Unified ram is not 'completely different'. The fundamentals of software haven't changed just because Apple made memory better integrated. People are just noticing swapping less because both ram is faster, and in particular SSD's are so fast these days with NVME.
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I am really torn between 8GB vs. 16GB RAM
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Unified ram is not 'completely different'. The fundamentals of software haven't changed just because Apple made memory better integrated. People are just noticing swapping less because both ram is faster, and in particular SSD's are so fast these days with NVME.
It‘s a 6 year warranty under UK law: https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/uk/
Honestly I'm playing the strategy to upgrade to a new model rather than stay with this current Air base model. I got the base model exactly because of that.
And guess what? 8GB is more than enough for me, sure I do almost 9GB of SWAP every day but I didn't get any issues of slowdown or tab refreshing.
I'm going to jump on the next Air with 16GB since I'll keep that one for far longer.
And guess what? 8GB is more than enough for me, sure I do almost 9GB of SWAP every day but I didn't get any issues of slowdown or tab refreshing.
I'm going to jump on the next Air with 16GB since I'll keep that one for far longer.
My daughter played it on a 16 GB Air and said it was decent. I'm not a gamer so I don't know what that means.
I have 128 + 48 + 16 + 16 + 16 on my current systems and another 16 coming in this week. The other family members have a total of 104 GB. There are some other miscellaneous systems with 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB that I didn't include. This memory is definitely more than I need but it makes playing with Virtual Machines really easy.
Yeah a lot of it is because SSDs are much faster nowadays. I don't think much of it has to do with RAM being faster. RAM has been plenty fast for a long time. But SSDs are fast enough nowadays that the system doesn't need as much RAM to still feel responsive because swapping is so fast. A person can feel this by opening a program on today's Macs. It takes a ~second. Then imagine MacOS moving data to the SSD from RAM and back and how fast that is, especially when we are talking about just saving the state of the program not having to load the or save the whole program.
Also, while 12gb video is still 12gb of video I did read that Apple's M1 RAM architecture is more efficient because the gpu and cpu can access the same data without copying it to multiple pools of memory. It might not help editing large videos, but very well may be helping the system with less RAM feel like it has more RAM and feel more responsive than it otherwise would be.
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I suspect that some programming effort is required to take the most efficient RAM approach with M1. I just browsed some documents an I think that developers have to change they way they think about managing graphics and memory.
My Intel Mac Mini has 64GB of RAM and my now deceased 2017 Macbook Pro had 32G. I really never regretted spending the money on the extra RAM, I need it for testing and VM's.
No, my workflow works great without any issue coming from a 16" base model.
Yes. With Big Sur 11.4, my memory pressure is in the yellow almost constantly and I often get beach balls opening a new browser tab.
What OS version are you on? What programs do you typically run, and how many browser tabs do you typically have open?
Not initially. But recently I've been experimenting with video capture and streaming via OBS, and I'm starting to see the limitations of the 8GB. So, my next purchase will be 16GB.
I didn't realise that AppleCare was so expensive for the laptops. It's £189 for the MacBook Air & £229 for the MacBook Pro but only £99 for the Mac Mini. I guess that the laptops are going to get more of a beating than a desktop & that's reflected in the price but 20-25% of the purchase price for AppleCare is pretty stiff.
Well you can't use max settings on a M1. There are several performance bottlenecks for certain settings and odd behaviour e.g white transparancies. More so at higher resolutions where you are limited to Low settings. Early impressions were good but misinformed as they were not the latest expansion areas, effects and limited to 1080p. A windows laptop with a 1050 TI would likely do better actually.
16GB is highly recommended if you play games like WOW. 8GB had my Mac mini 8GB stuttering with multitasking. 16GB MacBook Pro has no issues. You do have to open other apps and a browser at times for WOW too.
Having said that Mac M1 are much better than any equivalent Windows laptop with the same RAM.
That’s very true especially with a non upgradable product.
I’ve been using my MBA M1 base model (8/256) for about 2 months now. The base model has been more than good for what I do. Imho a regular user can go with the base (and no expectation to go above that down the line).
But! I don’t do major video editing or DB compiling or host multiple transcoding videoconferences. If someone has a non ‘regular’ use case I just don’t see the value in rolling the dice for 200$. Don’t be ‘that guy’ who says “Damn, I wish I had gotten more RAM”. If 200$ is tight right now, hey…eat home cooked for a month. Most people have a +200 food budget from eating out (or Taco Bell with coupons can save a lot quickly too ?).
I've been using the Mac mini 16/500 and I'd definitely say go for 16 GB of RAM. I'm just running Firefox, Apple Mail, iCal, Notes, Reminders, Time Machine and I'm at 11.45 GB of RAM. It's probably pretty easy to get the system swapping with some real programs running.