6. OS X has done memory compression since 10.9, which gives you more than 8GB in...

leejoramo · on April 19, 2016

Agreed. Last year, I had to have my MacBook's motherboard replaced. During this time, I cloned my system to a MacBook Air with only 4GB RAM. This did severely cramp my working style. I could not run multiple VM's, and things were slower with swapping.

However, I was surprised at how much work I was still able to do. I felt the slowness of the CPU far more than the limited RAM.

I am happy to be back to 16GB except when I look at battery life. And I could adapt to less RAM.

ghshephard · on April 19, 2016

I'm still running 10.8.5 - I run my system very, very hard, typically 20-30 Apps simultaneously with multiple Fusion VMs, and 50+ tabs in the browser, all three browsers, running, Aperture, Full Office suite - and I've never run into an issue with memory. Unless you are running XCode, or Video Editing, or some of the heavy Adobe Suite/SomeOtherSpecializedNicheWorkstationApp - you really don't need more than 8 GiB on OS X (at lease as of 10.8.5).

I'm guessing that SSDs and swapping really changed the game around virtual memory performance on Mac laptops.