How? It's 8GB of ram. It's impressive for working as 8GB of ram does on any other Mac.
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16gb is enough for now ,but i plan to keep my mac for 7 years .should i get 32gb ?
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didnt have an intel mac so can't contradict nor confirm that statement . but opening 30 chrome tabs , several pixelmator projects , 10 background services, notes, photos,keynote,pages,whatsapp, telegram,messages,mail,calibre,5 pdf expert windows ,yt music ,calendar, 5 safari tabs , it's still running well
background services such as maccy,alfred,aldente,BTT,adguard system wide adblocker,popclip,dropzone,monitorcontrol,appcleaner,swish,istatMenus,lensOCR,Mos.
to me , this is very impressive lol
7 years is too long. I suppose you can invest the price difference and use money towards an upgrade when and if 16gb will not be enough. Chances are you will get an upgrade on other components that will be as important.
The problem is our experience with updates is skewed. The last several years, before AS, saw little innovation. The 2015 MBP was competitive with all but the 2019 MBP. Will apple slow down now that almost all the machines have Apple Silicon? Hard to tell. But it does seem like AS was a massive jump from intel. Can they do that every year? No. Every couple years? Maybe. If so, then it will be unreasonable to think your machine will be a satisfying experience in 7 years.
Yes that
was almost full.
I’ve had mine a week and had the spinning ball on Google Earth. And CleanMyMac telling me (perhaps for their own benefit) that the RAM
was almost full.
As has been said- I think 7 years is too long. I've tried it a couple of times- future proofing and trying to hang on for a long as possible, but you always spend the last couple of years or more just making do.
Look, I bought 2 top of the range MacbookPros in 2018 and they were over €2500 each. They are both easily outclassed by the 2021 M1 mac which cost €1200 (about. Certainly less than €1500).
And that's the reality. It's not just memory which will be outclassed it will chips, screens, support for the OS and that's just 3 years later. Who knows what else will change? Charging speeds? Ports?
If you factor in the extra cost of Ram and having to change the battery at 3 years probably, is it really worth it???
You are talking of what? $400 for the extra ram? New battery at 3 years or so? $150 So that's $550 towards a new machine at about the 3 year mark +Trade in
Do the maths and maybe the there a sweet point, but in any case, I don't think you'll see a big difference in money and loading up your machine and hoping to make it run for as long as possible definitely isn't the cheapest or best way of doing it in my experience.
Look, I bought 2 top of the range MacbookPros in 2018 and they were over €2500 each. They are both easily outclassed by the 2021 M1 mac which cost €1200 (about. Certainly less than €1500).
And that's the reality. It's not just memory which will be outclassed it will chips, screens, support for the OS and that's just 3 years later. Who knows what else will change? Charging speeds? Ports?
If you factor in the extra cost of Ram and having to change the battery at 3 years probably, is it really worth it???
You are talking of what? $400 for the extra ram? New battery at 3 years or so? $150 So that's $550 towards a new machine at about the 3 year mark +Trade in
Do the maths and maybe the there a sweet point, but in any case, I don't think you'll see a big difference in money and loading up your machine and hoping to make it run for as long as possible definitely isn't the cheapest or best way of doing it in my experience.
I think the current sweet spot is 24Gb. Happy to see that’s avail on m2. When I had 32gb on my Intel Mac, I found my real usage ( without cache use) hovered between 18-20
This is more so based on a general response to the whole conversation happening here...
I have a sample of about 200 machines at my job (IT). What I see regarding RAM and user cases (this is based on machines from around the last 5-6 years, as the older it gets the more RAM it needs to keep up with modern software and websites):
>8GB:VERY light users, people who true only do very few things at a time. Ex: 1 or 2 websites open, while their email is open in the background; streaming a video with usually nothing else open; using messages while listening to music; using a few small MS Office files; editing some photo with some websites open in the background; light games (especially iOS games in Apple Silicon).
16GB-24GB: Sweet spot for the largest range of average users. People who leave a bunch of browser tabs open while working and streaming stuff and messaging people, with 1 or 2 cloud file syncing services (iCloud, OneDrive/Sharepoint, Dropbox, etc). Light virtual machine use. Can pretty much handle all Mac native games, and run lots of heavy virtualized game. App and Web devs as well.
32GB:Good for heavy average users. Lots of browser tabs open, while doing a bunch of other stuff from MS Office to Photoshop and decently size video editing. Lots of gaming, a little heavier virtual machine usages. I'm in this range—I have at least 50 tabs open in Safari (but have had over 100 tabs open), 12 apps open, including Photoshop, cloud file syncing services, etc.
64GB: Serious creatives and really heavy power users. Large and complex image editing, large video editing, and a little bit of both at the same time. Lots of virtual machines. Heavier virtualized games. Lots of stuff the other categories do, but at once. I creep into this category. I'd love and could use 64GB, but I don't need it.
