16gb MBP in 2021 isn’t enough for long-term

[hans1972]

That’s mostly the case where the Mac per es doesn’t earn your money.

This video shows how little gains you get with 32Gb of RAM for some tasks

I would argue that even for a lot of those who makes money with their Mac, spending those $400 on something else would be wiser.

 

[Jára Tyky]

He was not running Paralells, so the results are not so correct..
Only Windows 11 take 15 GB of RAM.

 

[smirking]

This video shows how little gains you get with 32Gb of RAM for some tasks...

I would argue that even for a lot of those who makes money with their Mac, spending those $400 on something else would be wiser.

What I found in the 8Gb M1 suicide test drive I took this summer was that I really didn't have to worry about tapping into swap space. I ran in the red constantly and whatever performance loss I suffered wasn't enough that I noticed.

What I didn't do was execute sustained actions that would demand max resources on multiple fronts the way MaxTech showed in their video. That they only lost a few seconds doing what they did was really impressive and bodes well for everyday performance.

The one issue I encountered with only 8GB of memory doing the work of my usual 32GB i7 was insanely high swap usage that may not be good for the health of the SSD, but so long as your workload isn't going to cause a constant 8GB+ deficit, I can't see the average person wearing out their SSD within 5 years.

Spending an extra $400 on the laptop isn't a big deal for me given that it's my work machine, but I downgraded to 16GB nonetheless to put my money where my mouth is. If I'm terribly wrong that 16GB is ample RAM for the foreseeable future, I'll be the first to know.

 

[smirking]

He was not running Paralells, so the results are not so correct..
Only Windows 11 take 15 GB of RAM.

I ran Windows 11 on an 8GB M1 with all of the following running at the same time:

Windows 11 ARM performing Windows Update on Parallels
Capture One Pro editing photos on an external volume
MS Excel
PHPStorm
MAMP PRO w/2GB server instance
OS X Mail
3 Browsers with lots of tabs
Quickbooks
Apple Music
Photoshop
And too many minor utilities and programs to list.

I have to admit, my Windows 11 instance was a little skippy while performing Windows Update and doing all of this at the same time, but everything on the Mac side was oblivious to the crazy overuse of resources. The only problem I found were incredibly high SSD writes to the tune of almost 1TB a day on some days.

Did you watch that video all the way? They were doing insane things like performing demanding video renders while simultaneously having Lightroom export a large collection of 50MP image files. That's nuts! That's way more intensive than running Parallels.

 

[Jára Tyky]

Yes. I saw it yesterday and one week before. It was really impressive but I would still appreciate more if he was running Parallls in the same time
He ran Paralllels in next video 32 GB vs 64 GB. So it keeps me asking why he ran it only with higher specs? Maybe he does not want to show us something..

 

[i9inkers]

I ran Windows 11 on an 8GB M1 with all of the following running at the same time:

Windows 11 ARM performing Windows Update on Parallels
Capture One Pro editing photos on an external volume
MS Excel
PHPStorm
MAMP PRO w/2GB server instance
OS X Mail
3 Browsers with lots of tabs
Quickbooks
Apple Music
Photoshop
And too many minor utilities and programs to list.

I have to admit, my Windows 11 instance was a little skippy while performing Windows Update and doing all of this at the same time, but everything on the Mac side was oblivious to the crazy overuse of resources. The only problem I found were incredibly high SSD writes to the tune of almost 1TB a day on some days.

Did you watch that video all the way? They were doing insane things like performing demanding video renders while simultaneously having Lightroom export a large collection of 50MP image files. That's nuts! That's way more intensive than running Parallels.

Yep,

I returned my 512GB 16" M1 Pro 16GB RAM for a 1TB 16" M1 Pro 16GB RAM as if it does decide to write to swap it will literally double the life of my SSD. Also when benchmarking the SSD I found that the 512GB SSD write speeds averaged about 4100 when the 1TB was averaging around 5900 (Blackmagic).

My advice to everyone is to get the M1 Pro 16" with 1TB and 16GB RAM. Most likely your battery will go to **** before anything else will. I go on the premise that I would rent this machine for 500 a year so I will go through a 4/5 year upgrade cycle.

