Is 8GB RAM enough these days?

[RAMd®d]

Yes when swap can happen at 3GB/s, however more RAM is always better.


This.

At worst, you're spending money you may not need to, on future-proofing, when you'll be glad you did.

My 2015 MB (High Sierra) has only 8G and I bump up against low memory all the time. I use an app call Memory Monitor, and it often tells me I've got less than 100MB free.

This machine is only used for surfing, and email, and watching video, on occasion.

8G just doesn't keep up. I have to quit Safari or Firefox to get free memory back. It's common for an app not to launch because I'm out of application memory.

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open, but I really have to prune them and I don't like it.

Browsers are memory hogs.

People brag about how little they restart their Macs. I restart once every three or four days and have maybe 3G of free memory to play with.

I've got 24G of memory in my 2015 iMac (Yosemite/Sierra) and I'm frequently down to 5G or less. I will take it to 32G.

I will not buy another Mac with less than 16G of RAM, unless it's 27" iMac. My 2018 mini has replaceable memory with a 32G limit (I think) but I got it with 16G of Apple memory because I don't know if/when I'll ever upgrade it.

So IF you're very, very light with use you may be tolerant or even happy with 8G.

Especially as OSs get lighter, faster, and more memory efficient each year.





No, not really.

[sekker]

R,

I spent an obligate period of time with an 8GB machine last year. It worked fine for even light photoshop, heavy powerpoint (i.e. >100MB files), hard email etc

I'm not saying 16GB isn't better, just that the differential continues to get smaller as SSD speeds increase.

And, as I noted, you need your SSD with sufficient room to serve as a scratch disk. Larry from OWC has always recommended 25% free at all times; so if you have 1/3 space on your SSD free, you will have sufficient room for some scratch.