Comment by reacharavindh
12 hours ago
If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)
12 hours ago
If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)
Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.
I've been using 8 GB on my M3 for years as a security engineer, doing pretty heavy development. I usually have like 15 Brave tabs open, several terminals, a game (PokeMMO) and a small DeepSeek model, lots of Claude Code instances running, Obsidian, and LadyBird, among other small things. I honestly have no idea what people do with all that RAM.
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I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.
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I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.
Development isn't hard on ram. Doing what Apple claims this device is designed for, spending lots of time in multiple browser tabs, is.
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Yes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.
Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally
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lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.
I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
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Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…
> id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram.
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
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> But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.
I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.
I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.
Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.
Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).
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It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.
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Apple is people, my friend!
> Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
Court cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases
People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.
This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).
Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)
It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.
Win 11 is actually way better at memory management than Windows 10. It's just more bloated.
That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.
My Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.
They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.
As a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.
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NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.
With builds running on big build servers.
I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
[dead]
There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.
Joke's on you; Swift has no garbage collector.
It obvious does, with reference counting. Otherwise programs would just balloon in memory.
if more apps were written in native swift we wouldn't be having any memory issues
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.
The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.
That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.
macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
While I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right.
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
Particularly when paying for more RAM means buying a completely new computer.
Even on an upgradable machine. We're looking at ~$400 for 32GB of DDR5, and the price is only going to keep going up. We're at a point now where Apple actually charges less for RAM upgrades than it costs to upgrade your own machine. Insane.
The worst memory hogs today are websites.
I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
Where are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.
I'm afraid it doesn't. People most everywhere in the world don't buy these overpriced machines. And you can get a new budget laptop with 16 GB of RAM for well under 200 USD.
However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...
Curious where can I find new budget laptop with 16g under 200? N100 mini pc’s sold for 350 at Amazon.
I love the new reduced resources Era. MS was clever in launching Xbox series S + X and demanding all published games run on the lower spec machine (similar to Xbox One-S specs).
Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.
It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.
Bye bye electron
This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.