3mo ago

Why are tech news websites suddenly bashing 8GB RAM in Apple devices?

I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.

Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?

I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.

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37 comments

8GB was already too low for what is positioned as a premium machine. RAM is a pretty cheap part of the whole computer, so it's completely unnecessarily small. I'm also a software engineer and the 16GB in my work MBP M1 is not even enough at times.
The big thing that's caused Apple to stop completely fleecing the people buying the low end option: AI. If you or Apple want to run local models on a machine with only 8GB of RAM, you probably won't have much left over for anything else.
- I should say that the MacBook Air in question is a personal device. My work MacBook Pro with something like 32GB of RAM can’t keep up sometimes with all the trash apps we have to use at work: Slack, Teams, VS Code. I very much wish we’d go back to native UI and stop using these insane memory hog apps.
  
  Yeah I don't think the Air is really the premium Apple laptop by any stretch.
  Not to be an evangelist; but on my M1 Air I found VS Code to be a pig (plus I had to run both universal and native M1 versions) so much that it was finally motivation to try neovim like I kept seeing all these people promoting. Wouldn't say i've gotten as used to it as quickly as others, but I can argue that its at least extremely lightweight in comparison, plus i'm not working under the license VSCode has.
  
  I use Smultron for personal work, and both Smultron and VS Code for work. There are things I like/dislike about each, but my main gripe with VS Code is that it is way, way harder on resources than it should be.
  
  I used Smultron for yonks as well; very good app.
  One thing I like about neovim (and its taking me ages to learn & improve) is being keyboard first and having less time with fingers away on mouse etc, its helped my concentration, as has full screening my terminal session and not having anything pop up in eye lines!

37 comments