I have a 32gb overclocked hackintosh and my 8gb M1 Air blows it away in nearly everything.

I’m not sure exactly what the difference is but in terms of UX, x86 ram needs do not translate to Apple Silicon 1:1

They do, you just notice it less. MacOS is notorious for having one of the most asinine memory management schemes in the history of software, and so causing a memory issue can be a bit of a finnecky task (but certainly not impossible). As a matter of fact, most times you don't even need to fill swap before MacOS runs out of memory: you just need to fool the OS into thinking the memory pressure is high enough to warrant GC.

>As a matter of fact, most times you don't even need to fill swap before MacOS runs out of memory: you just need to fool the OS into thinking the memory pressure is high enough to warrant GC.

I do DAWs (with tons of VSTs and sample libraries), VMs (vagrant, docker) and NLEs (up to 4K), but usually not at the same time, and I've never run out of memory in macOS ever in ~20 years. 16GB is the largest amount of RAM I ever had in them.

How often does this mythical "macOS runs out of memory" thing happen?

>MacOS is notorious for having one of the most asinine memory management schemes in the history of software

Citation needed.

I’m not saying a byte isn’t a byte. I’m saying that if I don’t notice it, then I don’t need as much. I routinely swap 6-8gb and I can’t imagine this thing being faster. Most interactions are near instantaneous.

So my ram needs are lower precisely because I don’t notice it.

That's good for you. But you aren't a market.

So the question is what share of the market this is true for? When it comes to laptops, I'd say not that larger (relatively, in absolute numbers it might have doubled, e.g. from 1% to 2%) than what it was in 2019 or 2020.