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M1 Macs with 8GB have a serious problem?

Let’s hope it can be fixed with software.

A while ago I benchmarked my new M1 MacBook Pro and was blown away by the performance. It allowed me to easily duplicate my entire book in Sketch and even with 1800 artboards on a single page it was still pretty responsive.

I went with the 16GB/512GB model, but assumed that it would probably work well enough with 8GB of RAM as well — after all my test was very unusual and purposefully “heavy” on the computer.

Real life design work (unless you also do 3D, audio or video) is not that heavy on the computational power. It’s just moving some vector rectangles around — easy stuff.

In my test even a 2014 MacBook Air with an 1.8 i5 and 8GB of RAM did fairly well (it was slow, but it was enough for realistic workflows anyway)

Will 8GB be ok for the M1?

So naturally the most common question under my YouTube video on the M1 performance was:

Can I use an 8GB base model for design? Is it going to be enough if I just work on UX designs?

And for a while my answer was: Yes. But now something has come to light, that may convince…