I’m curious, does anyone still get those warnings about RAM?
My suspicion at the time was that the problems would be sorted out by a software patch (i.e., it was a bug not a hardware issue).
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I currently have around 30 tabs open on Safari on my 8GB Intel MBA, including MPU. No problems, errors or tab crashes. It doesn’t feel particularly slow switching between them either.
Safari will use as much memory as it is available - why wouldn’t it - but its memory optimisation is impressive.
Sure, as long as you have enough HDD/SSD available, and not using several Apps at the same time with a high RAM load, everything will be fine!
Something I find really interesting about this discussion, especially the comments about Safari, is my experience on the M1 iPad Pro with 8GB of RAM. This is the computer I use 10+ hours a day whereas the Mac often goes days without my waking it. The way I tend to use Safari may be different from others. I’ve got one main window that I use and several others that I’ve created and forgotten about. I go back to those every so often. The main window tends to accumulate tabs and I’m usually only using those that are visible. So, I’ve got 30 currently but probably only using the most recent 6-8. Every so often I’ll use the grid view to close out older tabs I no longer want. But Safari tends to hold those 6-8 pretty well during a day.
All that said, I mentioned earlier in the thread that during a day, I’m bouncing between 10 or more apps on the iPad. Right now the most recent 15: Affinity Publisher, Files, Pages, Mail, Safari, Reeder, Messages, Mona for Mastodon, Notebooks, Textastic, Photos, Pixelmator Photo, Darkroom, Numbers, Music, Podcasts, Weather. An example of some of the tasks that I’ve been doing the past 2 days that are fairly typical: Layout for an annual report in Affinity Publisher, importing old RAW images (less than 10MB each), touching up, editing those images, converting to HEIF, website updates in Textastic, writing blog posts in Notebooks, then all the usual stuff in Mail, Mona, Safari, Reeder. And when I use the iPad multitasking window or Spotlight to open any of these apps the window appears instantly with content ready to use or with a delay of less than 1 second. Enough time that I can visually register that the window has refreshed or reloaded content but not enough to matter in terms of my tapping and doing anything. Even if I bounce back to an app from 2 or 3 days ago the app is open and ready to use nearly instantly. The only exception to this would be the Affinity apps that have a splash screen as they load if they’ve not been used in more than a day or so. That takes between 2 and 3 seconds. Other than that, some document exports to pdf from Affinity Publisher can take a few seconds. Filtering a column on an 8,000 row Numbers table does take a second or two. On the rare occasion that I edit a video in LumaFusion the exports for those require a wait depending on the video size.
What I gather from this thread and a recent thread I was a part of on Micro.blog is that the most likely drain of resources are things like: Virtual Machines, Docker, editing/stitching really large RAW files, extended video related work especially with high resolution content.
All this to say that, at least with my workflow, 8GB on an iPad Pro is the fastest computing I could ask for. I have yet to use Affinity Publisher for any length of time on an external monitor and that may stretch the RAM a bit. There’s a bug that’s causing issues with Affinity iPad apps on external monitors so until that’s resolved I won’t know.
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I’m also pretty sure that 8GB would be enough for most use cases and the grosso-modo of users. I own a MacBook Air M1 8GB RAM 512GB SSD. I’m a hobby photographer (so use photo-editing programs like Photoshop, Darkroom, Photos and Pixelmator Pro simultaneously), I’m a tab-horder in webbrowsers (Orion), use HandBrake a lot, and have always a lot of programs running. For the moment there are 21 programs running, under them Photoshop and HandBrake that’s making encodings (CPU intensive). RAM pressure is 57% (1,65GB available).
Also, with SoC introduced with the M-generation chip and fast SSD’ for swap, it’s another story then back in the Intel-days and slow HD’s.
Here are 2 articles (one from Macworld) where they come to the same conclusion:
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“Unused RAM is wasted RAM”
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The ratings of buyers at retail sites provide some data on the issue of how much memory is really needed.
Currently, at the US Amazon site the M1 2020 MacBook Air with 8 GB Memory garners a rating of 4.8 out of 5 (17,994 ratings). The M2 MacBook Air with 8 GB Memory garners a rating of 4.7 (1,200 ratings). Among the written reviews, there are very few complaints about the performance of these laptops.
It appears that these users are getting by just fine with 8 GB memory.
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I think that’s a “not enough information given” sort of thing. They’re not reviewing the RAM specifically - they’re just indicating that they like the laptop.
