Steam report is a good thing to look at:
replyhttps://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac
For Mac, 30% are at 8GB, 43% at 16GB.
Windows has nearly nobody below 16GB (27%) and the biggest is 32GB (58%)
I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.
replyI forgot about magical Mac memory.
replyJust keep it under one browser tab, bro.
It actually is magic Mac memory. No joke. 8GB on macOS is good enough for 80% of people.
replyDo browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific.
replyAnecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.
Swap on macOS is incredibly good. Not sure how Apple does it. Maybe hardware compression?
replyI don’t see much “for anybody”, but I do see a lot of “for students / people who browse the web / word processing” which is still a pretty large set of people, and the Neo handles those workloads just fine
replyLiterally two comments above mine in this discussion:
reply> The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.
I rest my case.
"students / web browsing / word processing" == typical people, but maybe that's my own biases
reply