The 8 gigabyte machine is fine for 90% of people. I've recommended just getting that platform to a number of people, and none of them have had issues.
I've got an 8 Gigabyte MBAir, and it never stutters. Meanwhile, on my 16 GByte Dell XPS (Ubuntu 20.04) - I routinely live in fear of exceeding my chrome tab quota because I know it will bring the system to a crashing halt. Somewhere around 45 is the point it all comes down.
Meanwhile, I don't even think about how many safari tabs I have open (hundred+) - and 8-10 applications open at the same time.
Different operating system has different models of swapping and degrading performance. Apple has nailed it.
Safari vs. Chrome (or Firefox) is one part of why I can get so much more mileage out of a Mac's memory than I can under Linux or Windows. It's wildly more respectful of system resources, across the board—memory, processor cycles, and battery.
The rest of their software's mostly like that, too, with the possible exception of Xcode. I often forget Preview with a half-dozen PDFs is open, and Pages with a document, and Numbers. I wouldn't forget a single tab of Google Docs under Chrome, left open for weeks, because it would make itself known in system responsiveness and battery use. Ditto MS Office. Mac Terminal's got notably lower input latency than most other terminal emulators, especially featureful ones.
Apple, seemingly almost uniquely among major software vendors, gives a shit about performance, and it shows. I really, really wish they had competitors, but in so many ways they're the only ones doing what they do, to the point that they can make periodic serious blunders and I'm left going, "yeah, but what else am I gonna buy, that won't have a 'normal' that's overall-worse than Apple's 'broken'?"
I've got an 8 Gigabyte MBAir, and it never stutters. Meanwhile, on my 16 GByte Dell XPS (Ubuntu 20.04) - I routinely live in fear of exceeding my chrome tab quota because I know it will bring the system to a crashing halt. Somewhere around 45 is the point it all comes down.
Meanwhile, I don't even think about how many safari tabs I have open (hundred+) - and 8-10 applications open at the same time.
Different operating system has different models of swapping and degrading performance. Apple has nailed it.