I'm still within the return period on my newly purchased M3 Macbook Pro, 16 GB RAM. I don't use any Adobe apps. I frequently have several apps open related to music, as well as several Firefox tabs open at a time. On Activity Monitor, I've had Firefox use up to 9GB and the reader get up to yellow while streaming ESPN. Otherwise, the computer is regularly using 12-13 GB of RAM. I plan to keep this computer for as long as it is supported by Apple. In your opinion(s), would a return and upgrade to 24 GB RAM be worth it?
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M3 Macbook Pro 16GB RAM...
- Thread starter Vacio
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macOS will "fill up" whatever ram you have, viewing empty ram as wasted ram. I wouldn't jump the gun on upgrading ram unless you see it turn red and/or have an aversion to swap usage. But seeing yellow is definitely a warning sign.
The issue with the M3 (base?) Macbook Pro is that you've already solved the bottleneck of the ram issue with the base spec, but I wouldn't spend more on that machine to get to 24gb. You'd probably just be better off with the 18gb M3 Pro for that price, plus you'd get an extra 2gb of ram to boot. I would test out one of those first.
I just picked up a 16" M3 Macbook Pro with 36gb ram and have to say -- it's blazing fast.
The issue with the M3 (base?) Macbook Pro is that you've already solved the bottleneck of the ram issue with the base spec, but I wouldn't spend more on that machine to get to 24gb. You'd probably just be better off with the 18gb M3 Pro for that price, plus you'd get an extra 2gb of ram to boot. I would test out one of those first.
I just picked up a 16" M3 Macbook Pro with 36gb ram and have to say -- it's blazing fast.
Thanks for your input. It's worth noting that when it was yellow, I manually deleted that process of 9GB cached web content on the Activity Monitor, which crashed the ESPN tab and left the others unaffected. Since restarting the computer and updating Firefox the monitor is consistently green. And I forgot to note that I have 2 TB SSD on this machine, due to my music collection which I like to have locally stored as well as backed up on external drives, which I assume due to swapping would help with the RAM issue.