Can someone help me pick out a 2020 Macbook Air for my mom? <3

[praisebe2jobs]

Hi!

I want to buy a 2020 Macbook Air for my mom. She would be using it mainly for email, podcasts, photos, streaming videos, and a million open tabs in Safari (you know mom). A few questions I could definitely use help on include:

- Would i3 be powerful enough for her needs? i3 because I have heard that the other models overheat quickly and are noisier.

- We are thinking of upgrading the RAM from 8gb to 16gb from 8gb, as 8gb might go slow with multiple tabs open/programs not closed. Is this a good move?

- Also considering upgrading from 256 to 512gb SSD, as that way my mom would never have to worry about running out of storage again!

Appreciate your feedback, and thanks!!!

 

[James_C]

Hi, based on her needs, she will be fine with the base level Air, If you think SSD size is a problem then the higher spec i5 also has a 512GB SSD, go for that. Web browsing with a lot of tabs or streaming video will not require more than 8GB.

I just bought my daughter a base level i3 Air to replace her 3 year old MacBook Pro. she loves it and says it is quicker and better battery life than her Old Pro. She is a Medical Student.

 

[praisebe2jobs]

Thanks! However, she doesn't remember to close apps or tabs haha.

 

[sahnert]

What computer is she using currently? How much storage space is she currently using?

The storage and RAM upgrades are both great upgrades if it fits your budget.

I am typing this on the i3 and I find it pleasant to use for the kinds of tasks you described

 

[Supra Mac]

i3 model would be more than enough for those uses as well as 8gb of Ram. Storage up to you.

I had the 2016 nTB 13" MacBook Pro, my i3 benchmarks higher in both Geekbench (short burst load) and Cinebench (sustained load). No one would question if her use cases could not be met with that.

As for Ram you will get a lot of opinions but I did a test myself. I have a Mac Mini so I took out the Ram and just left 4GB. I had several tabs, 15 plus, multiple YouTube playing. I also opened up almost all stock apps, except project ones like iMovie. Had movie playing in photos app and another in VLC. Memory pressure was yellow but not red, actually the processor was struggling to keep up. This was a 2011. 8gb is plenty, memory pressure is a better indicator than what is use as the OS will cache as much as it can.

Only drawback for the i5 is that it uses more power to run. If you don't take advantage of it then it's a waste. i3 will have longer cycles so that means less cycles hence laptop will last longer if you replace base on battery health.

 

[James_C]

Thanks! However, she doesn't remember to close apps or tabs haha.

it should not be a problem,

As mac starts to use up free memory, it looks for chunks of data in memory that are inactive, perhaps due to being used by an app that’s running, but only in the background. It then tasks an underutilized processor core to compress that data in memory in similar way you can compress a file. When the data is needed again, macOS expands it. This compression and expansion process uses some processor time, but not so much that you’d usually notice unless you’re running other CPU-intensive apps.

When memory compression isn’t enough, macOS resorts to virtual memory, which involves copying chunks of inactive data from RAM to disk-based swap files and back as needed, a process called paging. Virtual memory lets the Mac use more RAM than it has, but at the cost of speed, since copying to and from the drive is slow.

The best way to check how much pressure you are putting on your Mac is to use the Activity Monitor app, which is stored in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder. Open Activity Monitor, and click the Memory button to see a list of apps, how much memory they’re using, and other details. Click the Memory column header to sort by the apps using the most memory. You can use this list to figure out which apps to quit first to recover memory.

The most useful part of Activity Monitor, however, is the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom. It shows green when there is plenty of memory available, yellow when macOS is compressing memory, and red when it has been forced to rely on virtual memory.

I have 8GB of RAM on my Mac and have safari with about 20 tabs open, Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Mail and a number of other Apps open and I am still in the green. You will be fine with 8GB for your Mums use cases.