You're at least somewhat correct.

I'm now playing a 4K movie on Plex. It's using a little over 1Gb RAM for that. After I started it, my computer swapped ~250Mb to the SSD. Firefox is still snappy. Safari is still running normally. VS Code is still doing its thing. I even started a `brew update` on iTerm, and I have the App Store installing a couple apps. Mail still runs fine, sends and receives, and I can switch between mail accounts and messages.

So, you may be technically right about the memory usage and the need for swapping. What you're missing is the fact that it doesn't hurt the user experience.

This is not marketing or bamboozlement. This is me on the same laptop I'm typing this answer.

You should probably do a deep inspection of your beliefs and stop denying the actual, practical experience of many people who are responding to you with real world experience.

> This is the very type of bamboozlement I was alluding to - instruction set and/or silicon architecture doesn't actually change the amount of data you use.

Oh, but it does when it has a hardware memory compression engine. The very different GPU design also means it can use less (or more) memory in different situations.

Yes, "a single frame of 16 bit 8K RAW" will be the same size expanded. But on M1 it can be shared more easily with different parts of the CPU, GPU and co-processors without copying.

Even more so for other pipelines, involving CPU+GPU.

MacOS also has memory compression, assisted by the CPU.

And there are other ways an OS can use to keep memory usage lower given a different CPU architecture...