NOT with me! I buy on the cheaper side.. MBA or base MBP m3..In that case OP should buy a MBP at $7,200 with M3 Max, 128GB, 8TB or a Mac Studio at $8,800 with M2 Ultra, 192GB, 8TB...if they need the extra 64GB RAM
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M2 or M3 MBA and 8 vs 16 gig ram
- Thread starter Subliminal87
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I would buy M3 base model. My Intel 2013/Macbook air 8 go is still smooth for Internet, word etc
but I decided to update not because of the Ram but to get a better screen and new OS
In 5 years+, you might want to change for a better screen or better AI processor ? Who nows ? 200 dollars saved is quite a lot, indeed. You can get airpods pro
but I decided to update not because of the Ram but to get a better screen and new OS
In 5 years+, you might want to change for a better screen or better AI processor ? Who nows ? 200 dollars saved is quite a lot, indeed. You can get airpods pro
Like I said, people here are inexplicably fetishish on RAM to the point of a cult. In another MBA thread someone just complained and complained about 8GB of RAM not enough. Turned out he owns a Mac Studio so his use case is very different yet he comment on “MBA” topic anyway.
These people scare themselves and others to think that 8GB would never work for 5 years. Some even said you can only run a couple of tabs on Chrome with it.
I say let these people spend their hard earned money foolishly (even though theyre thinking it’s very smart) because the poster above is right. When it comes to longevity in term of OS support it doesnt care how many RAM you’re having. It only cares about the generation of chip. If 8Gb M3 is more expensive than 16GB M2 I’ll say go with the latter but it’s the not case so why spend more for previous generation of chip? 🤷🏻♂️
It just doesn’t make any sense. Bad advices.
I don’t see any sign that I won’t be able to use my 8Gb M1 for more than 5 years. Now it’s already 4 years and is still as good for my need as the day I purchased it.
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I understand you, but for me, it made me second guess about buying Macs in the future, because M3 MBA 16GB is $3000 in my country (includes tax though) and my rent is $500 and the average net salary is $1200. You can also buy a used car for that money and let alone much better PC.
In the case, try finding M2 MBA, new or refurbished, with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage.
For the cost difference, get 16 GB, otherwise you're crippling the longevity of the machine for a relatively minor cost saving.
This is a hot topic as always.
I never buy a machine with less than 16 GB. Yes, 8 may work but there is a noticeable difference in response times and you may regret saving the $100 later on. IMO 16 GB is more important than M3 over M2.
Good luck.
I never buy a machine with less than 16 GB. Yes, 8 may work but there is a noticeable difference in response times and you may regret saving the $100 later on. IMO 16 GB is more important than M3 over M2.
Good luck.
It all comes down to what you are doing with the machine. I have a mid-2014 MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM/256GB SSD and it still does almost everything I need it to do. I'm going to most likely upgrade to an Air and feel like at the pricing for 16GB I can't help but also look at Windows laptops. At the same time, I'm using an almost 10 year old MacBook Pro and other than starting to feel slow, has a failing battery and a pretty scratched screen, it still works for web/email/streaming and will even run DXO if you are a very patient person. I'd be shocked if any Windows laptop would be that durable, I doubt even more recent Apple offerings are that durable, kind of why I keep using it. At any rate, my point is that unless you are doing heavy duty computing 8GB will do just fine for most everyday tasks.
But are you really crippling the longevity? As others have said it depends entirely what you are using the machine for. I have a HTPC i built in 2013 that has 8gb of ram and is still running great today for its purpose. Unless you are editing Video or large image files or doing heavy multitasking 8gb of ram is enough and will continue to be enough for many years to come and if you are Doing those heavy tasks then the MBP is probably the correct machine for you anyway due to thermal throttling.
It's funny, isn't it?! We have folk posting here about their 10 year old MacBooks still in use, and how older versions of macOS are better anyway, yet we're also saying that a brand new computer with the same specifications isn't good enough.
