Before you buy a new Mac with just 8GB RAM, know this.

[msackey]

I'm sure you're correctly reporting on your experience and your use case. My needs do not differ substantially from what you describe. Nonetheless, I intend to purchase a 16/512 or even 16/1 version of the 15" MBA M2. The reason is simple - I tend to keep my computers for a long time, 5+ years at a minimum. In that scenario, while the 8/512 MBA may be perfectly fine for such tasks TODAY, and perhaps the next 2-3 years, I wonder whether that would be true longer term. The OS in not actually the only or biggest issue, since we know that Apple tends to support most hardware for at least 5 years or so, with security updates for some time after. My bigger consideration is with third party applications, what happens with their RAM needs in the future? [....]

I agree with the OP's point and also with yours!

For people who really tend not to deviate much beyond office-type software, perhaps 8GB for the long term would be enough. For those who are just a bit beyond the office-type software even if just once in a while (I count myself in that camp) going with the 16GB might be a good route especially if one intends to keep the machine for years, and I do mean years as in 5+.

I currently have a 2017 MBP touchbar (8GB RAM) and really hope I can keep it until at least 2027. My needs aren't great but 3rd-party software updates might make the machine slow at some point. Right now, it's working just fine.

 

[msackey]

Nothing sums up these multiple discussions in this forum – and elsewhere in the web – than this sentence.

If your base M1 Air runs fine with its 8GB of AM, then it runs fine. Why care about the memory swap if it doesn't influence the experience you have with your device? Apple Silicon is designed to work that way.

I love your characterization of it.

It's like data trumps actual lived experience, when actually it DOESN'T! Like you said, if the base M1 runs fine for someone's experience, then that's what it is: it runs fine. No amount of data quantification or whatnot should be able to tell that person, who says their experience is fine, that their experience isn't fine!

Why should data trump lived experience in this case?

 

[msackey]

I understand but my point is that to me its on the edge with yellow memory pressure on basic tasks. If I wanted to fire up iMovie or Final Cut I'd most likely have to close down some apps. plus I'd want my machine to last at least 7 years. My entry 2015 MacBook Pro came with 16 gig. I just can't see 8 gig being able to cope in 5-7 years time.

If in your case opening up iMovie or Final Cut is something you actually do (i.e; it isn't something you're doing just to try to tax the system), and it doesn't run fine, then it doesn't run fine. If it does run fine, then it's fine.

My 2017 MBP touchbar came with 8GB (base memory configuration). It's 2023. It still runs just fine for what I use it for. In fact, in previous years I even ran VMWare emulating Windows 10 while also running Mac stuff and it was fine.

 

[adamlbiscuit]

My M1 MacBook Air (8 GB RAM) falls into yellow memory pressure regularly and uses swap on the daily. I mainly just browse the web (here, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter), listen to music and check emails. Most of the time when it starts swapping it's because of sites like Reddit and YouTube taking up over a gig each.

However, I wouldn't even know the system was swapping or that it was struggling at all if I didn't look at Activity Monitor. I guess we all have different expectations from our machines. Wanting to have more headroom is valid IMO.

For me personally, I don't consider lack of RAM to be an issue until you either:

A) Notice slowdown and lack of responsiveness (that you can spot without having to go looking for it e.g. in Activity Monitor)

B) Receive the dreaded 'Your system has ran out of application memory' message

I have experienced A) on only a couple of occasions, mainly using Pixelmator Pro to apply colour adjustments to (very) high resolution images, or do ML upscaling on already high-res / detailed images.

I have only experienced B) once the whole time I've owned the machine, and that was due to a memory leak in an unoptimised app.

Note: the M1 MacBook Air is my secondary Mac. I was burned by a lack of RAM on my old Mac mini which I ended up using for more complex tasks. I've since rectified that by getting a new Mac mini with 24 GB RAM (overcompensating admittedly - I wanted more headroom in this case) but it was an expensive mistake!

 

[saudor]

Yet another RAM post. People should just buy what they want or vote with their wallet.

 

[smirking]

Dare I say the 8GB MacBook Air M2 feels snappier than my M1 Pro with 16GB and it hasn't skipped a beat? The only people complaining about 8GB are the ones who use video or photo editing software it seems.

I also had a very good experience on the original 13" M1 MBP on just 8GB of RAM. I even did plenty of photo editing on it. Most of the things it had difficulty with bottlenecked regardless of if I was running them with lots of other background apps or as the only task running so RAM wasn't likely the reason for the bottleneck.

At this moment in computing history, RAM still matters, but just a lot less than most people believe. A lot has changed since the days when swapping to slow HDDs was the kiss of death. On most computers, 8GB is sufficient for everyday computing and even some intense applications.

Right now I'm a dev who compiles software, runs virtual servers, runs Windows, does lots of photo editing, and lots of other things on a 16GB M1 Pro and I run it hard. I expect that I probably had some minor issues with running out of RAM and just didn't know it, but it's telling that even after 2 years I haven't noticed any bottlenecks significant enough that I felt like investigating.

