Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
How are you all Getting by with 8gigs?
- Thread starter getmac
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Exactly this. It’s nice to see someone else say this. Saying I have several tabs open is like saying I do video editing without any additional details. Well is it 1080p or 8k editing? Additional details matter. And the web is not the same as it was in the 90s. I created a memory leak bug in JavaScript years ago that cause a very basic website to end up using 1.5 GB of RAM.
Also this about macrumors. It’s why I subscribe to avoid the ads. It also heats up my phone until I sign in.
Ads do a lot of things to the resource usage. And it’s random too, site can work fine one day and bad the next. I have seen it just depend on what kind of ad gets loaded.
My own experience is that Google docs always brings my computer to its knees on Safari. I wouldn’t buy a machine with less than 16 GB for my own usage, but try closing the google docs window and using Firefox, if it’s apple silicon ready.
For 8 GB that's a lot, yes. I have the same MacBook Air as you have and compared to my 2017 iMac which had 32 GB of RAM I also had to find out that RAM is RAM even if the chip and memory management is faster if you exceed the included unified memory it will get more and more difficult to keep the speed up.
I do 4K video editing with Final Cut Pro and edit photos with Lightroom. That works ok, but sometimes I see the beach ball doing that.
As a web developer I can tell you that web apps like Grammarly, everything Google, Slack, ... are always very hard on memory. If you can always use native apps that don't rely on web technologies, native apps will always be more efficient.
Another web dev here. I don't need Grammarly, but I have among other things Discord, Slack, and VS Code running all the time, as well as Skype and Zoom when needed, and those are all electron apps. Additionally, I have numerous Edge, Chrome, and Safari tabs open because I'm too lazy to create a ton of bookmarks. With all that, memory pressure is usually yellow, and around 2.5GB swap in use, but that's why I upgraded to 16GB/1TB, and there's never a beach ball to be seen.
Yeah, and that's why I will get the new MacBook Air with 24 GB and at least 1 TB. 😉
You keep saying "minimal load"; I don't think you realize just how much memory a single Safari tab can use, depending on what it's doing. I just now checked memory usage of Safari with 3 tabs open to macrumors, it was about 100/MB per tab. I opened a large-ish Google doc (150 pages) and that single tab is using just shy of 1 GB all by itself.
IMO the 8 GB configurations are aimed at someone like myself who uses the laptop for email, maybe Teams or Zoom on occasion, and 3-4 tabs open to relatively lightweight web sites. Think mostly-non-work, family usage laptop. (I have a 16GB late 2013 rMBP, but the only reason I needed 16GB was because I often run a linux vm while actually on the road as opposed to sitting in the office bedroom.) TBH if I were buying a new laptop now, ignoring the VM issue, I'd still get 16 GB simply because I don't want to be dragged down if I need to open 4 or 5 pig google docs at once.
This really goes to show why the default recommendation should be 16GB. OP runs what most would consider a minimal load.
If you buy 8GB, you have to plan your workflow to navigate around commonly used apps. Who does that in the real world? Can’t use Google Docs, can’t use Grammarly, conserve your Safari tabs, etc.
If you buy 8GB, you have to plan your workflow to navigate around commonly used apps. Who does that in the real world? Can’t use Google Docs, can’t use Grammarly, conserve your Safari tabs, etc.
Who does that in the real world? People who don't have a "workflow". Someone using the laptop for non-work purposes. Lots and lots of people. My wife has an older Intel MBA with 8 GB and I bet she never gets anywhere close to swap 99% of the time. She generally sticks to the iPad, however when there's any amount of typing to be done, the MBA comes out.
8 GB is a valid configuration for many. I would agree that it might be good to make it a bit clearer somehow that you can't just count tabs when choosing a configuration.
I’d argue it’s the people who don’t have a workflow who are more likely to exceed 8GB memory use.
The red X doesn’t quit the app so they keep all apps open, whether it’s WhatsApp or Music or Prime. They don’t close tabs unless the computer slows down. My family members keep tabs open like YouTube videos because they treat it like a jukebox or they want to repeat those cooking steps in the future.
