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Expect RAM use to grow over the life of your Mac. Plan accordingly...

My Advice: If you have an Apple Silicon (M1, M2, or M3) Mac now with only 8GB of RAM, consider selling it on eBay or Facebook Marketplace right way, or give it away to a family member, and get a minimum 16GB RAM M4 based chip Mac, before everyone else with an 8GB RAM Mac dumps theirs for cheap, lowering your resale value. 8GB RAM Macs will soon be dinosaurs, in the age of Apple Intelligence and modern memory hungry apps.

If you want to future-proof yourself even more, get a M4 Pro and M4 Max Mac that has Thunderbolt 5 ports, so you can have external Thunderbolt 5 SSD drives (with over 6,000 MB/second transfer rate) and high end displays supporting up to 120 Gbps support. See the first Thunderbolt 5 external SSD drives here: https://www.owc.com/solutions/envoy-ultra
RAM should be chosen for your usage… if you are just fine on 8GB with 20 chrome tabs.. you don’t need to keep upgrading… Selling for 16GB is not necessary and actually a loss.. better to keep going on 8GB if it works well for you and put that money into your Roth IRA.
 
RAM should be chosen for your usage… if you are just fine on 8GB with 20 chrome tabs.. you don’t need to keep upgrading… Selling for 16GB is not necessary and actually a loss.. better to keep going on 8GB if it works well for you and put that money into your Roth IRA.
8GB doesnt exist as an option on any mac anymore, thankfully, min is 16
 
RAM should be chosen for your usage… if you are just fine on 8GB with 20 chrome tabs.. you don’t need to keep upgrading… Selling for 16GB is not necessary and actually a loss.. better to keep going on 8GB if it works well for you and put that money into your Roth IRA.
If you like what you have, then please keep it. I was just saying in my post that there likely will be a lot of people dumping their 8GB Macs very soon, so if you want to upgrade from a 8GB RAM Mac, do it now, before the resale value of your 8GB RAM Mac tanks.
 
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Just idling on Unreal Engine on my PC right now it's using 16GB (of 32GB) of system RAM and 6GB (of 12GB) of GPU RAM I'd be interested to see what happens with the same project if I happened to have an Apple Silicon mac with 48GB of unified RAM. My wife has an M1 MBP with 16 GB and says UE runs ... poorly on her machine
base M1? or M1 pro/max?
 
If you're doing ANY video editing work, I'd recommend at least 24 GB at minimum. Probably better off with an M2, M3 or M4 Pro with 32 GB on a MacBook Pro if you're editing 4K videos.

What do you consider editing work? I work with some 4k GoPro videos once or twice per month, and exporting it takes a few to several minutes. If you're not a professional, who cares if it takes two minutes or five minutes?

I had no problem editing them on my previous 8gb Mac, and even my current M1 Air 16gb seems overkill.
 
I kind of regret only getting 16gb in my M1 MacBook Pro, wish you could upgrade like in the olden days.

Maybe a M5 or M6 max in a couple years, hopefully by then they offer 16/32 brontobytes of ram as an option.
 
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Can someone explain the markup on RAM? How does something that costs less than $5 end up costing $1000? The prices below are spot so I assume that large companies like Apple have contracts that likely lower the cost even further.

Obviously there are integration / manufacturing costs for Apple but I can't imagine those costs taking a $5/chip to $200/chip.

https://www.trendforce.com/news/202...igns-of-loosening-likely-to-persist-until-q4/

Screenshot 2024-11-05 at 12.18.44.png
 
Can someone explain the markup on RAM? How does something that costs less than $5 end up costing $1000? The prices below are spot so I assume that large companies like Apple have contracts that likely lower the cost even further.

Obviously there are integration / manufacturing costs for Apple but I can't imagine those costs taking a $5/chip to $200/chip.

https://www.trendforce.com/news/202...igns-of-loosening-likely-to-persist-until-q4/

View attachment 2447222
Yes that's easy. They want money.
 
Can someone explain the markup on RAM? How does something that costs less than $5 end up costing $1000? The prices below are spot so I assume that large companies like Apple have contracts that likely lower the cost even further.

Obviously there are integration / manufacturing costs for Apple but I can't imagine those costs taking a $5/chip to $200/chip.

https://www.trendforce.com/news/202...igns-of-loosening-likely-to-persist-until-q4/

View attachment 2447222

The RAM is now imbedded in the processor chip so your numbers don't apply.

Apple also inflates the prices since they are the only one supplying the processor chip.
 
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How do you explain just Mail or Safari wanting over 200GB??? I'm not Hollywood movie editor or enterprise-level researcher, I just have bunch of tabs when I'm researching what air fryer to buy and then system runs out of memory 🤷 whyyyy???
This must be due to some sort of memory leak. Which version is this? Is it the latest macOS 15.1?
 
I ended up going with 48gb on my MacBook Pro. It was that or 24, and my current iMac i7 system with 64gb sees maybe 30gb regularly and jumps at times to be maxed out. I figured bumping the RAM and HD one level would be optimal, as I only upgrade my laptop once every 10+ years.
 
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Power user / hobbyist here. Getting 64GB on my M4 Mini and 48 on my M4 MBPro because when I see less than 10GB remaining before 'pressure' begins, I get worried. Run 1-2 VMs and the usual daily apps and you'll probably hit the base RAM pretty quickly. I routinely got to 20/24 on my M2 MBAir which made me a bit nervous.

Given my workloads I prefer more RAM than cores.
 
I think 48 is a good point. Good enough to run excellent LLM, and more than enough for some AAA gaming. And yes with the Vision Pro ultrawide screen and 0 latency, I think this is the best gaming experience I’ve had in a long time.
 
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How do you explain just Mail or Safari wanting over 200GB??? I'm not Hollywood movie editor or enterprise-level researcher, I just have bunch of tabs when I'm researching what air fryer to buy and then system runs out of memory 🤷 whyyyy???
Something is wrong with your system. Even if you had 64 GB, it wouldn’t be enough 😂
 
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