I think you made a wise decision. I hope your wife enjoys it.OP here. Well after much soul searching, ame good advice here, I decided to go all in and cancelled the 8G memory version and ordered the 16GB version. I also upped the SSD to 1TB.
Why you say? Well this is to be a birthday, wedding anniversary, and retirement gift for my spouse. She tends to hang on to laptops a long, long time time. So I thought I’d do a little future proofing, as well as add more SSD storage so maybe I can use it once in awhile (ha, we shall see if that ever happens)
if this gift fails to please what is Apple’s return policy? If I decided to keep it for myself, I’d probably giggle too much while web couch 🏄
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Old Question-New 15”MBA-Is 8GB RAM Enough for Zoom and Microsoft Office?
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I bought an M2 MBA with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD last Feb. Use it for translation work in MS Word, usually with two dictionaries open and Brave with 1 or 2 tabs. Never pops a sweat! Hardly ever swaps and then it's like 1 or 2 MB, and uses about 8GB of the total 16. The 1TB SSD is far beyond overkill, I keep OS and other installers and lots of MP3s on it and it still has over 850GB free. Your wife should be good for years, and she will love the midnight color. As for port chipping, that is called Aji in Japanese, or "character", showing that the computer has been well used. Don't even think about it. I have the space grey version and the ports are fine, even after constant use connecting backup SSDs. Quite literally, this is the best computer Apple has ever made, great keyboard, good screen and it's so fast, never makes you wait for anything. It is a joy to use. So much that I almost never wake up my old Intel 27" iMac from 2014!
And despite all the people in the thread listing off much more challenging workloads, you've personally seen this happen with Zoom and Microsoft Office?
My MacBook Pro M1 16GB ram see constant 12GB usage and occasional stutter or beachball when all the required app opens. Microsoft office. Discord. Music. Picture. Teams. Safari. A couple system monitoring program and so on.
My M1 8gb Air never does that - last time i saw beachballs was when updated from BigSur to whatever the next newer one. Quickly downgraded and never saw again.
My 14 Pro 16gb does show beachballs. Didn’t have time to tinker but using it with whatever OS it came with. Probably MacOS issue more than anything else.
I have the same workload.
Older system does have fewer nuances to run compared to newer ones so that certainly can be a factor. With ever-updating iOS software, it is quite hard for me to run too old software on Mac while maintaining compatibility with newer ones. As such, even at the same workload, my Mac will run slower year after year.
If I run a couple VM, 16GB will definitely not be enough.
I'm not sure why you're implicating RAM here... You have significantly more than you're using.
Yes, I have 16GB of RAM with 12GB in use. What I want to say is if I go for 8GB, I would be putting SSD under constant swap pressure every moment I use the computer, or forced to open fewer programs. Hence why I say to OP 8GB is not really that efficient and 16GB is better.
Well, sure hope that you are also getting your spouse other gifts as well — romantic ones, sentimental ones, etc.!!
And, are getting separate gifts for each of those occasions — not simply the Mac as an all-in-one gift.
For example, a memory scrapbook of photos of you all as a couple, a candlelight supper that you prepare, a book series your spouse is interested in, rom-com DVDs, several things that fit your spouse's favorite hobby, gift cards for household chores your spouse does but that you will now do, and so on.
Spread out the celebrations, too, so that each even is special, and honored separately. Your spouse deserves that and it will extend the fun and celebrations over more time!
But a MacBook?
I would be THRILLED if my Significant Other (if I had one, lol) gave me a spec’d out Macbook! With the amount of investment, it wouldn’t bother me one bit if it covered birthday, anniversary, etc. IMO, it would be an amazing gift!
All that aside, it shouldn’t have to be a “special occasion” for a spouse/SO to do an extra chore or two, or prepare a special romantic dinner, “just because…”
So if the OP is using Zoom and Office, and you're using Microsoft office, Discord, Music, Picture, Teams, Safari, and a couple system monitoring program and so on, which one is constantly generating new data at a rate that will be causing swap pressure every moment? Most of those look fairly static to me...
Since I'm not hearing a response, I'll fill in what I expect: there's nothing causing swap pressure every moment. None of those apps generate data constantly.
In this case, it's a gift, and a special one at that, so going the extra step to make it a bit more than it really needs to be is appropriate-- but that's an emotional reason, not a technical one.
This is the perfect example of the kind of argument that is causing people to spend more than they need to and/or worry if their beautiful machine might be somehow handicapped. The machine will "stall out" and you should be sure not to launch more than (very specifically) 3 applications? You'll be under "swap pressure" every moment and risk wearing out your SSD? It's just FUD, intentional or not.
Sorry I’m busy so unable to reply to your first reply.
