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How much RAM left right after boot up M1 8G?
- Thread starter Mrbobb
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This is my M1 8GB right after a restart, i left it for a minute or so to make sure everything was loaded. For me 8GB is enough but this machine is used mainly for surfing the web, emails and maybe writing the odd document. the machine never feels slow or sluggish for me, if you were going to use it for heavier things I'd go with the 16GB.
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Just to note that this does not give a good answer in how much ram is really free and available for other tasks. Macos (and any decent OS/app, but prob macos does it better than windows for example) uses ram as a cache memory to speed up stuff, which can be cleared if needed. I am not sure why there is so much cache use on a clean reboot, though.
I changed the Macbook Pro 2019 i5 from 16GB to the base Air M1 and despite the smaller amount of memory, it is not felt anywhere. I happen to work in Affinity Publisher and PowerPoint at the same time, and yes, I fall into swap, but I also ran into MBP and for more GB. The advantage is certainly the disk, which makes this swap imperceptible. 16 GB would definitely be better, but I don't know if I would feel it as much as my pocket, and besides, I don't want to stay with the Air M1 for long. 2-3 years is the maximum. I needed a change from Intel, and the base Air was at a great price.
Memory is managed by the system. No matter how much RAM you have, in the beginning MacOS will try to fill it with any junk until it's at least 75% full. Then it will compress and prioritize and finally when under pressure, throw out that 4K YouTube video, which you last watched over two hours ago and haven't closed the tab on. Memory is not a hard limit like free disk space. Unless you do data intensive and time critical stuff like live 8K video rendering, macOS will always make more memory available in split seconds. Memory is like a teacher writing on a blackboard, absolutely everything fits up on there and occasionally the sponge makes room for more. And you don't learn more in the classroom with the bigger blackboard.