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Does anyone actually need all this open at once?
There's no way one can genuinely be working on or referencing all these apps.

If one is working in say Photoshop, maybe referencing a Word Doc, or a PDF, maybe a photo or email, but not all of them. A habit of closing and cleaning will keep it tidy. Though I'm not lecturing, just noting that if 16 also isn't cutting it, it may be time to tweak the usage into more efficient workflows & usage
exactly. People are just sloppy with their resource management. Just open what you need and shut down the rest.
 
I tend to use modern computers in more or less the same way rather than expecting them to have unlimited resources.
This. While some need 200+ tabs open and want several programs running in the background, I tend to have no more than 10-15 open tabs with maybe one or two other programs running in the background. Given this usage, I never hit the ceiling on 8GB RAM on either my M1 Mini or Dell XPS 15.
 
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I think the RAM issue is much less of an issue on macs because even if you need to swap to the SSD the SSD is super fast. Ideally, you wouldn’t need to do this though.
 
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This. While some need 200+ tabs open and want several programs running in the background, I tend to have no more than 10-15 open tabs with maybe one or two other programs running in the background. Given this usage, I never hit the ceiling on 8GB RAM on either my M1 Mini or Dell XPS 15.
Just out of curiosity, how do you find anything if you have 200tabs open?
Lets say you have 200 Service-Now tabs open, how do you find anything?
 
This. While some need 200+ tabs open and want several programs running in the background, I tend to have no more than 10-15 open tabs with maybe one or two other programs running in the background. Given this usage, I never hit the ceiling on 8GB RAM on either my M1 Mini or Dell XPS 15.
Same literally, by 10-15 it's time to save and close. I like session buddy, a chrome extension, to save all tabs.
We're never gonna look back at them anyway lol.

And I'm sure we're power users. So if we can thrive with a max of 10-15 tabs and maybe 4-5 or up to 10 lighter apps max, everyone can. It's the right way to go about it to just have what you need at that time open.

In fact, this ties in really well to one of my biggest gripes with macOS - it is never made clear to the user that apps must be right click and quit from the dock or they are still 'open'. Generally speaking from what the average user has learned, whether that's iPhone itself, or any modern smartphone, which manages RAM itself if you just go to the home screen from an app - or Windows, where closing the window generally closes the the whole app/software.
It's great and I enjoy it, but I can see that bit isn't very clear to the lay man.
Often times when I tell a client they could benefit by right clicking and quitting apps, they are shocked!

Actually, I'm not even sure I can say it's great and I enjoy it - I can't remember one time I particularly benefitted from closing all windows but allowing the app to stay on the dock. I either have the app open with a window, or I don't.
 
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8GB is trash in 2022. Why should I give up storage space that will be reserved for swap because Apple wants to be cheap. Storage space is on the slim side now a days and every GB counts for some of us. Is 8GB enough, ya. Is it ideal all around…no. RAM is cheap and so is Apple.
Can you bring more practical examples?
 
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The thing is, if you’re regularly using multiple web browsers or have more than 10 tabs open, you’re no longer a casual user. My cable provider has a cloud service for watching recorded tv, and yesterday I caught that website using 1.93 GB of RAM for a single buffered movie stream. It is what it is.

There are still people who will find 8 GB enough. College students who work mainly with text documents for instance. Or light home users who browse and do finances. Some web designers. The list goes on and is quite long.

But for people who make medium-to-intense use of pro apps would be better off with 16 GB, I think we can safely say.
 
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The thing is, if you’re regularly using multiple web browsers or have more than 10 tabs open, you’re no longer a casual user. My cable provider has a cloud service for watching recorded tv, and yesterday I caught that website using 1.93 GB of RAM for a single buffered movie stream. It is what it is.

There are still people who will find 8 GB enough. College students who work mainly with text documents for instance. Or light home users who browse and do finances. Some web designers. The list goes on and is quite long.

But for people who make medium-to-intense use of pro apps would be better off with 16 GB, I think we can safely say.
My school required us to have a PC with 64GB of RAM and if you had a Mac they told us to buy a real computer. Pretty much the same argument there.
 
