Hey Adrindam, this is a valid criticism. Thank you! I'll try to clarify my assessment to support my claim.

This article reflects my experience of using a baseline M1 Mac Mini and a baseline M3 MacBook Air. Meanwhile, I did research to understand the particularity of pro users who are developers, designers, and video editors.

On both of my machines, when I connect them to a 4K display through the USB-C cable and run the Pixelmator Pro, a few browser tabs, and Apple Intelligence, the Activity Monitor shows over 3 GBs of swap memory.

As an average Mac user, I experience suboptimal performance on my machine as I don't code anymore, so I'm not particularly aware of the use case for each IDE you mentioned.

My friend does code, and he's a senior Android developer with an M4 Pro MacBook Pro, which has 24 GB of RAM. He reported that 20 GB of it was consumed while running the LM Studio (Phi-4, which has 14.7B params), alongside Chrome (+10 tabs), Android Studio, and Figma, which were opened. There were also some small utilities (VPN, Mail, Telegram, etc.) ,running as well.

I'd say for a developer, he isn't pushing the machine too far despite running an LLM (which is optimised to rely on Apple Silicon's Neural Engine) and consuming around 20 GB of RAM.

I imagine 16 GB would be insufficient, let alone 8 GB. In the next year, I predict 16 GB to be insufficient for most tasks, including small LLMs, which apps are adapting to rapidly.