(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)
Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.
Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb to free memory.
I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.
Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.
I don't see too many students running Teams.
Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.
I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)
I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).
Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
With builds running on big build servers.
The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.
That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.
macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...
Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.
It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.