Apple Silicon Unified Memory: How Much Mac RAM Do You Need?

[peneaux]

Few months ago there was a similar article saying 8GB RAM was enough for most.

According to Apple, 8GB in a Mac is the equivalent of 32GB in Windows.

It’s a shame we can’t buy one for peanuts online to max out our Macs for future use.

 

[JosephAW]

Surprisingly I can run daVinci resolve with a 8 gb of ram for standard video files

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I think this article could have been a lot shorter. If you do not know how much memory you need, you should buy 16GB. If you know how much memory you need, buy that, or just a little more.

Ignorance is not a good reason to just buy minimum available RAM. Minimum available RAM has usually been a poor life-cycle choice for many users. Anyone spending $$thousands on a 5-year-life-cycle computing device should do the homework necessary to best estimate what will be the appropriate RAM for the life cycle, which is 100% in the future.

The homework that I suggest includes reading up on Apple's Unified Memory Architecture.

 

[NJRonbo]

The biggest question Apple refused to answer with their introduction of silicon machines was whether RAM performance was equal to Intel systems.

After a few years of owning multiple Macbooks with 16GB and 64GB configurations, I think I can confidently say that 16GB gives a crapload more headroom than Intel ever could.

With my Intel Macbooks I needed at least 64GB as I had at least two dozen programs running in the background at startup and my browser had a dozen tabs that were open at all times.

With the same amount of memory on my M1 Macbook Pro, I hardly reach a 32GB threshold.

On my Macbook Air, with 16GB of RAM, it is amazing how many programs I can run at startup as well as tabs I keep open on my browser and not push the limit.

I think it has to do with both unified memory and the optimization being done by the Mac OS.

 

[Fuzzball84]

Expect RAM use to grow over the life of your Mac. Plan accordingly... Looking to future Mac memory purchase needs:

My Advice: If you have an Apple Silicon (M1, M2, or M3) Mac now with only 8GB of RAM, you may want to 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

UPDATE for Clarity: 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.

Dumping a system just because a spec update has appeared doesn’t make sense at all. Financial sense that is. Most users with 8 GB RAM and doing fine on the system as is probably have years left. Then after the system really has run its course they can update and likely the time an M6 or M7 has released and memory usage and technology has advanced or maybe even plateaued again.

This is exactly the behaviour Apple wants from its users. To panic buy another system when only a few months ago they made a purchase that was the best at the time. You will always be behind the curve in tech, always.

The 8 GB base systems have years of use left in them. Even if Apple uses virtual memory processes more, by the time the SSD has worn out the hinges, keyboard and battery will likely be well past it.

Unless you’re a “power user” doing memory or processor intensive tasks you’d be fine on Apples baseline. You will be able to do on your Mac what you were doing a few weeks or months ago. Yeah, you don’t get all the upcoming features. But if you’re really needing that, then go for it. The vast majority of Mac users won’t even know about the recent base spec jump and maybe won’t even be bothered or notice. They will still be able to browse the web, write a document and email as before etc

 

[0423MAC]

What type of work required 256GB or RAM, curious.

Anyone that would like to run a bunch of VMs or applications that require a TON of writes/reads to disks would benefit from it. The problem with macs today is that these are non-removable parts which means you risk burning through the internal SSDs if constantly writing 24x7x365.

In my case it's either a ton of RAM or pSLC SSDs connected externally. It's mostly for testing against macOS as most that would opt for this kind of work are primarily running linux servers.

 

[kamyk35]

95% of users would be more than good with 16GB.

More than good is the key phrase....of those 90% are good with 8gb

 

[daneoni]

Rule of thumb is to double storage and RAM every time you buy a new computer

 

[Fuzzball84]

N+1

You almost never want to go with the base amount of RAM. Choose the upgrade and add $200. With the storage, you can at least add an external drive.

Most buyers of Macs do. And have the systems for years.

Most buyers will get more storage but very few will spec more RAM. Only those using it for work on heavy workloads will spec more RAM.

 

[kamyk35]

If it is in fact just price gouging then I would like to see some type of inquiry, perhaps by Vestager (or her replacement) and von der Leyen. I don't expect American politicians to do anything as this country is owned by corporations via lobbyists.

And this article is just completely dubious as it implies some type of actual shortage that results in this multitude of configurations. No reason to not have a more simplified structure like the following:

• Mx chip machines (mini, Air): 16GB base and 32GB option
• Mx Pro chip machines (mini, Macbook Pro): 32GB base and 64GB option
• Mx Max chip machines (Studio, Macbook Pro): 64GB base and 128GB option
• Mx Ultra chip machines (Studio, Mac Pro?): 128GB base and 256GB option

Mac's have approx 6% of the market share, even the less than scrupulous EU dictators will struggle to put together a case against Apple, ultimately, no one really knows what the cost is to Apple and more importantly, Apple doesn't force anybody to buy their product!

 

[nova motum]

I read a lot of jokes here, but:
If you want to run a 70B Large Language Model in a local RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) on a Mac, you'll need 280 GB Unified Memory (full 32-Bit (FP32) quantisation: 70 billion (10^9) parameters at 4 Byte each

 

[Eracles]

The M4 pro is so powerful, that 24gb of ram seems like a bottleneck.

 

[kamyk35]

Wish I had known before buying the 8GB MBA, it's been making me very very angry.
Wasted my money with all the hype around how fast it is but turns out it runs out of memory all the damn time. 16GB would have been a much better place.

Who are you angry with?

 

[FoxyKaye]

I wish I had 196GB

I wish Apple laptops were still user-upgradeable, but alas, those days are long gone. Maybe for the better to offer advanced form factors <shrug>, but playing with my very old 2012 MacBook Pro, I do miss those days.

