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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

I started with an 8GB M1 Air and it was unusable.

But I also regularly leave dozens upon dozens of tabs open and use multiple heavy IDEs...

Upgrading to 16GB was enough to fix it instantly and I no longer have the freezing/crashing issues, so I'm surprised 64GB machines are running into it

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I recently got an m1 mini, just on principles the 16GB version, and did already get the RAM usage warning once, with my browser going into large memory usage. So there may be something to this story, will watch for it.

Huh I have an 8GB air and I run Kubernetes locally and develop a fairly complex system with Skaffold on it (~10 services). Thing is a beast, had no problems at all, but one does need to be aware one is not on the 128GB-of-RAM workstation :P

I mean how much demand will a locally hosted dev service generally have? Nothing about K8s inherently denotes high ram usage.

Browsers are generally the biggest culprits for memory usage. Random tabs will leak memory and before you know it some news article page is using 1GB, your GMail is using 1GB, etc.

Actually my co-founder who is a tab-hoarder has had a few issues. I am a tab minimalist so you're probably right!

It does sound like you expected more performance out of the 8gb model than was reasonable.

There were plenty of people claiming things like "8 GB on M1 is like 16 GB on x86/Windows" ...

I feel like this claim was made largely by nontechnical YouTube influencers and some Mac fanatics talking about how fast the swap on the SSDs is and equating that to not needing more RAM.

I don’t think it’s a wholly unfair assessment. You can get away with more when the memory management stack is smart and fast, but in the end if you need 9gb of ram and only have 8gb you’re going to know it. Most people just don’t (at one time).

I didn't have much of a choice, at the time the 8GB model was the only one you could get without a lead time.

So I got it knowing as soon as the 16GB dropped in stores I'd replace it

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