Will the SSD or RAM fail in 5 years? I wouldn't think so🙂

 

[Matck06]

Ouais,

J'ai retourné ma RAM de 512 Go 16" M1 Pro 16 Go pour une RAM de 1 To 16" M1 Pro 16 Go, car s'il décidait d'écrire pour l'échanger, cela doublerait littéralement la durée de vie de mon SSD. De plus, lors de l'analyse comparative du SSD, j'ai constaté que les vitesses d'écriture du SSD de 512 Go étaient en moyenne d'environ 4100 alors que le 1 To était en moyenne d'environ 5900 (Blackmagic).

Mon conseil à tout le monde est d'obtenir le M1 Pro 16" avec 1 To et 16 Go de RAM. Très probablement, votre batterie ira à **** avant toute autre chose. Je pars du principe que je louerais cette machine pour 500 par an donc Je vais passer par un cycle de mise à niveau de 4/5 ans.

Le SSD ou la RAM tomberont-ils en panne dans 5 ans ? je ne le penserais pas🙂

on my macbook pro 16 512 m1 pro I have a write speed of 4500-4700mb / s and the 1TB is 5300mb / s I saw it seems to me

 

[i9inkers]

on my macbook pro 16 512 m1 pro I have a write speed of 4500-4700mb / s and the 1TB is 5300mb / s I saw it seems to me

Yes this could be correct as within tolerances,

I saw a more extreme difference but it can most definitely vary

 

[Matck06]

Oui, cela pourrait être correct car dans les tolérances,

J'ai vu une différence plus extrême mais elle peut très certainement varier

comment faire l'échange car le délai est long pour obtenir un 1to ? vous vous retrouvez sans machine lors de la livraison du nouveau 16' 1to ?

 

[smirking]

I returned my 512GB 16" M1 Pro 16GB RAM for a 1TB 16" M1 Pro 16GB RAM as if it does decide to write to swap it will literally double the life of my SSD. Also when benchmarking the SSD I found that the 512GB SSD write speeds averaged about 4100 when the 1TB was averaging around 5900 (Blackmagic).

What I also found on my 8GB M1 test drive was that even a lowly USB 3.1 10Gbps external SSD drive was quite sufficient for most things. I was even editing RAW photos directly on it. It worked surprisingly well.

No doubt, external storage is a hassle and you'll want to avoid it if you can, but if spending the money to get another 2TB in the name of future proofing is going to be painful for you, just buy what you think you're going to need. You're not as stuck as you might think if you estimate wrong.

 

[smirking]

Yes. I saw it yesterday and one week before. It was really impressive but I would still appreciate more if he was running Parallls in the same time
He ran Paralllels in next video 32 GB vs 64 GB. So it keeps me asking why he ran it only with higher specs? Maybe he does not want to show us something..

A lot of things will have performance issues right now, but they're not necessarily due to RAM. Well, more RAM might help, but may not be the real cause. I did have some programs that struggled and I thought it was RAM related because I was running my i7 32GB workflow on only 8GB. When I quit everything and rebooted to run that program alone, it still struggled.

 

[Matck06]

Ce que j'ai également trouvé sur mon lecteur d'essai M1 de 8 Go, c'est que même un modeste lecteur SSD externe USB 3.1 10 Gbps était tout à fait suffisant pour la plupart des choses. J'éditais même des photos RAW directement dessus. Cela a fonctionné étonnamment bien.

Sans aucun doute, le stockage externe est un problème et vous voudrez l'éviter si vous le pouvez, mais si dépenser de l'argent pour obtenir 2 To supplémentaires au nom de la pérennité va être douloureux pour vous, achetez simplement ce que vous pensez. va avoir besoin. Vous n'êtes pas aussi coincé que vous pourriez le penser si vous estimez mal.

I just found this: no difference between internal storage (512gb) vs "sandisk extreme 10gbps" to export a 4k video

he gets the same times!

 

[Mcckoe]

I went to Apple store yesterday to see the 14/16” MacbookPro and do some testing. With a few basic apps open, 2 safari tabs it was using 10.5gb/16gb. Restarted the Mac and repeated the sam ram usage after 10-15 minutes.

If you keep your mac only a few years it’s ok but if you are planning to keep your mac for 5 years you should absolutely upgrade to 32gb.

So you walked into an Apple Store, played with it for a few minutes, and came to the conclusion without any stated reason; that 16GB of Ram wouldn’t be enough for the after user after 5 years.

come back to me when you’ve bought the computer and have some kind of evidence to support your currently unsupported claim. I’ll give you an example of what you did: “Went to a Best Buy and did some testing on windows 11 yesterday. I had two windows open and the system was showing I had used all my available ram and this system had 32GB of Ram. If you keep your windows system for only a few years your probably okay with 32GBs of Ram, but if you keep it for 5 years you should really upgrade to 64GB”.

