavy JavaScript hacks are my main thing. That should bring it up to par with my Linux box that has the top of the line Intel CPU.

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