Good to get this feedback from you because the Airs are starting to look so good that they're going to be an option for me in a year or two when it's time for me to upgrade from my M1 Pro.

 

[Warped9]

I had this very conversation this afternoon with a customer regarding RAM as he contemplated purchasing a new iMac. For his needs as he expressed to me 8/256 would work perfectly fine for him. That said he would still prefer 512-1TB of storage.

 

[StoneJack]

I had this very conversation this afternoon with a customer regarding RAM as he contemplated purchasing a new iMac. For his needs as he expressed to me 8/256 would work perfectly fine for him. That said he would still prefer 512-1TB of storage.

thats perfectly fine, if he has budget then why not?

 

[1@@@]

_

 

[kitenski]

M1 air user with 16gb, I've Edge personal open with 9 tabs in two groups, 17 others open, Edge Work open with 13 tabs open, Outlook and Teams open and I'm using more than 8gb! Also Terminal, RDP open but not in use.

 

[JamesMay82]

My M1 MacBook Air (8 GB RAM) falls into yellow memory pressure regularly and uses swap on the daily. I mainly just browse the web (here, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter), listen to music and check emails. Most of the time when it starts swapping it's because of sites like Reddit and YouTube taking up over a gig each.

However, I wouldn't even know the system was swapping or that it was struggling at all if I didn't look at Activity Monitor. I guess we all have different expectations from our machines. Wanting to have more headroom is valid IMO.

For me personally, I don't consider lack of RAM to be an issue until you either:

A) Notice slowdown and lack of responsiveness (that you can spot without having to go looking for it e.g. in Activity Monitor)

B) Receive the dreaded 'Your system has ran out of application memory' message

I have experienced A) on only a couple of occasions, mainly using Pixelmator Pro to apply colour adjustments to (very) high resolution images, or do ML upscaling on already high-res / detailed images.

I have only experienced B) once the whole time I've owned the machine, and that was due to a memory leak in an unoptimised app.

Note: the M1 MacBook Air is my secondary Mac. I was burned by a lack of RAM on my old Mac mini which I ended up using for more complex tasks. I've since rectified that by getting a new Mac mini with 24 GB RAM (overcompensating admittedly - I wanted more headroom in this case) but it was an expensive mistake!

is your M2 Mac mini a base spec with the ram and SSD upgrade? or did you go with a pro? I think when I do upgrade my personal machine a Mac mini is on the short list but can't make up mind between base spec with ram and SSD upgrades or the m2 pro model. as they start getting similar value when you start speccing up.

 

[smirking]

M1 air user with 16gb, I've Edge personal open with 9 tabs in two groups, 17 others open, Edge Work open with 13 tabs open, Outlook and Teams open and I'm using more than 8gb! Also Terminal, RDP open but not in use.

This is fine. Absolutely zero need to worry.

 

[iHorseHead]

M1 air user with 16gb, I've Edge personal open with 9 tabs in two groups, 17 others open, Edge Work open with 13 tabs open, Outlook and Teams open and I'm using more than 8gb! Also Terminal, RDP open but not in use.

View attachment 2312965

So? I can do the same on 8GB.
Remember that available ram is a wasted ram. It always uses RAM. Ever since Lion. If you had more than 2GB of RAM then it'd use over 2GB just by being on the desktop, if you had less then it'd use less RAM.

I was perfectly fine with 4GB of RAM even though it used like 3GB by being on the desktop.

 

[DHagan4755]

Know this: Any browser based on Chromium not only uses more energy it uses more RAM.

Not saying that Safari is a better browser overall — but Safari is far more energy & RAM efficient than Edge/Chrome/Brave/Arc/Opera & all the Chrome-based Electron apps like Spotify, Discord, TradingView Desktop, Slack, Twitch, etc...

So when it comes to this whole debate over 8GB vs. 16GB, having only 8GB would help greatly if the user didn't (need to) use Chromium browsers & apps. But many people need to use a Chromium-based browser so 16GB would help tremendously in the long run. More RAM is better if you can swing it.

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

I've "upgraded" from a 16" MBP M1 Pro with 16GB RAM and 512 SSD to a 15" MacBook Air M2 with just 8GB RAM and 512 SSD.

If I had to believe 90% of people on here, my wallet would be $200 lighter due to a 16GB RAM upgrade.

I'm constantly running Safari with 3-5 tabs, Chrome with 5-10 tabs and 10 extensions, Spotify and / or Apple Music, Google Drive, Magnet, Discord, Apple Mail, Apple Notes, WhatsApp (universal), Transmission, 1Password, 6 desktop widgets, Numbers and Messages and I play the occasional Arcade game in between.

