I'm typing this on an 8gb MacBook and Tahoe. it's mostly fine

You must not be doing much else then.

My M1 8GB Air did great before Tahoe; even medium complexity Xcode projects ran fine on it with other apps running. Since I made the mistake of upgrading it to Tahoe, it’s too painful to work in those projects.

Yeah it sounds like you’re the target audience for 16GB of RAM.

If you even know what XCode is you're not the target audience for 8GB

And who exactly is the target audience for a regression?

It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.

AI is so good these days I am using the laptop for quick changes more often, as I just push every change. I rarely need to fiddle. The general experience of using my desktop and laptop are converging.

Let me ensure I understand you.

Running a node.js server on Tahoe makes your macbook sluggish and you feel like Tahoe is fine performance wise?

May I reminded you that 10 years ago people also ran chrome and node js webservers and this was not a problem in any way with 8GB of ram.

That's very interesting to hear. I didn't know that.

I developed Node.js applications 10 years ago on a 2009 MacBook Pro with 5GB of RAM, and it was only a little tight on memory. 8GB _should_ be enough for moderate complexity development, but everything has become more and more memory-hungry with time.

> It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.

May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.

Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?

What are you doing in your node server? That shouldn't take up a ton of RAM.

It used to feel way better, that's the issue.

Tahoe is a massive regression in my personal experience (16GB here). So many random bugs and menu bar pop-up slowdowns (how is the system menu bar this unresponsive?).

Spotlight has gotten so bad, I can literally count the time it takes between typing the app name and the result showing up in the dropdown. Ended up switching Spotlight to Tuna.

Oh my god, yes. Spotlight on Tahoe is a joke. Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal? You’d think those would be in an always available cache guaranteed to always show up instantly? So many questions.

> Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal?

I've experienced this too, even after giving spotlight multiple shots months apart. For your sanity, I say just stop using spotlight. Don't let Apple steal your valuable waking hours with their crap QA.

what to use instead to launch apps and find stuff?

Tuna (https://tunaformac.com), like I mentioned earlier. Made by a really creative solo dev, minimal, and not as complex as raycast.

It's a night and day difference compared to the pile of garbage Spotlight.

Tuna looks super cool

But I'm sure there is some explanation but when I launched an app using tuna I got a standard macOS security notification "Tuna.app was prevented from modifying apps on your Mac"

Why a simple launcher needs "App Management" permission ?

I’ve had issues like that in the past, had to clear the cache for the spotlight index or something like that. Fixed it right away. Not sure if you’re facing the same issue.

For some reason Alfred is also a *lot* slower on Tahoe. I can often wait a whole second after pressing the shortcut before the bar appears whereas on Sequoia it was instant.

I wonder if there's actually something else with your OS. Have you tried wiping it, and starting again by clean?

Yes, it's the Windows solution. But I haven't experienced this at all.

I ended up downgrading to Sequoia. Day and night difference! My air m2 16GB is snappy again!

And settings app does actually work!

Exactly. 8 GB still seems plenty for lightweight work, even under Tahoe.

For general browsing and webapps and writing papers and watching Netflix and whatever, this is great.

> Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.

Ditto for iOS 26. They need some Snow Leopard action, for real.

This is the reason why I am not going to Tahoe. I have heard its very buggy at times and resource intensive.

And I am quite happy with Sonama.

Frankly... I see no difference on my M1 air. Maybe Jetbrains IDEs are not resource intensive enough ?

Is it possible to install an older version of the OS in these new machines?

> willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back

Sheesh - in iPadOS you’ve got multitasking, multitouch, full windowing support, external input and monitors, and a ridiculously accurate pen. If that’s holding back, what exactly are you looking for?

I’d still argue a device that size works better with just split screen than the new windowing, but other than the walled garden approach it does pretty much everything today that us techies have been whining about.

I'm seeing a ton of comments like that one about how apple is holding ipados back but am I going crazy or wasn't the big story of iPad is last year how many updates it got to make it more of a desktop replacement? Like half the features you mentioned were added last year plus a calculator app right? There was specifically a whole iPad os refresh that was well received as finally massively boosting iPad pro capabilities? Like, very recently?

> what exactly are you looking for?

File management that doesn't suck, incl. better handling of external drives.

The ability to install any software would be nice…

Please use the correct names, despite whatever apple says.

It's Mac OS Vista. This is the proper name for this abomination Apple calls Tahoe.

> dead on arrival for anyone doing real work

Honestly, we’re not the target market for this. I’m pretty sure at this price point though, it will sell like hotcakes. Once people get slightly into the ecosystem, it’s usually a big win for Apple since their stickiness ( from my experience of people around me) is undeniable once you get one product

It's perfectly adequate for most office work: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, web browsing / research. The vast majority of users are not doing software development and never will.

Why would anyone doing “real work” want this?

If you’re doing “real work” then 16gb won’t be sufficient, either. My “real work” machine has 96 and I sometimes wish it had more.

This is not for "serious work". It's for users who spend most of their time in a browser and/or using lightweight apps.

People doing real work have money to spend and Apple wants them buying Airs/Pros.

If only we could get fun colors for those…