Tell me you haven’t used an M1 device without telling me.
People getting their hands on 8GB M1 MacBook Airs in the early days were saying the memory management and performance were making it snappier than the 16GB Intel MacBooks.
I made a mistake of purchasing a 8GB M1 MacBook Pro. It was painful to work with. For casual stuff it worked just fine, but as soon as I ran a Docker image (with 2GB memory limit), had Slack and few other light apps open, some tabs in Safari it started to become slow. Painfully slow. The spinning beach ball was a very frequent sight to me. My RAM usage was often in the red zone and I had to kill applications constantly. When I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to a M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM all of these issues went away.
VMs are much more memory intensive than other workloads because they wire a lot of memory and/or just access it constantly, which defeats pretty much every optimization you could conceivably do to hide it.
