Agreed. I've noticed on my 12-core Mac Pro that until I had 2 gigs of RAM per core, building a large C++ codebase would cause extreme disk swapping to the point

Agreed. I've noticed on my 12-core Mac Pro that until I had 2 gigs of RAM per core, building a large C++ codebase would cause extreme disk swapping to the point where the OS would freeze (even with a super fast SSD). The situation wouldn't be as bad on a 4-core/8 hardware thread MacBook, but you start throwing in virtual machines and various other processes and 8 gigs of RAM starts to look pretty anemic for hardware marketed to the "pro" user.