I have a 2013 MB Pro (8GH, 256 SSD) that's finally showing its age. I'm an editor/writer, and most of my work is done either in Microsoft Word, using the Track Changes feature, or in Google drive. Lately, my machine has been crashing on a regular basis when I work with large (book-length) Word docs with heavy edits in Track Changes. I try to mitigate by backing up frequently and saving/closing the documents often, but when I'm in Word for an extended period, the machine slows way down. My current laptop's battery is shot, as are its speakers, so I'm considering buying a M2 or M3 MB Air. Question: How do I buy and configure a laptop to avoid the current issues I'm having? I'm sure the newer machines are faster, but other than that, do I need to purchase something with 16 GB? I'm not a power user, aside from these work projects, I mostly use the laptop for email, Zoom, streaming. Thank you.
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Help buying a new MB Air for a heavy Microsoft Word user
- Thread starter RKNY1
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Personally I would recommend 16 GB of RAM as a baseline even if you are not a strong power user. If anything it will help you get through many more years of use, so consider it a bit of future-proofing your purchase as well (you cannot add more RAM later). Though doing heavy Word editing probably would result falling somewhere on the "power user" spectrum anyway, so 8 GB is probably too little.
It doesn't sound like you would benefit from a chip with more GPU cores, so using the baseline CPU configuration is probably fine.
You could bump the storage if you need to, the baseline is 256 GB. Since that is how much you have now, take a look at see how close you are to using it all up. You might benefit from 512 GB of storage if you want to avoid the troubles of constantly running out of drive storage later.
It doesn't sound like you would benefit from a chip with more GPU cores, so using the baseline CPU configuration is probably fine.
You could bump the storage if you need to, the baseline is 256 GB. Since that is how much you have now, take a look at see how close you are to using it all up. You might benefit from 512 GB of storage if you want to avoid the troubles of constantly running out of drive storage later.
Counterpoint: no. If you just are a writer in Word, no matter how much of a power user of Word you are, this is plenty of RAM for you.
Wraith: Countercounterpoint: He currently has 8GB, and is getting excessive crashes with his current very large doc, which I'd assume didn't regularly crash with smaller docs, or he wouldn't have pointed it out... so clearly 8GB is not enough. With unified memory, his GPU will eat some of the memory too. Best to just get the 16GB.
vcs: He may not need the GPU cores, but they come automatically with the extra RAM on the M3 Air.
vcs: He may not need the GPU cores, but they come automatically with the extra RAM on the M3 Air.
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Is it the ram what makes the machine crash? Or the app itself? Why using a mac for a Microsoft app? I would test it on a windows machine how word runs before paying big money only to see that thr problem persists. 1GB are ca. 500.000 A4 pages if my source and calculation was correct when for 500 pages 1MB is needed.
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I don’t edit book-length docs in MS Word so I don’t know what sort of memory use that needs. I suspect that 8GB could be too little.
To tell - on your current Mac, after using it for a few hours without a reboot and with all your typical apps running - open Activity Monitor and go to the Memory tab. First, look at Memory Pressure - should be primarily Green, with minor historical jumps to Yellow/Red allowed. If it’s not, you need more RAM.
Also look at Swap Used, it should be “relatively” small… personally I like to see it <1GB but that’s not a hard & fast rule. More RAM memory will reduce swap.
To tell - on your current Mac, after using it for a few hours without a reboot and with all your typical apps running - open Activity Monitor and go to the Memory tab. First, look at Memory Pressure - should be primarily Green, with minor historical jumps to Yellow/Red allowed. If it’s not, you need more RAM.
Also look at Swap Used, it should be “relatively” small… personally I like to see it <1GB but that’s not a hard & fast rule. More RAM memory will reduce swap.
I would go for 16gb. They say 8 is adequate and it is, but for some reason they do seem to work better with 16.
It's sure that if you give it 16 it'll spread itself out and use 16 so more is kept in memory etc. People worry that their machine is using all the memory but it's supposed to.
It's sure that if you give it 16 it'll spread itself out and use 16 so more is kept in memory etc. People worry that their machine is using all the memory but it's supposed to.