Somehow, some of the members posting here seem to think that at some point in the near future, an 8Gb model that is perfectly good and workable today, will grind to a mystical halt or explode in an overload of some kind in the future. There really isn't much logic to it.
Seems like a good thread to pop in my query.
Currently own a 2018 Intel i7 MBP 13" 512GB with 16GB RAM (the highest offered back then)
Nowadays, when I'm on website like X for example, I always get a warning that "this page is consuming too much memory". And Im thinking...huh....why is this happening?
Currently, evaluating a stock M3 MacBook Air 15" w/16GB...and wondering if I'll run into the same issue as
on my Intel MBP w/16GB.
1. Will 16GB on a current M3 MBA machine behave in the same way as 16GB does on a 2018 Intel MBP?
I have to think it will not...but would love some detail as to why.
2. If I were to upgrade the RAM on the M3 MBA to 24GB, what sort of gains would I see?
And would this future proof the machine for a longer period?
Currently own a 2018 Intel i7 MBP 13" 512GB with 16GB RAM (the highest offered back then)
Nowadays, when I'm on website like X for example, I always get a warning that "this page is consuming too much memory". And Im thinking...huh....why is this happening?
Currently, evaluating a stock M3 MacBook Air 15" w/16GB...and wondering if I'll run into the same issue as
on my Intel MBP w/16GB.
1. Will 16GB on a current M3 MBA machine behave in the same way as 16GB does on a 2018 Intel MBP?
I have to think it will not...but would love some detail as to why.
2. If I were to upgrade the RAM on the M3 MBA to 24GB, what sort of gains would I see?
And would this future proof the machine for a longer period?
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What browser are you using? I used to get that error on Shutterfly using Chrome. When I switched to Safari, I never saw that error again. Not dogging Chrome (use it everyday), I just could never figure out why that error kept happening only on Chrome! My point is that regardless of the message itself, I don't think it's actually a computer RAM issue.
We have a (base model) M1 MBA. Two users are simultaneously signed in, with Fast User Switching enabled, and neither user ever Cmd+Q's (Quits) an app unless it's not responding. The machine is buttery smooth for both of us!
I'd say this issue is far more like;y related to the browser than anything else, but that's easy to test simply by using a different browser on the exact same computer and seeing what the result is.
Personally, I've never seen that error on anything except Firefox on a Windows system, and it was related to a site which was scripted originally for IE using ActivX. They hadn't cleaned it up when they rewrote it.
Unless you're doing something quite astonishingly RAM intensive, 24 very likely won't give you anything particularly over 16.
Good to know...I just have this habit of maxing out the RAM when I buy an apple machine.
And I'm not exactly a power user...keep telling myself it is to future proof myself against
upcoming apps and OS upgrades...now with more apps set to embrace AI, I thought 24 may be the way to go.
To circle back to my previous query:
Is 16GB RAM on an old architecture like 2018 Intel MBP the same as 16GB on todays M3s?
Edit: NVM, just read up on LPDDR5-6400....I reckon it's way superior and faster than LPDDR3
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You will always gain something by increasing RAM, but since macOS is built around a modular framework, where OS components are loaded as needed rather than by default all the time, it isn't as clear a set of improvements as it would be in Windows. Plus, you're not so much future-proofing for OS improvements as building in an overhead, which once it becomes more typical as a user base, allows for further expansion then.
Since current Macs are frequently sold with 8Gb, it means that Apple plan for at least 5 years of OS compatibility. Sine AI will be with us ahead of that by a long way, 16 would be great, 24 probably overkill.
I am in a very similar situation. I am looking to upgrade my wife's M1 Air (base 8 GB/256GB) to either base M2 or M3; however, one thing against M2 is the reduced SSD performance, so if you decide to go with 8GB memory, your system's performance might be severely reduced compared to even M1 base models due to much slower reads and writes on the M2 models. With that said many people would recommend to get M2 with 512 GB of storage to avoid slow SSDs, but if you dont need that big disk space, it is total waste. At that point, I would just go with base M3 and call it a day. Use it for few years and can probably trade it in for $500 after 3-4 years. Hopefully in few years Apple realizes to bump up base models to 16 GB of memory.
