if you are like my wife with 5-10 Safari tabs open and a Word/Pages document than yeah, 8 GB is plenty!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Anyone upgrade from an M1 Air to an M3 Air?
- Thread starter Mity
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
For simple projects for students, I agree, but I don't need a laptop for just school. Over the summer, I had to build a pipeline to get data from all utilities in the US and I was very thankful that my gov issued computer had 32GB of RAM. Even then, it struggled a bit. For large projects on my Github, I actually prefer to download data instead of SSH-ing to AWS due to the fees I have to pay for RDS & EC2.
Try Safari instead!
Impressive! Of course, most Mac users aren't doing anything remotely like that! So, 8GB is enough…
If it's for simple tasks only, I recommend the M1 again. I would never recommend the M2 8/256; I would get 8/512 or 16/512 for the M2 if you must but really, skip the M2 series altogether. The SSD of the base M1 is far superior to the base M2, as you already know. The base M1 will be a huge upgrade for her - I used to have a mid-2014 base retina so I speak from experience. The added benefit is that it's only $750.
But if keeping the wife happy is the primary concern, then I can understand getting her the new M3. The upgraded processor, camera, battery life, and updated design may be worth it as the base M3 is $1000 in the Apple Education Store, which your daughter qualifies for.
Last edited:
I am seriously considering an upgrade because I under configured by going with the base M1 3+ years ago. I run out of space on the drive when working with videos and the memory constraints cab be felt when multiple tasks.
If you don't have already any other mac with at least 16/512 then i would seriously consider upgrading. Running out of space is the least fun in this things - i liked my 2012 MBP 13 a lot but couldn't stop having issues for 4 years with 128GB storage.
So many people claiming that 8GB RAM is more than enough... so obviously you are doing something wrong.
It suffices for most people, not for everybody.
How would us 8GB people know if it's causing us issues?
What I mean is: Unix/MacOS swaps anyway - it's designed to. Plus, it's designed to use as much memory as it has, so seeing memory close to fully used is also normal.
The SSD in my (2020 Intel) MBA is pretty fast, but obviously not RAM-fast. What should I be looking out for? The only app I run here that seems slow to get going is MS Office 2019, but I saw it open slow on a friend's 16GB M1 MBA too.
Your best bet would be to order the same laptop but one in 8gb and second with 16gb ram. Then test them out for your hardest use cases.
I don’t see a difference 95% of the time, and was able to spot where it fails to satisfy 5% of the time this way.
So for me 8gb fails if/when:
1) external displays add 1.2gb of ram use on average cause ram is dhared between cou and gpu. In this scenario with 2 screens, 16gb noticeably faster than 8gb.
2) when i go all in eith hogging many tabs and have open a lot of applications then 8gb slows down at some point but 16gb doesn’t.
3) if you render your video, export photographs from lightroom and browse at the same time then 16gb is noticeably faster
4) if running 1 or more 4k screens, and play youtube 4k, 4k hdr 60 fps or 5K videos, then 8gb stutters more while 16 is smooth.
How many tabs in Safari (or other browser?) are you talking about? And how many/which apps?
Gut feel is the best guide to start. If things are chugging and you're frequently rebooting, and those frequent reboots are making things snappy again, then you might be hitting the wall.
Activity Monitor will tell you the amount of swap used. So if you are in that chugging/rebooting loop then next time before rebooting look in Activity Monitor and check the swap usage. Then correlate that over a little bit of time. If the chugging and swap use are directly correlated you are likely having low memory issues.
But low memory issues can be caused by misbehaved apps or bugs. Some apps just don't release their memory properly after being used. That's not a RAM issue, it's an app issue.
Finally, the more RAM you have, the more you will use. Using 8GB doesn't necessarily mean that you need to upgrade to 16GB, because on a 16GB machine you'll use 16GB too. But if you're using 8GB or RAM and you're rapidly ramping to 8GB of swap, that's a red flag for sure.
Swapping to disk used to be heavily punitive with HDDs and even slower SSDs. These days it's far less of an issue.
Usually 50+ for me across safari and chrome with microsoft office apps on the background, zoom. Not instantly but after like couple days. Reboot helps with lagging.
