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If we are doing anecdotes, a single tab Google doc with Grammarly running can easily surpass 4Gb of ram, especially if the doc is over about 30 pages. Use cases like that are not particularly uncommon.

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It's not actually using 4gb of ram. Pretty much every memory reporting tool cannot handle paging and will report total allocated. You can create a one line c program today that just calls mmap(file) on a large 4gb media file and your os will claim 4gb used. Actually measuring real physical ram usage is hard. I'd be looking for page table misses (and the likely noticable resulting performance issues) as a better indication of any potential issues.

But did it affect the overall user experience?

I was a heavy Google Docs user myself on my 8/256 M1 Air.

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