It wasn't and still isn't, unsurprisingly. But now Apple is doubling down on the 8GB shizzle, claiming that it's"suitable for many tasks", including browsing, video streaming and even"light" video and image editing.
What exactly"light video editing" or"casual gaming" really means is hard to pin down. Does casual gaming mean tolerating 15fps, for instance? Whatever, here's the thing. Even if there is such a thing as light video editing or casual gaming and even if an 8GB Mac does those tasks tolerably well, 8GB still isn't acceptable.
Handily, Chrome shows you memory usage if you mouse-over a given tab. And three of my current tabs are chewing up over 500MB each. So, that's 1.5GB for just three Chrome tabs. Add a couple more, plus MacOS's underlying memory footprint for just being up and running and you're bang out of RAM.