I was actually surprised by this--when I first started using this computer, I thought for sure I would need to add more RAM, which for the 2018 model is too complicated to do yourself (at least to me it seemed too risky).
I keep a lot of tabs open to look things up, but nothing excessive on that machine. I also run VSCode or Pycharm and would also bring up 5-10 containers at times.
It seriously hurt not only my productivity but also my mood afterwards just by having to put up with it for weeks.
Unless you're a very basic user I don't get why you would settle for 8GB in 2020. 8 gigs of RAM cost basically nothing, it's not worth changing your workflow in the slightest to work around that artificial limitation.
It's bizarre. If everyone used the native toolkits we'd have far less memory usage and everyone (even the memory-constrained) would have a good experience.
Also, with these memory hogs they will do a lot of allocation and deallocation. This is also a problem with interpreted languages. And allocation is the enemy of speed, and energy usage. It'll destroy your daily battery expectancy as everything gets interpreted.
Sad.
With every layer of abstraction added to ease development the hardware requirements go up. You can build things fast, or you can build fast things, doing both is tricky.
I'm running linux with an anemic window manager, and with nothing but chrome and slack open (20tabs in chrome) I am consuming 6GiB.
If you add teams, pycharm and outlook (electron) it consumes 9GiB... Actually, that's also less than I expected.
Well done pycharm.
When you are memory constrained, you can definitely tell. Everything comes to a halt and you just twiddle your thumbs between commands. This 16GB machine I have shipped with 4GB which was painful even 8 years ago when it was released, and I upgraded myself to 8GB 6 months into ownership. A few years later when javascript became more pervasive on the web, I hit memory constraint on 8GB a lot just from having tabs open in chrome, back when it was perhaps more of a memory hog, so I opted for 16gb and haven't had issues since.
I think at 16gb you should be set for at least 5 years. Most people, even a lot of devs on company issued equipment, are working with 8gb complaining about it right here in this very thread.
If you have larger requirements, a lightweight, thin laptop with a teensy fan isn't for you. Even if it had the hardware specs, the physics of heat dissipation don't work for you and you are better off spending the same money for more hardware sitting in a box under your desk. Me and my sore back are eyeing this up, all my computing is done on a cluster anyway.
For comparison, I also have a 2012 Mac Mini at home with an SSD and 16GB RAM, and it's still chugging along pretty well too, although it's noticeably slower than the 2018 model with 8GB RAM.
I'm curious with regard to swapping if that might mean my SSD is going to wear out sooner. Maybe investing in more RAM would be worth it even if I don't feel like I need it.