What I found particularly interesting about Max Tech's latest video is that the 16GB model used a lot of SSD swap as well. That kind of disarms the whole SSD wear argument, doesn't it? Please correct me if I'm mistaken here, I'm no expert at all.
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I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM
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myrtlebee
macrumors 68030
Decided to send my 16GB back after reading how capable the 8GB version was. To save a couple hundred dollars is helpful right now in this pandemic and I thought maybe I went overboard with the 16. I got 16GB because I'm a Safari tab hoarder, but I guess maybe it's better to change my ways and save some money. Ordered an 8GB version instead ... hope I made the right decision.
It depends on how often that swap space needs to be written to. The folks making the argument about SSD wear will say that with 8GB the likelihood/frequency of needing to write to the swap space is higher.
Polly Mercocet
macrumors 6502
Safari in particular is very well optimised for the M1 and hoarding tabs shouldn't be a problem.
Chrome is notorious for eating RAM when you keep a lot of tabs open, which I always do because my ADHD tells me "I'll get around to reading this later", but my 8GB MBA has not suffered for it.
As I type this now I have 18 tabs open in Chrome and the machine is running smooth as silk. I did do a fresh boot this morning but even so, I've been actively using all those tabs since, they're all actually open not just cached, and yet I have 0MB swap.
If your biggest worry is browser tabs the 8GB will suit you absolutely fine.
It is so unlikely you will use anywhere near the SSD life and if you are you will know it. If you have a current or old SSD mac why not check how much life has been used.
As an example my old 12" MacBook which is 3.5 years old was only 2% used and that is with much higher than average daily use - My 7 year old iMac with a fusion drive was around 28% used (and that has a tiny SSD that gets constantly written to)
It's a non issue for almost anyone.
As an example my old 12" MacBook which is 3.5 years old was only 2% used and that is with much higher than average daily use - My 7 year old iMac with a fusion drive was around 28% used (and that has a tiny SSD that gets constantly written to)
It's a non issue for almost anyone.
I agree. Swapping a few GB every single day will not significantly decrease the SSD lifespan. Maybe in terms of a couple of days. But these things have a rating of Terabytes written.
For a Samsung 960 Pro 512GB as a reference, it has 400 TBW - Terabytes written. This equates to writing 220 GB to the drive every single day and it will still last 5 years. Swapping 5-6 GB a day will not significantly impact the life. And you are more likely to upgrade to a new computer before the SSD dies out in 5 years.
I think people are making a much bigger deal out of this than it needs to. Sure, if you are writing 500+ GB to the drive every single day, then you need to be worried about your SSD lifespan within a few years. But a few GB here and there swapping it is literally a drop in a large bucket and won't have significant impact.
So lets say you swap 10GB every SINGLE day, even weekends. That is 18 TB of just swap in 5 years. That is only 4.5% of the 512GB Samsung recommendation/rating. So that leaves the majority of the rating still on normal drive space usage. And the larger the SSD the larger the TBW typically.
JeepGuy
macrumors 6502
I can understand if money is tight, but it's not a one solution fits all.
gank41
macrumors 603
If your main use on a laptop/computer is reading and browsing the web, even 10’s of open tabs or more, 8GB will suit you just fine. But 2 or 3 years from now if that reading has lead you to wanna learn how to work in GarageBand or FCP or something, you’ll be going back to this thread wondering why you didn’t pay that extra $200 for double the RAM. Although, I would assume the new MBA & MBP will retain excellent resale value even with the lower amount of RAM. So maybe you wouldn’t have to pay that much in 2-3 years when you need to upgrade your RAM but can’t. Or you know, stick with 8 because you’re not going to be using it. But something I’ve learned in my 20 or so years working on computers, more RAM is better than less RAM. There’s no technical info you need to read about WHY you’d need less. The “technical info” in this case is that it’d save you money. The 8GB machines are extremely capable and very impressive. At this point everyone should know whether you need the extra memory or whether you just want it. If you’re questioning whether you do, you probably don’t NEED it. But your experience will be better overall for a longer period of time. This is all very simple.
jlinn75
macrumors member
I think that is what I am doing. I ordered the 8gb MBP with 512GB went to the store the next day and had it.. The 16gb one is only available for delivery in my area and 2-3 weeks out
JeepGuy
macrumors 6502
I suddenly had this image of the market being flooded with 8gb models next year.
I canceled order for the 16gb. I went to the store today, returned my Pro, MPB M1, and picked up the MBA 8/512 (mostly because of the 8c gpu instead of the 7c)....happy I did.
JeepGuy
macrumors 6502
thegiftofdom
macrumors member
Yea, I was going to get the 16 GB version once my return period time was up, but I decided that I'm most likely going to be fine using this for 5 years, and pushing the 8 GB model I saw no drops in performance for my use case. I will be keeping the 8GB Air. Just ordered a nice Matte dbrand skin for my Mac to match my other devices!
MarkC426
macrumors 601
It's not a link, it just expands the image. The point is that I can easily modify RAM in PCs and that Apple's pricing is a pain.
Their CPUs, though, are so fast that it negates a lot of that pain.
If your workload requires ~32GB of RAM it will still require ~32GB of RAM on an M1 Mac. Being an M1 Mac doesn't change anything.
JeepGuy
macrumors 6502
The M1 is better optimized to use swap, and with the speed of the SSD's it's almost transparent giving the impression that you don't need more memory, it only shows it's weakness when dealing with very large files, and again not by much.
Swap should be the same on the M1 as it is on Intel. The SSD is fast but it's no substitute for RAM. If an application can benefit from the speed of the M1 processor and that application requires more RAM than what is available then you're hindering the M1s performance. Do not use swap (actually paging) as a substitute for RAM.
If I had to use macOS exclusively with my workload, I would just buy two of them and partition between the two systems. I run three monitors so I would need to do that anyways.
I'm curious if macOS on AS has hardware support for better predictive analysis on paging so that it can start loading the appropriate pages before they are needed by the CPU. Apple has a bunch of additional hardware bits which you do discrete things that you don't see on commodity CPUs.
My wife's 2011 MBA with 4GB memory, 128GB SSD is still running strong (although battery seems to be degrading and the charger is temperamental). I am also debating whether to get her the base model MBA with 8GB or go all the way to 16GB. Basically, just browsing and office. We tend to have a lot of tabs open, but we rarely actually jump back to them.