Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

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elzbardico 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.

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rbanffy 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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pants2 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.

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cocoto 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.

	▲	semiquaver 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Meh. I do plenty of development on my 32GB work macbook pro and 8GB M2 air and never notice a difference.
	▲	some-guy 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)

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humanperhaps 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.

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amluto 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.

(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)

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beejiu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.

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zadikian 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

VMs or huge builds can burn through that fast. Say 3 simultaneous Android emulators, or building Android itself

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leephillips 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Some people use computers to compute things. More memory is always useful.

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cbm-vic-20 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

egacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping

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bloomca 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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mvkel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Development isn't hard on ram. Doing what Apple claims this device is designed for, spending lots of time in multiple browser tabs, is.

	▲	jachee an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Less-so if you do it in Safari than using a non-Apple browser.

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zadikian 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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evantbyrne 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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nateb2022 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Then you're not the intended market for the MacBook Neo.

	▲	evantbyrne 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Totally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all

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a456463 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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marricks 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.

Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.

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slowjin 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Docker overhead is practically nothing, so running 3 docker containers should be well within the "light development" bracket.

	▲	marricks 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What the heck is going on here, something cannot be light and use 20gb of memory. Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb of free memory. I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.

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lowbloodsugar 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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…

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crazygringo 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram.

How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.

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bzzzt 10 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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lostlogin 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Teams

You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.

Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.

	▲	moduspol 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's probably not that bad if you ONLY use it for video calls and you've never used Slack before.

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crazygringo 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.

I don't see too many students running Teams.

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pooortal 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?

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rbanffy 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.

Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.

	▲	epistasis 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)
	▲	hypercube33 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Make that 1 or 2gb of ram, a 32gb emmc drive and a single core 2 thread original Atom

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bzzzt 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Clearly not Apple's.

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KevinMS 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.

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Razengan 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.

and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.

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compounding_it 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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post-it 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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etempleton 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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sgt 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

	▲	whizzter 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.
	▲	neoyagami 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is my use case, 4 ides. Chrome and docker, its a 14’ M1 Pro, it works nice, but im not installing tahoe any time soon xd

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AlanYx 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	Razengan 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Adobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff. Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.

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BurningFrog 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple is people, my friend!

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thatwasunusual 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?

	▲	downrightmike 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Court cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases