Originally Posted by joemikeb
Originally Posted by Ira L
This is interesting to hear and the answer to my observation may be the way in which the new M1 SOC Macs utilize memory. I am running Catalina on a late 2014 27" iMac with 16 GB of RAM. As I type this 9 GB of memory are in use with only 5 running apps showing in the Dock. However, Dropbox and the Music app are using just under 1 GB according to Activity Monitor (about 95% of CPU is idle). Could I get by with "only" 8 GB?
It all depends on what applications you use and what you do with them. With all of the stuff I am typically running Activity monitor typically shows Memory Pressure at around 20% with >7GB App memory, just over 2GB Wired, ~1GB Compressed, ~5.5GB in cached files, and <700MB in swap files. System Monitor indicates the four low speed/power Cores running between <10 and up to 50% each. The four high speed/power cores mostly zero with one or two occasionally peaking at 75 to 80%.

So yes, the average user would probably be fine with 8GB of memory, 256GB storage might also be okay UNLESS you are an app collector like me; or have a lot of pictures and/or tunes and eschew the use of iCloud and keep everything on the local drive at full resolution. (I only have 61GB free on a 512GB internal drive and virtually all of my tunes are on iCloud, I only keep "optimized" images locally, and my 250+GB database is on an external SSD.)

Myself, I do use only third party applications, but again, I typically am only running one application at a time (for example, right now I am only running Brave). For some smaller data files I need, they are on my Mini's internal SSD. But, for photos, "older" data files that I might need, movies, TV series, etc., I store them on external SSDs. That works really well for me.

The one area where things can get somewhat "tight" is memory. When I use Brave, I visit about 13 sites, including this one. Although I do it sequentially, one site that tends to "eat" memory is yahoo.com. The main reason for that is when I click to read a story there, most of them contain a good amount of graphics, and sometimes videos. Even when I leave yahoo, most of the used memory is not "given back", per se. So, I will frequently launch the excellent freeware app Memory Clean, and it will clean up a lot of "not given back" memory. That works fine for me.