8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests

During the M1 generation of Apple Silicon Macs, one area of controversy was whether the default 8GB of RAM was less of a performance bottleneck as it was under Intel Macs. The pundits contended that a paltry 8GB was unacceptably stingy on Apple's part, but in practice—and who's to say whether it had to do with the ARM CPU or the unified memory architecture or the blazing-fast SSD performance—no matter how much you threw at the M1 Macs, it never seemed to get bogged down by swapping out to disk.

Well, that era is apparently over, because the new M3 with 8GB is getting absolutely smoked by the same chip when it has 16GB to work with:

The 8GB model suffered double-digit losses in Cinebench benchmarks, and took several minutes longer to complete photo-merging jobs in Photoshop as well as media exports in Final Cut and Adobe Lightroom Classic.

If you don't watch the video, it's worth clicking through to MacRumors' summary for the charts alone.