I didn't notice a huge amount of difference with turbo boost disabled opening and working inside of office apps, all this did was for prolonged workloads kept the CPU running cooler for a longer period, improving battery life and cooler running. TB is a funny thing, when used as intended i.e. to quickly apply max power to get things opened it really works well, if you use the intel tools and watch the temp and power spike as you interact you can see why this quickly runs out of steam and settles as around 2.x GHz. I would suggest you try settings on, as your work profile may well be very different to mine and disabling is just not necessary.
Good info. Thanks.
16GB RAM is a good option, this allows you to have apps loaded in memory for quick recall which greatly improves user experience.
What specific workflows does your wife have that makes you think she needs 16GB RAM in her new computer?
If she already has a mac of some sort, run Activity Monitor and look at the Memory tab / Memory Pressure graph while she's doing her typical type of usage. If you don't know how to interpret the info post it here and folks will assist.
Unless you can point to the specific reason why she needs the upgraded RAM, I'd suggest not spending the money.
Most folks simply don't need (and won't benefit) from upgraded memory. Those who do have a need for it typically know exactly why they need it. It's sort of a "if you have to ask, you probably don't" kinda thing. (While caching stuff in memory used to make a notable difference back in the slow HDD days, with today's SSDs it's not going to be noticeable outside of a benchmark.)
All that said, it won't hurt anything but your wallet to spend the money - but don't plan on seeing more than a small fraction of the money come back in resale.
So two different perspectives. Regarding your suggestion to look at Activity Monitor...my experience has been that OSX will use up a good chunk of however much memory you have. For example, I'm just browsing the web with Safari (several tabs open - as is usually the case with me) and I have MS Excel open, but my 32GB MacBook Pro 16 is showing "Memory Used" as 21.70 GB. But you also mentioned Memory Pressure, so maybe that's the key? Right now, my MBP 16's Memory Pressure graph is green and flat.
To be honest, since posting my question, I've actually dialed things back. I'm now leaning towards getting her the i5 / 8GB / 256GB config. I don't think she'll have a need for the extra RAM, and the fact that Apple still keeps the base and recommended upgrade configs both at 8GB gives me hope that they won't change things in OSX for the forseeable future such that 8GB will feel limiting. When I bought my MBP 16 a few months ago, I did upgrade that to 32GB, but I'm a software developer, and figured I might want to do some stuff with Docker and/or a Windows VM.
The main thing my wife might do to "push" her Air would be some occasional 1080p iMovie editing/exporting, and it doesn't sound like upgrading the RAM will necessarily have much, if any, impact on that, but upgrading to the i5 should (unless doing that editing/exporting is going to cause the computer to overheat and lock up).
As for the 256GB storage...I was originally planning on 512GB, because she only had about 22 GB free on her 2018 MBA 256GB model, but after changing her Photos/Preferences/iCloud settings to "Optimize Mac Storage", a lot of space freed up. I also upped our iCloud plan to 2TB, and am thinking that she should be able to move a bunch of the stuff she's currently got under her Documents folder (which accounts for about 70+ GB of her current storage) to free up even more space. Another alternative would be our Microsoft cloud drive, where we've got a lot of space as part of paying the annual price for MS Office. And I'm thinking that I might invest in an external SSD of some sort for temporary storage needed when doing iMovie editing. But if anyone thinks I'm skimping too much by not upgrading to 512GB, let me know your thoughts.
