It also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.

Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.

I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?

	▲	StilesCrisis 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because 8GB is literally enough? There are multiple 8GB Macs in this house and they are fine. I wouldn't use them for development work but they're completely competent at the basics.
	▲	herdymerzbow 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Perhaps because it's enough for a lot of things. I only came up against the 8GB limit when I ran a LLM locally using Ollama. It worked but wasn't workable. 8GB isn't ideal though and 16GB would've expanded its capacity to do more things. But soon as I want to do more things I shuffle over to my PC with it's dedicated GPU and 32GB o ram I'm guessing Apple cuts capability to the lower end so as not to hurt sales of the higher end. Usage profile is often dependent on context. There are enough non-power users (when mobile) like me that 8GB isn't ideal but it's enough. And if it wasn't enough we could've paid more for the 16GB, but I personally decided it wasn't worth the ridiculous Apple ram price premium. So these are my reasons for saying 8GB is enough. I'm also using an M1 MacBook Air, so the puniest of the lineup. Next laptop I'm considering is possibly a think pad with linux so I'm no macOS fanboi.
	▲	nomel 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised. Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user. The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly. 8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.