This post is just so stupid, 8GBs of Ram with an M1 of any kind will be enough for the average user; let alone 16GBs. The only person who would need 32GBs of Ram, knows they need that much memory. Yes you can always future proof… But, things aren’t going to magically get more memory intense, if anything with current SSD read and write times, it might matter less.

 

[ascender]

What I also found on my 8GB M1 test drive was that even a lowly USB 3.1 10Gbps external SSD drive was quite sufficient for most things. I was even editing RAW photos directly on it. It worked surprisingly well.

No doubt, external storage is a hassle and you'll want to avoid it if you can, but if spending the money to get another 2TB in the name of future proofing is going to be painful for you, just buy what you think you're going to need. You're not as stuck as you might think if you estimate wrong.

I also ended up with an 8GB M1 Air for 6 months this year while I waited for the MBPs and I was amazed at how much I could run (including Windows in Parallels at the same time) without noticing any slowdown or sluggishness whatsoever.

I keep saying it, but I wish there was a sticky thread somewhere which explained how RAM works in macOS which would address some of the non-truths which get repeated over and over again as being fact.

 

[Hicksmat1976]

I do fully understand this as I work in IT. I just forgot the average reader here isn’t a complete beginner and it’s sunday morning so I didn’t took the time of justifying my answer like the case i’m handling all week.

Yes macos is using as much ram as possible to cache, accelerate, reduce write and ….. Which also mean that if there’s less ram there’s less caching possible. So while now the system is able to cache everything since there’s plenty it might not be the case in 4-5 years since base system/apps ram usage will increase.

With every release of Macos ram usage goes up (Which I could prove by comparing Snow Leopard vs High-Sierra on my mid-2009 MBP).

I want my system to be as fast as POSSIBLE and I don’t want to be limited in 4-5 years by few hundreds dollars saving I did

working for a university in the UK we have a base model of 16GB ram and 512SSD but I'm about to review this mainly because we are extending the life of these devices beyond a 4-5 year replacement cycle to something more like 5-6 or even longer, therefore a move to 32GB ram and at least 1TB SSD is probably what I am going to recommend..... its not about what you do with the device today, its what you do with it 4-5 years down the line.... which probably doesn't matter to the average consumer who might replace every couple of years, but to a HE institution, or even a large organisation, buying a spec to last over time is the thing to do.

 

[ASX]

@Mcckoe

Avarage user means, you close browser tabs frequently and using not so much?

I used 16 gb m1 pro 2021 models. I experienced significant slow down when opening 20-30 tabs one by one, not even simultaneously, which i do with some of my bookmark folders 😉.

Sorry im used to a very fast pc, which can handle 30 tabs simultaneously, without any delay. Wont see slowniness on a 2750 - 2950 Euro notebook. So i bought afterwards m1 max 32 gb model. It can handle 20 - 30 tabs one by one without slowdown.

 

[hans1972]

You are correct but at what price? My base MBA which I’ve had for 4 months already has 40TB written to it’s SSD. That’s insane. It might appear to be functioning entirely normally but I think it shows I need more than 8GB for my not particularly intensive workflows…I’m not convinced 16GB would be enough either.

Let's say the write capacity is 1000 Tb.

1000 Tb / ( 40 Tb / 4 ) / 12 months in a year = 8.33 years

 

[Matck06]

@Mcckoe

L'utilisateur moyen signifie que vous fermez fréquemment les onglets du navigateur et que vous n'en utilisez pas tellement ?

J'ai utilisé des modèles 16 Go m1 pro 2021. J'ai connu un ralentissement important lors de l'ouverture de 20 à 30 onglets un par un, même pas simultanément, ce que je fais avec certains de mes dossiers de signets 😉.

Désolé, je suis habitué à un PC très rapide, qui peut gérer 30 onglets simultanément, sans aucun délai. Je ne verrai pas la lenteur sur un ordinateur portable 2750 - 2950 Euro. J'ai donc acheté par la suite le modèle m1 max 32 go. Il peut gérer 20 à 30 onglets un par un sans ralentissement.

Corrected me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that the m1 max or m1 pro in 32gb has no difference with the cpu so in theory the graphics part is not used for safari or chrome web browsing?

