To put this into perspective it's a small enough amount of memory that merely running a web browser with a dozen tabs open is often a choppy laggy experience.
This is false for me on my launch month m1 Mac mini. I use edge all day and parsec and discord. I watch multiple twitch streams or plow through YouTube videos all day on this computer hooked up to my 4k TV. Sometimes I'll watch 4k HDR AV1 or x265 rips of videos. This computer handles everything with no choppy or laggy going on.
launch month M1 MBP w/ 16GB - I constantly have to close discord and browsers to keep enough RAM to keep browsing without huge slowdowns from paging memory.
Strange! Are you on the latest beta of macOS? Do you have the whatever the heck it's called search indexing thing that Mac OS has disabled? Those are the only two things that I'm doing with my system that I can think of offhand. I like never have situations where I'm out of RAM and swapping and if I do it's never to the point where it's making my computer unusable. I even use VS code with a whole bunch of really complicated extensions installed for different workspaces and it's no issue.
Edit: are you closing things or are you quitting things?
Not on beta. Haven't disabled search index manually. Closing certain tabs (especially reddit or other adware garbage sites) helps a lot, as does quitting. Discord is just a huge hog for me, but I'm on a lot of servers there.
I appreciate the search index tip!
I also have a work-issued M2 MBP with 32GB which has none of the slow-down issues I see on my personal M1 no matter what I do. Though sometimes the FireEye anti-malware process 'xagt' gets stuck using a shitload of CPU non-stop and murders the battery - killing that it immediately starts cooling down the outer case temperature noticeably within a few seconds, which is crazy. It starts up again shortly but doesn't continue using CPU like crazy ... I really need to write a daemon to do that automatically for me rather than just when I notice battery going way too fast.
Just to really stress how misinformed you are, I too have a launch M1 MacBook Pro w/ 8GB RAM and have only ever had problems with websites that contain a lot of UHD video content or similar.
Not really. I run a lot of thing even chrome, docker, Xcode, WhatsApp, messenger, … all and it still ok. I do get a 512 to last longer the wear and tears of swap.
> I run a lot of thing even chrome, docker, Xcode, WhatsApp, messenger
All at the same time? Because that’s hardly believable. Docker + any IDE already starts lagging with just 8GB. If you try connecting it to an external display it becomes virtually unusable.