I'd love to see some real benchmarks on this if they exist. That's insanity. M2 on Sequoia outperforming an M4 Pro on Tahoe!?
For clarification, not suggesting that the M2 is intrinsically faster, nor that if you processed a video file on M2 Sequoia vs on M4 Tahoe then the M2/Sequoia would be the higher benchmark.
But my son is an AI dev, and on his day-to-day, he's usually got about 7 instances of VS studio open / running, 2 or 3 Sublime Text open for coding, more tabs that he can mention, Claude Code (API) plus Claude chat, slack, teams, outlook etc as well as all the other OS usual stuff like mail, calendar, FaceTime etc.
And on a 24 GB M2 Air with Sequoia it's all running just fine. Which is a testament to SoC and MacOS RAM and memory management too (and opens up a debate about how much RAM a person really needs.)
Now, is he swapping memory at times? For sure.
But this raises another question for me: If we didn't have activity monitor open (like it doesn't exist on iOS) then we wouldn't notice and be so concerned about RAM (just like no one is really concerned about RAM on iOS).
If he has similar open on a new M4 16 inch w/M4 Pro CPU and 48 GB RAM then the RAM is not swapping so it's not a hardware issue, but everything slows down or somethings glitch. It's a OS problem not a hardware issue.
This is why I tried the experiment of 'downgrading' from 32 RAM, which I thought I needed, to 16 GB w/Sequoia (I'm in biotech so using more stuff then Office software).
And it's been refreshing. The 16 GB works just fine for me it turns out and I should have trusted SoC and OS management better. It helps that I upgrade every 12-24 months so I don't need to worry about future proofing RAM.
Our coders get 16GB for their new machines too and they've all been fine.
That said, 32 GB w/M4 (not pro) for me with Tahoe was an absolute dog compared to M4 mini w/16 GB RAM and Sequoia.
Hardware side, Macs are superlative since they went to SoC, and the MBA design since the M2 has been a near perfect computer design, but Tahoe is probably my least favourite release since Lion.