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 8 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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sgt 7 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 7 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 5 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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post-it 7 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 6 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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AlanYx 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	Razengan 7 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.