Back a few months ago (3 months iirc), my M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM started to have more frequent beachballs and freeze when using office applications. When I checked activity monitor, the RAM section was in red pressur, and 8GB of swap was used. I had to close almost all programs to bring memory pressure to the halfway mark, eventually decide to restart the machine, bringing pressure back to green with 4GB left and almost no swap. But not long, swap goes to 4GB and memory pressure was high yellow again wtih Beachball.
Later on, I just keep as few applications open (including background ones) as possible to keep memory pressure in low yellow. That keeps the machine happy and decently responsive since, and swap floats around 1GB with 4GB of ram free.
I also proceed to downgrade Photoshop to older version since newer one instantly uses up lots of ram after loading a 1MB JPG for some reason, while older one doesn’t have such behavior (snappier to use as well). I even was thinking about upgrading the machine to 32GB (buying a new one ofc), but ultimately gave up.
I get it, you can just dismiss my experience as fraudulent, or to put it nicely, with unrelated issues, and I don’t mind that. What I want to tell to OP is if his Spouse wants to keep machine for a very long time (4+ years), it is always better to anticipate future workload changes and upgrade a bit more. Even if his spouse uses the computer more or less the same throughout, accompanying application may use more resources anyways.
This sounds to me like something has a pretty serious bug. Your described use case seems to vary from telling to telling, so it's hard to know what applications you're using specifically, but there's no way that office applications should start consuming 24GB of RAM or bring memory pressure into the red.
Even Photoshop, which I don't consider an office app, shouldn't really do that unless you're working on gigapixel images.
This could be your culprit.
Note that Photoshop maintains its own scratch disk file rather than use system swap for most operations, though, so if it starts blowing up your RAM usage it sounds like something has gone haywire.
Still, Photoshop can work in 8GB of RAM, and your 1MB jpeg is as lightweight as it gets for these things, but this wasn't on OPs list of expected apps, so not really relevant to their decision.
Nobody is saying anything is "fraudulent", and it's disappointing that you see my questions that way. In the end though, what you're saying doesn't line up with expectations for RAM requirements or the OPs use case and the way you're saying it is alarmist.
I rather think it is buggy MacOS possibly Monterey early release. Have had the same - 8GB air would turn yellow on memory pressure just by staring at it.
Today, using the base model 15 Air with 8GB RAM, I had Word 365 open, Safari with about 8 tabs, playing YouTube music softly in the background, Parallels with a Win11 VM running--doing Windows updates--and then fired up Zoom. I noticed no issues with slowdowns or stuttering performance. I did not check the actual RAM usage because it ran so smooth that I didn't even think about it. Based on my experience, just having a couple Office 365 Apps open with Zoom, shouldn't be an issue. But, Apple does have a 14 day return policy so you could order a base model and try it. Return for an upgraded model if it doesn't work out for you.
While my wife doesn't need 16GB, I ordered her machine with it. She often leaves lots of apps loaded and keeps tons of browser windows open. She's not particularly good at "managing" the RAM by quitting background apps. And while modern Macs don't generally have too much issue with this, for the $200 difference or whatever it was, I ordered her 15" MBA with 16GB instead of 8GB. I want this machine to last as long as her outgoing machine -- a 2016 15" MBP.
You have too much free memory!
You should have no more than a few hundred Mb of free memory. How do you calculate your free memory?
VMs are a major escalation in RAM usage, though. They use a lot of RAM and I imagine that they cannot readily be swapped to disk except as a single chunk. As opposed to a browser where it might use significant RAM but tabs are be saved to swap when they era not being used.
8Gb is enough for running MS Office, a browser, Zoom/MS Teams and such apps.
You would have to have a lot of browser tabs open each consuming many Gb of RAM and being active before you would notice anything.
I even run virtual machines on Macs with 8Gb of RAM.
If you intend to keep the machine for a long time, 6-10 years, you should consider getting 16Gb RAM since 8Gb might be a little at the end of such a time period.
You would have to have a lot of browser tabs open each consuming many Gb of RAM and being active before you would notice anything.
I even run virtual machines on Macs with 8Gb of RAM.
If you intend to keep the machine for a long time, 6-10 years, you should consider getting 16Gb RAM since 8Gb might be a little at the end of such a time period.
I hear you - I can choke a 16 Gb Mac with PowerPoint alone! But that usually happens when I have 2-4 large (500 mb+) presentations open at the same time and I’m moving slides around.
Either way, 16GB for macOS can make sure the machine can last a relatively long time. As I said in other places and before, even if your usage pattern remains the same, software environments and associated hardware requirements supporting that usage pattern will most likely increase anyways. Especially with current and near future economic conditions, who doesn’t want their stuff last longer unless they absolutely have to replace?
To be honest that is not Mac choking but rather MS office product just like excel does.
For excel, we at work choke the whole computer with 500mb files. But then i put the same dataset into python or SAS, and it doesn’t even blink an eye, which leads me to believe that there is more than enough computing power and it is ms office freezes itself with whole computer.