When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'
If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.
I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.
note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.
Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.
Like the ipad pro 10.5 does not support later ios version, while the less powerful but newer base ipad does.
So, there is chance the M1 MBA stop receiving update before the MB Neo
“Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”
I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
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.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
With builds running on big build servers.
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
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.
The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.
That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.
macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
