How are you all Getting by with 8gigs?

[Wizec]

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.

And very likely the Apple Music app taking 30% of the RAM (2.4/8) is a good place to start troubleshooting.

 

[Juuro]

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.
View attachment 2025366

So, I tried to replicate your usage on my Air with the exact same specs. I have now 60+ open Tabs in Safari with some other apps I almost always have open. Memory pressure looks similar to yours except I already went into the red a couple of times while flicking trough the tabs. Sometimes it a several seconds until the content of a tab is loaded again. That's probably because macOS has to load it from swap. But if you stay in the same 1-3 tabs all the time it is fast as always.
I also had the music app playing things. And I went to Amazon and clicked around for at least ten minutes to get it to your whopping 2.3 GBs. I only managed to get it to ~600 MB, never more. Also Music stays at around 300 MB no matter what I do.
So by now I also think there is something wrong with your machine. It is not normal to have a 2.3 GB Amazon website nor 2.4 GB music app. 😳
For Safari I would also try to disable all the extensions you might have activated. But I don't have any clue why the music app is acting out like that.

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.

I almost can't believe that. I never had audio problems, but when working with Lightroom it is very easy to get to a point where the swap is around 8 GB and it becomes laggy to switch between photos in Lightroom.

 

[bradl]

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.

However, the common misconception is that because people think that bigger = better, they have free rein to throw everything and the kitchen sink to the wolves, assuming that the system should be able to handle it. In this case, we see the exact opposite, because one reason or another. People still have to realize that they need to work within the means of what the hardware can offer. As long as you keep that manageable, that hardware should never fail on you unless it is something catastrophic.

I again reference my mid-2011 13" MBA, which has 4GB memory and a 256GB drive. I went to that from a home built Linux box that I had 16GB memory and 6TB in. For what I was doing (mail, web, processing, the occasional compile), the MBA did everything with better managed resources than my Linux box did, and I didn't have to worry about supporting it myself.

That MBA is still going strong, 12 years after being built, and rock solid on Sierra.

My point: People need to consider their actions and means of performance on that hardware before simply thinking bigger is better, because their complaints may be self inflicted.

BL.

 

[zootalaws]

I support about 1300 macs at work, about 200 of them are M1 Airs

My user base never reboot, never close an app, have, in some cases, HUNDREDS of open tabs, gigs on the desktop and I have had one report of M1s being slow and remote monitoring shows little memory pressure in the red.

But, those M1s were provisioned with M1-native apps, and they don’t use Safari, but Chrome and with no extensions.

Typical app load is adobe CC suite, ms office, google workspace, autodesk, Xcode.

There is one teacher that complains about beachballs, but she’s so bad with her machine that she’s an anomaly.

We have a great infrastructure -1.5GByte(yes, not bit) internet connection, 48 Ruckus Wifi6 APs properly installed and managed, and the only time speed is an issue is when class is out and 1300 wee dears all go online at the same time.

I think you are either running some Rosetta extension or plug-in that’s causing an issue or you’ve got a bad one - out of the 200 I’ve deployed so far I’ve have seven faulty, three faulty out of box. That’s the highest ratio I’ve ever seen in 30 years, apart from the faulty gpu G5 iMacs that must have cost apple a bomb

 

[zootalaws]

However, the common misconception is that because people think that bigger = better, they have free rein to throw everything and the kitchen sink to the wolves, assuming that the system should be able to handle it. In this case, we see the exact opposite, because one reason or another. People still have to realize that they need to work within the means of what the hardware can offer. As long as you keep that manageable, that hardware should never fail on you unless it is something catastrophic.

I again reference my mid-2011 13" MBA, which has 4GB memory and a 256GB drive. I went to that from a home built Linux box that I had 16GB memory and 6TB in. For what I was doing (mail, web, processing, the occasional compile), the MBA did everything with better managed resources than my Linux box did, and I didn't have to worry about supporting it myself.

That MBA is still going strong, 12 years after being built, and rock solid on Sierra.

My point: People need to consider their actions and means of performance on that hardware before simply thinking bigger is better, because their complaints may be self inflicted.

BL.

