Development isn't hard on ram. Doing what Apple claims this device is designed for, spending lots of time in multiple browser tabs, is.
replyI agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.
replyCan't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.
replyTons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.
replyMeh. I do plenty of development on my 32GB work macbook pro and 8GB M2 air and never notice a difference.
replyMy work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)
replyWhile I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.
replyFor mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.
replyPretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.
reply(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.)
VMs or huge builds can burn through that fast. Say 3 simultaneous Android emulators, or building Android itself
replySome people use computers to compute things. More memory is always useful.
replyegacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping
replyI have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.
replyYes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.
replyWasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally
replyThen you're not the intended market for the MacBook Neo.
replyTotally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all
replylmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.
replyI also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.
replyLight 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.
Docker overhead is practically nothing, so running 3 docker containers should be well within the "light development" bracket.
replyWhat the heck is going on here, something cannot be light and use 20gb of memory.
replyIs 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.
Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…
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