That's why I said normal office workers and students. I never said 8GB is enough for devs. It wasn't enough for me. It was still manageable for that 1 year before Apple Silicon MBPs got released. But of course I upgraded to an M1 Pro 16GB as soon as it came out.
I just gifted a family member an M1 Air 8GB in late 2023. I felt very comfortable that it was enough for the work this person does on the computer.
PS. 8GB is perfectly fine for Chrome web browsing. You can have 50 tabs open and it'll still run smoothly. macOS does some magic with paging. Don't know how it does it. But never had an issue with 8GB and Chrome. It was always my IDE, Typescript, and docker that gave me RAM issues on 8GB.
Costing 9 hundos a piece, Air is not something a regular company would buy for their employees.
They're more likely to buy a budget laptop in the 400-500 range which you can bet will do just fine for office work, and you can always upgrade it if necessary.
If a company really does need their employees to work a Mac, they will have to cough out a lot more for the 16GB version, and this is what the article calls corporate greed.
I happen to think that the enterprise is an untapped market for Macs. Not tech offices. Other industries that run on Lenovos and Dells.
If I'm a small business, I still wouldn't buy $500 Windows laptops for my employees. I'd buy $750 M1 Airs. They last longer, "just work", and have fewer support issues.
As an employee of a company that runs macbook fleets, hell no they don't. Every other year we have had to replace half our inventory because of the 2015 macbooks having faulty batteries that want to explode, and then the next generations being that terrible keyboard, where every single employee needed their entire top cover replaced at least once because the keyboard didn't even last a year.
Meanwhile at my previous company which ran those boring ugly dell "workstation" laptops with the fat ass batteries, Entire generations of older workstations were still in inventory because they just didn't die, and were stupidly easy to repair, and you didn't have to send them away for a month for something like "my N key doesn't work anymore" or "the battery we gave you will burn your house down"
I just don't get how people say "Macs are reliable", because the only laptops less reliable than my work macbooks have been a series of cost reduced dell laptops that screws would literally fall out of, except even when that happened, dell would send someone to come fix it the next day, in your home!
But hey, it's not like Apple has a history of denying problems, right?
IIRC there was a recall/replacement program for those batteries as well as earlier generations of the butterfly keyboard. I'm not a fan of the butterfly keyboard, but Apple did replace it twice for free. The final revision fixed the reliability problems for me at least.
I'd imagine the TCO on those bargain basement laptops is terrible, so I doubt they're really a big sell for corporate buyers.
(B) In my experience corporate machines simply aren't upgraded. You get enough for the job when you order it. If you need more, you get a new machine and the old one is repurposed or retired if it's remaining usable life is short.
Yeah. It would basically be insane for a company for nickel and dime laptop purchases and then pay an IT person to do bespoke upgrades. Like a lot of things that may seem sensible on a personal level where labor is cheap/free, they don't make sense when you're paying someone $50+ an hour to do them.
I remember in a n org I worked a few years ago we got new laptops with SSDs instead of HDDs. Everybody was happy except the people who worked with a lot of data as the first SSDs were very small like 128 GB (still the amount of disk space you would get in an entry-level MBP 2019 I think). So we asked for an upgrade and they replaced our SSDs rather than replacing whole laptops. But I'm sure it's place-dependent.
It is an i3, but still... this is $279! Do some bargain hunting and you can find some pretty decent machines for <$500 now.
Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!
What? NO. 8GB is not enough for browsing and the proliferation of Electron apps these days. The solution shouldn't be constantly swapping, which is what all 8GB Apple devices do. This will lead to early SSD death and since the SSD is soldered on, that means the entire device is useless.
I see it on computers (and phones too) whose owners bought the smallest capacity to avoid spending money on something they didn't think they would use.
On the flip side, the very same laptop has a much better display than competing MacBook Air, and better in a manner that is observable in its entirety in non-professional casual use: visually better scrolling of web pages and documents; easier to see in bright sun; much more superior HDR movie watching experience.
It also has much better laptop speakers - completely irrelevant for professional use (like music production), but very relevant for movie watching.
Base 14" MBP is merely a better Netflix machine than MacBook Air is.