All good advice. Here's a data point. Mac Studio M2max, 64gb RAM. I brought up two roughly 400-page Word docs, one with comments (but not Track Changes) and the other clean. Together they were taking up about 350 mb of memory as I paged up and down in them.
So although I'm a person who suggests as much memory as can be afforded, it doesn't look to me as though large Word docs take up much memory.
So although I'm a person who suggests as much memory as can be afforded, it doesn't look to me as though large Word docs take up much memory.
To tell - on your current Mac, after using it for a few hours without a reboot and with all your typical apps running - open Activity Monitor and go to the Memory tab. First, look at Memory Pressure - should be primarily Green, with minor historical jumps to Yellow/Red allowed. If it’s not, you need more RAM.
Also look at Swap Used, it should be “relatively” small… personally I like to see it <1GB but that’s not a hard & fast rule. More RAM memory will reduce swap.
Thanks for all of these helpful suggestions. Word on its own isn't a memory hog; I can open a book length document and simply read or edit or add to it without a problem. It's the track changes feature, which preserves edits from multiple sources, that seems to be the issue, together with (I think) cached documents from autosave. If Word crashes, which will happen if I keep working for several hours without periodically quitting the documents I'm using, it brings up multiple versions of whatever Word docs I have open, saved at various points.
Sounds like 16GB is the way to go. My activity monitor is mostly green but jumps to yellow when I open a Word doc. But Swap Used is 4.48GB.
Again, thanks for all of this!
Also look at Swap Used, it should be “relatively” small… personally I like to see it <1GB but that’s not a hard & fast rule. More RAM memory will reduce swap.
Thanks for all of these helpful suggestions. Word on its own isn't a memory hog; I can open a book length document and simply read or edit or add to it without a problem. It's the track changes feature, which preserves edits from multiple sources, that seems to be the issue, together with (I think) cached documents from autosave. If Word crashes, which will happen if I keep working for several hours without periodically quitting the documents I'm using, it brings up multiple versions of whatever Word docs I have open, saved at various points.
Sounds like 16GB is the way to go. My activity monitor is mostly green but jumps to yellow when I open a Word doc. But Swap Used is 4.48GB.
Again, thanks for all of this!
He is using a 11 year old Mac. Assuming he wants to keep his new one as long, I would recommend 16/512 minimum. I am personally looking at the 16/1Tb model that I see on sale for $1710. My use case is about the same as his plus storing a few photos.
Just a heads up. I'm a heavy Word document editor on a 16Gb M1 Pro. It still crashes on that a lot. I've also got a 64Gb Windows laptop. It crashes a lot on that too.
The problem is Word is absolutely terribly buggy.
I mostly use MacTeX when I don't have to work with people who don't know how to use it.
The problem is Word is absolutely terribly buggy.
I mostly use MacTeX when I don't have to work with people who don't know how to use it.
As always this RAM amount will be a point of contention and I tend to favour the other camp with more RAM. Word users my include diagrams, illustrations and photo images. These would benefit from more RAM. The real issues is that Word is likely to not be the only application open - Safari and email usually are open. If someone wants music playing as well. Again 16 gigs would benefit and also help add life to the device. TheWraith, I would fully agree with you if Apple saw fit to give better memory management as 8 gigs should be plenty but alas, this is not the reality.
Another data point.
I'm a researcher and writer and have had no problems writing book manuscripts using Word 2011 and 2016 on a 2015 13” MacBook Air with only 8GB.
8GB is more than enough.
OP: Your instincts about auto-save being a problem are right. Over the years, I’ve found it produces crashes. It also becomes tricky trying to recover a saved version. I've always ended up turning it off.
Simply get in the habit of hitting Command-S after every new paragraph or major change — and frequently saving dated backups to an external drive.
The other thing, as you've noted, that can produce problems is excessive track changes.
Which version of Word are you using? Do you have to keep months and months of Track Changes? Can you not resolve them periodically as you go? Would saving dated backup versions of your book work for you?
Those changes may well be more important than 8gb vs. 16gb. In any case, if you're planning on keeping the new Mac for a number of years, paying that extra $200 for 16gb makes good sense It's virtually a no-brainer.
