I wish Apple makes 16" MBA, I would be all over it...
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I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM
- Thread starter Booji
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Hi,
I'm a software developer for photographers on Mac.
I recommend 8GB as a good choice for Macbook Air for majority of users who don't work with heavy files in photo/video editors.
For Mac Mini 8Gb is good for 1080p external screens.
And definitely 16GB for 4K, 5K and 6K external screens.
If you plan to use Mac Mini during 5-7 years, 16GB would be more preferable.
If you choose Macbook Pro, I guess that you need a powerful Mac for at least several years. Choose 16GB.
I'm a software developer for photographers on Mac.
I recommend 8GB as a good choice for Macbook Air for majority of users who don't work with heavy files in photo/video editors.
For Mac Mini 8Gb is good for 1080p external screens.
And definitely 16GB for 4K, 5K and 6K external screens.
If you plan to use Mac Mini during 5-7 years, 16GB would be more preferable.
If you choose Macbook Pro, I guess that you need a powerful Mac for at least several years. Choose 16GB.
My above title comments, in all honestly could have been leveled at most/All Apple machines over the past couple of decades.
In fact this is the single reason which has stopped me from going all in on Apple machines as much as I would otherwise have loved to.
The thought of paying £1000 / £2000 and having a computer with basically low power laptop graphics chip/power is simply something I personally could not accept.
And I accept this is 100% down to Steve Jobs not personally having any strong interest in this area of computing.
If Steve had always been a "Gamer" and loved entertainment titles, the history of Apple in this regard would totally different.
But that's the past..................
So, now we have Apple ARM based Silicon, and Apple now have the freedom to stretch their wings in any direction they wish.
Given this new found freedom, do you think Apple will finally kick of the past when it came to not taking GPU's and Entertainment seriously.
Still leave it to AMD (as they won't use Nvidea) to handle this?
Or might there be a chance that finally, after literally decades, and given they have total freedom now to follow any path they like.
We might, at long long last see Apple take this side of computing seriously and put effort into competing with AMD and Nvidia in this up till now ignored area of computer chip design?
Many seem to be thinking Apple make have it's own separate GPU chip to fit inside higher end macs next year.
Now, of course I don't think anyone is expecting a RTX 3090 with 28 billion transistors and many many Thousands of various GPU cores level of chip from Apple next year
But they could make a small start along that path, with a goal in perhaps 5+ year to reach the current leaders PC machines can enjoy.
So, Given their freedom do you think they will expand into this direction and aim to have the best consumer CPU's and GPU's to offer Apple customers.
Or do you think the concept of not trying too hard with graphics, and "it's good enough" is so deeply ingrained into the companies core mentality that even with their new freedom it's simply not going to happen?
I just want to point out that the methodology used in this linked video is highly flawed. The presenter only talks about what the system indicates as "Free" memory. However, all Unix based systems, including macOS, will cache file system contents in unused memory in order to provide a performance boost. It's not uncommon to see that a system will report close to zero "Free" memory even with very little actually running on it because of this. The "Cache" memory is also available to be used by applications at any time. Thus, if you want to know how much memory is available to be used by the system, you need to add the free and cache memory together. See the following link for full details:
View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac
In Activity Monitor, view the amount of system memory being used on your Mac, including physical, compressed, wired, and app memory.
support.apple.com
Edit to add: It baffles me that the presenter didn't simply use Activity Monitor for this video instead of a third-party application.
That was 2012-2015 when the 15" MBP was way lighter and smaller than any other 15" laptop. You excepted these systems were bigger because you wanted the performance. Nowadays I find my 16" too big and use my 13" much more often. Even thinking of going down to a MacBook Air given that it can perform much faster than my 2015 15" could, and above or close to the level of my 2019 16".
His methods aren't flawed, nor are his results (time to export).
Yes he did point to free memory between the 2 systems while the exports / benchmarks were running, and yes I agree that isn't a good metric. But he didn't weight any of the results based on free memory.
My takeaway from your screenshot is that Citrix viewer is a resource hog, and I'm guessing it's x86 still.
The whole point of the video was to help someone determine if they need to get 16GB. He then makes statements that the 8GB system is using more memory because the free memory was lower, therefore suggesting that even a simple task like running Geekbench somehow uses more memory on the 8GB system. But as I said, he wasn't taking into consideration the Cache memory, which is also considered to be available. If you watch, he never exhausted the available memory on either system. I'm not sure how anyone could reach any conclusions based on his tests. So yes, his method is flawed.
Yes it is, but even on x86 it was also consuming 2-3GB of ram, I think it's pretty normal, wouldn't call it a resource hog.
You don't need an "out of memory error" - you just need to load up the machine until the "Memory Pressure" reading in Activity monitor goes yellow or red. As long as it is green, then the speed is probably being limited by the CPU, GPU or disc access. The problem is when people look at "Memory Used" instead of "Memory Pressure" or panic because "Swap Used" is > 0. That's just business as usual. "Memory pressure" combines several factors such as swap rate for the specific purpose of deciding if you are short of RAM.
With that video, my guess is that the XCode build got a small boost by using spare memory to cache files, Logic didn't really get tested because (as the video said) it's using a ton of plugins or virtual instruments that clobbers the RAM - loadsa tracks on its own is more about SSD and CPU - and it was only the 8K video that really clobbered the RAM. But they were all straightforward "single" tasks - the question is, what happens when you've got a load of effects on a video, or a bunch of browser tabs open, or a VM with 4GB RAM allocated running while you're coding...
