MacBook Air 2018

[Ori Dekel]

Hi,
I purchased my MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM.
When I open the mail app, calendar and 3 or 4 safari tabs I get the "rainbow" circle ...
I have maybe 2 or 3 external apps (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Office 365 that I don't use every day...)

Is it normal?....

Thanks,
Ori

 

[Bending Pixels]

The short answer - yep. Office 365 is a RAM resource pig (anything Adobe isn't far behind). I opted for 16gb of RAM and a 512 ssd just to avoid this issue

 

[revmacian]

Hi,
I purchased my MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM.
When I open the mail app, calendar and 3 or 4 safari tabs I get the "rainbow" circle ...
I have maybe 2 or 3 external apps (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Office 365 that I don't use every day...)

Is it normal?....

Thanks,
Ori

I'm going to say "it depends". I have the 2019 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. You can see from my dock (below screenshot) that I currently have 9 apps open with 5 tabs in Safari. I don't see any beach balling, freezes, lag or any other issue. 8GB RAM seems to be working fine here. I don't have Adobe Acrobat Reader or Office 365 installed - I prefer to use apps made by Apple because they are optimized for my machine.

 

[bsamcash]

I have the 2019 Air and I’d be very surprised to see the beach ball with that load. Open Activity Monitor and check the RAM and CPU load. It’s might even be one of the tabs in Safari trying to load a page with a ton of ads.

 

[lambertjohn]

Never seen a beach ball with my 2018 Air, and I run PS and Office 365 and surf the web, all at the same time. Zero issues. Actually runs pretty good for what the Air is.

 

[Ma2k5]

You can get a beach ball even on a 16" MBP (I have) without running loads of apps. There are many reasons it may happen to be honest, sometimes its easy to conclude your machine isn't powerful enough. But computers/software are complex and hiccups occur from time to time.

 

[Seanm87]

Check out activity monitor. Ive had a similar situation where my fan was going crazy like a jet. It turned out one of my apps was having a meltdown for some reason. Closed it and its been fine ever since.

 

[CPL593H]

Never seen a beach ball with my 2018 Air, and I run PS and Office 365 and surf the web, all at the same time. Zero issues. Actually runs pretty good for what the Air is.

Same here. 8/128 2018 MBA and never felt under powered for general office style use.