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by aurareturn 76 days ago
It actually is magic Mac memory. No joke. 8GB on macOS is good enough for 80% of people.
1 comments

Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific.

Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.

Swap on macOS is incredibly good. Not sure how Apple does it. Maybe hardware compression?
It's no different from NT in that respect. macOS is significantly worse at handling OOM events than NT (even NT4, for that matter).
> Not sure how Apple does it.

They do it by prematurely wearing down the soldered SSD just in time for you to buy a new laptop.

As far as I know, there is no M1 8GB SSD wear down complaints in 2026.
There are - people are complaining about SSD health
Source? Is it SSDs breaking down or people are just looking at SSD usage and then get scared?