To Howard’s point: by day 2-3 it has 8-16 gb in swap and starts lagging until reboot.
8gb on m1 air mac os 11.2.3.
Though my old mbp 13 2012 retina with 8gb on sierra (or high sierra) never gave me this problem and had up time of 180-360 days on average.
I have a 2019 16" MBP with 64GB of RAM. I use it for learning data engineering so I have multiple apps open along with many Chrome tabs. It has never swapped.
But I consistently see memory pressure on my M1 MBA with multiple YouTube windows open. And I don't use it for actual productivity work, just a glorified netbook.
I think it's just how they designed Apple Silicon.
Holy Buttermilk Batman, I can't keep track of 10 tabs, let alone 50(+).
Yeap, just for fun loaded 4(8 maximum) - 4k hdr 60 videos on youtube using 1 external 4k + 1 internal screens.
M1 air with 8gb struggles hard.
M1 pro 14 with 16gb didn’t even blink.
Checked stats - cpu/gpu was chill on both but the RAM was limiting because external ate away 1.2gb of it right away.
This was just a pure mechanical benchmark- I don’t claim someone needs to watch 8 4k videos on 2 screens but it gives an idea of roughly limits for other tasks.
Though once i put a cartoon for kids on external while sitting in a zoom meeting on internal screens - so that was helpful but that was handled with ease on air.
Had an M1 16/512. Best machine I have owned. Loved it. Dealt with anything I threw at it. From early on using Premiere Pro via Rosetta, to a Resolve grade I used it for just last month. Upgraded to a M3 16/512. Reasons were the new form factor, much better battery life, bigger screen, better webcam/mics. ProRes hardware acceleration was also important to me. Really helped that the M1, especially in the config I had still retained a lot of value, so managed to get the new machine all told for around 800 quid with AppleCare. Do pro video for a living and it's my second machine, but a ridiculously capable one. Easy decision for me.
Thanks, both. Playing with a friend's M1 (512, 16GB) vs my Intel i5 (256, 8GB) and their machine is slightly faster, but neither of us have issues with things slowing down or being sluggish. I'm putting the difference down almost 100% to the M1 chip.
I do shut down each night, though, which might help.
Upgrade decision waffle:
I was debating the base M3, but checking the Apple trade-in value of my laptop vs. one a year older, it's the same Fr.255 (Swiss Franc), so I may wait for the M4 as mine is working fine.
It all depends if it'll last another year with all-day battery life as I'm currently at 72% health, and a new battery is Fr.165. Add the above together and subtract from the Fr.999 education price of the M3 and it's Fr.580 to upgrade. Hmm. Tempting.
You'd use your MacBook Air closed so that you could use two external monitors? I personally never use a laptop connected to a monitor without also having the laptop open as well (the more screens, the better), but to each their own!
I have a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and 1TB SSD, I do a lot of astrophotography processing using Pixinsight... I also "suffer" from memory pressure... I brought a MacBook Pro 16" to replace it, but returned it because I wasn't seeing much of a performance boost to justify the extra $$$$$, perhaps the M1 does such a fantastic job of paging from the 8GB to the 1TB SSD that for me, 8GB of RAM is fine.. I want Apple to keep the 8GB option out there for people like me who do not want to fork over $200+ for a limited performance boost
I haven't replaced my M1 but I did add a 15-inch M3. Both are 8Gb/256.
I used a TimeMachine backup from the M1 to restore on the M3 - in other words, they have the exact same OS, configuration, software and settings as each other.
Using fairly heavy software such as LibreOffice with a 2,500 page document in .doc format, or a 20Mp image in Affinity Photo, I see a notable improvement in speed and responsiveness on the M3, which has the feel of the '1.6x' that Apple quotes.
Internet-related stuff is not much different, though Safari and Firefox both render pages somewhat faster.
For some reason, the 14.3 to 14.4 macOS update was far faster on the M3 after (of course) taking about the same time to download. No idea why that would be, since the download was the same size. Quite possibly the update had a bunch of stuff to remove from the M1's prior macOS installs, which weren't there on the M3.
Side by side, the M3 is quicker, and while I wouldn't say it's like night-and-day, I would say it's a distinct incremental improvement.