[simonh]

The stress tests with multiple Youtube windows open simultaneously, editing 4K video, and doing heavy duty image editing tasks, in some cases doing stuff like that all at the same time have been very impressive. It does have to fall back on swap, but even then seems to soldier on really well considering. Are you better off with more memory? Absolutely, but it still seems perfectly capable of managing even many low to medium duty pro workloads if you don't mind a performance hit.

MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.

A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.

https://box.co.uk/blog/macbook-air-memory-usage-macos

[remix2000]

My macbook was UMA and memory compression has been used everywhere for dozens of years now. Symbian had memory compression. Is it just apple users catching up to what a snappy computer actually feels like…? (Doubt, since as I said I used Apple before) The article doesn't address the world outside apple either, and Darwin is objectively slow by its obsolete architectural design, down to the kernel. And not a single objective measure was brought up in replies, so it's my experience vs theirs. Not helpful.