[wil421]

I’m the tech guy in my circle and despite my wishes most of my friends and family get the standard 8GB models. Beside one friend that had a crazy memory link, most of them don’t bat an eye. If Safari, Word, and Excel open they don’t mind too much.

8GB is fine at the moment on MacOS. The standard is still 8gb for most non-performance laptops and there are legions and legions of corporate HPs and Dells with 8GBs.

[yamtaddle]

Really, 8GB is only a problem if you use multiple Electron apps or heavy Webapp tabs (full-fat Gmail, Google Docs) at once or use lots of VMs, which is something most people don't do unless it's for work (or not at all, unless they're tech nerds, in the case of VMs). Otherwise, they'll have 1-3 heavy webshit things open at a time, generally, which fits OK in 8GB.

It's when you've got two or three needlessly-heavy web "dashboards" and Gmail and Slack and Jira and Notion all eating 500-1500 MB each that 8GB starts to feel cramped.

[mikhael28]

I think 8gb is totally fine if all you are doing is full-stack JS development, with some light backend stuff thrown in (Python rest service, maybe even running postgres locally).

I occasionally run my tech stack on a 12' MacBook with an Intel m3 processor to make sure that I haven't gone overboard with tooling, mostly to ensure international, developing country open source contributors don't have to struggle opening local servers and such on their machines.