Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM
- Thread starter Booji
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That's uh, ...wrong.
Spending one $ more than you need at time of purchase is a waste of resources with computers."Future-proofing" doesn't exist. It is always better to upgrade to a newer machine later *if* your needs change, and pass along your original unit to someone whos needs can still be met with it.
A lot of people are on budget that they can't afford buy the highest spec or they want to save money. Personally, I would want to save the money for something else like put it towards vacations, put the money in an emergency fund account, or invest the money.
Best advice I've read vis-a-vis “future-proofing” and return on one's investment!
AppleCare+, particularly on a new model, and a laptop, makes more sense for many, if not most, users than springing for the 16GB.
A Mac with AppleCare+ will have greater appeal on the used market. In fact, one can sell the AC as an add-on — advertise a decent price on the Mac itself, along with a separate, amortized price for AC. If the person wants it, fine — they pay for it and you transfer it over. If not, you can cancel the AC and Apple will refund you for the unused portion.
It's a compelling approach.
Haha interesting story.
Yea for my type of usage I didn’t see much difference between 8 or 16. I saw the swap was always higher on the 8GB but that’s to be expected. I was more concerned about not having enough internal storage in the end.
Im still thinking what I should do. I also recently learned that you can installed software on external drive that was something new. Also my other worry was that my bakblaze backup was going to eat up a lot of memory but it turns out to not be the the case. So yea.
Fair enough, but let’s’ say your a FCPX or Premiere user and the next version needs that extra bit of memory to function adequately, you have to sell your machine and get a better one.
That depends on what you are doing with the computer. If you are only using a handful of common apps, a single cloud solution and not too many user accounts and customizations, frequent upgrades can be cost-effective. For a more demanding user, the effort required to migrate to a new computer can be a serious expense. In such cases, it may be better to buy a more powerful computer than you initially need and hope that it will last a year or two longer.
The last time I upgraded my iMac, it took me two days to set it up and another day to clean up the old machine. Upgrading my MBP is probably going to be a similar effort, and I don't want to do it every year.
How much editing are you doing in Adobe? Specifically, are you using Lightroom (classic or otherwise?)
I had the 15" 2018 MBP with a radeon 560x and 16GB of RAM, and had both the 8 and 16GB model of the M1 Macbook pro's for a bit and did some comparisons between them. As a part-time wedding photographer I was trying to edit an engagement shoot and experienced some issues with the 8GB model. People said it was because I skimped on RAM but upon receiving the 16GB M1 the performance difference was only slight.
The curious thing is that, for the exact same workflow between 3 devices, while the M1 16GB was the better performing one (by a hair), the RAM usage was always maximal- with very high swap used (writing Terrabytes to the disk/day). BUT the intel MBP was only using 10x less RAM for the same workflow with 0 swap used.
Some of us on r/Lightroom were speculating that it could be caused by Rosetta, but even Lightroom CC (running natively) is consuming a ridiculous amount of RAM. Another theory is that the RAM is being shared by the graphics processor as well because of the M1 SoC, but it's also speculation.
I would add that the swap used is lesser on the 16GB model than on the 8- if you're worried about the longevity of the SSD's, it might give you some peace of mind to go with the 16GB model if you're going to be a big LR user. (mind you, the workflow I was using involves 500+ RAW files from a 30MP camera)
On another note, I'm quite agnostic about whether a high "swap used" will hurt the longevity of the drives- people who say that the swap usage is a drop in the ocean of SSDs often neglect the worries of having literally terabytes written on a disk per day. But on the other hand, Apple has some great engineers and I'm sure they know what they're doing. And if they don't (like in the case of the butterfly keyboard), they have a solid reputation of offering good repair services even past hardware warranty expiry for known problems (albeit, having a hard drive fail on you seems a lot more disastrous than having a keyboard not work)
Here's a short video that I did demonstrating the odd RAM usage between devices:
I had the 15" 2018 MBP with a radeon 560x and 16GB of RAM, and had both the 8 and 16GB model of the M1 Macbook pro's for a bit and did some comparisons between them. As a part-time wedding photographer I was trying to edit an engagement shoot and experienced some issues with the 8GB model. People said it was because I skimped on RAM but upon receiving the 16GB M1 the performance difference was only slight.
The curious thing is that, for the exact same workflow between 3 devices, while the M1 16GB was the better performing one (by a hair), the RAM usage was always maximal- with very high swap used (writing Terrabytes to the disk/day). BUT the intel MBP was only using 10x less RAM for the same workflow with 0 swap used.
Some of us on r/Lightroom were speculating that it could be caused by Rosetta, but even Lightroom CC (running natively) is consuming a ridiculous amount of RAM. Another theory is that the RAM is being shared by the graphics processor as well because of the M1 SoC, but it's also speculation.