Can you bring more practical examples?
Are you just going to counter everyone that says 16 is valid at 1000 bucks? Because that's a valid point regardless of whether who needs how much. Apple is just doing it to get away with it, but, everyone's right. 1000 bucks for 8gb ram is a joke. HELL, the iPhone 13 Pro has 6gb RAM, and my Android phone at half the price has 8gb RAM.
Even though I see that 8 is enough for the average user, almost every laptop 900 and up has 16gb or some other niche feature it's bringing. Browsing Newegg, there's plenty of laptops for 500 with DDR4 16GB RAM.

Say I wanted to ensure 2k res, here is one at 900 offering 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD, and a UHD display.

The point is valid, maybe that's the answer to the OP of the thread. That hey, everyone's talking about it not even necessarily cause they all need it, but cause Apple is starting to short change people / their product and it is up to us to speak up about it like we are, to incite the change
 
Your RAM is overflowing into swap, the less RAM you have, the more this happens. The more this happens, the more you wear out your SSD. You don't want to wear out your SSD.

The more RAM you have, the less that happens. This is why people "obsess" over having more RAM. You're not "feeling" it because macOS does a good job of memory compression, but that's not enough forever.

People also worry about RAM because, unlike how it was in 2010, 8GB isn't a large amount of RAM anymore and on today's Macs, you can't upgrade them after the fact. The 2020 27" iMac, the 2019 Mac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini are the last Macs sold where the RAM was at all user-upgradable. On the Apple Silicon side of this transition, none of them will be. That sort of puts pressure on one to not necessarily cheap out up front. Then again, I have an army of base model M1 MacBook Airs and a base model M1 iMac, all at 8GB of RAM. But I also have a single M1 13" MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and all of those other M1 Macs are secondary and used for light browsing and app usage as well as IT testing (for which 8GB of RAM, 7 GPU cores, and 256GB SSDs are more than enough). Were it my main Mac, there'd be no way in hell that I'd want 8GB of RAM in 2022.
My Mac is almost 10 years old and the SSD has run and keeps running fine. My work PC is over 4 years old and its SSD has never had issues. I don’t see these monstrous issues with 8GB of Ram, is there any data to back up the SSD wear claim on a significant number of users?
 
My school required us to have a PC with 64GB of RAM and if you had a Mac they told us to buy a real computer. Pretty much the same argument there.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t object to insane RAM creep. A 64 GB min spec is crazy, when I went to university we didn’t even have to have a computer and I did engineering. Not everyone needs a workstation, is what I am saying. Apple sells these computers with this min spec because they are useful to a significant part of the market.

Determining where you fall in that market seems to be a bit of a pain point for consumers, because its not just what you do, but its how you use the computer that actually makes a difference. If you are reasonably disciplined and clean up after yourself, you get a lot further with 8 GB than if you never quit an application.
 
I’m not saying we shouldn’t object to insane RAM creep. A 64 GB min spec is crazy, when I went to university we didn’t even have to have a computer and I did engineering. Not everyone needs a workstation, is what I am saying. Apple sells these computers with this min spec because they are useful to a significant part of the market.

Determining where you fall in that market seems to be a bit of a pain point for consumers, because its not just what you do, but its how you use the computer that actually makes a difference. If you are reasonably disciplined and clean up after yourself, you get a lot further with 8 GB than if you never quit an application.
That was my point. They required us to have 64GB of RAM while I used MacBook Pro mid 2010 with 8GB of RAM from China. (I upgraded because of school) and I graduated and managed to finish all of my Unity and Unreal projects. Sure, I had issues, but you know… You can overcome anything.
It teaches you to be more resourceful and optimise your code better. In fact, I'd argue less RAM would make you a better developer.
Remember that Sony PS1 had like 2MB of RAM and there are some amazing and good looking games. Better looking than some of the mobile games today.
 
For the ones that say 8GB is enough, open 100 channels with delay, space designer and EQ in Logic and see what happen… maybe its ok for casual users with few web pages, mail and youtube, but for anything else 16GB is the minimum.
 
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For the ones that say 8GB is enough, open 100 channels with delay, space designer and EQ in Logic and see what happen… maybe its ok for casual users with few web pages, mail and youtube, but for anything else 16GB is the minimum.
You haven't read the rest of the thread, have you?
If you give me money for Logic, I can try and report back on my result.
 
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For the ones that say 8GB is enough, open 100 channels with delay, space designer and EQ in Logic and see what happen… maybe its ok for casual users with few web pages, mail and youtube, but for anything else 16GB is the minimum.
Or better still, just manage your resources effectively. You don't need all that running in real time. I ran a home studio on a core2duo Mac Mini with 4GB RAM.

