I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.

Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?

I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.

  • misk
    301·
    1 month ago

    8GB is just too low and was too low in 2020. It gets shared with GPU and once you swap you decrease lifespan of a soldered SSD. It’s okay for light use but let’s not kid ourselves that even if it was passable in 2020 it would be enough for much longer.

    It got bashed for low RAM by everyone except mainstream tech „reviewers”. Tech media are glorified advertisements these days so the only thing that happened between then and now is that they switched from selling you that new shiny M1 MacBook to selling you that new shiny OpenAI model.

    I’m not going to bash M1 MacBook Air. It’s awesome, the CPU was ahead of time and I knew it would last me years. That’s why I got 16GB one.