It's got to be something on those tabs. I have the base MBA. Right now I have Music playing, (not the streaming version), three tabs on Safari, Mail, Stocks, LibreOffice, and Activity Monitor running. That last shows 3.0 GB app memory, 1.15 wired, and 0.93 GB compressed. Swap is 140 MB.
By the way, I rarely have more than 3 tabs open in a browser. The sites I want quickly and often are bookmarked. I don't keep them open just in case I want them tomorrow.
Stocks and Activity monitor will be shut down by the time this posts since they have fulfilled their function.
I just don’t get the part about having 12 tabs open? You need to close out most of those tabs and actually have tabs open that you are actually using. How are you even getting work done with so much going on?
I bought a 24" iMac 8/512 as needed it straight away and got a 10%discount, if ordered 16gb would of had to wait and would of been another $550AUD here as no discount.
Wouldn't do it again, also wouldn't buy another iMac till they have pro motion.
My 14" 16/1TB MacBook Pro makes it feel old. double the speed.
Wouldn't do it again, also wouldn't buy another iMac till they have pro motion.
My 14" 16/1TB MacBook Pro makes it feel old. double the speed.
maybe when you are a website comparator - or a google bot for a living?
joking aside - i also don't get it how dozens of tabs could be needed to be constantly open when there are inventions like bookmarks or reading lists
most of this seems more "sloppy" than "pro" to me, but what do i know
of course instances like VM are very valid points that you could need much more than just 8 gigs
or if you are producing large and complex movie files, 3D renderings, high resolution print magazines with tons of artwork, complex photo editing with dozens of layers and different photos, etc.
of course 16GB (or more in certain cases) are better / more future proof than 8, which are indeed on the tight side of things, but it's not that you will have a horrible experience with just 8gigs if you don't unnecessarily clutter the memory with stuff.
Even professional work can be done with 8 gigs beautifully, unless you need to do certain more demanding tasks, but people who need to use those tasks should know about their requirements and got something with more RAM and/or horsepower
I'd be interested to see the memory page of Activity Monitor there. That sounds like a lot of memory for a few web pages. - The modern web can be quite depressing at times. I mean yeah, we may think of 8GB as "tight", and in relative terms it is, sure. But that's still 8 billion bytes. The iMac G4 came with 128MB RAM base and up to 256MB. We ran Mathematica, Adobe CS2 or 3 or something, etc. on that back in the day, and now a single website will apparently gobble up 2.5 billion bytes. Unfathomable quantities when the original Mac came out in 84, let alone the Apple 1 in the 70s. Absolute madness.
As a sidetone though, I really never understood keeping so many tabs open. That's not a judgment or anything, do what works for you. But the way I use web browsers, I rarely have more than 2-3 pages open at a time, and I don't even like doing tabs. I tend to do separate windows. Only way I really use tabs is as a quick queue. cmd+click some YouTube videos or MacRumors threads and then one by one cmd+w to close each one as I go through them. I have a lot of background apps but I don't get the whole tabs thing. It's faster to hit cmd+alt+9 to go to MacRumors than to keep a tab open in the background and switch to anyway. But maybe it's just cause I use a fairly limited amount of web pages day-to-day and most things I use have apps anyway; Messenger, Discord, documentation viewers like Xcode's Documentation Viewer and Terminal's man pages, etc.
I do feel like something odd is going on though. Like it may be expected behaviour to some degree, but the reported memory usage for the Music app is greater than I've ever seen it on any of my computers, playing hi-res lossless and all. But I guess that could also just be a super long playlist loaded in the up-next queue or music video queuing or something. My Music app hovers around 300MB though.
This MacRumors thread is ~80MB listed in Activity Monitor. WebKit.GPU + Safari Networking + Safari Web Content (Cached) + Safari + the YouTube window I also have going from Safari all together increases that to ~1GB. But that's for both pages, including a 4K video stream in YouTube. I guess that still adds up quickly, but the MacRumors page itself (not counting the Safari and WebKit processes, just the page's sandbox thread itself) is under 80MB still.
