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I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a litt
by post-it 8mo ago
I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
- justonceokay 8mo agoI’ve used a computer with 4 gigs for the last 15 years and it still does emails, recipes, and YouTube. I.e. 100% of my computer needs.
- ciupicri 8mo agoWhat's so special about this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?
- post-it 8mo agoI'm not sure. I think it does swap more aggressively. I think the disk is also just really fast and has a higher speed connection to memory. Qualitatively I'm running way more things in the background than I could on Linux and Windows machines with double the RAM, with far fewer hiccups. I haven't tried a modern Surface or other high-end Windows laptop so maybe their swapping is comparable, but given the shocked reactions of non-Mac users at 8 GB of memory, I don't think so.
- alexzenla 8mo agoAll of that is a yes, plus compressed memory is a big component of macOS.