If you don't care about the design, webcam or screen size. You might as well go for the 16GB Ram M1 Air. All those extra gigs of RAM doesn't hurt and the so called leap in performance of the M2 over the M1 isn't that great enough that the target market for the MBA would really benefit from it. Extra RAM though is nice to have especially in use cases such as that you need to run a windows environment locally via parallels or whichever VM.
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M1 Air 16gb or M2 Air
- Thread starter Dnzilla
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Yup.
People who stilll think "internet use" is basic and don't need much RAM probably are stuck in the 90s, thinking that websites are simple text pages like the days of altavista. Current websites are actually heavy on resources. You have every blog and social media sites having dozens of ads and trackers. Add on people watching 4k youtube/netflix through the browser, web browsing is no longer a simple task. Besides, RAM is cheap. We have phones with 8 to 12GB of RAM now. Apple cheapening out a $1500 laptop with 8GB of RAM is simply Apple being cheap.
I wonder when the next leap to 16gb and 512 is scheduled for apple.. that’s also a good ear to buy perhaps… surely they cant jump the based up by the overpriced upgrade fees by then 😅
(Other manufacturer do it too tho! Some Dell upgrades have massive price increase, and also multiple versions of the same unit.. too confusing)
I don’t plan to swap out my computers as often as I do phones so I go for a higher spec model with the intention of keeping it awhile. So for me this 256gb ssd fiasco, while annoying, never affected me since I was getting a higher storage option. So if you were already planning to go bigger, then just enjoy what the new model offers. Don’t get caught up in the drama and click baits.
Once the drama dies down, you’ll see more threads out about people actually using the device in real life and just enjoying it.
Once the drama dies down, you’ll see more threads out about people actually using the device in real life and just enjoying it.
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This is such a ridiculous example.
No one is photo editing high-res Raw files and doing panoramic stitching with 60GB images on a tiny internal drive; they are using a fast external.
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Finding that since using the M1 with 16gb, I am easily over 8gb, like I was with my 8gb 2014 mbp
So based on that would argue its prob a bad idea to try the M2 on just 8gb right?
I got no budget to go higher than an M2 base.. so I suppose I stick with this M1 Air which I do enjoy
(Of course always nicer for more screen etc, but 8gb prob won't be enough and ill end up w a bunch of swap NOW, before the apps even bloat next 2 years)
So based on that would argue its prob a bad idea to try the M2 on just 8gb right?
I got no budget to go higher than an M2 base.. so I suppose I stick with this M1 Air which I do enjoy
(Of course always nicer for more screen etc, but 8gb prob won't be enough and ill end up w a bunch of swap NOW, before the apps even bloat next 2 years)
In your case, wait for the M3 Air; by then you will have saved for a higher spec.
If you can’t afford more than the base M2, then no stick with your 16gb M1 air. Makes more sense for your needs
"Office use" doesn't necessarily mean 'not much'; there's several apps, chats, video conferencing, a lot of browser tabs, etc. MacOS will use as much Ram as you have available, but yeah if you need more that 8GB on your current computer, your new computer wont need less.
Using swap isn't inherently a bad thing. MacOS is designed to do it in a very efficient way which is why most people would never notice their computer using Swap unless they were looking at Activity Monitor. My MBP has 16GB Ram and if I'm doing a render in the background I would have no idea that it's using swap with yellow memory pressure while I'm using other apps.
If you are regularly using a lot of swap, with hundreds of GBs being written all-day every day, then you need to get more RAM and a larger SSD, but that's true for MBPs as well.
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