alt Hacker News> Can it run multiple programs at the same time?
I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.
Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:
- PostgreSQL (server)
- TablePlus (db client)
- Docker
- Slack
- Chrome
- Safari
- Zed
- Claude native
- ChatGPT native
- Zoom
- Codex
- Numbers
- Calendar
- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)
With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).
I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
Replies
I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said:
Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while.
It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
> Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs
So either it has magic fairy dust, or more likely it swaps a lot, but thankfully today's flash is faster than yesterday's hard disk; though this intense usage will shorten its life. By the way I wonder if Apple will use cheap QLC for this.