Also to add before someone jumps and criticize upgrading from M1 to M2/M3, our plan if to give the current M1 to our daughter who has 9 years old MBP and is in need of something newer and better.
Also to add before someone jumps and criticize upgrading from M1 to M2/M3, our plan if to give the current M1 to our daughter who has 9 years old MBP and is in need of something newer and better.
Yes.
Memory requirements go up over time as new libraries are written and higher level programming abstractions are used.
CPUs these days spend most of their time idle for most end user tasks. Especially light duty stuff like a MacBook Air will typically be used for.
Cheaping out to save say, 10% of the total BOM cost on a machine you plan to keep long term is not a good idea especially when the baseline spec is borderline in 2024 already.
As above, memory requirements go up over time.
Go talk to some users who went with the 4 GB or 2 GB spec on previous models and see how they're doing today.
Running older versions of macOS means you can't stay secure, and give up the ability to run future applications that require new macOS features.
While it is true that memory requirements go up over time the degree that it affects people is highly dependent on their use case. For someone who does Photo and video Editing or has 100's of tabs open at a time in Safari it is going to affect them more then someone like myself who generally only has 2 or 3 tabs open with a single session of Remote Desktop. For my use case 8gb is borderline overkill, I can assure you it will be more than enough for someone like myself for the lifetime of the machine (if you get a M3) which is 7 years till it stops getting OS updates.
I really wish Apple would put 12 or 16gb in the base config so people don't need to have this discussion anymore.
I am one of those users, thanks. True certainly that on the older systems with less RAM I may be constrained to old (meaning age appropriate) software, but that's not an issue at all. The systems were bought for a purpose, and they still fulfill exactly that.
In that respect it isn't actually true that memory requirements go up over time, because they only do this if the user keeps updating, updating and even more updating the system. There's no law that says you have to do this, or keep doing it until the computer eventually chokes on the latest bloat. Even if you do keep updating, all you need is to grab a TimeMachine backup before each major update so you can quickly roll it back if you need to.
Security can be an issue, though there's several years of security updates before that is a potential issue, and keeping moderately informed on the threat landscape is neither difficult nor actually challenging.
In my case, some of my computers are old enough they have no internet or network connectivity, which is precisely why they're useful tools, and in my work environment, the primary issue is that the OS increases RAM load through monthly patches and fixes which because it's Windows, can't be avoided or mitigated. This same issue doesn't impact our Macs in at all the same way.
Thing is, if you don't keep up with security updates you're rolling the dice with internet connectivity and not getting your stuff (id, files, etc.) stolen.
Sure, you might be OK, but personally I'd rather not risk my digital (and therefore financial) life with old unsupported hardware running old unsupported known insecure software.
The risk tradeoff is unacceptable to me. Not keeping current is not an option, and I simply can not recommend anybody pursue that.
To some extent this is true, but somewhat also not.
Of primary importance is the fact that the user is the greatest risk to the security of their own systems and data. Whilst the entire business of hacking and exploiting systems has moved inexorably from teenagers in their bedrooms to organized crime and state sponsored actors, the risks have changed greatly. Today, the primary aim is to exploit holes in corporates, and particularly those systems which contain user data. There's far more profit to be made from social engineering vectors than direct attacks, and users are far more vulnerable to phishing and scamming.
It is remarkably easy to exploit users who are ill informed, even when running the latest macOS versions. That isn't to say that older editions are safe - they're not - but they are only one of several security concerns, and as such can be largely mitigated by users being informed of risks.
As an example of risk, I keep all my systems which connect to the internet fully updated and secured, including the use of third-party software and security appliances. Yet twice in 2023 I received notification from businesses who I was not even aware I did business with, one related to the federal government itself, notifying me that my personal data which may include SSN and bank or credit card details, had been exposed by system breaches. Security is a many-legged stool, and realistically in today's threat landscape, individual systems are amongst the least profitable to attack or harvest.