im planing on purchasing an M1 macbook air soon, for doing photoshop, lightroom, some light video editing and coding on it, doing all of this while connected to an external display , I have only the budget to upgrade the RAM OR the SSD but not both , which one should I upgrade ??
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macbook air 8gb vs 16gb
- Thread starter lorgonoir
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trevpimp
macrumors 6502a
I would upgrade the RAM and save up for a external solid state drive. Whichever feels best for you and your MacBook
Btw I did a test see how well my MacBook Air 256gb 8gb ram did I opened a galore of apps including Xcode, Survival Z, playing videos Apple TV, over 4 Twitch streaming tabs on different streamers, opened tons of apps preinstalled on MacOS, garage band, my macbook got warm to the touch with a ton of apps opened and running, I'm more than happy with what 8GB could fluently run
Btw I did a test see how well my MacBook Air 256gb 8gb ram did I opened a galore of apps including Xcode, Survival Z, playing videos Apple TV, over 4 Twitch streaming tabs on different streamers, opened tons of apps preinstalled on MacOS, garage band, my macbook got warm to the touch with a ton of apps opened and running, I'm more than happy with what 8GB could fluently run
No doubt. If you absolutely must choose only one, choose RAM since there is no way to upgrade after the fact. You can always add a fast, external Thunderbolt/USB4 SSD. Not as convenient as having the SSD internal to the MacBook but doable.
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16GB of RAM>Extra Storage>Extra GPU Core
That being said if you can get it on an Education Store Discount you can get the 512 SSD/8 Core GPU for $1149 add $180 for 16 GB of RAM for a total of $1329 (plus tax), so if you were budgeting say $1200 (sans tax) then that's just an extra $129 to get it ALL (16GB of RAM, Double SSD Storage @ 512GB, Extra GPU Core)
That being said if you can get it on an Education Store Discount you can get the 512 SSD/8 Core GPU for $1149 add $180 for 16 GB of RAM for a total of $1329 (plus tax), so if you were budgeting say $1200 (sans tax) then that's just an extra $129 to get it ALL (16GB of RAM, Double SSD Storage @ 512GB, Extra GPU Core)
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RAM! But really depends on your use case. I have 8GB; had no regrets until I was suddenly able to run Windows on my M1 MacBook Air.