MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot. I used an M1 Pro for a ...

MrDrMcCoy · 2026-03-04T17:23:34 1772645014

Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

deepthaw · 2026-03-04T18:22:26 1772648546

I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

astrange · 2026-03-04T19:07:50 1772651270

You can post images in Slack and use text formatting. Those are things that use memory.

abujazar · 2026-03-05T00:05:39 1772669139

Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

astrange · 2026-03-05T05:17:37 1772687857

Slack is an Electron app.

jshen · 2026-03-04T18:53:47 1772650427

Gifs. I'm only half joking.

akdev1l · 2026-03-04T19:06:41 1772651201

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

Kirby64 · 2026-03-04T17:31:46 1772645506

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

vunderba · 2026-03-04T18:47:46 1772650066

Is Slack that much worse of a memory hog than Discord? Aren’t they both built on electron?

Kirby64 · 2026-03-04T18:53:46 1772650426

Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.

alwillis · 2026-03-04T20:14:48 1772655288

You can make a pretty good electron app or one that kinda sucks. Slack is in the latter category.

vunderba · 2026-03-04T21:48:10 1772660890

VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.

alwillis · 2026-03-04T22:55:06 1772664906

Say what you will about Microsoft but the performance of VS Code is really good.

briandear · 2026-03-04T22:58:19 1772665099

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

Schiendelman · 2026-03-04T17:30:42 1772645442

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

MrDrMcCoy · 2026-03-04T17:36:51 1772645811

I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.

Izikiel43 · 2026-03-04T18:43:04 1772649784

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.