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by skybrian 893 days ago
I was about to say that both my M2 Macs (laptop and mini) run fine with 8gb. Haven't noticed any problems. I don't play high-end games, though.
3 comments

There are two things going on here. The M series seem quite efficient with ram, and Apple are ludicrously stingy with it.
"8GB should be enough for anybody"
640K was enough for anybody when that quote was made.
It's always amusing to see how Mx Mac fanbois always forget to add "in my use case".
I can never quite figure out what the use case is - as I sit here with 2 brave tabs open, my 10.13 mac is using up 13.58gb of ram.

These conversations usually usually end up at "my 8gb ram machine actually swaps constantly, but it's fine because otherwise I'd have to face the cognitive dissonance of justifying this purchase, so I'd rather repeat the apple marketing line they came up with to BS around their poor silicon yields"

The SWE colleague sitting next to me has a M1 Air with 8 GB RAM and runs VS Code, multiple browsers with many tabs, Slack and Webpack with the TS/React app he works on just fine. Dual display setup too.
That's so high I suspect measurement error. How did you come up with that number?

(It does look like my machine is using some swap space, but I don't notice any lag, so I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.)

I’m not sure that usage means anything. If it needed more it would be more aggressive in clearing stuff out as far as I can tell.
Clearing out means swapping to disk, right?
Perhaps?

Maybe it’s the speed of the SSD that prevents me noticing it, but it sure feels fast and I don’t have a ton of memory

Of course it’s for their use case, what else would it be? Every use case?