 

[Timo_Existencia]

Fact: Apple MOSTLY sells the base model configuration, by a large margin. In fact, many of the higher-ram models are not carried in much supply in the stores.*
Fact: Apple consistently scores at the top or near the top in consumer satisfaction surveys.
Ergo: The 8 gb base model macs that Apple has sold have not hurt Apple's reputation, at all. And the 16 gb models will be great for the overwhelming majority of buyers as well. They work well for the people who buy them. All arguments beyond this are just tech flexing nerds.

*which kills the "Apple is just trying to gouge consumers by upselling them to higher RAM models" arguments. NO, if Apple were doing that, they'd stock very few base model macs in the stores and have higher stock of the higher ram models.

 

[Realityck]

The M4 pro is so powerful, that 24gb of ram seems like a bottleneck.

There were plenty of MBPs using M2 pro, M3 pro that only had 16GB sold. If your entertainment or creative software needs more to run better then go with M4 Max w/36GB.

 

[jole]

Enterprise-level users

This does not mean anything.

Anything beyond 64GB can be described: If you cannot calculate RAM needs in terms of 3D scene vertex count, DataFrame dimensions, or ML model hyper parameters, you do not need it.

 

[neotint]

🧠 Here’s the best advice: ignore generic recommendations and review your own personal usage data.

How?
👉 Install iStatMenus and check your memory pressure and swap memory over a regular week of use.

If your memory pressure is over 50% or 75%, and your swap memory is consistently being used, especially if it’s higher than your physical RAM, you definitely need more memory.

💡 The more RAM you get, the more capacity you have for memory-intensive applications. Get as much as you can with some extra room for future use.

💡 DON’T DECIDE BASED ON GENERIC ADVICE. GATHER YOUR OWN PERSONAL USAGE DATA AND PLAN AHEAD.

 

[Fuzzball84]

Fact: Apple MOSTLY sells the base model configuration, by a large margin. In fact, many of the higher-ram models are not carried in much supply in the stores.*
Fact: Apple consistently scores at the top or near the top in consumer satisfaction surveys.
Ergo: The 8 gb base model macs that Apple has sold have not hurt Apple's reputation, at all. And the 16 gb models will be great for the overwhelming majority of buyers as well. They work well for the people who buy them. All arguments beyond this are just tech flexing nerds.

*which kills the "Apple is just trying to gouge consumers by upselling them to higher RAM models" arguments. NO, if Apple were doing that, they'd stock very few base model macs in the stores and have higher stock of the higher ram models.

You’re completely right. I think the issue on Macrumors is that it’s only a tiny percentage of tge Apple/Mac user base. Most Mac users will not even have heard about this site, and wouldn’t care about any rumors.

Even very few people who are “power users” or use a Mac for work would be be on this site.

There will, and always will be arguments over storage and RAM on here. But for the vast majority of Apples customers, it will be a shrug shoulders moment. Like what’s the issue, it works doesn’t it. It will be supported 5 or so years. So who cares, I just want to browse the web, do productivity tasks and read my email. 😂

 

[kamyk35]

Web browsing speeds? Really?? 😆

I have an M1 Air. My buddy has a M3 MBP with 32gb. Browsing is identical..sure, you can benchmark and see a difference, but it’s imperceptible by a human.

Rendering, compiling, games, sure. Web browing….lol

I had a base 13" M1 MBP and now I have an M3 with 16gb, I can assure you, the difference in browsing speeds is very perceptible to me as just a normal human.

 

[Populus]

The M4 pro is so powerful, that 24gb of ram seems like a bottleneck.

Yeah, I’m really worried about this. But going with 48GB is a steep increase in price…

 

[iHorseHead]

To be honest, I've been thinking and I've realised I don't really even need a Mac. A Linux PC would be fine. I've been thinking and I'm sure if a lot of us thought about things…
Do you actually need a Mac? Do you actually need an iPad? Or an iPhone? I thought about it and I don't. I'd be fine with Android and a Linux PC and don't need a tablet. I have an iPad 9th gen and the battery life is so disappointing. I don't know what that is but I think my iPad mini 2 had a better battery life, but maybe it's the apps consuming more power these days? I don't know if that makes sense.
Back in 2014 I used GarageBand, played GTA III, surfed the web and still had battery life left for the whole weekend. Nowadays I watch YouTube and play Tropico a bit and then I have to charge it again every single day.…

 

[Timo_Existencia]

My wife inherited my 2019 Intel Macbook Air with 8 gb of Ram when I bought my M3 Macbook Pro with 18 gb of Ram.

So I did a test a couple of days ago; I did an export to Movie of a Keynote file with 500 slides, all the slides have animations on the slide. I did the export to 1080p at 60 fps.

Result: my MBP M3 with 18 gb of Ram did the export in 24 minutes. My wifes 2019 MBA with 8 gb of ram did the export in 52 minutes.

Sure, mine was a bit more than twice as fast. But her nearly 6 year old MBA with 8 gb of RAM had zero problem doing the task.

She never, ever does anything of that nature on her MBA. She's happy as can be with the computer, doing light graphics work and basic browsing and productivity work.

If you need more, you know you need more. But most people, by a very large margin, simply don't even think about RAM, and suffer very little for it.

 

[Fuzzball84]

Rule of thumb is to double storage and RAM every time you buy a new computer

Irrespective of actual needs and the technological landscape regarding hardware and software. 🤨

 

[asdfjkl;]

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/

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I don't disagree with your premise but M4 ASi uses LPDDR5x which is more expensive than DDR4. I've just never been able to find any wholesale price for it.