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Why are tech news websites suddenly bashing 8GB RAM in Apple devices? (links.hackliberty.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/apple_enthusiast

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I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.

Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?

I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.

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[–] hperrin -3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Mac is generally really good at handling memory, including compressing it on the fly. My guess is anyone complaining is looking at it through the lens of Windows, where 8GB is not enough for a lot of tasks.

Edit: here’s an article about it, https://www.lifewire.com/understanding-compressed-memory-os-x-2260327

[–] [email protected] -2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

⬆️ This

[–] hperrin 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Apparently people don’t like hearing that. xD

I use all three, Mac, Linux, and Windows, all the time. Mac is the only one I’m ok with having 8GB of RAM. At least 12 on the other two, unless you use zram swap on Linux, then you can get away with 8. Afaik, Windows doesn’t have anything like that, so 16 is best, but 12 is ok.

I don’t really understand why people would downvote that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I realized recently that my Raspberry Pi 4 has just 4GB of RAM, but while syncing huge files to Storj I’ve noticed it doesn’t fill up whatsoever (even with slow spinning hard drives).

I’m starting to think for most things I do CPU is more important than having tons of memory.

[–] hperrin 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

If you’re transferring files over a socket (like through SMB or SFTP), the receiving end usually has a small buffer, like 64KB. It’ll just pause the stream if it’s receiving data faster than it can push it to disk and the buffer gets full. So usually a file transfer won’t use much memory.

There is some poorly written software that doesn’t do that, though. I ran into a WebDAV server that didn’t do that when I was writing my own server. That’s where you could run into out of memory errors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

That lines up with what I know about networking, but on the software side I figured it would chew through memory quick (especially because it’s encrypting it on the fly).