New MacBook air: Ram quantity options

[arktika06]

Hello everyone,

I just bought a great new MacBook air M3. I bought it with 16 GB RAM, as is often recommended.

But today, I'm wondering if I shouldn't have switched directly to 24 GB RAM?

I've got about a dozen tabs open in Safari + a bit of editing on Lightroom, and here's a (French) screen of the RAM status in the activity monitor.

It already shows 4 GB of swap files in use (the famous swap, right?) and 7 GB of compressed ram.
What do you think?

My usage remains amateur (office, internet, photo and video editing (Raw Fufjilm and 4K gopro - just for fun) but if possible, I'd like to avoid slowing down the Mac in the next two years for these activities...
Keeping in mind that I don't do editing on Lightroom every day...

 

[marvin_h]

I wouldn’t worry.

 

[Isamilis]

Did Adobe Lightroom consume 8gb alone? If that’s the case, don’t worry as you didn’t use frequently.

 

[krspkbl]

As you can see Lightroom is eating up over 8GB itself. If you're only using it occasionally then you will be fine but I'd maybe think about going with 24GB if you are going to use it often or want to keep the machine for 4-5 years.

You still have 1.64GB free RAM so it's not like you're pushing the memory hard and the pressure is still in yellow. Compressed RAM isn't a problem nor is cached. It just means MacOS is being efficient with memory management.

Swap isn't really a problem either. Yes, it offloads stuff to your SSD but this is completely normal and every OS/device in existence today will use it to some degree so accept it and live with it. With modern SSDs you have to write thousands of TB's to them before it becomes a problem. One of my 250GB drives is rated to 2400TB so I can write over the entire capacity 9,600 times. The larger the SSD the more durable it is...because it takes longer to full the capacity. My 5 year old 2TB drive which I use for gaming/storage is still at 100% health. My 250GB is at 97% health after 4 years. Even if you have a 256GB SSD you won't have anything to worry about.

 

[gigatoaster]

Not to worry. The more you put RAM, the more it will be eaten. Enjoy your machine and don't pay too much attention to RAM. Instead, ask yourself: does everything works as intended?

 

[Torty]

And with 24GB Lightroom reserves more RAM and you see similar in activity monitor? Then you think better get 32GB 😆

 

[za9ra22]

Hello everyone,

I just bought a great new MacBook air M3. I bought it with 16 GB RAM, as is often recommended.

But today, I'm wondering if I shouldn't have switched directly to 24 GB RAM?

I've got about a dozen tabs open in Safari + a bit of editing on Lightroom, and here's a (French) screen of the RAM status in the activity monitor.

It already shows 4 GB of swap files in use (the famous swap, right?) and 7 GB of compressed ram.
What do you think?

My usage remains amateur (office, internet, photo and video editing (Raw Fufjilm and 4K gopro - just for fun) but if possible, I'd like to avoid slowing down the Mac in the next two years for these activities...
Keeping in mind that I don't do editing on Lightroom every day...

Two things to bear in mind: Firstly that macOS is scalable, which means that the more RAM you have, the more it will tend to use. Sonoma will grab about 6Gb on an 8Gb system (but then scale back as RAM usage from apps increases), but generally start with around 10Gb RAM grab in a 16Gb system.

Macs and macOS have been designed to work this way for years, and it tends to result in people assuming lower RAM capacity systems get overwhelmed easily. They don't.

Secondly, Lightroom has a minimum RAM requirement of 8Gb, with 16 recommended. It isn't scalable, so even on a 16Gb system, it will tend to push RAM usage higher than average. As it does, macOS will scale back to a degree to optimize RAM and swap. On an 8Gb system you'd get into system performance issues with a lot of other background stuff, but in 16Gb, it'll remain good.

What you're seeing, is perfectly normal and entirely ok.

 

[SteveOm]

Don’t look at the percentage or numbers. Look at “Memory Pressure” in Activity monitor. If that’s green (low), which it probably is for your case, then you’re fine keeping this machine. Really.

 

[snipr125]

So is it safe to assume that running Adobe Lightroom on a base MBA (any M chip) will cause a LOT of swapping to the internal SSD?

 

[za9ra22]

So is it safe to assume that running Adobe Lightroom on a base MBA (any M chip) will cause a LOT of swapping to the internal SSD?

That's interesting, and I think .... quite possible.

The YouTube example where the guy runs Lightroom on 8Gb also included dozens of Safari tabs, and 50 RAW images, along with a couple of other background tasks, and it choked up the system almost totally, in large part due to swap.

That's a deliberately unrealistic use case though, since nobody in their right minds could expect that to work well. His parallel experiment with a 16Gb system ran pretty well, but showed a fair amount of swap too, not least because Lightroom appears to do that with common data to notionally keep the overhead within 8Gb.

On an 8Gb system running only Lightroom, it looks like performance is reasonable and swap not a big deal. Personally though, I'd be very wary of expecting an 8Gb system to be usable in anything like a regular workflow with this application. It's never been RAM friendly, and there are arguably better apps for casual use.

 

[sixth]

Eh. I would go 24GB and not worry about it. Its $200 bux solving the worry and bit less wear on the SSD. But... also will be perfectly fine w/ 16GB.

 

[raythompsontn]

The YouTube example where the guy runs Lightroom on 8Gb also included dozens of Safari tabs, and 50 RAW images, along with a couple of other background tasks, and it choked up the system almost totally, in large part due to swap.

I would question those reviews. They start with an agenda and do what is necessary to support the agenda. I have loaded 1,100 raw images into Lightroom without issue on an 16GB machine. I can apply corrections to those images, crop, color balance, exposure, vignetting, in just a few minutes. If his system is choking on 50 images, he is faking something.

 

[ignatius345]

Hello everyone,

I just bought a great new MacBook air M3. I bought it with 16 GB RAM, as is often recommended.

But today, I'm wondering if I shouldn't have switched directly to 24 GB RAM?

I've got about a dozen tabs open in Safari + a bit of editing on Lightroom, and here's a (French) screen of the RAM status in the activity monitor.

View attachment 2359718


It already shows 4 GB of swap files in use (the famous swap, right?) and 7 GB of compressed ram.
What do you think?

My usage remains amateur (office, internet, photo and video editing (Raw Fufjilm and 4K gopro - just for fun) but if possible, I'd like to avoid slowing down the Mac in the next two years for these activities...
Keeping in mind that I don't do editing on Lightroom every day...

Is the machine actually slowing down? If not, I have a great productivity hack for you: close Activity Monitor unless there's an actual problem.

 

[Torty]

Is the machine actually slowing down? If not, I have a great productivity hack for you: close Activity Monitor unless there's an actual problem.

Closing Macrumors tab would also free 360MB 😆