What you said about Pro, and what the article says about Pro, is very fair and quite excellent in fact for, uhm, actual Pro laptops, which is Mx Pro/Max based machines, not the new base 14" MBP on an Mx (small one) chip.
What I indeed find perplexing is the fact that 2 default 14" Mx MBP configurations that do not require any changes (they often ship faster, being default is a tangible difference) aren't 8 GB 512 and 16 GB 512, but 8 GB 512 and 8 GB 1TB. That I find odd, because I think yes, a small subset of office users might find a low core count but bigger RAM version useful in practice (I'm thinking some very heavy spreadsheet hitters kind of office power users, managers probably), but virtually no one in that category would actually care to have 1TB of SSD with everything being web-based and/or stored on company's servers in corporate environment. That is indeed odd. But maybe I'm wrong in my assumptions for this one - it's easy to be lacking any actual stats or data - and it's appropriate as well. I don't know.
Funnily enough, I'm typing this from a 3 year old Thinkpad that I use for work, which has in all likelyhood a slower CPU than even the M1, but it's perfectly usable for dev work, because it has 64GB of RAM.
Of course, 16 GB (or more) is nicer.
Once per day, I maybe got a slight 600ms hang when something was unexpectedly swapped in.
So I can imagine that 8GB will work okay, even if Chrome eats 30% of it.
But nowadays full dynamic applications are shipped in a browser tab, and a huge number of "desktop" applications are written in JavaScript using electron, so they're essentially an isolated chrome instance for running that app.
People talk about chrome being a resource hog, and maybe it is, but if you have dozens of JavaScript applications running in different tabs, then chrome is just taking the blame for the fact that it's essentially serving as the user application layer of your OS.
I'm glad I stuck with embedded development. The biggest resource-hog I interact with regularly is GCC.
I can be productive on a P3 with 256M of RAM.
Make sure to view "Real mem" in Activity Monitor. That's the amount of data actually stored in your RAM, the rest being swapped out. That number can be quite small, even for apps that theoretically use a lot of memory.
I have found Docker to be an "actual" memory hog with not much of it being swapped out, but could imagine that it would be possible in the case of Finder.
If the processes just allocated a lot of memory and never touched it, it might be reasonable to say they don't actually use it because the OS might never actually reserve any physical resources for it. (Happens a lot e.g. in Linux with memory overcommit allowed by default and some processes allocating dozens of gigabytes of virtual memory, most of which they never actually use.)
But would those pages then count towards swap use either? Only dirty pages end up in swap. Unless macOS counts allocated but untouched pages towards used swap as committed resources.
edit: better wording
Also, it's such a controversial thing you would think if the difference was so stark The Verge, Linus Tech Tips or Max Tech, etc. would, you know, actually measure it.
The only kinda objective side-by-side test I could find, on typical workloads, was this 2 year old video on the M1 which stated the 8gb did well on typical multitask workloads. For Chrome tab test the bottleneck was the internet speed, not RAM. Lightroom and Final Cut Export was slower, but typical multitasking workloads basically matched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h487I_5xOZU
Obviously things change so where does this stand today?
And in usage I also find macOS and its Apps to more often than not actually take more RAM. It isn't a bad thing pe se, it often means more speed because more things are cached, available fast and the like.
However, it is quite annoying when Apple simultaneously pretend the contrary and at the same time upcharge for their soldered RAM in a greedy way. If anything, a "Pro" PC laptop in this price range will have not only at least 16GB as default but is highly likely to have 4-8GB for its dedicated GPU when with Apple Silicon, the RAM advertised has to be shared and any GPU activity lower even more what can comfortably be used as system memory.
The more time passes, the more Apple Silicon feels like the ultimate scam. At this you better have a very real need for battery life because it really does not make a lot of sense otherwise. In fact, if it is only autonomy that you need and not true mobility, it would be better to buy cheaper performance equivalent PC and buy one of those large carriable battery.
It's often mentioned that macOS is more frugal with RAM, a claim which I flat out found to be untrue. I regularly saw Dock and Finder leak and eat gigabytes of RAM each.
The unfortunate reality is that base Mac models always existed as an upsell. There were a few precious historical exceptions, most recently the M1 Mac, but that doesn't change this rule.