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by Spunkie 471 days ago
Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time.

But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
3 comments
potatoman22 471 days ago
Totally an anecdote, but my 8gb M1 runs fine with multiple browsers/tabs, VS Code, and Spotify all open. Usually performance is only an issue for me when working with larger ML models. I wonder why others are getting worse performance? Maybe it's the specific sites they're using?
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marricks 470 days ago
Could be chrome vs safari or ff
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famahar 471 days ago
That's me. It's brutal trying to do Unity game dev on this. Constantly run out of memory and can't do much multitasking.
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postexitus 471 days ago
Cries in 4Gb Macbook Air 2013 /s

I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.

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Spunkie 471 days ago
It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now.

1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.

While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.

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skydhash 471 days ago
> While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.

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postexitus 470 days ago
well those are really apps, the fact that they are running in a browser does not make that browsing.
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snovymgodym 471 days ago
That's a rough era, new enough to have soldered RAM and old enough that Apple felt ok with 4GB in a base model.
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