this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I'm genuinely amazed that it hasn't fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS' memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn't feasible.
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn't surprise me given Apple's laptop history
They were talking about memory not storage
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we're pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
I seriously doubt many people using this will be doing much video editing with 40 tabs open. Your expectations are unrealistic for the type of user who will be buying these.
Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.
Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.
It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.
This is a step backwards from M1 in terms of cores, core speed and bus speed. This is not going to feel like an m1 base even.
We’ll see when the reviews hit. It’d be pretty dumb for it to be worse than an M1 when older airs get discounted down to similar prices.