$950 seems like roughly $950 more than nothing to me. Apple doesn't offer retail value for trade-ins (nor do other businesses). You have to sell it yourself to get the retail value of your used equipment.
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I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM
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lol, that's not how it works. everyone says the same thing - sell it yourself get more. Sure, but my time is worth a lot more than selling it myself and the risks as well. I'm not in the market to buy and sell things. $950 is an FU for all apple hardware buyers. 4 month old brand new laptop for $950, you gotta be dumb to part ways at this price. It's not like the laptop doesn't work either. anyway, this is off topic. Just buy what you like and use it. stop moping around the 8GB vs 16GB - you can get 8GB now, order the 16GB, wait until return window in 2021 and keep either the 8GB or 16GB model by then.
Your views mystify me! Hard to imagine how you imagine businesses are supposed to work, but none I know of work the way you seem to think they should.
This is the only question that needs asking when deciding between 8gb and 16gb.
I am probably in two minds. I run a 2009 MacBook White which I have upgraded. Of course it lacks processor grunt but does have 8GB RAM and two SSD's (slow cheap ones admittedly). Works just fine unless I play Roblox games with my daughters then the graphics and processor struggle.
My eldest daughters MacBook Air (which we are just about to replace) is 2011, i5 with 4GB RAM and a 2012 1TB OWC replacement SSD. That runs the same games with no problem at all.
Superficially admittedly and not an extensive study but this suggests processor speed may be more important than RAM. However, I am no expert so feel free to flame me!
My eldest daughters MacBook Air (which we are just about to replace) is 2011, i5 with 4GB RAM and a 2012 1TB OWC replacement SSD. That runs the same games with no problem at all.
Superficially admittedly and not an extensive study but this suggests processor speed may be more important than RAM. However, I am no expert so feel free to flame me!
If you're planning keeping it for 5 years plus would it not make sense to spend an extra $200 for the extra ram so it's there for the future as machines usually slow down with age? I'm still using my late 2012 iMac and will upgrade next year when the arm iMacs come out, I will then get at least 16gb ram and keep for a minimum of 5 years or longer if there's no real issues.
Thank you for the clarification. The CPU die image I saw on Ananadtech gave me the impression the RAM was on the die.
That may be the situation for this particular use case. Other use cases may have different requirements.
A system is only as fast as the slowest component a specific work load depends on. If your use case requires a specific amount of memory, say 16GB, and you're using an 8GB system then your use case is limited to the speed of moving information to and from RAM and the SSD.
While SSDs have decreased the impact of low RAM situations they are no substitute for RAM. I mentioned earlier that the SSD in my M1 Mini is capable of reading data at 2.1GB/sec and writing it at 2.5GB/sec. RAM in the M1 systems is rated at approximately 60GB/sec.
One of the speed enhancing steps Apple made with the M1 was to create Unified Memory. The idea behind Unified Memory is to ensure all the different components that needed access to data had access to data without the need to shuffle around. Each component, such as the GPU, had direct access to the same memory as the CPU. By doing this performance could be increased.
Now you have a number of people who are effectively recommending negating this performance benefit by recommending using even slower SSDs. Instead of keeping everything the shared memory the recommendation is to go out and retrieve data from SSD through the virtual memory paging system. Now you have a high performance CPU which cannot perform to its peak because it's waiting on data from a, relatively speaking, slow SSD. That doesn't make sense.
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This is the right answer. More ram will give you more longevity out of the system. Future OSs will use more ram, newer apps will need more RAM. If you are the type that upgrades your systems every 1-2 years, then 8gb should be fine. But if you are going to keep it for 5 or more, then go ahead and upgrade the ram
I agree but for the lay man there is no use case for 16GB of RAM. High end usage yes but those will be people who are Tech savvy and know what they need. The rest of us? Honestly 4GB is still enough, maybe 8GB for future proofing. Fast SSD's yep do it.
Lots of RAM anxiety in this thread.
There's more than one kind of future proofing. If you know what you'll be using your M1 for the next five years, and it doesn't require more than 8GB, you can invest your $200 in mutual funds and future proof that way instead.
There's more than one kind of future proofing. If you know what you'll be using your M1 for the next five years, and it doesn't require more than 8GB, you can invest your $200 in mutual funds and future proof that way instead.
Here a little demonstration 15 live streams and prime number search in backround, no lags with 8GB ram. I dont need more ram : )
Exactly. I compare Apple still offering an 8GB option for RAM like they still offered that low end Fusion Drive as an option. It “works” but yeah
decided to order 16GB ram option for m1 mini - I have multiple users on one system, the extra ram makes a huge difference when multiple users have apps open and running.
Apparently you do not. Though I am not surprised as streaming video and searching for prime numbers aren't memory intensive use cases.
How does that align with the statement "Intel GPU allocates 2GB of RAM no matter what you are doing"?
Yes, it's a downgrade. Unless you're running an extremely processor intensive task for longer than 10-15 minutes at a time, you will get the same identical performance from the MBA as the MBP. Even then, the thermal throttling differences that I've seen are like 15%, not a deal breaker for most.
So you're losing the 16GB ram and 512GB SSD for basically nothing, IMHO. I guess the extra battery life would be nice if you're the type to roam away from power for a long time, but if it were me I'd rather have the memory and esp. SSD.
guys its really simple.
if you dont venture out of office, mail, web browsing, you dont need 16gb.
if you're running some kind of proprietary application, vm, emulation, multitask you probably need 16gb, but can get away with 8gb if your system isn't under load always
if your system is always going to be on load, compiling, running proprietary apps, vm, you WILL need 16gb
the disk caching is not anything to worry about unless your SSD is always over 80% capacity + always under load + always getting extra r/w added. its not 2012 anymore, its actually really hard for 1 user to wear out NAND now. this is well studied.
if you dont venture out of office, mail, web browsing, you dont need 16gb.
if you're running some kind of proprietary application, vm, emulation, multitask you probably need 16gb, but can get away with 8gb if your system isn't under load always
if your system is always going to be on load, compiling, running proprietary apps, vm, you WILL need 16gb
the disk caching is not anything to worry about unless your SSD is always over 80% capacity + always under load + always getting extra r/w added. its not 2012 anymore, its actually really hard for 1 user to wear out NAND now. this is well studied.
Actually, it was only meant to align to you writing “Not seeing 2Gb usage from the OS only..”