I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM

[dgdosen]

Why is there so much drama around M1 upgrade choices? If you make a 'mistake' in the upgrades, or find out in a few months that you did, you'll be able to sell it pretty easily in a 2nd-hand market. These machines are crazy good, no matter what route you take.

It's not like these are going to lose value as fast as the Intel macs that are out there just did.

 

[Wolfmore]

Why is there so much drama around M1 upgrade choices? If you make a 'mistake' in the upgrades, or find out in a few months that you did, you'll be able to sell it pretty easily in a 2nd-hand market. These machines are crazy good, no matter what route you take.

It's not like these are going to lose value as fast as the Intel macs that are out there just did.

Good point! my 2 cents though: don't sell on eBay unless you can afford to lose it. I sell using Facebook Market place. I meet people at my local police station (inside the office, not outside in the parking) and take CASH only. Never had issue. Any shady people don't want to meet there. Stay Safe!

 

[MrEcted]

I went with 8 (base model Mini). No regrets at all. I don't do video editing or anything like that, the most taxing thing I do is produce music in Logic and do some software builds in Xcode. I bought this as a secondary Mac for my living room, it's basically a way over-powered Apple TV replacement, but now I can chill on my couch and make projects in Logic, which is cool.

I'm not the best person to ask because I don't run 20 pro-level apps at the same time and bounce between them constantly, but I simply cannot bring this system to its knees no matter how hard I try. It seems like no matter how many Safari tabs I load and no matter how many YouTube videos I'm running, and if I run literally every single app on this machine while running Logic's unofficial benchmark at the same time - it's still so damn fast. I literally cannot make this computer flinch no matter what I throw at it.

Again, I'm not really a macOS power user, but this thing is FAR FAR better than my 2015 maxed out 15-inch MBP. I can make it cry and sound like a jet engine just by launching Chrome!

 

[MauroT]

Huge Swap Memory reported using After Effects and M1

Huge Swap Memory...Using After Effects

 

[mlykke]

All these ram discussions are causing some people to believe the M1 has some magic where it can load much more into memory than previous models - This is false. It's really not that complicated.
Normally I hate analogies, but I posted this in another thread:

The 16 GB version is like an Audi RS 6 Avant. It's very very fast and since it's a wagon it can carry a lot of stuff.
The 8 GB version is like an Audi RS 5. It's also very very fast but it can't carry the same amount of stuff.

So for workloads where you need to move a lot of stuff, the RS 6(16 GB) will be faster. The RS 5(8 GB) version can move the same amount of stuff, but it will have to drive multiple times back and forth, making it take longer.

For situations where you don't need to move a lot stuff, you just need to move it fast. They will be more or less identical in performance.

 

[the8thark]

Rene Ritchie's advice is the same as mine. If you can afford it, get the 16GB.

Can you get by with 8GB today? Possibly yes. But in the future as your computing needs increase having the 16GB as more of a future proof is alays a good thing. It will make your mac last even longer as a daily driver or usable machine for you. Very few people buy new Macs every year or every other year. So in a few years time when your ASi Mac is full of whatever, and you've used it for a while, having that 16GB there will be very benefitial. You don't know what your RAM needs will be a few years from now. Since you can't upgrade the ram ever apart from at initial purchase, the 16GB is the better option.

 

[bandrews]

I've just edited and exported a short 1080p video on Adobe Premier Rush on my base M1 8/7, 8GB MBA. It's not even been optimised for ARM and ran fine. Exported in less than a minute.
Chances are I'll swap it in every year or two rather than run it into the ground.

 

[jerryk]

Huge Swap Memory reported using After Effects and M1

Huge Swap Memory...Using After Effects

It is using Rossetta 2 to convert a Mac Intel application. As a Creative Cloud subscriber, I will be more interested to see how the Adobe CC products work once they are native Apple Silicon.

Knowing Adobe, they will not be as optimized as Apple equivalent applications; but still should require fewer resources than today.

 

[pshufd]

Rene Ritchie's advice is the same as mine. If you can afford it, get the 16GB.

Can you get by with 8GB today? Possibly yes. But in the future as your computing needs increase having the 16GB as more of a future proof is alays a good thing. It will make your mac last even longer as a daily driver or usable machine for you. Very few people buy new Macs every year or every other year. So in a few years time when your ASi Mac is full of whatever, and you've used it for a while, having that 16GB there will be very benefitial. You don't know what your RAM needs will be a few years from now. Since you can't upgrade the ram ever apart from at initial purchase, the 16GB is the better option.

One other thing is that the CPU is so powerful on this thing that it could very well provide a decade of usable service. The 2015 MacBook Pro 15 is in this category and I expect mine to last until at least 2025. Of course it will become my backup laptop when a M1X 14 or 16 comes out and I will sell my 2014 which is my current backup.

 

[JeepGuy]

Rene Ritchie's advice is the same as mine. If you can afford it, get the 16GB.

Can you get by with 8GB today? Possibly yes. But in the future as your computing needs increase having the 16GB as more of a future proof is alays a good thing. It will make your mac last even longer as a daily driver or usable machine for you. Very few people buy new Macs every year or every other year. So in a few years time when your ASi Mac is full of whatever, and you've used it for a while, having that 16GB there will be very benefitial. You don't know what your RAM needs will be a few years from now. Since you can't upgrade the ram ever apart from at initial purchase, the 16GB is the better option.