I would add that the swap used is lesser on the 16GB model than on the 8- if you're worried about the longevity of the SSD's, it might give you some peace of mind to go with the 16GB model if you're going to be a big LR user. (mind you, the workflow I was using involves 500+ RAW files from a 30MP camera)
On another note, I'm quite agnostic about whether a high "swap used" will hurt the longevity of the drives- people who say that the swap usage is a drop in the ocean of SSDs often neglect the worries of having literally terabytes written on a disk per day. But on the other hand, Apple has some great engineers and I'm sure they know what they're doing. And if they don't (like in the case of the butterfly keyboard), they have a solid reputation of offering good repair services even past hardware warranty expiry for known problems (albeit, having a hard drive fail on you seems a lot more disastrous than having a keyboard not work)
Here's a short video that I did demonstrating the odd RAM usage between devices:
I learnt that regardless apple will open the laptop so I was being unnecessarily cautious. Not sure what I was suppose to learn.
Even on Windows with 128 GB of RAM I saw Chrome using swap. I did some research (this was a year ago and can't find the post now) that pretty much any software can use swap even if you feed it 1.5 TB of RAM.
chrome is a bad thing.... and not really optimized for the Mac M1´s can't understand people who using it. Safari and ff84 is fine 
Just buy what your gut is telling you to get. Don't let people talk you into or out of what you want. You are the one who will be happy with your decision or not.
Go 16 GB. Applications and data sets are only getting bigger. The fact that the M1 is a leap of 200-300% in processing speed means that ultimately it will be capable of working on data sets 2-3x as large in equal time, given enough memory - vs. the previous machines.
Its also shared memory, and a lot of 3d applications are pushing for 4-8 GB of VRAM alone these days - when you consider that, 16 GB doesn't look so excessive.
I'm sure there will be people claiming that 8 GB is more than anyone will ever need, but they said that about 4 GB, 2 GB, 1 GB, etc. in the past, too.
That if you are trying to be conscientious it would better to not purchase machines that you fully intend to return at all.
After trying out my mac mini m1 with 8 gig for two weeks, I've concluded that 16 gig is minimum.
For its intended purpose of home theater / TV machine, 8 gig is more than enough. But when I tried to use it as a computer (more than 20 tabs of browser opened, youtube playing, mail app open, with some word editing going on), 8 gig is not enough. Also I tried WoW on it while browsing at the same time, and it felt like it was noticeably slowed or showed some hiccups due to swap.
The performance while heavy swapping is still acceptable somewhat, but that's true only because my M1 Mini is not my main machine. I'd be wanting more if this was a main computer.
Conclusion. 8 gig is 8 gig no matter it's M1 or not. Get 16 gig.
For its intended purpose of home theater / TV machine, 8 gig is more than enough. But when I tried to use it as a computer (more than 20 tabs of browser opened, youtube playing, mail app open, with some word editing going on), 8 gig is not enough. Also I tried WoW on it while browsing at the same time, and it felt like it was noticeably slowed or showed some hiccups due to swap.
The performance while heavy swapping is still acceptable somewhat, but that's true only because my M1 Mini is not my main machine. I'd be wanting more if this was a main computer.
Conclusion. 8 gig is 8 gig no matter it's M1 or not. Get 16 gig.
Google has a M1-specific version of Chrome you can download. I don't know if it's any good, as I don't use Chrome, but it is available.chrome is a bad thing.... and not really optimized for the Mac M1´s can't understand people who using it. Safari and ff84 is fine
This is not true, and it is what caused me to waste $500 on 128GB of RAM when all I do is 1080p video editing. I fell in the "More RAM = Better" trap and it was a major waste of money. 8GB of RAM and 128GB of RAM for 1080p video editing is only a few seconds export times.
Well said. If you will need 16GB later (5 years or so), getting the M5 Mac would be a major improvement.
Are you sure about this? Writing a terabyte a day would make some most recent SSDs only last 100 days.
And Adobe will use all the RAM you have available. I only do 1080p video editing and Adobe fills up my 128GB of RAM. But 128GB of RAM for just 1080p video editing is just insane. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Adobe performs the same when I replace the RAM with only 8GB.
Usually when we say more is better, we are saying 16 or 32, consumer level, not 128 level. To go that high, users should know their exact needs beforehand.
Then people shouldn't blankly state more ram is better. And no 16GB vs 8GB on 1080p video editing is not better just as 128GB is not. If you are doing 4K video editing, then yes 16GB is preferred.
Or else, one should read the context of what's being discussed. And in addition, More is always better. That's true. The definition of better, and % of gain versus money spend is always depending on each other's unique needs. Therefore, all people, including myself, is making some kind of assumption on what demographic certain ram size is suitable for. many people are talking about 16 vs 8 here, and countering that argument with 128 gig is for what purpose?
I think you are trying to be way too word picky in order to counter some of the arguments here.
I didn't get 128GB from this topic, I got it a year ago when people said similar things. More memory the better. Max it out if you can. So I did, and a whopping few seconds faster in my exports. For $500. When the export takes 15+ minutes anyway. No its not really better, its a rounding error in the stats.
It seems there is something up with lightroom cc on M1 that causes excessive disk use. One user in a different thread (and I understand in other forums) tracked it down - partially - to the graphics acceleration in the performance preferences. The auto setting there on M1 causes it to use gfx for everything but that setting doesn't play well with M1. Not saying this will fix everything and likely an updated version needed, but worth trying.