Is 8GB ram enough?

[The Man]

This is slightly off-topic, but I would like to point out that your MacBook Air 2013 has the opportunity to be upgraded with an NVMe storage blade. See this wiki posting, which lays out a lot of incredibly useful information:

Upgrading 2013/2014 Macbook Pro SSD to M.2 NVMe

This thread is about upgrading MacBook Airs & Macbook Pros (2013-2015) with new high speed and/or high capacity NVMe SSDs. This thread was one of the first to talk about MacBook Pro NVMe SSD upgrades on Macrumors, and was started by user "maxthackray", which we can thank and give tribute for...

forums.macrumors.com

NVMe prices have really come down, and a terabyte of storage is now only a little more than $100.

I know. Although they have problems with draining battery life even when in the MacBook Air is in sleep mode (on the 11" models), but even the PCIe versions from Transcend have had problems with battery drain I've read, like gen3x4 Transcend I believe. I think gen3x2 might be all right. OWC Aura N might be good too. I might upgrade to 480 GB later this year for about 150 Euro but simply go with a brand name instead of dabbling with adapters. But first I need to replace my battery, because after so many years and 1200 plus cycle count, it hardly gives me any battery life anymore. I think I will go with the NewerTech NuPower one. Hope it will get me back to 9-12 hour battery.

Yeah, it's a bite for sure. But sure enough down the road a year and I think I'd find myself wishing I could spend that $400 for the upgrade.

I really long for the days when you could open your MacBook up and replace the hard drive and RAM yourself...

Sure, but that's the nature of the game when you don't have much money :-( There will always be (some) regret. There will always be: "If only I waited just a little longer." But waiting for things is even worse I've come to realize. Months will turn into years. "Just a little longer." And then what you wanted is taken off the market and prices rise and you can start anew with the search. Set a budget and buy something within that budget and temper expectations of what you can do with a smaller budget (yes, some things you will never be able to do).

At least with my MacBook Air I can replace the battery and the SSD, but I will have to see how good those replacements are. Really, if only Apple continued the old MacBook Air but added an IPS screen, many people would have been happy.

 

[Siamchaim]

Future proof your devices by getting as much RAM as you can. 8GB was ample about 5/6 years ago. But 5/6 years from now it might not be enough.

I always max out RAM to the maximum possible. I had some insufficeint memory issues reported during rendering in photoshop and illustrator when I had 8GB. But on 16GB I haven't had any issues to date.

You will be surprised how much RAM is required by browsers, email clients etc.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I upgraded my 2012 Mac Mini Server from dual 1TB RAID0 drives (2TB total) with 8GB of ram to a 2TB SSD and 16GB of ram several months ago and the computer feels brand new again (I'm sure newer first tier games would be awful if they'd even run, but productivity and browsing feel faster than they did in 2012 for the most part and that RAID 0 could 130MB/sec and was about 2-4 faster for access than a standard drive for smaller files so it wasn't a total drag like a regular single spinner, but it was getting worse. I dared not even upgrade past El Capitan until I upgraded the drive.

Now it runs Windows 10 as well (You couldn't easily install Boot Camp with RAID0 because you could only have one boot partition with it) and both get around 450MB/sec sustained and are like 100x faster for random tiny files. It went from taking like 3 minutes for a full boot towards the end to about 20-25 seconds on average now. Windows 10 Pro boots in like 15 seconds. Both use the full 16GB of Ram. I'd say the SSD was more impressive (I used it for awhile before upgrading the RAM too), but I think it can multitask faster with more RAM (I can have a dozen things running at once and as long as one isn't a game or a Handbrake, it speeds right along).

So I'd say go for the 16GB on a new machine. I'd be thinking 32GB-64GB on a new desktop, really.

 

[MacClueless]

I want buy MacBook Air and I am not sure what to do.
8 or 16 gb ram?

More is always better, but you knew that. You'll be fine with 8Gb and ready to buy a new machine before it's an issue.