This seems correct. RC vs GC might explain how a Mac full of NSObjects needs less memory than a Windows full of .NET runtimes, but it doesn’t explain how M1 Mac

This seems correct. RC vs GC might explain how a Mac full of NSObjects needs less memory than a Windows full of .NET runtimes, but it doesn’t explain how M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM is faster than x86 Mac with 16GB or more of RAM. Besides, a lot of memory usage is in web browsers, which must use garbage collection. Looking at the reviews of M1 Macs, those systems are still responsive and making forward progress at a “memory pressure” that would make my x86 Mac struggle in a swap storm. It seems to come down to very fast access to RAM and storage, large on-die caches, and perhaps faster memory compression.