I have an really old macbook pro (mid 2014) with 8 gigs of ram. I am regularly running out of ram, I think it should be independent of processing power, right? Or is there some other way it feels snappier? Maybe the SSD got so fast it can better handle memory pressure...or you just don't need more than 8 gigs and it wasn't a limiting factor before

The SSDs in the apple silicon machines are likely much much faster than whatever you have in your macbook pro so when they do spill over into swap it would be much less noticeable. That being said, I'm pretty pro apple silicon (purchased an M2 Pro this morning) and I would never recommend anyone buy a new computer with less than 16GB of ram unless the usecase is strictly web browsing/streaming/ms word type stuff.

Yep, you'll definitely still notice swapping on the 8gb version.

And yet I remember my old 286 with what? 500mb of ram or something ...

500 megs sounds wayy off for a 286, by an order of magnitude or two. Windows XP required 256.

More like 1MB of RAM.

Our 286 (which was the first computer my family owned) also had a 40MB Hard Disk, which seemed like plenty at the time. It could run Windows 3.1 with that, although it wasn't exactly fast.

I never claimed to have good memory. Just a 286. It may have had a turbo button.

I've done many drugs and many years since then.

I think the 80286 could support a max of 16mb of ram. I doubt many computers built from them had anywhere near that much ram.

I scrounged enough chips and a carrier board to max my Compaq out at 3.6MB. That may have been a model specific limitation.

I believe that this computer had a 20MB hard drive, and that I eventually ran Stacker to compress the volume and squeeze out a bit more space. I know for sure that I never got anywhere close to 100MB.

On one of my computers in this era, I managed to get a paperwhite VGA and Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) running despite not meeting product specs. My 40-something brain is not quite reliable enough for me to state this with any certainty.

I had a Pentium 1, 100mhz with 16MB of ram. Was a beast playing MechWarrior 2 and Terminal Velocity!

As long as we're reminiscing about old specs... my first hard drive was 20 megs, external, and the size of a small pizza box.

The Apple silicon chips handle ram consumption differently. Maybe it’s the ssd speed but I hadn’t had an 8Gb ram computer since I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 that supported 16gb and I have 64gb of ram in my windows desktop. I really don’t hit a wall with the M1 over ram. It’s an incredible machine but YMMV, especially if you use virtualization.