My daily driver for the past couple of years has been the last Intel Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM, but I just started using an M2 Mini in the last few weeks and with 16 GB of RAM it easily outperforms my older machine. A couple days ago, I realized I had a lot of stuff running without any signs of trouble at all, and I checked and was using only 14 GB of RAM with all of these apps open:

XCode, a Flutter project in Android Studio, a Rails project in Rubymine, a running server/database and 2 different mobile Simulators, Sublime, Safari, Chrome, and 3 different Firefox profiles.

I'm looking forward to picking up a new Macbook sometime in the next half a year, but for now I'm quite delighted when using my Mini which literally boots in less than 5 seconds.

Edit: just wanted to emphasize that sometimes my Macbook Pro struggles without even all of the above apps open.

A more extreme example—- I had an 8GB M1 Air that outperformed my 64GB Intel MBP that was less than a year old when I got the Air.

I've seen this a lot since the first m1 macs came out. While I'm not a hardware engineer my understanding is this:

For regular stuff that's not gpu intensive, it's not really much different to any other system in terms of how it uses ram. What's different is it has a ridiculously fast SSD and can swap without much performance hit.

Relying on your ssd for swap over getting enough memory in the first place seems like false economy to me.

> Relying on your ssd for swap over getting enough memory in the first place seems like false economy to me.

Important to keep in mind you won’t be able to replace that SSD without taking the machine to an Apple Store, and I’m not even sure they can replace the SSD without replacing the motherboard.

It’s more that the system itself is designed with the assumption of a super fast SSD, so it keeps way more in both ram and swap longer because it can swap fast enough to not be bottlenecked.

So almost no matter how much ram you get, in multi-application day to day workflows it’ll still use swap sometimes just because it can.

If your workflow involves something like giant objects in python or huge data structures that need to be in ram for performance, then you need the ram. But for use cases like 2,000 browser tabs plus photoshop plus Lightroom plus ten electron apps, mac osx “feels” like it has way more ram than an equivalent windows machine.

I don't believe I've yet seen any swapping on my 128G M2 studio but I also don't watch it like a hawk.

Being able to use swap is obviously beneficial, and if you're going to use it, it's better if it's fast.

But relying on it in place of regular RAM means you're just artificially shortening the life of your SSD - that's what I meant about "a false economy".

The machine "feeling" responsive isn't the point.

If all other factors are the same, the ssd wear on a machine that's used the ssd heavily for swap is going to be significantly higher.

> RAM usage on macs, particularly ARM, is completely different to Windows.

Using a Mac (or Linux) is deeply enlightening on how terrible the Windows user experience is. From random slowdowns to odd degradation patterns under load, it’s a very frustrating environment.

The only reason I can imagine people putting up with it is being unwilling to change - it takes work to move from Windows to Linux, but Macs are so well rounded, and now with their ARM CPUs, they can offer a much tighter integration between hardware and software.

And, for developers, it’s Unix from top to bottom (well… no X, but that’s another story). WSL is impressive, but it’s still a Linux bolted on a VMS-like OS.

One thing: considering how long Macs remain usable and the fact they are impossible to expand, it’s wise to get more memory than you need right now. Thinking on developing for cluster environments, I’d try to get a Mac with 32 or 64GB of RAM.

Some developers prefer VMS philosophy.