That's all from my Intel iMac where I am currently, but on my M1 Max 16" I only see 35% RAM usage the majority of the time. That's a 32GB model and I run all sorts of stuff all the time, Final Cut, Xcode, VSCode, etc. - Only thing that really pushes it above the mid-30s-40s% is starting some virtualisation environments like starting up Docker, QEMU, etc. At least when not counting the caching memory. If I don't use the bigger programs there I can easily stay ~20-25% memory usage which will put me under the 8GB mark. But then again, as mentioned I don't tend to use a lot of tabs or web content. Flip side of that though, I have had Final Cut eat over 100GB of RAM in a project once and that just killed everything because, yeah, 32GB of RAM the rest came from the drive... Had to move to proxy on that one
As a sidetone though, I really never understood keeping so many tabs open. That's not a judgment or anything, do what works for you. But the way I use web browsers, I rarely have more than 2-3 pages open at a time, and I don't even like doing tabs. I tend to do separate windows. Only way I really use tabs is as a quick queue. cmd+click some YouTube videos or MacRumors threads and then one by one cmd+w to close each one as I go through them. I have a lot of background apps but I don't get the whole tabs thing. It's faster to hit cmd+alt+9 to go to MacRumors than to keep a tab open in the background and switch to anyway. But maybe it's just cause I use a fairly limited amount of web pages day-to-day and most things I use have apps anyway; Messenger, Discord, documentation viewers like Xcode's Documentation Viewer and Terminal's man pages, etc.
I do feel like something odd is going on though. Like it may be expected behaviour to some degree, but the reported memory usage for the Music app is greater than I've ever seen it on any of my computers, playing hi-res lossless and all. But I guess that could also just be a super long playlist loaded in the up-next queue or music video queuing or something. My Music app hovers around 300MB though.
This MacRumors thread is ~80MB listed in Activity Monitor. WebKit.GPU + Safari Networking + Safari Web Content (Cached) + Safari + the YouTube window I also have going from Safari all together increases that to ~1GB. But that's for both pages, including a 4K video stream in YouTube. I guess that still adds up quickly, but the MacRumors page itself (not counting the Safari and WebKit processes, just the page's sandbox thread itself) is under 80MB still.
That's all from my Intel iMac where I am currently, but on my M1 Max 16" I only see 35% RAM usage the majority of the time. That's a 32GB model and I run all sorts of stuff all the time, Final Cut, Xcode, VSCode, etc. - Only thing that really pushes it above the mid-30s-40s% is starting some virtualisation environments like starting up Docker, QEMU, etc. At least when not counting the caching memory. If I don't use the bigger programs there I can easily stay ~20-25% memory usage which will put me under the 8GB mark. But then again, as mentioned I don't tend to use a lot of tabs or web content. Flip side of that though, I have had Final Cut eat over 100GB of RAM in a project once and that just killed everything because, yeah, 32GB of RAM the rest came from the drive... Had to move to proxy on that one
Below is a screenshot from the activity monitor. I did a hard reboot this morning and reset the PRAM. So far so good. It was frustrating. I have had the computer for about a month and a couple of times a day the music would freeze, all windows would freeze, couldn't move the mouse, and I'd just have to wait patiently until I could force quit something.
As far as "why tabs?", a combo of research and ADHD. Let's say I am looking up a new photo assignment to do with my class. I'll check out another teacher's website, see a good idea, then google the assignment looking at how others present the info. I'll CMD click and open 10-12 tabs to steal the best methods. Then in another window or browser, I'll have Google Docs open typing/copying and pasting to create the assignment. Youtube is open to looking for supporting videos. And then open lightroom, photoshop, etc. to run through. I'll have music playing and a couple of other sites to take a break from the research. Then a song will play, I'll google the band, look for similar bands, check a reddit thread for top albums by ... and so forth.
I am not doing that with this M1 Air, but that is what I have done for a decade or more with a MacBook Pro. Another example would be researching between 14" MacBook Pro and M2 Air. I'll google reddit, macrumors, etc. CMD click 10-12 threads open. Read through them for research while listening to music, checking email, checking social media, etc. Plus, still have other tabs open. I'll get distracted or bored, take a break from the current research, then get into checking something else. I'll leave the tabs open to come back.
