

Not trying to beat this to death, but I have run across some here who have made reference to doing development on the 8GB M1 Macs, without really getting into details, but who have alluded to the 8GB machine being a great experience. I would love to hear from anyone who has actual hands on experience with the 8GB Mac Mini, developing in various IDEs, and multitasking on dual 4K displays - where other apps are actually running and not just minimized or in the background (thus being a great target for memory compression as opposed to actual utilized RAM). I have so many Raspberry Pi machines, that I don't think I will need to run virtualization at all on this M1 Mac, as I always have a Pi hanging around that can be used for Linux testing. I am concerned, however, about fluidity and responsiveness when using various IDEs with fairly large projects.īesides for development tasks, I am a pretty heavy user, and typically spec machines for considerably more RAM than 8 or 16 GB, mostly due to running virtualized environments. I'm planning on probably selling it when the next Mini gets released, so I am not really concerned about long term use.

I'm specifically looking at the Mac Mini, and I am trying to decide between 8GB or 16GB. I'm not interested in compilation benchmarks, as I am more concerned about responsiveness in the more heavy weight IDEs (JetBrains) during actual coding and usage. I have also watched all of the YouTube videos that I could find. I have read through ALL of the discussion here on MR about the 8GB vs 16GB debates.
