[greatgib]

I have sadly to use one M1 with 8gb and it is really painful.

I think that a normal user will feel the bad effect of the low ram amount but will not really realize where the problem is coming from.

Switching from one app to another is painfully slow. It might take 1, 2 or more seconds to go from one app to another in my opinion.

The os is really greedily evicting app memory once you switch to another window. And reload it when you come back.

I even have the personal hypothesis that Apple is keeping as-is the ergonomically awful Dock because of that. As it is difficult to switch between multiple windows of a single app, you can't easily realize how show you pass from a window to another. Like a magic trick.

[kcartlidge]

> I have sadly to use one M1 with 8gb and it is really painful.

I've been using an 8GB M1 for a couple of years, including for development with C#, Go, Python, and Rails. I've had triple-figures of browser tabs open, Office 2019 Mac, Affinity Designer, and more all running at once. And never in all those years have I experienced sluggishness or slowdown either in-app or during switching.

I don't doubt your experience, this is simply to say that not all observed behaviours can be assumed to be generally applicable.

[etrautmann]

that's crazy to me. I was given a 32GB MBP for work and found it to constantly eat all of the ram and slow down to the point of being useless and require restarts every few days. It took considerable active management to keep more than 4GB free. I upgraded to a higher ram machine now and all of my challenges went away.

My main workflows are python dev and data analysis, some CAD modeling with fusion, and inevitably keeping too many chrome tabs open. Still, with what seemed normal to me, 32 GB didn't cut it, but reading these discussions is crazy making since I seem to be the only one.

[robenkleene]

> It took considerable active management to keep more than 4GB free.

This illustrates ignorance of the basics of how memory management works on macOS (e.g., "free" memory is not a determination of whether you need more RAM) https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-yo....

[throwaway89201]

> As it is difficult to switch between multiple windows of a single app

Magic trick: press command + ~ to quickly switch to another window of the same app.

[dzhiurgis]

Wizard trick: map this to four finger trackpad force press (via BetterTouchTool)

[dzhiurgis]

I'm 90% sure your workplace supplied malware ala cloudstrike is causing this.