[photokandy]

My perspective: Going from a 2019 15" MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory to an 8GB M1 13" MacBook Pro

You don't start to feel the 8GB until you:

* have a lot of tabs open in Safari (like ~30+)

* have heavy web apps (GMail & Outlook, I'm looking at you)

* run a virtual machine (Only so much you can give a Parallels instance w/ 8GB)

* run some known performance & memory hogs (Slack, Teams, etc.)

* vpn seems to slow things down a bit

I generally will close down apps when I don't need them (but that's _always_ been my habit). I do find the M1 to be fully sufficient (and still faster than my previous MBP) when doing my day-to-day (including VS Code, JIRA, Slack, Xcode, Node, etc.). I also use my M1 for music performance and composition, and that's worked just fine for my purposes (but so did the previous MBP). I will (as I did before) switch contexts by closing apps I don't need, so it's hard to say if apps from development impact the apps for music or not; they rarely run side-by-side.

Things that have greatly improved my productivity:

* This thing is as cool as a cucumber, and absolutely sips its battery. This means I can be more comfortable taking my MBP to the couch, or to the patio (when it was warm) and not worry about watching the battery %.

* This thing _in general_ is much snappier. Native apps load quickly, and performance in the apps I use is about twice that of the previous MBP.

* I can type on this keyboard!

* Using a single external monitor is fine; I work from a couple of locations, and both my Dell P2415Q and my LG 24MD4KL-B 24" Ultrafine 4K work fine.

There are edge cases here where the M1 falls short:

* I can slow the poor thing to a crawl for a few seconds if I attach a 4K monitor and then try to AirPlay to another 4K display. It catches back up and is generally fine after, but you see the beachball for a while.

* Lots of tabs in Safari will cause slow tab switching, and some web sites just chew through CPU. Battery life is still _way_ better than the previous MBP, but it definitely impacts the feel of the device.

* Bluetooth mice -- ugh. I bought a Logitech MX ergo and had to switch to using the receiver instead because the MBP bluetooth felt so laggy.

* Most iOS apps just aren't well suited for the device. Apollo (for Reddit) works pretty well, but even that has its quirks where sometimes keyboard shortcuts will just stop working.

* VMs. If you run Windows in Parallels, you _will feel it_. I do not run VMs all the time for this reason, but spin them up and down as needed.

[Abishek_Muthian]

This is so far(04:13:32 UTC) the best answer to my question, just because most other comments seems to be 'I use 16GB, so it should be fine' disregarding 'assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM' part of the question.

Thank you for your time writing this detailed comment.

Few things which caused degraded performance were obvious e.g. tabs, VM.

But things which surprised me,

> * vpn seems to slow things down a bit

With great single core performance and WiFi-6 I would have expected networking to fine.

> Bluetooth mice -- ugh.

Digging further, Bluetooth/WiFi/USB issues seems to documented by others as well[1] unfortunately these gets buried under other reviews following a common narrative for M1 macs.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xyFIF9jA5w

[throw14082020]

That bluetooth lag was annoying me on my first day, but since then I haven't noticed it: either it was fixed or I got used to it. The cursor is quite responsive for me.

Maybe you should try install "Logitech Options", because I did that immediately on the first day, which might have fixed it.

[jondwillis]

I have noticed bluetooth lag apparent with first party keyboard, mouse, trackpad on an M1 Mini.

But that was also happening in different ways on my non-M1 MBP.