I have had 60 tabs, multiple browsers, slack, mail, music, messenger, photoshop, etc. all open on old MacBook Pros with 16GB ram and they wouldn't freeze. Maybe not typical usage, but that's how my mind works.
As far as "why tabs?", a combo of research and ADHD. Let's say I am looking up a new photo assignment to do with my class. I'll check out another teacher's website, see a good idea, then google the assignment looking at how others present the info. I'll CMD click and open 10-12 tabs to steal the best methods. Then in another window or browser, I'll have Google Docs open typing/copying and pasting to create the assignment. Youtube is open to looking for supporting videos. And then open lightroom, photoshop, etc. to run through. I'll have music playing and a couple of other sites to take a break from the research. Then a song will play, I'll google the band, look for similar bands, check a reddit thread for top albums by ... and so forth.
I am not doing that with this M1 Air, but that is what I have done for a decade or more with a MacBook Pro. Another example would be researching between 14" MacBook Pro and M2 Air. I'll google reddit, macrumors, etc. CMD click 10-12 threads open. Read through them for research while listening to music, checking email, checking social media, etc. Plus, still have other tabs open. I'll get distracted or bored, take a break from the current research, then get into checking something else. I'll leave the tabs open to come back.
I have had 60 tabs, multiple browsers, slack, mail, music, messenger, photoshop, etc. all open on old MacBook Pros with 16GB ram and they wouldn't freeze. Maybe not typical usage, but that's how my mind works.
Yes, something's quite abnormal here. My music app uses 300mb ram at most. Just went to Amazon and it's using 260mb.
Some adblockers contain exceptions where they don't block certain ads on certain sites.... that could be the issue with your massive ram overuse on Amazon.
However, this doesn't explain the music.app overusage, which suggests some kind of bug in either the app or your install of the OS.
Some adblockers contain exceptions where they don't block certain ads on certain sites.... that could be the issue with your massive ram overuse on Amazon.
However, this doesn't explain the music.app overusage, which suggests some kind of bug in either the app or your install of the OS.
Not going to be an in depth reply like most, but I do photo editing on photoshop and Lightroom often swapping files between apps, web browsing, streaming music or podcasts as well as emails…
8GB has been perfectly fine for me and I’ve not experienced any issues.
8GB has been perfectly fine for me and I’ve not experienced any issues.
I have a 16 GB Air and I have problems with audio dropping out, GarageBand lagging, and just overall feel like I’m throwing too much at the system.
These Mx Macs seem to be, … they don’t slow down, they stay fast, they just become choppy.
I have always found this topic very interesting.
The iron rule of memory is always the same: bigger is better, bigger is better than smaller, and just because it is better today does not mean it will be better in 5 years. This is the truth, it's always the same. At least in our perception of computers, this truth is always the same, otherwise, please convince anyone who tries to assemble a WInPC that 8G is enough, no need to buy more, and guess what, they will say: that's because you don't have a choice, so you can only convince yourself that 8G is enough.
The reason I find it interesting is that there are always specific people (and there are many) who keep advocating: 8G is quite enough, 8G is good, 8G is so fast, all you need is 8G .....
This is simply ridiculous! Leaving aside the fact that the OS is getting more bloated every year, even applications are demanding memory. Very few developers are willing to go to the trouble of developing resource-efficient applications these days, why? Because everyone is so "rich" nowadays, there is almost enough memory, so why don't applications take more memory?
As a joke, a few years ago my colleague asked me how to make SQL faster. I said: replace the server with an SSD. Although it has nothing to do with memory, the joke illustrates the fact that hardware 'abundance' has made many application developers lazy.
You can't expect applications to always be fairly disciplined, I'd rather assume they're always greedy for memory, especially for the Web! Today's browsers and Web are not what they were 20 years ago. Web engineering is now a complex application with many integrated technologies stacked on top of each other.