I have the latest apple gear to work with, but my own work desktop is a dual-screen 2015 8GB dual-Core 1.4GHz iMac with a 256GB SATA SSD running Big Sur

I could order anything, as I control the hardware budget, including a Pro or a Studio (it’s a big budget!) but I’m not driven by tech envy and my machine is perfect for my job.

Do I sometimes have to wait a second for something to load? Does it sometimes take a pause transcoding or vector-tracing a 4k image? Sure it does, but those aren’t my normal work flow (which is spreadsheets, docs, pdfs, network monitoring and ARD) so there’s zero frustration.

If I was a photographer or graphic designer there would be a Studio on my desk, but I’m not.

At home I have two M1 minis and two Xeon Mac Pro running my side hustle of wide-format printing and label-making

Horses for courses, and learning to use your tools is the key to a happy life

 

[zootalaws]

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.

Or, use the tool best suited, by design, to run google docs - chrome.

We live in a google workspace and if the users want to use Firefox or brave or safari, they’ll find their service tickets get closed with a short ‘unsupported- use chrome’ message

 

[zootalaws]

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.

I look at my colleagues that support similar-sized sites to me (~1000-user plus) with a mix of hardware from hp, acre, asus, Lenovo, etc. and they have an average of 40-day service ticket life and an average queue length of 400 tickets.

I have two tickets, currently and an average ttl of about three days.
They have three techs per site, on my site there is me.

I have to skulk about looking for work, creating scenarios to test and organising meetings to keep me busy.

I thank the local deities MacBooks aren’t upgradable

 

[yitwail]

Or, use the tool best suited, by design, to run google docs - chrome.

We live in a google workspace and if the users want to use Firefox or brave or safari, they’ll find their service tickets get closed with a short ‘unsupported- use chrome’ message

What about Edge? Being Chromium based, shouldn't it be roughly comparable to Chrome for this use case?

 

[zootalaws]

What about Edge? Being Chromium based, shouldn't it be roughly comparable to Chrome for this use case?

Sure, why not?

But I won’t be.

 

[profcutter]

Or, use the tool best suited, by design, to run google docs - chrome.

We live in a google workspace and if the users want to use Firefox or brave or safari, they’ll find their service tickets get closed with a short ‘unsupported- use chrome’ message

Eh, I don’t like to use Chrome. Firefox works just fine on google docs on my 2015, when safari grinds to a halt.

 

[bradl]

I have the latest apple gear to work with, but my own work desktop is a dual-screen 2015 8GB dual-Core 1.4GHz iMac with a 256GB SATA SSD running Big Sur

I could order anything, as I control the hardware budget, including a Pro or a Studio (it’s a big budget!) but I’m not driven by tech envy and my machine is perfect for my job.

Do I sometimes have to wait a second for something to load? Does it sometimes take a pause transcoding or vector-tracing a 4k image? Sure it does, but those aren’t my normal work flow (which is spreadsheets, docs, pdfs, network monitoring and ARD) so there’s zero frustration.

If I was a photographer or graphic designer there would be a Studio on my desk, but I’m not.

At home I have two M1 minis and two Xeon Mac Pro running my side hustle of wide-format printing and label-making

Horses for courses, and learning to use your tools is the key to a happy life

Can not agree with this more than I do. For 11 years, that MBA is still screamingly fast. It’s still a 5-second boot up to login, and less than 2-seconds wake from sleep from closing it. My windows box? Laughable, despite 32GB memory, and that’s even putting the boot drive on NVMe just for a test.

I’ll happily admit that my M1 Pro MBP is overkill, but I also think about future proofing, which is what I did with that MBA, which is why it’s lasted me 11 years; I’ll keep that workhorse going until it can’t go anymore.

BL.

 

[zootalaws]

Eh, I don’t like to use Chrome. Firefox works just fine on google docs on my 2015, when safari grinds to a halt.

Different strokes - I have multiple google profiles (google admin, personal acct, support accts, student-look-alike, JAMF) and flicking between them with Chrome is simple.

When supporting 1300+ users, you draw the line at what you support. They can use whatever they want, but if they want support, they use what we support.

You are using it for yourself, and not having to support anyone other than yourself, you can use whatever you like.

I'm sure Firefox is a fine browser, but I don't, and won't, use it.

