Is a M1 8gb good for me?

[Dentifrice]

Hi,

So someone I know wants to buy a mac studio and is willing to sell me his mac mini m1 for half the price ($700 CAD).

It has 8gb of ram and 512gb of ssd.

The most intense task I do : Lightroom CC and some final cut editing (very light videos I do from my iphone 11 at 4k/60fps).

I also have a usb-c 4k display (scaled to 1440p) and a second 1440p hdmi display.

Do you see a problem in term of performance?

Will it swap so much with 8gb that it will kill my ssd? How does M1 perform with scaled resolutions?

I currently have a macbook pro 13 2020 with 16gb of ram. It performs OK but not great either. The fans are very often running at max speed and it gets hots easily. I also feel the performance drop with scaled resolution.

Any known limitations with M1 that could hit me?

Thanks

 

[Fishrrman]

Unless you are REALLY hurting for money, I would advise against this.

I would not consider ANY m-series Mac UNLESS it has 16gb or more of RAM.

Because... with the m-series CPU's...
"16gb is 'the new 8'"...

Buying an m-series Mac with 8gb in 2022... would be like buying a 2014 Mac Mini with 4gb in 2015. The low amount of RAM will strangle it in the future...

 

[Dentifrice]

Ok thanks! I will not buy it in that case and keep using my mbp 2020!

 

[theluggage]

So someone I know wants to buy a mac studio and is willing to sell me his mac mini m1 for half the price ($700 CAD).

Ideally, I would get 16GB minimum for anything other than "office productivity" use, and I wouldn't buy a regular M1 or lower-end (8-core) M1 Pro machine now with the M2 rumored to be coming Real Soon Now (at least wait till WWDC in June). If you're using a MacBook Pro now, do you need the portability? With Apple Silicon there's far less performance/spec difference between laptop and desktop - so if you have any need for portability it's best to get a laptop.

But Apple sure ain't gonna halve prices at WWDC - and half price for an 18-month old Mac isn't bad. The question is (not something you need to discuss here), can you reasonably afford anything better? Because it's probably going to be faster than your MacBook Pro.

Will it swap so much with 8gb that it will kill my ssd?

I'm not saying that it's a non-issue - and I'll never see soldered-in SSDs as anything other than a downvote - but if the worst, early scare stories of ridiculous swapping hadn't been largely fixed by now, we'd be deep into "SSDgate" and multiple tales of prematurely dead Macs. Just close your web browser tabs when you're done with them

How does M1 perform with scaled resolutions?

Better than an Intel Mac with integrated graphics....

I currently have a macbook pro 13 2020 with 16gb of ram. It performs OK but not great either. The fans are very often running at max speed and it gets hots easily. I also feel the performance drop with scaled resolution.

The Intel 13" MacBook Pro was never exactly a powerhouse - esp. the i5 "2 port" version.
First - you could run Activity Monitor and look at the "memory pressure" ('memory used' is not that helpful - macOS finds uses for 'spare' RAM) at a time when the Mac is struggling - if that's not in the green on a 16GB Mac then I'd forget any thought of "downgrading" to 8GB.

If it's in the green, you could try creating an 8GB RAM disk to "simulate" only having 8GB RAM and see how that affects the memory pressure. (Disclaimer - haven't tried that myself).

I'm not completely disagreeing with @Fishrrman here and probably wouldn't get an 8GB Mac myself - just maybe seeing it a bit less black and white (having used an 8GB Mac for years, including virtual machines and light video editing/transcoding, without really hitting RAM problems).

 

[Joestanxx]

Hi,

So someone I know wants to buy a mac studio and is willing to sell me his mac mini m1 for half the price ($700 CAD).

It has 8gb of ram and 512gb of ssd.

The most intense task I do : Lightroom CC and some final cut editing (very light videos I do from my iphone 11 at 4k/60fps).

I also have a usb-c 4k display (scaled to 1440p) and a second 1440p hdmi display.

Do you see a problem in term of performance?

Will it swap so much with 8gb that it will kill my ssd? How does M1 perform with scaled resolutions?

I currently have a macbook pro 13 2020 with 16gb of ram. It performs OK but not great either. The fans are very often running at max speed and it gets hots easily. I also feel the performance drop with scaled resolution.

Any known limitations with M1 that could hit me?

Thanks

I sold my m1 Mac mini with 8gb when the studio came out. I was a great machine never had any problems running out of ram.

 

[now i see it]

Email, casual online web browsing, occasional little things done on the Mac = 8 GB is perfectly fine.

But if much time is spent with video editing or Adobe software, you’ll wish you had 16 GB (or 32).

