I do admit the "reliance on swap" thing is speculation on my part :)

My experience is that I can still tell when the OS is unhappy when I demand more RAM than it can give. MacOS is still relatively responsive around this range, which I just attributed to super fast swapping. (I'd assume memory compression too, but I usually run into this trouble when working with large amounts of poorly-compressible data.)

In either case, I know it's frustrating when someone is confidently wrong but you can't properly correct them, so you have my apologies

How convenient :)

Memory compression isn't magic and isn't exclusive to macOS.

I suggest you go and look HOW it is done in apple silicon macs, and then think long and hard why this might make a huge difference. Maybe Asahi Linux guys can explain it to you ;)

I understand that it can make a difference to performance (which is already baked into the benchmarks we look at), I don't see how it can make a difference to compression ratios, if anything in similar implementations (ex: console APUs) it tends to lead to worse compression ratios.

If there's any publicly available data to the contrary I'd love to read it. Anecdotally I haven't seen a significant difference between zswap on Linux and macOS memory compression in terms of compression ratios, and on the workloads I've tested zswap tends to be faster than no memory compression on x86 for many core machines.

Regardless of what you can't tell, he's absolutely right regarding Apple's claims: saying that a 8gb mac is as good as a 16gb non-mac is laughable.

My entry-level 8GB M1 Macbook Air beats my 64GB 10-core Intel iMac in my day-to-day dev work.

That was never said. They said 8gb mac is similar to a 16gb non-Mac