At home I use Safari, because web-based tools aren't something I use a lot.

 

[zootalaws]

Can not agree with this more than I do. For 11 years, that MBA is still screamingly fast. It’s still a 5-second boot up to login, and less than 2-seconds wake from sleep from closing it. My windows box? Laughable, despite 32GB memory, and that’s even putting the boot drive on NVMe just for a test.

I’ll happily admit that my M1 Pro MBP is overkill, but I also think about future proofing, which is what I did with that MBA, which is why it’s lasted me 11 years; I’ll keep that workhorse going until it can’t go anymore.

BL.

I still have a couple of A1278s kicking around the house, despite their weight and age and bus speed, because I can easily swap out a hard drive, because they have 16GB RAM, because I have a dozen spares, should anything go wrong, because they have a DVD drive and support hyper threading, so great for VMs on the go.

My reality is that I rarely need a laptop, so whatever is at hand will do. My personal machines are a 2011 i7 2,5GH with GEForce 650, which is more than good enough for my needs and still rarely gets used, and a 2020 i5 which has had about 60 power cycles since I've owned it.

99% of my time is spent on an old iMac at work or a late 2102 i7 Mini at home.

Would I like a Studio or a latest-gen Pro? Hell yes! But I prefer buying an old Xeon Pro for a couple of hundred bucks and refurbishing it with modern drives and more ram than spending 10k.

I also drive an 850cc Fiat

EDIT: You a kiwi too? I'm constrained by what's locally available affordably for my own kit, and spend a lot of time refurbishing and trading up. The i7 cost me $200 on Trademe with a duff drive and 4GB.

 

[RRC]

I almost can't believe that. I never had audio problems, but when working with Lightroom it is very easy to get to a point where the swap is around 8 GB and it becomes laggy to switch between photos in Lightroom.

That hasn't been my experience, I had a 16GB i7 Intel iMac before and the M1 with less memory is much better, much smoother with zero lag or hang ups.

 

[applesith]

I use a 13“ M1 512/8 for work and I constantly run into performance issues where I have to either reboot or completely quit apps to clear memory. when things are bad I get audio issues too where Teams meetings or Chrome meets will lag and audio stutter. memory pressure is always yellow with sporadic red while CPU usage is low.

I do a lot of work in chrome, safari and MS office and find that MS is running things in the background that suck up so much ram. I researched it a bit and it’s a common issue with running a Mac on a 4K external with scaled resolution where MS has to use a lot of ram for resizing windows.

Do not under estimate what’s in your tabs. I’m always in Google ads, sheets, and data studio which will commonly push safari or chrome to take 4gb of ram alone.

Next time I will get at least 16gb of ram.

 

[Juuro]

That hasn't been my experience, I had a 16GB i7 Intel iMac before and the M1 with less memory is much better, much smoother with zero lag or hang ups.

I had an Intel iMac 2017 with an i5 and 32 GB memory. When Lightroom is really using much memory and the memory would be already more than full on the 8 GB M1 MacBook Air the iMac is still faster. And that makes perfect sense, because it doesn't need to move around Gigabytes between swap and memory. Of course the M1 is faster for everything else, so exporting images, rendering videos, normal work when the memory is not full... but if it's full more memory is always better. Even with M1 vs. 5 year old Intel, the CPU doesn't simply matter too much in those cases.

 

[sleestak]

I use a 13“ M1 512/8 for work and I constantly run into performance issues where I have to either reboot or completely quit apps to clear memory. when things are bad I get audio issues too where Teams meetings or Chrome meets will lag and audio stutter. memory pressure is always yellow with sporadic red while CPU usage is low.

I believe Teams is still a horrible Electron based application and, as a result, is a total memory hog. My Windows laptop at work has 64GB of RAM and an i9 and I got two "out of memory" errors from Teams last week while making calls 😆

The base M1 air with 8GB of RAM fits my personal workload just fine and I've never redlined the memory pressure; admittedly, old habits from the 90s die hard and I typically just keep only the browser tabs/programs I am using active and close everything else. I realize that isn't viable for everyone, but I don't see the point in paying more for "future-proofing" RAM beyond my current needs. When/if I need a new machine due to memory constraints, I'll just upgrade.

