M1 Imac Memory

[fivenotrump]

16 GB/1 TB/Blue

I don't know or care if I really needed 16 GB right now... I tend to keep my Macs for five years or more (previous one lasted me 7.5 years) and I consider it highly likely that at some point during that time I will find I am much better off with 16 GB. Potentially cutting short the life of the machine to save ~10% of the up-front cost seems dumb to me.

I bought exactly the same as you (so pleased I picked blue), after the same reasoning, and am wildly happy.

 

[familychoice]

16/512 for my M1 Mini, and it flies through everything I throw at it. I notice though just with a couple of Affinity apps, web browser, previews and a music player I’m over 8gb in the resource monitor, so glad I plumped for the extra 8gb, and no worries about Apple potentially beefing up the OS RAM usage in future updates.

 

[SR 7]

I bought the mid-tier 24" iMac with standard 8GB RAM. I thought it would be fine as I really only do office stuff and web browsing, plus occasional very light Photoshop, and memory pressure on my Intel mac with 16GB is always low green. Reading about more efficient RAM management with M1 persuaded me. But, on the 8GB iMac, memory pressure was almost always yellow, with several GB in swap.

That was partly due to an apparent memory leak with Word – I was seeing 3GB+ RAM usage, even with no documents open, and that would just keep climbing until I quit the application. There was obviously some problem there (Office 365 version, running on Big Sur 11.4). But, even without Word open, memory pressure would regularly get into the yellow.

I no longer have screenshots of Activity Monitor, as I ended up returning the Mac and forgot to save them, but one contributing factor I noticed was high RAM usage by certain web pages (including 2 x webmail clients and one news site that could be over 1GB each). Another was the fact that I typically have multiple applications and documents open at once and switch frequently between them. These include:

• Safari (anywhere between 5-30 tabs depending on how 'tidy' I'm being)
• Firefox (average 3-5 tabs)
• Word (average 5-10 documents)
• Acrobat (average 5-10 documents, some quite large)
• Keynote
• iMessage
• Often Powerpoint or Excel as well
• Occasionally Photoshop

Performance was still excellent, and I never saw memory pressure hit red or any 'out of memory' warnings, but my perception was that hopping between applications/documents slowed down when I had a lot of things open at once. I also don't want to need to worry about what I have open at once (especially if RAM demands increase in the future). I'm now waiting on a 16GB version, which I think will suit me better.

So what you are saying is this new $1600 iMac is suited for people that are very very light users. Which is why a lot of people have migrated back to windows.

 

[NeonIbis]

So what you are saying is this new $1600 iMac is suited for people that are very very light users. Which is why a lot of people have migrated back to windows.

That's not what I'm saying (and personally I would never go to Windows). The key realisations for me were that video editing isn't the only situation that might benefit from more RAM (it all adds up) and that my usage isn't as light as I thought (again, it all adds up – and many users would not be using two office suites at once, for example, or doing as much hopping between applications as I do for work).

The other thing that really struck me, looking at Activity Monitor, is how much memory many web pages use (over 1GB, which seems excessive). But, unlike on my Intel Macbook Air (2020 i7/16/512), bloated webpages did not get the fans roaring!

 

[poked]

16GB/1TB purple. I know eventually I’m going to need the RAM to be that high because I found out a video game I used to play has Mac support and I am jumping in it for video editing/website designing/etc. I may not need it now, but it beats waiting for a Mac that may not have the colors and specs I want. Do I wish it had 32GB? Yeah, I do. But will I ever realistically need that much? Probably not. Whatever I come from (2013 MacBook Air, base model) will be such a stupidly huge upgrade it’ll be embarrassing to look at my poor laptop again. Moderate side grade from my old gaming laptop, etc.