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.

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.