[paustint]

Seriously.... My 16gb MacBook pro M1 work machine runs out of memory constantly. I had a MacBook air 8gb and it was useless, it would freeze constantly and have crackly audio. I found that 24GB ram is really the minimum that is usable on M-series when doing any type of basic work.

Likely an output of so many electron based apps which are memory hungry, but if the memory is supposedly "really fast" then I would expect better performance. Never had the issue with Intel.

But with a nice bit or memory, the performance is really nice.

[sgt]

I'm on 16GB which seems plenty - running many JetBrain's IDE's at the same time, browsers, VM's etc. I know people with the 8GB version and they are fine too. Could be that your machine is faulty somehow and that it's not the RAM but something else.

[kanwisher]

You are only person in thread that says this. I still have one laptop is a M1 air 16gb. Still fastest computer I have ever owned outside of my MBP, I really only mbp for AI training everything else runs great on air still

[Toutouxc]

> 24GB ram is really the minimum that is usable on M-series when doing any type of basic work

M1 Air with 16 GB RAM. I have RubyMine (JetBrains IDE), an application server running Rails, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, Slack, Safari and Apple Music running, and DxO PhotoLab 7 loaded on the non-work desktop space and clicking through some photos I took yesterday. Memory pressure green, laptop chilling at 30 °C.

[wickedsickeune]

I'm using Unity (uber wasteful) and Rider (Java) and an M1 air with 8GB is fine, no slowdown whatsoever* (compared to my desktop with 32GB on Windows). RAM is not the bottleneck in *NIX OSes, unless you do something that specifically requires a lot of RAM (eg machine learning)

*compiling is slower, but the desktop has a much faster CPU

[turquoisevar]

You might want to get that checked out

I’ve got a 8GB Mac mini, 16GB iMac and a 64GB MBP, all on Apple Silicon. In 99% of the cases I can’t tell a difference in responsiveness or use and my main use is app development in Xcode and high resolution photo and video editing.

Even when actively monitoring things I mainly see a difference in memory compression, not so much in swap.

As for Intel, before Apple Silicon I had the most tricked out Intel MBP and I’d rather chop my left arm off and be stuck in a bunker for a year with just the 8GB Mac mini than have to use that the Intel MBP is had. Unless perhaps the bunker has no heating, in which case I might have to reconsider.

[skybrian]

A contrasting data point: I have an 8gb M2 and haven’t noticed any problem yet that made me wish I had more memory. I’m not using it for work, though.

[asadm]

Not sure what workflow you are on but I have a few IDEs, simulators, electron apps, etc. on my 16gb m1 pro. I haven't ever had memory issues.