 

[ASX]

The cpu is the same but the memory bandwith has been doubled for m1 max. Because it's using 4 instead of 2 ram chips.

The graphics has only a minor usage for web browsing. I don't think the gpu will make a difference for web browsing 😀.

@hans1972

512 gb has an endurance of 200-300 tb and 1 tb 400-600 tb. It's not classified which toshiba memory they are exactly using. I would assume they are using the cheapest tlc chips to save money. Apple is know for cheaping out even on cables and keycaps.

 

[hans1972]

I have been reading through the many posts about RAM in this thread and in others, and the feeling I get is that even when some people earnestly believe that they need the extra RAM, many are still met with, "You don't need 32GB." These people are doing exactly what you said about spending money on what they think they need today, which is extra RAM.

I wanted to ask if my use case would warrant a 32GB, but people here have scared me away. It feels hostile. I already know the answer I'm going to get. I don't have the time nor the energy to try convincing people.

"Believing" doesn't mean that they need it.

I have seen very few backing up their needs with numbers and real world tests to see if more RAM helps the experience.

 

[ASX]

If this would not be an very expensive mac book, with soldered ram, you would really try to whitewash 16 gb ram (shared with gpu) for 2200 - 2950 Euros?

You would upgrade the ram by yourself and in case of soldered ram you would ask the manufacturer if he is silly for only using 16 gb shared ram for such an expensive laptop.

This discussion is only there, because this apples cant be upgraded and they are so expensive. The only options are, paying 400 Euros more or finding "arguments" for not needing more ram.

 

[hans1972]

512 gb has an endurance of 200-300 tb and 1 tb 400-600 tb. It's not classified which toshiba memory they are exactly using. I would assume they are using the cheapest tlc chips to save money. Apple is know for cheaping out even on cables and keycaps.

Those numbers are usually just warranty numbers.

In practise it is much longer. A Samsung 850 Pro endured for 9100 Tb.

Endurance Test of Samsung 850 Pro Comes To an End after 9100TB of writes

Yes, tso hat is 9.1 Petabyte of data written. Good lord. The German colleagues from c't have ended their SSD endurance tests after the last SSD decided to go belly up. ...

www.guru3d.com

A study by Google and University of Toronto showed that age was one of the most important reasons for failure, not use, https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/conference/protected-files/fast16_slides_schroeder.pdf

Annually replacement rate was 1-2% for all kinds of reason not only wearing. And this was for SSDs in data centres!

It really shows the longevity of SSDs.

 

[DMG35]

I have been reading through the many posts about RAM in this thread and in others, and the feeling I get is that even when some people earnestly believe that they need the extra RAM, many are still met with, "You don't need 32GB." These people are doing exactly what you said about spending money on what they think they need today, which is extra RAM.

I wanted to ask if my use case would warrant a 32GB, but people here have scared me away. It feels hostile. I already know the answer I'm going to get. I don't have the time nor the energy to try convincing people.

Bottom line is that if you have the money to spend to upgrade to the 32GB of RAM then you aren't doing anything other than possibly improving your experience and should do it. If you don't want to spend the money, odds are your experience is still going to be great.

 

[hans1972]

Peoples attack me on technical points then never reply to my technical arguments. I didn’t remember how toxics macrumors was.

This was your original post:

"I went to Apple store yesterday to see the 14/16” MacbookPro and do some testing. With a few basic apps open, 2 safari tabs it was using 10.5gb/16gb. Restarted the Mac and repeated the sam ram usage after 10-15 minutes."

How do you distinguish between

1) OS is using all memory for efficiency and performance?
2) OS is using all memory because the applications really need it?

macOS is supposed to use all available memory as soon as possible. Your test only shows macOS doing its job and don't distinguish between 1) and 2).

So you might look at swap usage. But macOS will still use swap even if you have enough memory so it isn't a reliable factor alone either.

 

[hans1972]

@MrBrault

I have no ms office installed. I have ms office 365 for windows but not for mac. The major flaw of the m1 pro 16 gb are the browser tabs. The other programs are not the problem.

I did it for you without ms office:



I will not make much of a difference.

@jahin17

That's the problem of the 14" version. 3000+ rpm fans after a short time (1+ minutes) full load.

The Activity Monitor shows you have plenty of RAM. No swap usage and no memory pressure to speak of at all.

Whatever your problem is, it isn't memory.