Macbooks Air thermal throttle, thats why the Air with 16gb is an issue and the mini isn't, no fans = throttling at heavy loads, its not a ram issue.

I bought the first MacBook Air M1 with 8GB because it was the only option available in my area. Initially, I had doubts, especially after using notebooks with more than 16GB of RAM in previous years. But I was genuinely surprised by how well the M1 performed. My takeaway is that there’s a lot of room for similar improvements in Linux!

I have an m1 as well.

And while I'm broadly satisfied with its performance, I do think that the SSD is probably carrying some of that load. And for a machine that often gets used far longer than a PC, I can't see that being great for longevity.

> And while I'm broadly satisfied with its performance, I do think that the SSD is probably carrying some of that load. And for a machine that often gets used far longer than a PC, I can't see that being great for longevity.

This isn't the early 2010s anymore - SSDs last "long enough" for most people, to the point they are no more consumable than your motherboard or your RAM. (I've actually experienced more RAM failures than SSD failures, but that's an individual opinion here.)

And for the downvoters - do you remember the last time you handed in your Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch, iPhone, or even laptop specifically for a random SSD failure, unrelated to water damage or another external cause? Me neither.

people really don't grasp that the slowest SSDs are still 3-5x faster than the fastest HDDs (including SAS drives. Yes, the dualport kind).

And, Looking at the anandtech review of a vertex 3 way back in 2011...

I'm still very happy with my 8GB Air M1 as well. It's incredible how well it still works for a 4 year old entry level laptop. I see all these new M's come out, and I'm sure they're fantastic, but I'm not at all tempted to upgrade.

Yeah, I don’t know why 8gb base models get so much hate online. 8gb is 64 billion bits of memory. If you’re writing everyday software and you need more memory than that, you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.

Seriously?

What if you want to have a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet open? Or containers?

My M1 routinely rests around 22gb of RAM.

I also use an 8GB M1. It has firefox with many tabs & windows open in OSX and also a Linux VM in UTM which is running VSCode, vite, and another firefox with lots of tabs. It's performing well! (although swap is currently at 2.3GB, and there's a further 3.5GB of compressed data in RAM)

Using Chrome I'd guess?

How much RAM should a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet use? Spreadsheets and webpages were both invented at a time when computers had orders of magnitude less ram than they do today. And yet, Excel and Netscape navigator still worked fine. It seems to me that bigger computers have caused chrome to use more memory.

If 16gb is considered to be a "bare minimum" for RAM, well, how much ram will all those programs use next year? Or in 10 years?

That doesn't help you right now, but 22gb is ridiculous for a few browser tabs and a spreadsheet.

It’s not just for tabs and spreadsheets, I also have an ide, containers, etc.

I do think the memory footprint of many applications has gotten out of hand, but I am more than willing to spend the extra money not to have to think about it.

> If 16gb is considered to be a "bare minimum" for RAM, well, how much ram will all those programs use next year? Or in 10 years?

16gb is the figure for the next 10 years. If you see yourself being content with 8gb of memory shared between your CPU and GPU in 2030, you must have a uniquely passive use-case.

I remember when people said 4gb doesn't need to be the minimum for all Macbooks. Eventually MacOS started consuming 4gb of memory with nothing open. Give Apple a few years to be insecure about the whole AI thing and they'll prove to you why they bumped the minimum spec. Trust me.

I'm not doubting that modern macos, chrome, firefox, spotify, etc are giant memory hogs.

My claim is that the developers should fix their shit, and stop making their laziness something for me to solve by buying more RAM.

This doesn't necessarily mean that your workload would perform unacceptably on an 8GB model. It just means that fewer optional things would be cached in RAM, more RAM pages would be compressed, and there'd be more swap usage.