Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.

I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.

When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.

I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.

Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.

Tons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.

Meh. I do plenty of development on my 32GB work macbook pro and 8GB M2 air and never notice a difference.

My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)

I have a 128GB M3 Max from my employer. Due to some IT oversight, I was able to use it for a few months without the corporate "security" crapware. Didn't even ever noticed this machine had a fan before the "security theatre" corporate rootkits were installed.

> My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory

What are you doing that needs that much memory?

While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.

Pretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.

(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)

For mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.

VMs or huge builds can burn through that fast. Say 3 simultaneous Android emulators, or building Android itself

Some people use computers to compute things. More memory is always useful.

egacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping

I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.

I've been using 8 GB on my M3 for years as a security engineer, doing pretty heavy development. I usually have like 15 Brave tabs open, several terminals, a game (PokeMMO) and a small DeepSeek model, lots of Claude Code instances running, Obsidian, and LadyBird, among other small things. I honestly have no idea what people do with all that RAM.

To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.

Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

15 tabs? I manage multiple projects, one per window, and have about 15 to 30 tabs per window. So maybe 300 tabs.

Oh yeah well I run 500 VMs of Windows Vista each with an instance of DeepSeek botting Neopets stocks for me. I make more neopoints in a day than you'll make in USD in a year.

/s but I suppose I've developed a work flow that adapts to the RAM I've always had. I've seen people with zillions of tabs and I do wonder if it's really that much more productive than the occasional HTTP request to reopen one. I find leaving things open as a form of bookmarking clouds my mental space too much.

I do intend to have beastly RAM on my new desktop so who knows, maybe I'll be like you in a year.

Development isn't hard on ram. Doing what Apple claims this device is designed for, spending lots of time in multiple browser tabs, is.

Less-so if you do it in Safari than using a non-Apple browser.

Yes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.

Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.

Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…

I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally

Then you're not the intended market for the MacBook Neo.

Totally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all

lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.

I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly

Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.

Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.

Docker overhead is practically nothing, so running 3 docker containers should be well within the "light development" bracket.

What the heck is going on here, something cannot be light and use 20gb of memory.

Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb of free memory.

I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.

What takes 20GB memory? I dev on a 2015 i5 and run multiple docker containers all day without issue.

Isn't docker overhead a full VM unless you're running Linux natively?

But is the system choking? Or, are you certain it would choke with half the RAM you have? It's a well know thing that OS will book majority of the RAM you have and that's actually not a problem at all.

if you had 64GB you'd be using some 59GB. I have a 128GB machine and it happily hits around 40GB of used memory in no time at all.

> id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram.

How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.

That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).

It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.

> Teams

You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.

Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.

It's probably not that bad if you ONLY use it for video calls and you've never used Slack before.

Still needs 2Gb of memory for a video call though.

Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.

I don't see too many students running Teams.

Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?

Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.

Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.

> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors.

I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)

For governments and services governments delegate to third parties, being usable by low-end machines is extremely important.

I always have to point out government services should not be designed to be efficient, but fair and universal. After they are fair and universal, THEN you can make them efficient, just as long as you don’t break fairness and universality.

Make that 1 or 2gb of ram, a 32gb emmc drive and a single core 2 thread original Atom

Or a single-core Raspberry Pi with 512MB and an SDCard ;-)

Testing should be on such laptops. Development, especially in things like xcode or visual studio would be insane

That would force vendors to make Visual Studio and Xcode same ;-)

Clearly not Apple's.

I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.

and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.

I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.

I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.

Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.

Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.

I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).

16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.

Could it be all the corporate-tracking software ? I used to have a M1 Pro macbook with 16gb ram when it's first released, and somehow it still feel slow when compiling.

Then try again on my friend personal M1 MB, it was night and day.

We're a small shop so nothing of that sort, it's more of larger Figma projects and modern web-apps being hogs.

Honestly, these days compiling feels like really lightweight work in terms of memory compared to so much else.

This is my use case, 4 ides. Chrome and docker, its a 14’ M1 Pro, it works nice, but im not installing tahoe any time soon xd

On Tahoe, I upgraded only recently (maybe they made fixes after the initial complaints). Haven't noticed any regressions except for the weird corners but those I'm already used to. Super fast.

It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.

Adobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff.

Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.

Apple has history of giving inferior device newer update because it's released later.

Like the ipad pro 10.5 does not support later ios version, while the less powerful but newer base ipad does.

So, there is chance the M1 MBA stop receiving update before the MB Neo

> But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.

I dream of a macOS installer in which you can decide the level of bloat, instead of then fighting against apple’s super user in your device (SIP) using scripts from generous Internet friends.

“Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”

Something like TinyOSX (or TinymacOS, which doesn't have the same ring to it) would be pretty awesome.

> Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?

Court cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases

Apple is people, my friend!

People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.

This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).

Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.

I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)

It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.

Win 11 is actually way better at memory management than Windows 10. It's just more bloated.

That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.

My Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.

They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.

As a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM.

2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.

2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.

We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.

In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.

That's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives.

I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".

WhatsApp has a native Mac app

NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.

With builds running on big build servers.

I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.

Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.

But the Mac has a huge trick up its sleeve: it can run iOS and iPadOS apps. Meaning developers only have to make relatively minor adjustments to make it nice in the desktop and bin off the electron app on Mac.

Among the biggest offenders when it comes by my daily usage are Youtube and Facebook web sites. Both have iOS apps but did choose not to provide native Mac OS apps. I don't think MacBook Neo will make them to reconsider this policy.

There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.

Joke's on you; Swift has no garbage collector.

It obvious does, with reference counting. Otherwise programs would just balloon in memory.

ARC isn’t a garbage collector.

It is if you're being pedantic.

if more apps were written in native swift we wouldn't be having any memory issues

I love the new reduced resources Era. MS was clever in launching Xbox series S + X and demanding all published games run on the lower spec machine (similar to Xbox One-S specs).

Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.

It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.

There was this argument by someone the other day that Electron is so attractive, because native APIs are shit and too complex. On the other hand, all software, even simple stuff like messengers or app managers, seems so bloated thanks to Electron and similar frameworks. I like to think of these packaged webapps really as prototypes, and now start to imagine that agentic swarms can effectively translate them to native code, which would save resource both on the hardware and human-ware side.

This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.

“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”

That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.

The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.

That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.

macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.

I'm afraid it doesn't. People most everywhere in the world don't buy these overpriced machines. And you can get a new budget laptop with 16 GB of RAM for well under 200 USD.

However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...

Curious where can I find new budget laptop with 16g under 200? N100 mini pc’s sold for 350 at Amazon.

I don't use Amazon (and am not in the US). But look for manufacturers like Xiaomi, Chuwi, Mechrevo, Teclast, or even less-prominent ones; here's one example:

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010041415903.html

While I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right.

We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.

Particularly when paying for more RAM means buying a completely new computer.

Even on an upgradable machine. We're looking at ~$400 for 32GB of DDR5, and the price is only going to keep going up. We're at a point now where Apple actually charges less for RAM upgrades than it costs to upgrade your own machine. Insane.

The worst memory hogs today are websites.

I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

Where are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.

Bye bye electron