If you're doing 8K video I'd still recommend not buying Apple's cheapest Mac to replace your tricked-out 16" MBP or high-end iMac simply for The Silence of the Fans. Apart from a 32GB option, there are things like the number of ports, support for more than 2 displays and 10 GB Ethernet to consider. And if a low-end 13" M1 ultraportable with 4+4 cores can complete an 8K export in 6 minutes with the CPU pegged out, what's a 32GB M2/M1X/whatever with maybe 8+4 cores and/or a bigger GPU going to do?
Yes, and he did a slew of tests:
- Geekbench 5
- Cinebench R23
- Logic Pro
- His own XCode benchmark
- Lightroom
- FCP H.264 export
- FCP 10 bit HEVC export
- 8K R3D RAW export
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You seem to have alot of swap. I'd say you'd be a candidate for 16 GB. Just unclear how close your use case is to whatever we'd consider an "average" MBA user to be (if there even is such a thing).
Brave Browser seems to be using a lot of RAM as well, in addition to Citrix.
True. I'd have liked to see him redo all of the tests with several Safari tabs pinned, perhaps Spotify running, and a few Excel sheets / Word docs open.
A VM user (I would think) would be automatic 16GB territory. I don't expect Microsoft to push out a Win 10 for M-series between now and whenever the 14" MBP comes out, so I'm not gonna be using Parallels on this MBA.
Obviously I did watch the entire thing, otherwise I wouldn't have known that he never exhausted all the available memory. Though after rewatching it does appear he did exhaust the memory in his last test. For ALL of these tests I would have expected him to push things until the 8GB system's available memory was exhausted to give the viewer a sense of what it took to accomplish that, and what happened to the performance as a result. Instead, he repeatedly made statements that the 8GB system's available memory was being used up, when in fact it wasn't. Each time he claims all the memory is being used he shows that memory pie chart which has a whole bunch of blue, which is cache. There are MANY places where he makes statements such as "...this one only has 532 megs free," while showing a screen where there's 2.85GB of cache. That's over 3GB of memory available, but he makes statements as if it's running out. This clearly demonstrates that he doesn't understand the memory classifications of UNIX operating systems. He does go on to say that there are differences, but given everything I've said I'm not convinced those are a result of available memory in all but the last test.
He also makes statements like "8 gigs isn't really limiting it that much," and "It's not really bottlenecking it so far." Well of course it's not if he's not successfully exhausting all the available memory.
While the tests are interesting, if the intent was to demonstrate what it takes to exhaust the available memory and the resulting performance then he failed to do so, with the exception of the last test. Given that the title of the video is "8GB vs 16GB M1 MacBook Pro - How much RAM do you NEED?!" and he failed to actually reach a point where having more memory actually mattered in 7 out of 8 tests, yes his methodology is flawed.
Ok. I understand your point now. Yes he wasn't doing any multitasking as far as I can tell. Just head to head tests on each app. Probably not a very realistic use case (who only uses one app at a time).
He should have chosen a standard slew of background apps to be running, like X Safari tabs, Excel, Word, whatever else.
Or some sort of methodical approach to push the 8GB into high memory pressure, and then circle back and evaluate how realistic it would be for a majority of users.
I was at one point this past month running a Big Sur VM (16 GB), a Mojave VM (8 GB) and a Windows 10 VM (8 GB). The Big Sur VM was just kicking the tires so to speak but I noticed that the kit was more than double the size of a normal kit and gave it extra memory. Of course maybe it has Intel and ARM code.
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I decided to retire my trusty mid-2012 13" MBP for the new Macbook Air and after thinking it over and over, I decided 8GB of RAM should work for my use. The bigger issue for me was the SSD size. I have a somewhat large photo library and a large music library of live concert recordings. I know I can move that stuff to an external drive, but it's much easier to have all of that stored on the machine itself, so I opted to stick with the 8GB and upgrade to 512GB SSD. Just picked it up today at the Apple Store and using the migration assistant to move things over. One thing I miss already: the loud fan! Haha. This M1 MBA is dead silent. Love the no moving parts.
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16 GB is the new standard and has been for a long time now.
8 GB is still ok though.
There are some VM bugs in Chromium. I had a problem running iCloud Notes where Chromium browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Brave and Opera) would run for a day or so and then the VM usage would go up to 13 GB of RAM and stay there. I would restart the browser and it was always the same - it would run for a while and then take off in memory usage. I did not see the problem with Firefox. It was eventually fixed in Edge. I don't know if it was fixed in the others.
Firefox on my system typically uses about 4 GB. It starts out with about 1 GB with my static tabs and then just grows. I have Firefox set for maximum performance (opposite is minimum memory) so I'm not complaining.
The people that have 40 or more tabs open on Chrome - that's a lot of tabs for any browser.
Upgrading a new Mac the following year? Seems rather wasteful to me.
This new M1 has enough beef that I am glad I opted for the 16gb 1TB model. It flies in heavy workloads, silent and cool as a cucumber. Loafs working on huge libraries with 50mp RAW images even LR which is not native runs fine.
I could see this model providing 5+ years of service. I would save up and wait till you can get the 16gb ram model.
I could see this model providing 5+ years of service. I would save up and wait till you can get the 16gb ram model.