Dare I say the 8GB MacBook Air M2 feels snappier than my M1 Pro with 16GB and it hasn't skipped a beat? The only people complaining about 8GB are the ones who use video or photo editing software it seems.

(Ironically, MacRumors.com in Safari is using 1.20 GB of RAM according to Activity Monitor 😵

Now post the Activity Monitor and show how much Swap Memory is being used.

 

[ignatius345]

I had this very conversation this afternoon with a customer regarding RAM as he contemplated purchasing a new iMac. For his needs as he expressed to me 8/256 would work perfectly fine for him. That said he would still prefer 512-1TB of storage.

Storage can be a big bottleneck, and it's hard to work around. I under-spec'ed the SSD on my M1 Air and am constantly finding things iCloud Drive has purged from local storage and that I have to re-download. On a desktop you can just plug in an external drive and tuck it away somewhere, but that doesn't really work on a laptop.

 

[raythompsontn]

On my M2 Air, 16/1TB, I have Messages, Maps, Safari (five tabs), Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Pages, Sheets, Keynote, Books, FileZilla, TurboTax, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Lightroom, Activity Monitor and BitWarden open. Here is my memory usage.

Now post the Activity Monitor and show how much Swap Memory is being used.

9 Gig of memory used, no swap memory used.

 

[memo90061]

I just bought a MacBook Air 15 base model for $760 from MicroCenter open box and don't know if I should return... It was very cheap!

 

[raythompsontn]

I just bought a MacBook Air 15 base model for $760 from MicroCenter open box and don't know if I should return... It was very cheap!

I say keep it. I think you got a good deal. I think it will be a very serviceable machine for several years.

 

[memo90061]

I say keep it. I think you got a good deal. I think it will be a very serviceable machine for several years.

That's what I'm thinking... I only want it for work meetings, email, browse the web. I've been using a Mac Mini M2 Pro at home and it's been good with 16gb of ram.

 

[raythompsontn]

I don't think you will have any problems with memory limitations. I had, maybe 20, apps open on my 16 gig machine and it was only using 9 gig. Photoshop, Lightroom are not light memory users as Adobe seems to be a memory glutton in their applications.

The base 15" Air goes for almost $1,300.00 and you paid $760. You got almost a 42% discount. You got a really good deal. Keep it.

 

[memo90061]

I don't think you will have any problems with memory limitations. I had, maybe 20, apps open on my 16 gig machine and it was only using 9 gig. Photoshop, Lightroom are not light memory users as Adobe seems to be a memory glutton in their applications.

The base 15" Air goes for almost $1,300.00 and you paid $760. You got almost a 42% discount. You got a really good deal. Keep it.

I wondered if it was a mistake and bought it just in case it was. The laptop is ready for pick up. I wonder if the condition is really bad. I still have to pick it up.

 

[adamlbiscuit]

is your M2 Mac mini a base spec with the ram and SSD upgrade? or did you go with a pro? I think when I do upgrade my personal machine a Mac mini is on the short list but can't make up mind between base spec with ram and SSD upgrades or the m2 pro model. as they start getting similar value when you start speccing up.

It's just the base M2 but with 1 TB SSD upgrade, and a 24 GB RAM upgrade.

I wanted the M2 Pro, but budgetary constraints meant I had to decide between either a large SSD and RAM capacity, or an M2 Pro with base spec.

Performance is great for me. With regards to RAM, I've owned the machine since March this year and it's probably written less than 1 GB to swap in the whole time I've owned it (approx).

Currently I'm sitting at 20 KB swap - I've got text files bigger than that 😂

 

[h.gilbert]

I've "upgraded" from a 16" MBP M1 Pro with 16GB RAM and 512 SSD to a 15" MacBook Air M2 with just 8GB RAM and 512 SSD.

If I had to believe 90% of people on here, my wallet would be $200 lighter due to a 16GB RAM upgrade.

I'm constantly running Safari with 3-5 tabs, Chrome with 5-10 tabs and 10 extensions, Spotify and / or Apple Music, Google Drive, Magnet, Discord, Apple Mail, Apple Notes, WhatsApp (universal), Transmission, 1Password, 6 desktop widgets, Numbers and Messages and I play the occasional Arcade game in between.

Dare I say the 8GB MacBook Air M2 feels snappier than my M1 Pro with 16GB and it hasn't skipped a beat? The only people complaining about 8GB are the ones who use video or photo editing software it seems.

(Ironically, MacRumors.com in Safari is using 1.20 GB of RAM according to Activity Monitor 😵

You must be lying because everyone here says 8GB is next to useless

 

[h.gilbert]

I disagree. While my base M1 Air runs fine, If I open activity monitor it tells a different story.

I have outlook, messages, excel, teams, Skype, safari with 2 MR tabs and it's showing yellow memory pressure and 6.8 gigs used. I have 300MB swap used.

Well what story does you actual experience using it tell? If stuff loading from swap is fast enough for you and you don't notice it then what's really the problem?