Anyone else feel like 8GB unified memory has become a much bigger bottleneck then 2 years ago?

[mactinkerlover]

Title. Back in 2020, when M1 first came out, everyone was arguing about 8 vs 16GB or unified memory (RAM). Back then, it seemed like the consensus was that you should get 16 GB if you want to do things like photo and video editing or to future proof, but 8GB would be fine if you were just doing basic tasks or light productivity, even if you kept quite a few things open.

Now, it seems like in late 2023, 8GB is becoming a bottleneck even for average consumers. I've come across many people who complain that their m1 machines are lagging now when they have a lot of stuff open, and I ask them to check how much ram they have, and sure enough, they only have 8GB.

Now I'm not saying that this was unexpected. This is absolutely to be expected and I even predicted this back in 2020 when M1 first came out thus why I ordered 16GB of RAM (the M1 is now my dads, I personally have an M1 Max 16 inch and handed the M1 down to him). But it's just interesting how much ram demands have increased in just 3 years.

Thoughts? Like I said, I predicted this back in 2020 and it seems to be coming true now. It just seems like that back in 2020, you were able to keep much more stuff open without it lagging whereas now, it seems to not be able to keep as much stuff open. Of course, even in 2020, 8GB of RAM was tight then and it's only gotten tighter now.

 

[Mcdevidr]

No. The 8gb m2s I’ve used perform same or better than 8gb m1s. Suppose if you want to play a game and it won’t run well on 8gb ram then you’re just out of luck or need a system with 16.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Honestly no. I used to have the same view and would consider 8GB to be nowhere near enough for a computer. That was five years ago. But then I started a business and we had to buy laptops for our staff. We thought we needed to go with Windows because of Windows only software (which later turned out not to be the case) and so got entry level Microsoft Surface Books with 8GB of RAM. I felt really uncomfortable buying machines with those specs but we needed to get machines that could be delivered next day so it had to be stock models and the stock models with 16GB of RAM cost between 50 and 100 percent more. It turned out 8GB was fine and so that's what we stuck with for all new staff members. In 5 years, having 8GB of RAM has *never* been an issue for our staff members. They use their machines 8 hours. It's all Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and some browser based cloud apps. 8GB is more than enough for that.

As the Surface Books have aged and Microsoft has made design choices that ruined the line, we've started to move our staff to Apple laptops as they're more reliable and cheaper. Entry level MacBook Airs are more than enough. 8GB RAM. These are used by people using multiple office based apps and doing real work all day long. It's a bit of a tough thing for me to swallow as a tech lover but I've come to realise that 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs are more than enough for most users. For 3-5 years of ownership, 8GB is going to be fine for the vast majority of users (not tech savvy users or media production users) and most people would be better off getting a cheaper entry level model and putting anything they would have spent on higher spec machine towards upgrading sooner instead, a few years later.