Reiterating: most comments reference today's usages, and certainly looking at today's usages is relevant information. However when buying a new box our primary concern should be with tomorrow, i.e the lifecycle of the new Mac. So any comment like "24 GB [or whatever] should be ideal for your needs" should immediately be increased to plan for always-increasing future RAM demands. I suggest minimum +50% to +100%.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
How much unified memory to get?
- Thread starter kalex
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
EugW's "Mac rule #1".
Such rules are pointless with a desktop, since you can just use external storage.
Not to mention that using 80Gb of 512Gb Storage. Mostly use external for video storage hence why small main disk usage.
Certainly not buying a 1 Terabyte at Apples prices when barely using the 512Gb that have now.
Yeah, I went from a 1 TB M1 Mac mini to a 512 GB M4 Mac mini, and I currently have about 340 GB free on the M4.
I use an external SSD. The 1 TB internal was not helpful because it was too small to also house my Photos Library which is nearly 700 GB, so that 1 TB internal drive just sat mostly empty. Note though, the only reason I bought the 1 TB was because it was used and relatively inexpensive. Had I been buying new at that time, I would have gotten 512 GB, meaning with the upgrade to M4, I would have kept the same 512 GB size. No SSD size doubling there either.
BTW, I passed down my 1 TB iMac 2017 to my kid, and he has about 950 GB free.
Most of his stuff is in the cloud.Just for perspective, my previous iMac M1 had 16 GB, which was the max you could spec on it, and I used it for graphic design and lots of other productivity stuff running at the same time. I also would routinely run it with two user accounts logged in (one personal, one tied to my work). It handled all of that amazingly well. Very rare to see any beachballs or big slowdowns when switching apps or switching user accounts.
Also remember that by design the Mac will do its best to use up all your available RAM, to speed things up. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
You haven't said what kind of work you do with it, but unless it's something super RAM intensive, I'd suggest putting that extra $400 in the kitty for something else.
100% agree. I still remember how in the bad old days you'd launch an app and listen to the hard drive audibly grinding away while it wrote out the contents of RAM to make room for the new app. And the whole while you'd see a beachball on screen. It's nothing like that now. I've hit on the occasional lag, but only when I'm doing absurd levels of multitasking.
Productivity hack: don't open Activity Monitor looking for problems. If the machine starts slowing down, then go investigate. But I honestly couldn't care less what my swap space is or isn't, unless I start seeing actual issues beyond the color of some graph.
Yeah, but we're MacRumors geeks!
Anyhow, I just find it interesting, especially if you're considering getting a new Mac soon. I don't go looking for it either, but it was educational comparing it between machines. With the swap below 1 GB I almost never notice it but once the swap size gets larger, it becomes easier to notice.If someone is consistently having a swap in the few GB range, with occasional pauses here and there, then for the next purchase it would probably be worth getting a memory upgrade.
I got curious and looked at my current memory stats. I've got about 2.5 GB of swap being used on my M4 iMac with 24 GB RAM. I can tell you with absolutely that nothing is slowing down. No beachballs, no weird pauses, no hiccups.Yeah, but we're MacRumors geeks!
If someone is consistently having a swap in the few GB range, with occasional pauses here and there, then for the next purchase it would probably be worth getting a memory upgrade.
In fact, just for sh*ts and giggles, with my dreaded swap space being 2.5 GB I launched Photoshop 2025, which I haven't used in a few days. It took about 8 seconds to launch and go to a ready to work state. Would it have taken 5 seconds with no swap being used? I'm gonna go ahead and close activity monitor and continue ignoring that little number is unless something is actually impacting the machine's responsiveness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last edited:
Is it a deal-killer to have app launching and app switching increase in time by a few seconds? Definitely not, and it's good it doesn't bother you. However, it can still be annoying to some people, and it's a situation where I personally might think about a RAM upgrade for the next Mac I buy. (That's assuming that RAM is actually the cause, but it isn't always.)
I use ChatGPT and it can be both storage and memory hungry, which will grow. It is okay now but for some that 1TB will be used for local work, and it is memory intensive. So, apps that incorporate AI LLMs will get hungry for those reources. Software always drives up demand for hardware. Been that way for my 50+ years in industry.
Amen.
We are seeing right now, in early 2025, the growing pains of Apple Intelligence.
The rollout is going slowly... and embarrassingly, for Apple.
It's not that Apple does not have good SW engineers. They do.
The problem is that Apple declared they wanted to run AI on device.
And that takes memory.
On my 16GB RAM iMac, if I run Ollama then I am limited to the reduced 7b model versions.
Try to load bigger and it will crash.
Even on Apple Silicon there will be crashes. As in hard Mac crashing. Go check out Alex Ziskind's YouTube channel for examples.
AI is overhyped, for sure, yet that does not mean you're going to be able to avoid it.
Apple has a 5 decades long history of squeezing as much into as little RAM as possible.
For the grandparents wanting to facetime with their grandkids using an iMac the minimum RAM is fine. I often defend that, as most humans on this planet only want a computer to watch a few videos, check some social media site, etc.
But, the people in this forum, in this thread, are not normal people. (My signature line here used to point that out.)
We here are power users, in some large part.
I want to run 70 billion parameter versions of AI models, if I can't run the original model, and that means 128GB of unified memory, or more.
You may not want that, but if Apple Intelligence becomes what Apple keeps projecting they want it to be, then you should double your boot storage size and RAM.