 

[kp98077]

A little over a month ago I needed a computer ASAP. I have had several variations of the 15 in pro going back to when it was a PowerBook. My last several MacBook Pros all have had 16GBs. As a Media Arts teacher doing graphic design, photography, video editing, etc., and also lots of tabs open, the Pro has been vital. Anyhow, my most recent MacBook Pro is 2017 which is always hot, with fans running nonstop, battery on its last legs, etc.

I couldn't find a MacBook Pro at the time and needed a personal computer ASAP, so I bought the base M1 MacBook Air at Costco for $849. I figured with the 90-day return policy it would hold me over until Pros were back in stock. I watched all these YouTube videos and read threads on MR about how efficient the M1 is and 8GB would be plenty for average (non-pro) use. Either my Air is jacked or people are lying. For the past month, all I have used the computer for is to browse the Internet, listen to Apple Music, use Google Docs, and play a really old RPG game Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition.

With around 10 tabs open in Safari and listening to Apple Music, I keep getting spinning beach balls, and everything freezes, music hiccups, stop playing, etc. I have to keep Activity Monitor open to force quit processes. Currently, I have 12 tabs and Apple Music playing. That's it. 175GB HD space free. I am using 7.5GB RAM and 8 GBs of swap. Several times a day music freezes and I have to close some tabs. Sometimes even force restart.

What am I doing wrong? I know it is a base model, but I am not doing anything. If I was under normal workload with two browsers, 2-3 dozen tabs, Adobe open, Music, Slack, etc., I'd get it. But ... browsing the web, typing a document, and listening to Music? I am also only getting like 7-8 hours on the battery. No video editing, no photo editing, no Adobe.

as much as I want to like the air, i too have always had these same issues! Wonder how people do real work on them? I never had this issue on a MBP...

 

[star-affinity]

I am going to try to reset the Pram and see if that will fix it. I am thinking it has to be hardware issue. I have watched the YouTube videos with people opening several programs, multiple tabs, exporting a video, etc. on 8GB. Any other tricks to try besides reset Pram? Maybe SMC?

Resetting PRAM and SMC is no more since M1 arrived:

System management and NVRAM on M1 Macs

There’s no SMC, so you can’t reset it. Although there’s still NVRAM (PRAM), that can’t be reset either: full details of both for M1 models.

eclecticlight.co

Was also thinking which version of macOS you're on and if you've checked in Activity Monitor if there some process spiking CPU wise when those beach balls occur?

 

[jordanfc21]

Amazon and Google services consume significant amounts of RAM. If I have Google Docs or Gmail open for long periods in Safari, the RAM usage skyrockets. It's actually insane. In saying that, I use a base model M1 MBA for work, and I regularly have over 50 tabs open in Safari with Slack, Notion, Pages, Mail, Calendar, and Creative Cloud running in the background with little to no slowdown. It seems strange this is occurring for you though - was your new MBA set up as a new Mac or restored over time machine/from another Mac? This can sometimes cause issues and a fresh install can help.

 

[kschendel]

How on earth do you even find the tab you want when you have 50 open? I get lost after about 8...

 

[yitwail]

How on earth do you even find the tab you want when you have 50 open? I get lost after about 8...

Don't know how jordanfc21 does it, but I have a lot more than that, and I organize them into windows, so each window contains related tabs. Once a window has more than 7 or 8 tabs, it's inconvenient because the tab titles are too short to make out.

 

[getmac]

Similar to @yitwail I'll have separate windows and even browsers. Maybe one browser personal another work related. One window with photography stuff, another with video stuff, another with .... and so on. There is method to the madness. Hahaha

 

[nvmls]

How on earth do you even find the tab you want when you have 50 open? I get lost after about 8...

Easy. Raycast.

 

[eicca]

I've had zero problems with 8 gigs. I don't consider my use case very heavy. Documents, YouTube, emails, fairly casual stuff.

Currently I have about 30 tabs open as part of a research project I'm in the middle of, and my memory pressure graph has turned yellow but I've only used around 200mb of swap so far. No discernible slowdowns of any sort.

I imagine if I were to do music production on this thing I'd hit the RAM limits pretty quick. But I bought this MacBook Air to replace my iPad as a portable machine, and it's been more than sufficient.