 

[Dentifrice]

Thanks guys. I’ll wait for a M2 mac mini

 

[Dentifrice]

Ideally, I would get 16GB minimum for anything other than "office productivity" use, and I wouldn't buy a regular M1 or lower-end (8-core) M1 Pro machine now with the M2 rumored to be coming Real Soon Now (at least wait till WWDC in June). If you're using a MacBook Pro now, do you need the portability? With Apple Silicon there's far less performance/spec difference between laptop and desktop - so if you have any need for portability it's best to get a laptop.

But Apple sure ain't gonna halve prices at WWDC - and half price for an 18-month old Mac isn't bad. The question is (not something you need to discuss here), can you reasonably afford anything better? Because it's probably going to be faster than your MacBook Pro.



I'm not saying that it's a non-issue - and I'll never see soldered-in SSDs as anything other than a downvote - but if the worst, early scare stories of ridiculous swapping hadn't been largely fixed by now, we'd be deep into "SSDgate" and multiple tales of prematurely dead Macs. Just close your web browser tabs when you're done with them


Better than an Intel Mac with integrated graphics....


The Intel 13" MacBook Pro was never exactly a powerhouse - esp. the i5 "2 port" version.
First - you could run Activity Monitor and look at the "memory pressure" ('memory used' is not that helpful - macOS finds uses for 'spare' RAM) at a time when the Mac is struggling - if that's not in the green on a 16GB Mac then I'd forget any thought of "downgrading" to 8GB.

If it's in the green, you could try creating an 8GB RAM disk to "simulate" only having 8GB RAM and see how that affects the memory pressure. (Disclaimer - haven't tried that myself).

I'm not completely disagreeing with @Fishrrman here and probably wouldn't get an 8GB Mac myself - just maybe seeing it a bit less black and white (having used an 8GB Mac for years, including virtual machines and light video editing/transcoding, without really hitting RAM problems).

Memory pressure is green. I think the resolution scaling impact a lot. Scrolling a website isn’t super smooth when using my external display but OK when using it alone.

BTW I have the 4 ports version

Edit: looks like all the choppiness was solved by a reboot.

 

[arpd1971]

Email, casual online web browsing, occasional little things done on the Mac = 8 GB is perfectly fine.

But if much time is spent with video editing or Adobe software, you’ll wish you had 16 GB (or 32).

Totally agree. I got an M1 mini, 8/256 - almost all my work is Office, the very occasional still photo edit. When I got it i did a check by opening ALL my daily apps and a half dozen browser tabs and checking the memory pressure - it was green so i kept it.

I also imagine I'll upgrade in about 3 years, so I was figuring that kind of lifespan - how long you need it to last may be another factor.

Very little swapping for me. So hopefully the SSD will be fine.

 

[Kaikidan]

I have an M1 8gb, works nice, but I plan to update in the future to an M2/M3 with 16gb, I rarelly get to yellow pressure on mine, but that requires a lot of micromanagging RAM specially with browser tabs. I really don't need much more than 8gb now, but it will be good for keeping the machine for more than 2 years.

 

[Admiral]

In respect of whether 8GB RAM is "enough", I have today discovered the following:

In December 2020 I bought two M1 Mac minis, one for me at the office and one for my wife at home. My wife is clueless and insensitive to computer specifications, and has no idea what she's using. I am rather sensitive to these things — or so I thought. So, I bought her an 8GB mini, and 16GB for me in the office.

But today I found out after installing the mac OS 12.5 beta and looking at "About My Mac" that the one on my desk at the office is the 8GB model. I've been using it all this time for all kinds of intensive tasks including editing 1080p video in Final Cut Pro, and hadn't noticed. I haven't encountered any memory pressure issues at all.

While I agree that 16GB is probably a sensible choice, and routinely spec additional memory in the other Macs I buy, I can confidently report that there's no reason to be concerned that 8GB is insufficient.

 

[George Dawes]

Definitely get the 16gb Ram , you can always add hd space later via the rear expansion ports, can't do the same with the Ram

 

[trevoz]

I use my base model M1 Mac mini 8G/256G for software development for macOS and (cross compiling) for Windows (x86_64) - no issues at all with the speed of the machine or with the amount of memory. For the last 18 months it has also been doing large automated software builds twice a day, every day. The SSD remaining life is currently rated at 99%, so there's no issue with it being exhuasted before the machine gets replaced.

I find the M1 better than my 2018 Mac mini 16/1T which is now only used for running Windows VMs to test software developed on the M1. For everything else I'm using a 2011 Mac mini 16G/1T running FreeBSD