Memory management on M1 is actually quite amazing. With an entry level M1 mini, I can have a crap ton of stuff open and it doesn’t choke. I can run UTM and have Chrome and a few electron apps open, and have many terminal windows open. No sweat.

For disk, I just put a 1tb NVMe in an external USBC enclosure, cuz most of my data doesn’t need crazy I/O and I feel like Apple charges too much for disk space.

I own one M1 with 8Gb RAM, one with 16Gb, and one with 32 - 8Gb was enough only for basic tasks (I’m a web developer, TS + Rust). Anything non-trivial was causing swapping.

Memory management is quite usual, nothing magical. The disk is faster, but it's not the reason to rely on swapping, still.

That just isn't true on these M1 machines. People are editing 4k, 6k, even 8k video on these and have stated that it runs better than their 2020 16GB i9 MacBooks.

There is no magic, and “unified memory” just means that you need some more memory because you have no additional “VRAM”.

What’s the entry level spec for RAM? Like 8GB? That’s plenty for most things. I’d be more worried about disk.

16. I have an M1 Mac mini under the desk that has been doing more than fine for most of my development work on 8 GB of RAM.