Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.
In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.
You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.
In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)
Wait what? How did you manage that?
The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.
And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow.
The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p
I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from Linux, it's a relatively new feature to have on by default, so you might be pleasantly surprised.
Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.
Not everyone is a power user, and non-power users are the target audience for this. Clearly.
8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. The majority of people just open some webpages, maybe some office tools (rarely outside of browser), and play some music, at the same time. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.
Most cool. Is it an M1?
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
the keywords here are "depending on the workload".
edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.