Resolved Am I going to reget getting only 512 GB on my new Mac?

[xRem]

Since people seem to be genuinely doubting my sanity, I just want to clarify: the software I need for work is REALLY memory hungry. Just google for Power BI and RAM recommendations and you will find plenty of threads on Reddit and who knows where recommending 16 GB as a minimum. This matches my experience. My old laptop had 16 GB Ram and I had crashes due to having not enough memory.

So I really don't want to be running on minimum and therefore I really need to be able to assign more than 16 to Parallels. If I had gone with 32 GB, I could have assigned 24 to Parallels and left 8 GB to myself. But if I had wanted to quickly do something in Lightroom while Power BI is busy refreshing data (with the amount of data I am running for clients a refresh can take 20, 30 minutes), I am not sure if 8 GB would have been good enough. So really, for me, it was a choice between getting 32 GB and risking slow downs in some cases or having 64 GB and peace of mind. If there had been a 48 GB option that would have probably been the perfect fit for me. But that's unfortunately not an option.

 

[BellSystem]

Given the choice, I would opt for the 512 and the extra RAM. It is pretty clear that RAM cannot be upgraded later yet one can get fairly fast communication to external drives and RAID setups. The latter is nothing new for those that engage various media files whether video, music or still. I am using an M1 Mac Mini with 512/16. The 16 gigs is often getting "filled up" and it can be as simple as MacRumor's web pages taking 1-2 gigs alone. Get a 1tb internal with 32 gigs and you may be happy now but in the future, again NO RAM upgrades.

On a desktop, sure. You could throw your home directory on external storage and never look back. Laptop, this is a poor choice in my eyes. Taking advantage of 64GB of RAM is hard. Even with A/V workflows. 32 is the sweet spot. There are plenty of examples out there. To bottle neck the storage for RAM you’ll likely never use seems short sighted. File sizes are more likely to rise before you’ll need the RAM. MacOS also loves to dump things in RAM that are idle even when you have GB for days. You’d have to be doing some crazy stuff or keep the thing for 20 years to see real benefit. Apple will likely obsolete the thing with OS updates before you say “good thing I got the extra RAM”. But by then you will have a dead SSD from all the extra writes trying to manage space creep.

Apply your logic to a Mac Mini or Studio…I’m 100% with you.

 

[Andrea Filippini]

First time Mac owner here. I decided to make the jump from Win to Mac recently and I have now gotten my MBP 14" M1 Max with 64 GB RAM and... well... 512 GB SSD. It was a deal and I am confident that I will eventually need the RAM down the line (since I will have to run a Windows VM for the time being in Parallels and the specific software I need tends to hog RAM, so I want to give Parallels at least 24 or 32 GB to work with). But now I am starting to wonder about my SSD. Will it last me?

My use cases are:
- Running Windows in Parallels for work (VM won't need to be massive, my actual space requirements for my job are fairly small since I just need one specific piece of software)
- Lightroom Classic (storing pictures on a NAS, so I only need my catalogue locally)
- Premiere Pro (this one might be tough since I do edit 4k videos...)
- Browsing and other casual stuff

So what can I do about the space? I am considering getting one of these external drives, like the Samsung T7, but will that make sense? From my understanding my internal SSD in my Mac is blazing fast, so the T7 might be comparably slow... but is this slowness something I will notice in day to day life or is the speed difference only going to be notable when I am moving large files from A to B?

Personally I would get at least 1TB for basically two reasons:
1. Storage is soldered so you can't upgrade/fix it after purchase (but you can extend warranty with AppleCare)
2. File size is dramatically increased nowadays (4K-5K videos, high-resolution photos etc.). It's true that music is no more downloaded due to online services access (Spotify, Apple Music etc.) and movies and tv series are experienced via internet platforms (Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime etc.) but a spacious storage is mandatory even more so with a soldered storage and your daily use of Adobe Creative Cloud (Lightroom, Premiere Pro etc.).

 

[phrehdd]

On a desktop, sure. You could throw your home directory on external storage and never look back. Laptop, this is a poor choice in my eyes. Taking advantage of 64GB of RAM is hard. Even with A/V workflows. 32 is the sweet spot. There are plenty of examples out there. To bottle neck the storage for RAM you’ll likely never use seems short sighted. File sizes are more likely to rise before you’ll need the RAM. MacOS also loves to dump things in RAM that are idle even when you have GB for days. You’d have to be doing some crazy stuff or keep the thing for 20 years to see real benefit. Apple will likely obsolete the thing with OS updates before you say “good thing I got the extra RAM”. But by then you will have a dead SSD from all the extra writes trying to manage space creep.

Apply your logic to a Mac Mini or Studio…I’m 100% with you.

RAM challenges often depend on what type of applications one wishes to use and if you use a VM, you certainly do want more RAM. Btw, I have had up until a few months ago a 2015 Macbook Pro and I had absolutely zero issues keeping an external SSD for use and storage. The MBP was 512/16 and did suffer from time to time due to limited RAM. I also used a VM and pretty much closed out apps on the OSX/MacOS side to get best performance from the VM.

 

[kschendel]

Oooof 350. Thats 68% at capacity. It’s gonna creep up. I don’t even get why Apple sells such a small drive in 2022. I would have traded half the RAM for more storage. At 32GB you’d have a hard time filling that with most tasks. I went 512 once and it sucked having to constantly deal with space creep.

That's 350 available, not 350 used, and there's no reason why it has to creep up to fill the drive if you are reasonably disciplined and can save off old / inactive stuff to an outboard drive for archival storage.

OP has explained why his particular use case might need 64 GB of RAM. Having used some BI tools myself, I can see where even 32 GB might be a little tight. It's too bad that the next increment has to be another doubling, but that's just how it is.