I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.

I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.

Yes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.

Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.

I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally

lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.

I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly

Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…

That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).

It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.

I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.

I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).

Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.

Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.

I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.

It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.

Court cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases

It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.

My Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.

In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.

It obvious does, with reference counting. Otherwise programs would just balloon in memory.

if more apps were written in native swift we wouldn't be having any memory issues

Even on an upgradable machine. We're looking at ~$400 for 32GB of DDR5, and the price is only going to keep going up. We're at a point now where Apple actually charges less for RAM upgrades than it costs to upgrade your own machine. Insane.