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.

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justonceokay 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’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.

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ciupicri 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What'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?

	▲	alexzenla 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		All of that is a yes, plus compressed memory is a big component of macOS.
	▲	post-it 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'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.