I'm a researcher and writer and have had no problems writing book manuscripts using Word 2011 and 2016 on a 2015 13” MacBook Air with only 8GB.
8GB is more than enough.
OP: Your instincts about auto-save being a problem are right. Over the years, I’ve found it produces crashes. It also becomes tricky trying to recover a saved version. I've always ended up turning it off.
Simply get in the habit of hitting Command-S after every new paragraph or major change — and frequently saving dated backups to an external drive.
The other thing, as you've noted, that can produce problems is excessive track changes.
Which version of Word are you using? Do you have to keep months and months of Track Changes? Can you not resolve them periodically as you go? Would saving dated backup versions of your book work for you?
Those changes may well be more important than 8gb vs. 16gb. In any case, if you're planning on keeping the new Mac for a number of years, paying that extra $200 for 16gb makes good sense It's virtually a no-brainer.
I do wonder why more Mac users don't gravitate towards Scrivener (which has been my friend for nearly 20 years) or Ulysses for full-fat word processing. Generally speaking if there is a Microsoft option for a piece of software it is often the worst of its kind. Compare Publisher to Pages for example.
As for the OP? If you can afford it get 16gb for future proofing but 8gb will do.
probably because there's no track changes in Scrivener, and there's a steep learning curve. If the OP is using track changes, I'm thinking they are sharing documents as well.
my opinion:
1. 8GB is more than enough for your needs. However, Word is buggy and crashes often, because it's a buggy program. HOWEVER...
2. Have you tried using the Windows version of Microsoft Word? In my experience, it's more stable than Mac's version. If the Windows version runs successfully, then get a 16GB machine and install Parallels and Windows 11.
1. 8GB is more than enough for your needs. However, Word is buggy and crashes often, because it's a buggy program. HOWEVER...
2. Have you tried using the Windows version of Microsoft Word? In my experience, it's more stable than Mac's version. If the Windows version runs successfully, then get a 16GB machine and install Parallels and Windows 11.
Thanks, this is all so helpful! I've long thought the cache and autosave might be a problem, and your comments confirm it. I do save frequently, but I've been suspicious that something else is going on. When possible, I delete comments and accept changes in the Track Changes feature, but some of this work is for clients, so the timing is not entirely up to me. Track Changes is a sharing feature; if not for that, it would be much simpler to save dated versions of the manuscript, as I do with my own writing.
It seems that buying a 16G MBA is the way to go. Since I've had my MBP for a decade, I want to future proof a new laptop, but it's hard for me to see real advantages in the M3 over the M2. Am I wrong?
And yes, Scrivener or another word processor would make sense in theory, but Word is still the industry standard in the area where I work, so buggy and imperfect though it is, I can't avoid it.
It seems that buying a 16G MBA is the way to go. Since I've had my MBP for a decade, I want to future proof a new laptop, but it's hard for me to see real advantages in the M3 over the M2. Am I wrong?
And yes, Scrivener or another word processor would make sense in theory, but Word is still the industry standard in the area where I work, so buggy and imperfect though it is, I can't avoid it.
I don't now how long we can use out Macs we buy today cause AI might change a lot. The focus on AI and NPU just started so the SOCs from today might become obsolete sooner than those from 10 years ago. So I would not "futureproof" too much.
Performance-wise, I seriously doubt you'll noticeably gain an advantage with the M3 over the M2. Maybe with long-term support, but--since AAPL now Services their own architecture--what used to be a 10-year lifespan, might now be double 🤷♂️
I'm not really Up on the most recent features/upgrades that come with the newer M3 laptop variants, so it's a personal analysis/choice as to which hardware will serve you well into the future.
You'll just have to do the accounting on what ports, screen, storage, &c., you feel you need.
It's an 11 year old MacBook Air. Not withstanding Word bugs, I suspect an M2 or M3 Air will feel like a massive difference in terms of speed, responsiveness etc. Even if it does need to use swap, the current ssds are lightning fast.
I think the same advice always applies. If you don't need 16GB, but can happily afford to upgrade to it and not compromise on storage, go for it.
I think the same advice always applies. If you don't need 16GB, but can happily afford to upgrade to it and not compromise on storage, go for it.