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A comment on New MacBook Air with M2. Parent comment

Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by eropple on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @11:17AM (#32002264)
Having had an M1 Air with 8GB of RAM--under very light use it was great, but under anything a little more taxing (a good number of tabs, having Discord open, a relatively "light" creative app like Logic or Fusion 360) it would very rapidly not just get bad, but get stop-the-world awful. (edit: and as a sibling poster notes, plugging it into an external monitor made things a lot worse!)

I don't know if MacOS's low-RAM behavior has anything particular to it that makes it act so erratically, but it's the only time using a Mac in the last ten years where I've gone "oh, this sucks." Going to 16GB of RAM is a way better spot, I think, for folks who want more than strictly web-browser-and-keyboard. (And those folks are probably better off with an iPad in 2022 I think? The current iPads are great.)

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Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by Aperocky on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @11:43AM (#32002624)
I have a M1 with 16G ram. I don't think 8GB ram is even feasible - and that's coming from a user whose primary interface is terminal.

16GB is great though, never had a problem with RAM issue.

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Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by throw34 on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @12:17PM (#32003121)
Usually it’s what’s being run inside the terminal that matters. ssh? no big deal. ffmpeg? can slow a machine down and can have a significant memory footprint.

YMMV

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Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by april_22 on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @02:39PM (#32005038)
Why is that though? I have a ten year old machine at home with 8gigs of ram and it smoothly runs with alot of chrome tabs open?
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Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by Aperocky on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @08:45PM (#32008713)
M1 GPU also lives with the same RAM.
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Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by Arcanum-XIII on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @01:47PM (#32004371)
Fusion is anything but light, and still not optimized for M1 (still a Rosetta app). Even on a beefy Workstation, it’s no fun. Logic is better but not exactly light if you have multiple track, AU plug-in…

So that’s not surprising - heck, with 16gb or ram it’s not a walk in the park. I’ve discussed with owner a Mac studio, and they were not happy for Fusion either, that’s with 64gb of ram so…

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Re:New MacBook Air with M2 by eropple on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @02:24PM (#32004817)
In my experience, Fusion and Logic both quite well on M1s with 16GB of RAM, no other changes. One variable makes a ton of difference.
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