The new MacBook Neo has been taking a beating online lately, mostly because the base model only comes with 8GB of RAM. For a $599 machine, people apparently expected more, and they have not been quiet about it.
I disagree. As someone who has been running 8GB of unified memory for the last five years, I think the criticism is overblown, and I am going to make the case that for most people, 8GB is not a weakness. It is just fine.
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What do most people do on a computer anyway?
Hint: It’s not running local LLMs
Mahnoor Faisal/MakeUseOfCredit: Mahnoor Faisal/MakeUseOf
I am not saying “oh 8GB is fine” while sitting behind a monster of a system. I am actually writing this on an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of unified memory, the lowest configuration you could get, and I have been using this exact laptop for the last five years. It is easily the best tech purchase I have ever made. This thing has got me through university, and every single article I’ve ever written.
As someone who uses this machine every single day, let me start with my own workflow. Most of my work is done inside a browser, with roughly 15 to 20 tabs open at a time, and maybe a couple of apps like Slack, Discord, and Apple Music open, and occasionally, I’ll open up a game via CrossOver. Other than that, I have used it for heavier stuff as well, such as developing iOS apps (along with running a simulator), and editing 4K videos.
For the browser stuff, it’s been completely fine. I have 15–20 tabs open inside Dia, and I have never felt like I am pushing it. Everything stays snappy, and I have never thought, “I need more RAM.”
And when you think about it, that is what most people actually do on their computers. Browse the web and maybe have some music playing. That is it. High school students, and even a lot of university students, live their entire academic lives inside Google Docs.
That does not need a lot. And plenty of people’s jobs just come down to email, a spreadsheet, and whatever internal platform their company uses. There is a reason Chromebooks have been so successful, even while having four gigs of RAM for the longest time.
How far can you push it then?
To an absurd limit
I wanted to go by feel rather than raw numbers, so instead of watching Activity Monitor the whole time, I just kept piling on until the machine finally said no.
I started with 10 Chrome tabs, a normal browsing session with a mix of YouTube, some articles, and Google Docs. Completely fine. Then I threw Apple Music and Discord on top. Still fine. Bumped the tab count to 15 and opened VS Code alongside everything, nothing compiling, just a project sitting open the way it realistically would be during a normal working day. Still no complaints.
Then I decided to stop being reasonable about it. Instead of small increments, I just opened 20 apps all at once. Everything. This is while on a Discord call, music playing in the background, and multiple tabs still open. Was it great? No. Was it unusable? Also, no. And keep in mind, almost nobody’s actual workload involves launching twenty apps simultaneously. You can see the absolute abomination I put together in the screenshot below.
Raghav Sethi-NAR
The only thing that actually broke it was opening Xcode on top of all of this and compiling a project. The machine was on swap memory at this point, but you don’t really feel it in any way that matters.
None of this means 8GB is the answer for everyone. If you are doing serious video editing with heavy effects, running virtual machines, working in 3D software, or compiling large projects as part of your regular day, you are going to hit a wall and no amount of memory compression changes that.
But the way to figure out if you actually need more RAM is not to look at how full the bar is. It is to pay attention to how the machine feels. If Chrome is suspending tabs you were just using, if apps are taking a beat longer to come back into focus, those are the real signals. That is your device telling you something, and it is worth listening to. A number in Activity Monitor is not. Go by feel. If your current setup feels fine, it probably is.
RAM usage is just a number, not the real picture
Feel > numbers
Tashreef Shareef/MakeUseOf
The thing that drives me crazy about this whole debate is that people are screenshotting their RAM usage sitting at 7.8GB and using that as proof that 8GB is not enough. That is not how RAM works. Your operating system is supposed to use as much RAM as it can. Unused RAM is literally wasted RAM. The OS is just doing its job.
The issue is that macOS and Windows handle memory in very different ways, and that context matters a lot here. macOS is aggressive about memory compression, which basically means it squishes data that is sitting idle in the background to take up less space, freeing up room for whatever you are actually doing right now.
It also leans on swap memory more gracefully than Windows does. And when you pair that with how tightly Apple controls both the hardware and software on Apple Silicon Macs, you end up with a machine that can do a lot more with less memory than you would expect.
Windows, on the other hand, has a different problem entirely. Microsoft is actively making it worse by stuffing more and more AI features and background processes into the OS with every update.
Task Manager on WindowsCredit: Kanika Gogia / MUO
That is bloat, and bloat eats RAM. So when someone on a Windows machine says 8GB is not enough, they might actually be right, but that is a Windows problem, not a RAM problem. If you load up a Linux distro on the same machine, your experience is going to be much, much better.
And if you want to actually test this yourself rather than just staring at a number, open Activity Monitor on a Mac, load up your normal workflow, and instead of looking at RAM usage, look at the memory pressure graph.
On a Mac, if the memory pressure graph stays green, the machine is handling it fine, full stop. It doesn’t matter if your memory usage is something like 7.8GB. As long as your graph is in green, and your system is running smoothly, you really shouldn’t be concerned.
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Am I saying 8GB is fine for everyone? No. My next machine is almost certainly going to have more, because I have been playing around with local LLMs and OpenClaw lately, and that stuff genuinely needs more juice. I can feel it.
But for most people, on the Mac side at least, 8GB is not the dealbreaker the internet wants it to be. And if you are someone who actually needs more, you probably already know it. Your workflow tells you. Mine finally did.
