How much ram: 16 vs 32?

[Khardius]

Greetings everyone,

Context:
- For the last decade, I've been using a late 2011 MBP 15'/ i7 2.3GHz/ 16GB RAM. Served me incredibly well, but has been running slower and slower for the past 12-18months (+ errors, etc), and now struggles significantly with gaming and multitasking.
- I multitask a lot with hungry-RAM MS Office (word, excel and ppt) and heavy pdf files, use SPSS (also savage on the RAM), Safari, Chrome, watch Netflix and occasionally play some wow/sc2

Initially, I was going for the "baseline" MBP M1pro/16'/ 10/16 cores/32 GB RAM, but I just feel like that would an overkill in terms of the specs I need. I want one of the new MBP M1P because of several factors, namely power, display, longevity, among others. But this time around, I'm more inclined to a 4-5 year cycle, rather than a decade.
Therefore, I find myself pondering on buying the baseline M1P 14' instead, with the 8/14 cores, 512gb SSD and... 32gb.

Could you please help me figure out if this is the most reasonable option?
- Do you think 16gb would work insanely more effective on this mac, in comparison with my previous one (I know the other specs are leagues apart from each other)?
- Would 16 suffice or is it worth splunging the extra 400pounds on upgrading the ram to 32?
- Any comments on the number of cores?

Thank you all in advance

 

[thesheep]

My hunch is that 32GB would probably be overkill for you. You don't mention if your current system has an SSD or HDD but even if you do have an SSD already, I think the M1 MBP will be so much faster across the board that your performance issues will all just vanish.

My impression is that 32GB is probably only going to be necessary for people like video and graphic pros, where the amount of data they need to manipulate is many times what most people do.

To research this further, maybe you could look at some in-depth reviews of the 13" M1 MBP that are already out there, this kind of thing: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/y...its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/

 

[Khardius]

My hunch is that 32GB would probably be overkill for you. You don't mention if your current system has an SSD or HDD but even if you do have an SSD already, I think the M1 MBP will be so much faster across the board that your performance issues will all just vanish.

My impression is that 32GB is probably only going to be necessary for people like video and graphic pros, where the amount of data they need to manipulate is many times what most people do.

To research this further, maybe you could look at some in-depth reviews of the 13" M1 MBP that are already out there, this kind of thing: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/y...its-the-battery-life-that-will-blow-you-away/

This was quite helpful!
Thank you

 

[theluggage]

Could you please help me figure out if this is the most reasonable option?

I don’t disagree with the previous poster - the only question mark is the SPSS work which could depend on the size of data sets you are using. You should also double-check that SPSS is compatible with both Big Sur and M1.

To get reassurance about memory use Activity Monitor to look at the Memory Pressure reading while you’re using your old Mac. Not “memory used” - MacOS uses spare RAM for file caching which shows as “used”, but memory pressure takes account of swapping rates etc. to show whether lack of RAM is slowing things down. If you’re not seeing high memory pressure on your existing machine then you probably won’t benefit from extra RAM on an M1 Pro. M1 Pro is probably going to thrash your old machine anyhow, but if you’re getting high memory pressure it could thrash it even more.

NB: although I wouldn’t lavish too much effort or money on a 2011 machine right now, if you haven’t upgraded it to a SSD yet - which is dead easy with those machines - it *can* make a huge difference and give it a new lease of life.

 

[Phil77354]

Everything you always wanted to know about RAM, but were afraid to ask:

PSA: you probably don’t need 32 or 64Gb RAM unless you know you need it.

With the new MBPs, this question is super-popular on these forums, and I see multiple posts spreading misinformation and FUD about 16Gb models, causing a bunch of people to most likely overspend of panic about their purchases. There is a lot of misunderstanding how RAM and swap files work and...

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