M-series laptops are pretty efficient at swapping, so overutilization of RAM isn’t nearly as big of a deal for the average home user. They won’t likely even notice that it’s happening. But you shouldn’t be utilizing your Mac with lots of swapping - you should buy the RAM that fits your daily workload.
And that’s something that the average user wouldn’t even know how to look at.
I still think that 8 GB is probably fine for people doing limited multitasking and who aren’t “tab hoarders” - but Amazon reviews don’t seem to be a useful signal in that direction.
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When I retired in 2018 I had a hundred+ users “getting by” on 8GB Intel Macs.
I’m not sure why not.
If swapping is fast, seamless and barely noticeable, then why not do it?
Swapping is, as I understand it, a constant fact of computing. I think the M1 uses 5 levels of memory storage: Level 1 cache, Level 2 cache, Level 3 cache, RAM, SSD. Things are whizzing around between them all to provide an optimum price/performance solution. 64GB of Level 1 Cache anyone?
Of course, ‘lots’ of swapping is relative. Lots of annoying swapping that has a noticeable impact on daily use or lifetime is important and should be avoided. Lots of swapping that keeps the computer moving smoothly is great.
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I have a M1 MBA with a mere 8 GB of RAM. I opted instead to get hard disk space. I rarely run into problems and if I do, I simply reboot. Basically, it is just one app. I really don’t do anything special on my computer. That being said, I do think I would be better off, in the future, if I had purchased more RAM.
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Light and occasional swapping is more than fine. That’s what swap is there for.
That said, one of the great things about the M1 is that swap is super-fast - which means it’s not as noticeable when it’s happening. But even if (hypothetically) the SSD was as fast as RAM, you wouldn’t want to be constantly utilizing it as you’d be putting a fair bit of wear on a completely non-replaceable SSD.
It’s definitely not the end of the world. But whether or not somebody should or shouldn’t have more RAM isn’t anywhere nearly as simple as whether their subjective experience causes them to rate their computer well on Amazon. 
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Buyer ratings are flawed for many reasons. The main one being that people tend to rate just after buying products rather than when they are fully using them.
As someone else said, the rating isn’t for RAM.
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“Swapping” has only ever applied to disk swapping in my experience. External storage. HDD then, SSD now.
I agree with you about the ratings being less the perfect data. But I still think that the laptops with 8GB memory must be performing fairly well for many people, or it would show up in the ratings and comments. Some people do wait to rate products and others will come back to tell people about their bad experiences.
People get upset when they get out of memory messages or when they have to constantly reboot hung machines, so I doubt that this happening very much. For many years people were unhappy with the “spinning beach balls” that plagued apple computers, and you heard plenty about it. We are well beyond those days.
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The beach balls and such were a huge issue with spinning disks - but they’re almost nonexistent (at least relative to swapping) these days. This is mostly because of the SSD transition / optimizations on Apple Silicon.
And that’s my whole point. A modern Apple computer could be swapping to disk like crazy and the average user might not even know. I’ve had an 8 GB swap file on my 16 GB M1 MBA, with almost no noticeable impact on performance.
But that doesn’t mean it’s good for the computer. And it doesn’t mean that the user wouldn’t benefit from more memory. It just means that everything else has become good enough that it doesn’t draw the average user’s attention.
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My question is:
When is good enough enough?
Computers can always be made faster with new chips, new memory, etc. At some point we have to say enough is enough.
“Good enough” is the point where the computer isn’t constantly swapping large amounts of memory (and shortening the computer’s useful lifespan by grinding the SSD) to serve the user’s needs.
And what I’ve been trying to explain is that that’s fundamentally unknowable UNLESS the user is in Activity Monitor and looking at what’s going on.
I know a lady who KEEPS well over 100 Chrome tabs open on a base model MacBook. And she’s happy with the computer’s performance, coming from an older PC.
But I would be absolutely shocked if she’s not semi-permanently using gigabytes of disk to compensate for the fact that she should’ve spent the extra couple hundred dollars and got the RAM that her machine needs to handle the way she uses the computer.
The fact that our modern computers have gotten better at not slowing down when they’re overwhelmed doesn’t mean they’re not overwhelmed. It just means that we’ve effectively made the problem invisible in the short term.
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When you are not wishing you had more processor, ram, or storage?
With the exception of being the only person in the company that used Terminal all the time I was a typical office worker. And I would still be using my 2015 8GB MBP if they had let me keep it when I retired.
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That’s pretty amazing that you don’t take a hit with a swap file that big. 
I generally run with 0 swap on a 16GB M1 MacBook Air (even with a dozen apps open including Photo Mechanic and Affinity Photo).