And anyone who really does genuinely need to "open 100 channels with delay, space designer and EQ" should know full well that 8GB isn't enough. It shouldn't come as a surprise.
 
Can you bring more practical examples?
Ya a MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. I can’t keep all of my files on it and have to use iCloud Drive. Then my space is randomly reduced to accommodate all of the MS office apps (Teams, excel, one note, word). Then I have 30 tabs open in a browser some of which balloon up to GBs of reserved RAM. My field is data intensive and 8GB is just trash. If I start running packet captures I’m screwed instantly.

In 2022 the default should be 16GB, 512GB. But Apple likes it’s crazy margins so nope.

People who do work….real hardcore work, not browser tabs….generally notice when things are not ideal. Not everyone has intense workloads, but a lot of us do. Even the browse people will notice though. Chrome is a pile of hot garbage and for whatever reason loves to let web pages go hog wild on RAM. Bloatbag ConnectWise will run off the rails pretty easy for example.

The other issues. Lots of coders are lazy and don’t care about managing resources.

8GB is fine for the Martinetti’s….even PowerUser gramps….but not most people relying on it to work efficiently. (+100 points to anyone that gets the reference above, you are a true Mac user lol)
 
Why do I constantly see people whining about the RAM? If you're not happy with it sell your 8GB MBA and buy a 16GB one. Why blame Apple for this? I even see PCs with 4GB of RAM for sale and some of them are around $700.
Because 8GB isn’t enough and once you’re in with 8GB you have no alternative to increasing that resource to help you get what you require or want… it also influences the performance of the machines too. People are buying the 8GB models because thats what they can afford and see the massive and unjustified increase Apple charges to go from 8 to 16GB...

Perhaps if Apple allowed people to upgrade their RAM independently of having to use Apple’s outlandish gouging at the time of buying the system, people wouldn’t be complaining… kinda like it was before… ya think?
 
Ya a MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. I can’t keep all of my files on it and have to use iCloud Drive. Then my space is randomly reduced to accommodate all of the MS office apps (Teams, excel, one note, word). Then I have 30 tabs open in a browser some of which balloon up to GBs of reserved RAM. My field is data intensive and 8GB is just trash. If I start running packet captures I’m screwed instantly.

In 2022 the default should be 16GB, 512GB. But Apple likes it’s crazy margins so nope.

People who do work….real hardcore work, not browser tabs….generally notice when things are not ideal. Not everyone has intense workloads, but a lot of us do. Even the browse people will notice though. Chrome is a pile of hot garbage and for whatever reason loves to let web pages go hog wild on RAM. Bloatbag ConnectWise will run off the rails pretty easy for example.

The other issues. Lots of coders are lazy and don’t care about managing resources.

8GB is fine for the Martinetti’s….even PowerUser gramps….but not most people relying on it to work efficiently. (+100 points to anyone that gets the reference above, you are a true Mac user lol)
That's not a practical example.
 
Because 8GB isn’t enough and once you’re in with 8GB you have no alternative to increasing that resource to help you get what you require or want… it also influences the performance of the machines too. People are buying the 8GB models because thats what they can afford and see the massive and unjustified increase Apple charges to go from 8 to 16GB...

Perhaps if Apple allowed people to upgrade their RAM independently of having to use Apple’s outlandish gouging at the time of buying the system, people wouldn’t be complaining… kinda like it was before… ya think?
you can sell your 8gb Mac and buy a 16 gb one.
why to make more threads on macrumors and reddit everyday and whining about it? That was one of my points.

8GB is enough for Xcode and Simulators and for web development.
Case closed.
 
What the OP is trying to ask is ‘is there a practical difference that a user notices when using 8GB of Ram?’. And the answer is clearly, no. You don’t need to talk about how many GB a tab uses o what red lines you see in an activity monitor. Do you notice a difference in usage? The answer is no. Except for specific cases, like video editing maybe idk, normal everyday usage is fine with 8GB. I have never had issues both on Mac and PC. I can do all I need to for work and personal stuff. I don’t even know how much Ram I’m using normally, I don’t need to look; it’s not important.
If you’re not noticing running out of RAM, you’re not running out of RAM. While the swap is impressively fast on new Macs, running into swap usage is still VERY noticeable.
 
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