To reiterate your point about RAM for anyone wondering: don’t get the 8gb version! I’ve run 3 Apple Silicon Macs in different configs since 2020. Real-world performance on a range of different workloads is substantially worse than the 16gb version. Don’t even think about having more than one user logged in!
I'd imagine it's relatively easy for the OS to just swap out the memory from the inactive user. Unless they're actually running a task in the background, but how often does that happen?
I have used the 2020 M1 air with 8Gb since last summer without any issues as a documents/productivity suite and web application development tool. There are zero complaints here. I had a Core i9 with 16GB of ram MBP before it. This feels just as fast.
I have an really old macbook pro (mid 2014) with 8 gigs of ram. I am regularly running out of ram, I think it should be independent of processing power, right? Or is there some other way it feels snappier? Maybe the SSD got so fast it can better handle memory pressure...or you just don't need more than 8 gigs and it wasn't a limiting factor before
The SSDs in the apple silicon machines are likely much much faster than whatever you have in your macbook pro so when they do spill over into swap it would be much less noticeable. That being said, I'm pretty pro apple silicon (purchased an M2 Pro this morning) and I would never recommend anyone buy a new computer with less than 16GB of ram unless the usecase is strictly web browsing/streaming/ms word type stuff.
Our 286 (which was the first computer my family owned) also had a 40MB Hard Disk, which seemed like plenty at the time. It could run Windows 3.1 with that, although it wasn't exactly fast.
I scrounged enough chips and a carrier board to max my Compaq out at 3.6MB. That may have been a model specific limitation.
I believe that this computer had a 20MB hard drive, and that I eventually ran Stacker to compress the volume and squeeze out a bit more space. I know for sure that I never got anywhere close to 100MB.
On one of my computers in this era, I managed to get a paperwhite VGA and Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) running despite not meeting product specs. My 40-something brain is not quite reliable enough for me to state this with any certainty.
The Apple silicon chips handle ram consumption differently. Maybe it’s the ssd speed but I hadn’t had an 8Gb ram computer since I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 that supported 16gb and I have 64gb of ram in my windows desktop. I really don’t hit a wall with the M1 over ram. It’s an incredible machine but YMMV, especially if you use virtualization.
It really depends on how you are using it. If you are primarily a single-tasker, then the 8GB should be enough. A lot of people just use one app at a time. I imagine that most people on this forum would be more technical and more likely to be multi-taskers where the extra RAM would matter more.
