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I bought M1 Air 256GB with 16GB RAM on release for light web development and professional 2D gamedev on Unity. Still using it till now and it's really really du

by SXX 3y ago

I bought M1 Air 256GB with 16GB RAM on release for light web development and professional 2D gamedev on Unity. Still using it till now and it's really really durable hardware and I've been usign it daily for 3+ years. With so little RAM had to sacrifice ability to properly run VMs, but yet till this day there just no comparable hardware on market. 8GB versions though... Certainly Apple should be damned for selling laptops with 8GB RAM in 2023 when my x220i ran 16GB in 2011. At some point they will all become e-waste due too little RAM or dead soldered SSD because of extreme swapping.

stuff4ben 3y ago
8GB of RAM ought to be enough for anybody right? I'm hoping that's true for someone who spends most of their time in Google Docs or Word and the occasional light web browsing. This MBA replaced a Chromebook which really was on its last legs.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  I'm using an M2 Air with 16GB and M1 Mini with 8GB. On the 8GB machine I have to restart Firefox every few days because otherwise it completely fills up RAM + Swap and the entire system starts getting sluggish. It's a very noticeable bottleneck while on the 16GB Macbook I don't really think about memory usage. I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks.
  - stuff4ben 3y ago
    > I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks. Which is basically all my kids do. Less than 10 tabs, nothing else.
    - Synaesthesia 3y ago
      I’m a heavy user often do 50 tabs and lots of apps in the background. 8gb M1 air is really fast for me.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Check about:memory in Firefox. It's not reasonable to run out of swap; that means it's trying to keep something like 40GB in there after compression. You might have an extension or something leaking.

by SXX 3y ago

stuff4ben 3y ago

8GB of RAM ought to be enough for anybody right? I'm hoping that's true for someone who spends most of their time in Google Docs or Word and the occasional light web browsing. This MBA replaced a Chromebook which really was on its last legs.

alpaca128 3y ago
I'm using an M2 Air with 16GB and M1 Mini with 8GB. On the 8GB machine I have to restart Firefox every few days because otherwise it completely fills up RAM + Swap and the entire system starts getting sluggish. It's a very noticeable bottleneck while on the 16GB Macbook I don't really think about memory usage. I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks.
- stuff4ben 3y ago
  > I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks. Which is basically all my kids do. Less than 10 tabs, nothing else.
  - Synaesthesia 3y ago
    I’m a heavy user often do 50 tabs and lots of apps in the background. 8gb M1 air is really fast for me.
- astrange 3y ago
  Check about:memory in Firefox. It's not reasonable to run out of swap; that means it's trying to keep something like 40GB in there after compression. You might have an extension or something leaking.