alt Hacker NewsSo what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
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> Can it run multiple programs at the same time?
I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.
Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:
- PostgreSQL (server)
- TablePlus (db client)
- Docker
- Slack
- Chrome
- Safari
- Zed
- Claude native
- ChatGPT native
- Zoom
- Codex
- Numbers
- Calendar
- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)
With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).
I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.
Yes, it can -- to all questions.
Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.
This is wrong.
My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.
Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.
Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets.
As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...