I have an older 8GB MacBook Air. This is false. I routinely have Slack, Chrome, iTerm, Visual Studio Code, and more open on it. It’s fine.

Those apps don’t need every single byte of memory you see in Activity Monitor to be active in RAM all of the time. The OS swaps out unused parts to the very fast SSD. If you push it so far that active pages are constantly being swapped out as apps compete then you start to notice, but the threshold for that is a lot higher than HN comments seem to think.

I’m sick to death of this. It’s so devoid from reality in 2026 that I see it as a lowest common denominator populist political catchphrase more than any legitimate contributor to any conversation. My min spec MacBook Pro from 6 years ago doesn’t flinch at this, and it barely flinches at a whole lot more.

Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked if you’re legitimately still having these issues.

Only if you insist on running the standalone slack app for some reason. Why run one instance of Chrome when you can pay for two?

You don’t have an 8GB Apple Silicon MacBook, so you? So why did you post?

Maybe if you have 100 browser tabs or something silly like that?