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.

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.

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.

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.

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

With builds running on big build servers.

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.

“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.”

Bye bye electron

The worst memory hogs today are websites.

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.

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

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.

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

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.