Help me decide: 18GB or 36GB of RAM?

[Nicole1980]

It doesn’t look that way with the M1 generation, still feels current enough for most. OS support is an open question, but Apple have a good track record with supporting older iPads.

The M1 pro is only 2 years old at this point. So were not even close to that 3-5 year window yet

 

[gpat]

M2 Max is my suggestion.
Even if you're not covered by the refurbished store, there will be plenty of third party sellers offering a discount.

 

[pgolik]

I observed my ageing 2015 16GB MBP, and noticed that even though memory pressure shows mostly green, swap increases to 4GB within a day or two after booting, and it's being hit not only with page ins, but also page outs. So, I decided to bite the bullet and ordered 36GB, hope it'll serve at least as long as the 2015. Shipping in 2-weeks.

 

[klaaside]

@pgolik

What did you end up buying & how is it holding up? I'm debating a similar question..

 

[phrehdd]

A wise move would be to get as much as you can afford as you are using apps that do exploit available RAM and as things move forward, the OS itself may require more. Rumour is that some models will no longer come with 8 gigs minimum but rather, 16 gigs. At any given time I use a couple of art apps, email, messages and a few tabs in Safari or another browser. You just need to park on the wrong web page to watch your RAM get eaten up. Even MacRumors can gobble up a gig of RAM on its own.

The phrase "it should be enough" might be correct... until it is not.

 

[klaaside]

A wise move would be to get as much as you can afford as you are using apps that do exploit available RAM and as things move forward, the OS itself may require more. Rumour is that some models will no longer come with 8 gigs minimum but rather, 16 gigs. At any given time I use a couple of art apps, email, messages and a few tabs in Safari or another browser. You just need to park on the wrong web page to watch your RAM get eaten up. Even MacRumors can gobble up a gig of RAM on its own.

The phrase "it should be enough" might be correct... until it is not.

What model do you own?

 

[MacBH928]

I've ran out of M1 16Gb RAM (slows down) when several tabs are open to demanding web sites or when 3 apps are open and processing. Fine with typical surfing and a single app. Haven't noticed slow downs with 32Gb yet regarless of the number of tabs oen.

I think you are doing something wrong. I have like over 50 tabs open no slow downs on 2015 macbook 8GB RAM. You have to enable background tabs sleep/disable I think in the browser.

8GB is ridiculous amount of RAM. I come from a time when I upgraded my RAM from 256MB to 728MB. That machine browsed the web, edited video, runs 3D games, created Flash animations, Photoshop files, and played videos and burned DVDs.

 

[phrehdd]

I think you are doing something wrong. I have like over 50 tabs open no slow downs on 2015 macbook 8GB RAM. You have to enable background tabs sleep/disable I think in the browser.

8GB is ridiculous amount of RAM. I come from a time when I upgraded my RAM from 256MB to 728MB. That machine browsed the web, edited video, runs 3D games, created Flash animations, Photoshop files, and played videos and burned DVDs.

I appreciate your suggestion, but it wont change how my art progs work, how even messages can at times take up to a gig and so on. To be candid, I found that from M1 early days to today, the memory management is either non-existent or at best less than mediocre.

Btw, I recall days where 4 megs of memory was a big deal or typical home PC and before that, when the co-processor was not part of the CPU and JRAM too was to be added.

 

[pgolik]

@pgolik

What did you end up buying & how is it holding up? I'm debating a similar question..

I went with 36GB (M3Pro). Unless there’s something with a memory leak (there was this one release of DXO Photolab) I don’t see any swapping at all. Looking at memory usage it appears that I’m actively using about half of the RAM (the rest goes to caching), so with 18GB I’d be close to maxing it. In some of the specialized command line programs I’m using I noticed that as I have more CPU cores, they’ll use more threads and thus more RAM. So, at least for my use case, 36GB seems to provide me with the cushion for long term use of the Mac that I wanted. 18GB would be enough now, but I expect the requirements to increase in the future.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with the MBP - it’s fast, quiet, and the battery life is unreal. A huge upgrade from the 2015, as good as it was for its time.
The rumors indicate that 16GB will be a new base, I always aim at one step above the base for long term use.

 

[phrehdd]

What model do you own?

Originally an M1 Mini 512/16. I then went to an M1 Max Studio with 64 gigs of RAM. The M1 was to replace a 2015 MBP - 512/16.