Is the 8 GB M1 Air even useable at this time?

I've had no problems running all of my applications, including Adobe Creative Cloud Photography subscription items (not yet Apple Silicon native outside of Lightroom CC which I use far less than Lightroom classic). Also do 4K video editing with 10-bit 400Mbps All-I clips from my Panasonic GH5 with a large number of titles, effects and color grading. All from an 8GB MacBook Air. I do however have the next step up (8GB, 8core/8gpu M1, 512GB SSD). I do use external Thunderbolt 3 NVMe storage when doing the extensive edits.

Sometimes my renders are not as fast as 16GB M1 MacBook Air have shown in YouTube, but I still achieve the results without error. Watching activity monitor will show "yellow" memory pressure, but I'm really pushing this system beyond a daily driver that most customers and creatives will use. However, you can return the M1 MacBook Air within the return time frame and purchase the 16GB version instead if that's a concern.

Oh, yeah, while a former PC head, I'd recommend staying clear of Chrome, even the native version that recently came out. While it's anecdotal evidence and argued by many, myself and others found significant impact from the keystone updater software bundled with Chrome. I had stuttering occurring in DaVinci Resolve Studio that was eliminated when I used "CleanMyMac" to remove Chrome and all it's hidden bits.. Simply dragging to the trash is insufficient to resolve the Keystone issue.

As for anti-virus. It is to an extent built into Big Sur, but I understand that peace of mind is ensured when you have the AV software. Be very careful, many of the AV virus makers recommend waiting for their M1 Apple Silicon releases of their product for proper operation. The problem is that the "intel" based versions that are currently released will "run" with the Rosetta 2 translation on the M1 well enough to make it appear you are good to go. Actually as it's not accessing the processor and system resources in the correct manner, it's slowing your system down without actually providing the level of protection that application would provide on an Intel based Mac. My own virus vendor that I have a subscription for has yet to release their Apple Silicon (or universal) application and mention this in their support FAQ, which sadly customers may not view before installing their "intel" AV.

It is to an extent built into Big Sur, but I understand that peace of mind is ensured when you have the AV software

The "to an extent" is an understatement unless you can explain to me how a virus, an AV app or a "cleaning" app can gain access to an inaccessible, sequestered, read-only volume which contains the OS and all system files. You no longer have access to it and neither does anyone or anything else.

Here is a partial explanation:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650

The peace of mind comes from having common sense and not downloading or clicking on things I shouldn't be.

As suggested above, common sense.

No cleaning or antivirus apps are necessary and they will do nothing other than suck up resources... and that's a best case scenario.

Using non-Apple "anti-virus" and "cleaning" apps are the quickest way to ruin a perfectly good Mac.

Just to add, more than apps themselves, websites are quickly

becoming significant RAM hogs. Just out of curiosity, one day

when I was browsing the news page of the tech site CNET, when I

got to the point on the page where it started showing yesterday's

postings, I opened Activity Monitor and found that it was using

up 1.5 GB RAM! Even this community with only the MacBook Air

page open and this thread page is using nearly 400 MB! So,

it is no wonder that "tab happy" people are running out of RAM

or running into slow performance due to memory swapping.

Start by getting rid of Kaspersky and CleanMyMac.

They are both complete garbage and serve absolutely no purpose, especially on an M1 based machine.

I own an 8 GB Macbook PRO, I haven't run out of memory! I have put the machine to a test beyond anything reasonable I would do on day to day basis, and it worked just fine. It started to throttle on ridiculous amounts of apps open, with nearly 100 tabs in chrome. 8GB Air machine is totally fine for day to day use. (I don't normally use Chrome at all, basically ran it to stress test). Long story short, for most people 8GB ram is fine, keep in mind that the Air version is a light version, tailored mostly for day to day average consumer.

FatherAntox wrote:

What do you recommend as alternatives?

Common sense.

Did you also know that Chrome is a resource hog - it will eat everything you've got for breakfast leaving not enough for dinner. And, it is a Google product which means your information is being used/sold.

I agree with KiltedTim. Also, based on test reports the way the new M1 chips handles RAM it is much better and the system requires less RAM than previous models. Remove the noted APPS and retest.