Comment by carlosjobim
12 hours ago
Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.
Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.
If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.
But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.
> 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026
I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.
Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?
And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.
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It depends on how you define "serious work". Is it to get the best results possible, or is it to tax a computer as much as possible? Programmers would usually answer the latter, while users would answer the former.
That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.
Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.
As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.
I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.
I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.
Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.
Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?
If you're trying to link clang, this laptop is not for you. It's for people that would consider a chromebook for their use case.
Usually the problem then is more fundamental.
Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.
I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.
I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.
I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.
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>People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.
I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...
> Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM.
They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"
Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.
My spouse bought a mac and asks me (mostly a linux user, and I'm happy to help) for support somewhat regularly (mostly recently, for a tahoe upgrade). It's not the golden unicorn people paint it to be. 8gb is insane in 2026.
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Until 1/3 of your hard drive space is taken up by weird cache stuff that MacOS doesn’t explain nor offer a straightforward way to clean up.
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I like my MB Pro but it has serious audio and external display issues. I've had to remove spotlight indexing to prevent obscure OOM issues. One time I woke up to open my laptop and find it's screen cracked for no apparent reason. Since I couldn't prove it wasn't my fault I was charged for the repair anyway and I'm grateful to myself that I had AC+ because I might have as well just bought another laptop if not. At the end of the day, it's still just a computer.