[Yizahi]

Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.

I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?

[StilesCrisis]

Because 8GB is literally enough? There are multiple 8GB Macs in this house and they are fine. I wouldn't use them for development work but they're completely competent at the basics.

[Yizahi]

What's basics? Of course one can always overbuy hardware compared to the tasks but we are discussing some usage more fitting to the laptop form factor. I would argue that for a laptop a basics is at least some kind of office white collar work or similar. And so it is most likely that at least 2-3 of the Electron monstrosities would be used, an office package or something along the lines, multiple loaded tabs in a browser a few of which will be memory leaking enterprise crap, a few communication apps etc. Nothing really outlandish, only handful of apps, but because they are all fat, they will eat the 3Gb margin super fast and start caching.

[nar001]

The storage is fast enough to not be too much of an issue, and the basics would be mostly a web browser, a lot of things can be done with only it, and if you need to do more than web browser, text editors, you probably should want more than the Neo in the first place

[sgt]

Tons of 8GB users out there who are happy. I'm on 16GB and its definitely enough for a power user - and running multiple coding environments, Docker, IDE's. MacOS is really good with caching.

[nomel]

> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners

This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised.

Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.

The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly.

8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.

[macintux]

Gruber said something[0] that parallels your point, and emphasizes the target audience for this Mac:

> If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want.

Apple has made extensive tradeoffs to make this price point, but they all seem to be reasonable tradeoffs for casual users.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

[herdymerzbow]

Perhaps because it's enough for a lot of things. I only came up against the 8GB limit when I ran a LLM locally using Ollama. It worked but wasn't workable.

8GB isn't ideal though and 16GB would've expanded its capacity to do more things. But soon as I want to do more things I shuffle over to my PC with it's dedicated GPU and 32GB o ram

I'm guessing Apple cuts capability to the lower end so as not to hurt sales of the higher end. Usage profile is often dependent on context. There are enough non-power users (when mobile) like me that 8GB isn't ideal but it's enough. And if it wasn't enough we could've paid more for the 16GB, but I personally decided it wasn't worth the ridiculous Apple ram price premium.

So these are my reasons for saying 8GB is enough. I'm also using an M1 MacBook Air, so the puniest of the lineup. Next laptop I'm considering is possibly a think pad with linux so I'm no macOS fanboi.