64GB+: Heavy creative professionals, data crunching, simulation, heavy virtual machines, and doing a lot of the stuff 64GB users do, but at once. Anyone who's time is money, where being able to do more at once would save them money over the life of the machine.
On a note regarding unified memory:
It's not some magical form of memory that Apple first implied and some people ran with, but it does have some serious advantages, most related to interchanging data between the CPU and GPU, and the GPU can take advantage of most of that memory (though, most apps/games won't).
Basically, a data can be accessed by the CPU and GPU at once, cutting out the major bottleneck of having to process data in either the CPU or GPU, then pass it onto the other's separate memory pool, and back again. And since the GPU can use most of that memory (what's available) at any given time, it blows away most average vRAM's size limits.
A downside is that, and something that is relevant to this conversion, you're literally sharing the memory. So while the GPU not can access 16GB of memory (for example), not your CPU is sharing that memory.
Let's compare my 2019 intel MBP with 32GB of system RAM and 4GB of vRAM, to my 2021 MacBook M1 Pro with 32GB of unified RAM to see what unified memory really means: my old Intel's CPU has 32GB of system RAM all to itself, but my new M1 Pro has to share that with my GPU. The old Intel had up to 4GB of RAM to use, but the new M1 Pro's GPU can theoretically use almost 32GB (which is pretty crazy). On average, my M1 Pro's GPU uses 2GB of RAM (some of this may not be active memory though), meaning, at face value, my M1 Pro has less memory to work with than my Intel. If I had a very memory intensive app, that didn't care about the GPU, I could potentially run out of memory faster. 32GB helps a lot though, and have never run out if memory in a way that was significant. this could be more pronounced on machines with less memory. In reality though, my M1 Pro is faster than my Intel, overall, so this isn't a real issue in my use case on the M1 Pro machine.
What Apple did to streamline their new machines was to make their unified memory very fast, give us lot of CPU and GPU cores to crunch data quickly, and (in most cases) very fast SSDs, many of which are low-key in a proprietary hardware RAID-like setup. The ARM-based architecture uses significantly less power and produces less heat, so that helps a with throttling as well. It's more efficient overall.
I can tell you, though, paging out from memory to the SSD is still not the most ideal situation, especially when you factor in that not all software is well optimized. I see a lot of people with 8GB models getting the out or memory alert all the time, and have to reboot to continue to work. My 2 coworkers fall into this category too, we're going to upgrade one from the original Air with 8GB, to an M2 Air with 16GB, and the other person from a 14" MBP with 16GB to either an M2 Air with 24GB, or wait for new M2 MBPs with 32GB (he's a heavier user, and underestimated his needs).
Overall, I stand by my categories of memory use cases, and it's based on a large sample size, but users can vary slightly, so it's a broad rage. I really see most people not being ok with 8GB, but there are a few people where it won't matter. I think about every 5-7 years you have to half the usefulness of your memory. Meaning, if 16GB was really goo, but 8GB was only ok, the year you bought the computer, then in about 5-7 years your machine's performance about the same as if you had used 8GB in the first year. An easier way to think of it is, you ideally want to double your RAM every 5-7 years to keep up with software and web services. My 2011 MBP has 16GB of memory and was great from about 2011-2016, then I really started feeling it slow down around that mark, and it's been down hill since. The CPU on it is perfectly fine for most of my uses, but I will that RAM up like crazy trying to keep up with modern tasks. 32GB is ok now, but I image I'll want 64GB in the next 2-3 years.
PS: so for throwing in acronyms and interchanging memory and RAM from time to time, a comment this long got painful to write, but I wanted to spell it all out for anyone that may read this thread lol
I have a sample of about 200 machines at my job (IT). What I see regarding RAM and user cases (this is based on machines from around the last 5-6 years, as the older it gets the more RAM it needs to keep up with modern software and websites):
>8GB:VERY light users, people who true only do very few things at a time. Ex: 1 or 2 websites open, while their email is open in the background; streaming a video with usually nothing else open; using messages while listening to music; using a few small MS Office files; editing some photo with some websites open in the background; light games (especially iOS games in Apple Silicon).
16GB-24GB: Sweet spot for the largest range of average users. People who leave a bunch of browser tabs open while working and streaming stuff and messaging people, with 1 or 2 cloud file syncing services (iCloud, OneDrive/Sharepoint, Dropbox, etc). Light virtual machine use. Can pretty much handle all Mac native games, and run lots of heavy virtualized game. App and Web devs as well.
32GB:Good for heavy average users. Lots of browser tabs open, while doing a bunch of other stuff from MS Office to Photoshop and decently size video editing. Lots of gaming, a little heavier virtual machine usages. I'm in this range—I have at least 50 tabs open in Safari (but have had over 100 tabs open), 12 apps open, including Photoshop, cloud file syncing services, etc.