Sometimes I have to guess that there are only a few people in the world who seem to advocate that 8G is enough.
1. they use 8G mac
2. committed Apple fans
3. "Apple says..." They just say "yes". (Because you're not in a position to increase your own memory anymore)
About whether 8G is enough? I think people who use 8G either know it very clear or are very good at allocating memory. How allocate it? There's really no great technique, you can only always keep a bit application, keep a bit browser tabs, and then frequent "QUIT" application, but there's not much else you can do.
Then how to dig, will not find 16G or more from the pit, because it is only 8G, not because there are "many people" say "8G is actually very enough", it will behave like 32G.
The Mac is yours, the money is yours, and the experience is yours. Many people often make "not so smart" choices and then try to find arguments that comfort them. If you have a choice, forget the guys says 8G is enough, your experience already explains the answer, and return it.
It is now 2022 and it is unethical to advocate that 8G is sufficient.
The iron rule of memory is always the same: bigger is better, bigger is better than smaller, and just because it is better today does not mean it will be better in 5 years. This is the truth, it's always the same. At least in our perception of computers, this truth is always the same, otherwise, please convince anyone who tries to assemble a WInPC that 8G is enough, no need to buy more, and guess what, they will say: that's because you don't have a choice, so you can only convince yourself that 8G is enough.
The reason I find it interesting is that there are always specific people (and there are many) who keep advocating: 8G is quite enough, 8G is good, 8G is so fast, all you need is 8G .....
This is simply ridiculous! Leaving aside the fact that the OS is getting more bloated every year, even applications are demanding memory. Very few developers are willing to go to the trouble of developing resource-efficient applications these days, why? Because everyone is so "rich" nowadays, there is almost enough memory, so why don't applications take more memory?
As a joke, a few years ago my colleague asked me how to make SQL faster. I said: replace the server with an SSD. Although it has nothing to do with memory, the joke illustrates the fact that hardware 'abundance' has made many application developers lazy.
You can't expect applications to always be fairly disciplined, I'd rather assume they're always greedy for memory, especially for the Web! Today's browsers and Web are not what they were 20 years ago. Web engineering is now a complex application with many integrated technologies stacked on top of each other.
Sometimes I have to guess that there are only a few people in the world who seem to advocate that 8G is enough.
1. they use 8G mac
2. committed Apple fans
3. "Apple says..." They just say "yes". (Because you're not in a position to increase your own memory anymore)
About whether 8G is enough? I think people who use 8G either know it very clear or are very good at allocating memory. How allocate it? There's really no great technique, you can only always keep a bit application, keep a bit browser tabs, and then frequent "QUIT" application, but there's not much else you can do.
Then how to dig, will not find 16G or more from the pit, because it is only 8G, not because there are "many people" say "8G is actually very enough", it will behave like 32G.
The Mac is yours, the money is yours, and the experience is yours. Many people often make "not so smart" choices and then try to find arguments that comfort them. If you have a choice, forget the guys says 8G is enough, your experience already explains the answer, and return it.
It is now 2022 and it is unethical to advocate that 8G is sufficient.
Except that it's very clear that OP's 8gb machine is not having this trouble because his ram amount is insufficient - there is some kind of unexplained malfunction that is causing 10x normal ram usage in multiple apps.
Bought a M1 Air in 2020 with 8GB and do not regret it (I decided to go with the 512GB flash because that was the way to get 8 instead of 7 GPU cores).
Dunno what other ppl do with dozens of Chrome browser tabs or what misunderstanding of free vs. reserved memory is regarded "common knowledge", but I have not yet come to the point to wish for more RAM...
Dunno what other ppl do with dozens of Chrome browser tabs or what misunderstanding of free vs. reserved memory is regarded "common knowledge", but I have not yet come to the point to wish for more RAM...
MacOS is very good at masking the signs of low memory, but sometimes video playback will stutter while other apps are eating all of the RAM on my M1 Mac Mini with 8GB. I really wish Apple made these things upgradeable, even if it meant that users could install slower aftermarket memory than what Apple can include on the logic board.