I agree, besides I'm sure as more software gets optimized for the M1, we will start to see some differences.

 

[Jinbei]

I agree, besides I'm sure as more software gets optimized for the M1, we will start to see some differences.

For me optimizing mean more performance with less resources

 

[tiberiu]

I have the mbook pro base with 8GB of RAM.
It looks like to me that it uses the swap memory pretty often, when I opened just Fortnite and nothing else, it had 2 GB in the swap memory.

In the image attached I've had a lot of stuff opened and it has 8GB in the swap, I also did a stress test with everything opened and it had 12GB of swap memory, but the perfomance was still very good, you cannot make the difference when it uses swap vs RAM.

 

[MarkC426]

An issue with that, is the ssd is gonna get hammered, and can‘t be replaced.
This is why people put more ram in their computers..... 😬

 

[pshufd]

An issue with that, is the ssd is gonna get hammered, and can‘t be replaced.
This is why people put more ram in their computers..... 😬

You could get a bigger SSD too.

 

[lairdpopkin]

That's very encouraging news. That being the case, I would still go 16GB just to future-proof.

Now I just have to see if the M1 Mini can drive a 46" Ultrawide screen display but that's in another thread...

There are some comparisons in reviews on YouTube, and their consensus appears to be that the SSD and CPU are so fast in the M1 that 8 GB RAM performs like 16 GB Intel, and 16 GB RAM performs like 32 GB Intel, and that they saw identical performance between 8 and 16 GB except when constructing extreme scenarios that aren't likely to occur for most users (e.g. encoding multiple video 4k video streams, while playing a video game). So while I also usually max out RAM on Apple laptops since they can't be upgraded, so far it sounds hard to prove that it's worth it numerically.

 

[Jinbei]

An issue with that, is the ssd is gonna get hammered, and can‘t be replaced.
This is why people put more ram in their computers..... 😬

Look at the test online, the os do the exact same thing for the 16GB version...

 

[MarkC426]

Exactly, so you need 32 or 64 to avoid the swap.
Biggest blunder from Apple is no upgrade options.

 

[lairdpopkin]

An issue with that, is the ssd is gonna get hammered, and can‘t be replaced.
This is why people put more ram in their computers..... 😬

Modern SSD's have much, much better lifetime write capacity than years ago - failure due to SSD's wearing out is not an issue any more for laptops - they appear at least as good as mechanical hard drives these days in terms of lifetime, and of course they're faster and far more physically durable.

 

[Jinbei]

Exactly, so you need 32 or 64 to avoid the swap.

Or the OS will use the swap anyway, because that is how it works 😄

 

[mlykke]

Modern SSD's have much, much better lifetime write capacity than years ago - failure due to SSD's wearing out is not an issue any more for laptops - they appear at least as good as mechanical hard drives these days in terms of lifetime, and of course they're faster and far more physically durable.

They might be more reliable but swapping is still the last resort for when a computer runs out of memory. Sure the OS might use it to a small degree when running fine, but when the swap hits 7+ GB fast, then thats a clear indication of too little ram. And you will be able to feel it in everyday use if you compare. The SSD is much slower than ram.
The upgrade is only $200, so unless you are strapped for cash(in which case it might make sense to save), then just get the 16 GB unless your workload is very light. Just stop the nonsense of 8 GB M1 = 16 GB Intel because it is wrong in every single way you approach it.

 

[pshufd]

Or the OS will use the swap anyway, because that is how it works 😄

One nice thing about Windows is that you can disable page and swap. You better have a lot of memory though.

 

[Ethosik]

About the 8GB of RAM and you should get more for future cases. Unless you are one of those that are looking forward to the rumored Mac Pro Mini. So my intention is to get 8GB now and upgrade the Mac Mini when the Mac Pro Mini comes out with more RAM that I will use for hopefully 5 years.

 

[limesmoothie]

I've bought an 8gb MBA and an 8gb Mini. Previous machines were an i5 2017 MBP with 8gb, and a 2020 i5 MBA with 16gb.

For my use case (lots of productivity work, multitasking, multimedia consumption, and limited creation e.g. photo editing and screen recording for teaching) the M1s are fantastic and blowing my previous machines out of the water. Battery life is also phenomenal.

As I'm a serial upgrader, and will likely swap out the MBA if there's a major chassis redesign, I went with the 8gb and I'm very glad I did.

 

[pshufd]

I've bought an 8gb MBA and an 8gb Mini. Previous machines were an i5 2017 MBP with 8gb, and a 2020 i5 MBA with 16gb.

For my use case (lots of productivity work, multitasking, multimedia consumption, and limited creation e.g. photo editing and screen recording for teaching) the M1s are fantastic and blowing my previous machines out of the water. Battery life is also phenomenal.

As I'm a serial upgrader, and will likely swap out the MBA if there's a major chassis redesign, I went with the 8gb and I'm very glad I did.

One thing about Apple making their own chips that's nice is that they can upgrade Macs on their own schedule. We may get more frequent refreshes.

 

[Ethosik]

Huge Swap Memory reported using After Effects and M1

Huge Swap Memory...Using After Effects

Even 20GB+ swap every day will not significantly decrease the lifespan of the SSD. You will typically want a new computer in about 5 years, and these SSDs usually have 600+ terabytes written as a specification. That is 330GB+ written to the drive every single day - including weekends and it still lasts 5 years. Get more SSD space if you are that concerned about swap. Higher SSDs have higher TBW.