Even with swap, 8gb is pretty paltry on a memory-hungry system like MacOS, let alone a system that shares GPU and system memory. 16gb is the minimum for me even though I really only edit/compile code, and even then it can be pretty easy to max out your system memory after a couple docker containers...
It might not be a 'trick' per-se, but anyone who intends to use a Mac for work should consider upgraded memory (IMO).
I will agree with your last point. If I had bought this machine for doing seriously development I would've gone for 16gb. Saying that, I've been pleasantly surprised with its power. I've been playing with Metal, throwing together a native version ShaderToy, and it hasn't felt unpowered once. Even when running the iPad emulator.
I did feel a little duped when I learned that some M1/M2 machines can only support one external monitor. Now I have to replace my two monitors with a widescreen.
IMO, the 'problem' is that MacOS will use 4-5gb OOB, and using an Electron app with a browser open will easily push that into swap space. For most daily drivers, even light users, they'll be happy to have upgraded memory.
Right now with just safari and a few background things I'm hovering at 6gb in use, so you're not wrong about how much memory is being used. Regardless I don't think it's a problem for light users. A light user imo would be just browsing and email. 8GB will give you plenty of headroom in that case.
I'm going to keep an eye on ram usage for the next few days. I'm curious what it will look like on a more full workload because if things have been swapping out, I haven't noticed.
I was "compelled" to get MacOS as I develop an iOS app using flutter. I needed a lightweight power-efficient laptop so got a second-hand 8GB M1 and can fairly comfortably develop (VSCode + dotnet + nodejs + many tabs in firefox) inside a Debian VM running i3 with zram & UTM... Perhaps it depends on how memory-hungry one's development actually is - a massive Java Eclipse project might not work nearly as well.
I help my dad when he has computer problems. His M1 8GB isn't even enough ram to edit 20-50MB photos from an SLR camera. At first I thought it was because he had a bunch of stuff running but it turns out all the rosetta translation and such stuffs the cache and combined with adobe creative suite background programs and all the mac os stuff leaves only ~2 GB of ram left for the photo editing program. And that's after the browser is closed.
You can say that it was my dad's mistake to buy an M1 8GB but I say it was pretty lame of Apple to sell a computer that expensive that can't do basic tasks. And don't even get me started on peripherals like external monitors.
I would blame Adobe. The Adobe suite is massive, and it sounds like it hasn't been ported to M1. So I'm not surprised that it doesn't perform well on the base model. In my experience, it has more than enough ram for web browsing, streaming, and developing, all at the same time.
Peripherals have been fine, except for monitors as you mentioned. I do think it's ridiculous that I can only have one external monitor when it's clearly able to support more than that. I can add a third monitor through my iPad or DisplayLink, but both of those methods breaks DRM video.
