[pxmpxm]

My 13 year old mac desktop is sitting here with 14.82gb used with nothing but messages and firefox. Really dount that 8gb will cut it.

[yunnpp]

This is really not the right comparison to make. An OS will use memory liberally. Give it more and it'll use more. Give it less and it'll swap to disk. So the real question is how long a given workload takes to complete, or whether you can multi-task without shitting out to/from disk every time you switch windows. "My OS uses X amount of RAM" is an entirely meaningless and irrelevant statement.

[nottorp]

> the real question is how long a given workload takes to complete

The memory eaters most people are complaining about are not workloads, but shitty communication apps that keep all those cat pictures from the last 4 months uncompressed in ram...

[smallerize]

Browsers use available RAM for cache, but they don't require that much. Firefox officially supports running on Macs down to 512MB of RAM. It will just be slower.

[nottorp]

Try opening a google spreadsheet in 512 Mb ram.

[smallerize]

Interesting, what happens?

[nottorp]

Whatever happens will take a while, since the one google docs spreadsheet that I keep open - which isn't complex - uses 399 Mb just for its own tab.

[fooker]

Macos will try and keep available memory used.

Launch a few more applications and you'll see everything sort of still keeps working at an acceptable responsiveness.

[tim333]

I've been using the 8GB M1 Air for years and had very few issues.

[EagnaIonat]

That would put your mac as an Intel one, as ARM only came out in 2020.

Intel doesn't even remotely compare to ARM. Even an M1 8GB would far outperform what you have now.