8GB or 16GB on base MBP 2020 for a light user?

[PurpleIsAFruit]

I’ve ordered a base MBP 2020 with 8GB of RAM which is being delivered tomorrow. I’ve since spent hours trawling the internet wondering if 8GB will be okay for my usage. I have come to no conclusion.

I am a light user who will only be using the Pro for productivity tasks and general web surfing etc. The only reason I didn’t go for the Air was because the price difference ended up being marginal when you specced the Air up, and the cooling system (or lack thereof) on the Air does not exactly inspire confidence.

I don‘t intend to game or video edit etc. on there so I don’t know if my needs really require the 16GB. I do want this to be the laptop I keep for many years to come, so I would be prepared to send the one I’ve ordered back if need be. Equally if it’s not going to be that important, I’d be happy making the £200 saving.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[adrianlondon]

Base Air would probably have been fine.

8GB is definitely fine.

 

[PurpleIsAFruit]

Base Air would probably have been fine.

8GB is definitely fine.

The dual core i3 was what put me off with it. I would have gone for the quad core i5 had it not been for the thermal issues and performance throttling, because even though I’m not needing to do intensive tasks now, I might in the future so I’d like to be safe in the knowledge that my laptop can do more if I need it to.

The Pro was also delivering 3-4 weeks earlier so that may have swayed me a little.

 

[Ma2k5]

As there is a 16GB base model available for same price as the 8GB last generation, I think I’d be very tempted to go for 16GB. If however price saving is beneficial - personally I’d get the i5 Air even with its throttling, especially with your current workflow. The Air is slower but it isn’t a slow machine as such.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

My wife uses my 2012 11” MBA 4GB RAM as her daily machine for surfing, Facebook, zoom meetings, Office apps, email, etc. She has zero issues with it. Used it for her BS program as well.

8 GB RAM should be fine for you, IMHO.

 

[sixtydashone]

You're probably fine with 8GB but if you plan to keep the machine for a long time, you may want to consider 16GB.

 

[cmanbrazil]

I too had this concern. I really did not want to spend much more than the base level MacBook Pro 13 so the only consideration was whether or not I needed to pay extra for more Ram. It was only $100 more so even though I had wait a little longer I got the extra ram. While quicker machines will make a difference in high intensity tasks, ram issues can cause webpages and programs to crash because of the over load. If you rarely have a lot off apps and/or web pages open at once, it shouldn't be an issue. However, I often -even when its unnecessary- multitask between programs, so the Ram does matter to me.

Here is the catch now. They just increased the price for 8 extra gigs on the base model to $200. It seems like a lot of people are like me and apple is trying to push those who want 16gigs of ram towards the 1799 model.

 

[pshufd]

I've been running 48 GB for a few weeks on an old desktop and web browsing is fantastic. No little pauses here and there that I see with 16 GB. I have Firefox set to max performance and it happily sucks up to 7 GB of RAM but performance on this 2008 machines is fabulous. Of course the question is why do web pages use so much RAM/

 

[Dhock_Holiday]

You're perfectly fine with 8GB of RAM, I still have an old unibody MBP with 4GB of RAM and its still trucking along nicely. In my experience its the CPU that really makes the difference in performance. By the time your base model MBP is obsolete we should have hopefully have 6 Core 14 inch MBP's for sale.