Weighing an upgrade from MacBook Pro M1 8/512 to MacBook Pro M1 Pro 16/512. Day to day I run Colima and lazydocker for Odoo on 8GB RAM, the work itself is fairly heavy, and there are moments the machine gets hot, fan spinning loud. At first I thought that meant the CPU was being pushed hard. Turned out it wasn’t — the RAM fills up first, then the system starts swapping to disk, and that’s what makes the machine heat up.
Bumping RAM from 8 to 16 turned out to be the upgrade that actually helps. It’s not about the fan — the real minimum RAM I need for this kind of work looks like 16GB, not 8GB, so it stops forcing swap during those heavy moments.