64GB: Serious creatives and really heavy power users. Large and complex image editing, large video editing, and a little bit of both at the same time. Lots of virtual machines. Heavier virtualized games. Lots of stuff the other categories do, but at once. I creep into this category. I'd love and could use 64GB, but I don't need it.
64GB+: Heavy creative professionals, data crunching, simulation, heavy virtual machines, and doing a lot of the stuff 64GB users do, but at once. Anyone who's time is money, where being able to do more at once would save them money over the life of the machine.
On a note regarding unified memory:
It's not some magical form of memory that Apple first implied and some people ran with, but it does have some serious advantages, most related to interchanging data between the CPU and GPU, and the GPU can take advantage of most of that memory (though, most apps/games won't).
Basically, a data can be accessed by the CPU and GPU at once, cutting out the major bottleneck of having to process data in either the CPU or GPU, then pass it onto the other's separate memory pool, and back again. And since the GPU can use most of that memory (what's available) at any given time, it blows away most average vRAM's size limits.
A downside is that, and something that is relevant to this conversion, you're literally sharing the memory. So while the GPU not can access 16GB of memory (for example), not your CPU is sharing that memory.
Let's compare my 2019 intel MBP with 32GB of system RAM and 4GB of vRAM, to my 2021 MacBook M1 Pro with 32GB of unified RAM to see what unified memory really means: my old Intel's CPU has 32GB of system RAM all to itself, but my new M1 Pro has to share that with my GPU. The old Intel had up to 4GB of RAM to use, but the new M1 Pro's GPU can theoretically use almost 32GB (which is pretty crazy). On average, my M1 Pro's GPU uses 2GB of RAM (some of this may not be active memory though), meaning, at face value, my M1 Pro has less memory to work with than my Intel. If I had a very memory intensive app, that didn't care about the GPU, I could potentially run out of memory faster. 32GB helps a lot though, and have never run out if memory in a way that was significant. this could be more pronounced on machines with less memory. In reality though, my M1 Pro is faster than my Intel, overall, so this isn't a real issue in my use case on the M1 Pro machine.
What Apple did to streamline their new machines was to make their unified memory very fast, give us lot of CPU and GPU cores to crunch data quickly, and (in most cases) very fast SSDs, many of which are low-key in a proprietary hardware RAID-like setup. The ARM-based architecture uses significantly less power and produces less heat, so that helps a with throttling as well. It's more efficient overall.
I can tell you, though, paging out from memory to the SSD is still not the most ideal situation, especially when you factor in that not all software is well optimized. I see a lot of people with 8GB models getting the out or memory alert all the time, and have to reboot to continue to work. My 2 coworkers fall into this category too, we're going to upgrade one from the original Air with 8GB, to an M2 Air with 16GB, and the other person from a 14" MBP with 16GB to either an M2 Air with 24GB, or wait for new M2 MBPs with 32GB (he's a heavier user, and underestimated his needs).
Overall, I stand by my categories of memory use cases, and it's based on a large sample size, but users can vary slightly, so it's a broad rage. I really see most people not being ok with 8GB, but there are a few people where it won't matter. I think about every 5-7 years you have to half the usefulness of your memory. Meaning, if 16GB was really goo, but 8GB was only ok, the year you bought the computer, then in about 5-7 years your machine's performance about the same as if you had used 8GB in the first year. An easier way to think of it is, you ideally want to double your RAM every 5-7 years to keep up with software and web services. My 2011 MBP has 16GB of memory and was great from about 2011-2016, then I really started feeling it slow down around that mark, and it's been down hill since. The CPU on it is perfectly fine for most of my uses, but I will that RAM up like crazy trying to keep up with modern tasks. 32GB is ok now, but I image I'll want 64GB in the next 2-3 years.
PS: so for throwing in acronyms and interchanging memory and RAM from time to time, a comment this long got painful to write, but I wanted to spell it all out for anyone that may read this thread lol
In the same timeframe the size of if the boot drive a heavy user might need could also increase by about 100% at lower capacities (256G and up) but smaller amounts moving into the terabyte ranges.
I want to use the 24" iMac M1/8GB/256GB for 10+ years. The main reasons to retire my 13-year old 27" iMac are related to energy consumption (noise and heat) or wear and tear. The optical SuperDrive is dead, keyboard and mouse are run down and can't hold a charge. I had to replace the HDD and the new one doesn't communicate with the heat sensor, so the fans spin on full speed during boot up. The display shows some minor heat spots and accumulates dust under the glass. But other than that, it's still as brilliant as on day one and too good to throw away.
In my experience you buy a Mac for the design and quality of display and speakers.
If you love it, you will keep it.
In my experience you buy a Mac for the design and quality of display and speakers.
If you love it, you will keep it.
