M1 MacBook Air 8GB vs 16GB Performance Difference for Video Editing

[16bitplus]

I picked up the higher end M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD.

Been blown away so far. It seems like 8GB is plenty, even for editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro. While editing and then exporting I was still able to use Safari and Microsoft Office Apps while playing back a Youtube video all at the same time. Seems even better than my 16" MBP with 16GB of RAM.

I am trying to figure out why I would go to 16GB for the extra $200? Also I picked up the 16GB/1TB model of the M1 Air at my local store today since they had them in stock, but I haven't opened it yet.

The $1249 model seems like a great value, I might just need to spring for the 1TB upgrade and wait for it to ship as this is just to hold me over until the 14” Pros with 4 ports arrive.

 

[riverer]

I'm wondering if 16gb would be better for audio, if you load a lot of samples and recorded audio into projects to throw around. Thinking about it though that'd be a lot less memory intense than video so maybe not.

 

[phl92]

Would really appreciate if you can run a test for us in a demanding task, to see the differences of 8 vs 16 GB Ram!

 

[johannnn]

When you do those tasks, could you check the Activity Monitor if the memory pressure is green or orange? And whether it swaps?

With my 8GB M1, I find that it swaps even from just having a few tabs in Safari. Which is crazy. But even more crazy is that I don't notice AT ALL when it swaps. The machine is so fast, and the SSD it swaps to is so fast, that I don't notice anything.

 

[DanTat]

When you do those tasks, could you check the Activity Monitor if the memory pressure is green or orange? And whether it swaps?

With my 8GB M1, I find that it swaps even from just having a few tabs in Safari. Which is crazy. But even more crazy is that I don't notice AT ALL when it swaps. The machine is so fast, and the SSD it swaps to is so fast, that I don't notice anything.

Does your memory pressure turn red if you open a bunch of chrome tabs instead of safari since chrome is more ram hungry? I'm debating 8 vs 16gb as well

 

[CalMin]

For the price difference, just get the 16GB. Otherwise you will always be wondering if 16GB would have been better.

 

[johannnn]

For the price difference, just get the 16GB. Otherwise you will always be wondering if 16GB would have been better.

8GB review. Everything looks good. At 13min he's talking a bit on the 8GB.

I just got my 8GB. Just booting macOS and 6GB has been claimed. However, from just "casual usage", I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, even when it's swapping. I guess it helps to have an extremely fast chip, together with a +2GB/s SSD.

No, I don't do any video editing or gaming. But I was afraid that 8GB wouldn't be enough for casual usage. It's definitely enough.

 

[Spindel]

8GB review. Everything looks good. At 13min he's talking a bit on the 8GB.

I just got my 8GB. Just booting macOS and 6GB has been claimed. However, from just "casual usage", I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, even when it's swapping. I guess it helps to have an extremely fast chip, together with a +2GB/s SSD.

No, I don't do any video editing or gaming. But I was afraid that 8GB wouldn't be enough for casual usage. It's definitely enough.

I was just going to comment something similar.

This is not just a M1 Mac thing, but I’m starting to think we might start to see the return of the swap file in general now when SSD storage has both becom the norm and become really fast. It sure as hell is more cost effective than loading up systems with huge amounts of ram that mostly is just used to store cached data that actually isn’t used.

Of course this needs to be supported in the OS runing in the system to be effective. I have hopes for Linux, I do think macOS has this sorted and in about 10 years windows will have an effective swap algorithm.

 

[anubis1980]

8GB review. Everything looks good. At 13min he's talking a bit on the 8GB.

I just got my 8GB. Just booting macOS and 6GB has been claimed. However, from just "casual usage", I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, even when it's swapping. I guess it helps to have an extremely fast chip, together with a +2GB/s SSD.

No, I don't do any video editing or gaming. But I was afraid that 8GB wouldn't be enough for casual usage. It's definitely enough.

cheers for this, never heard of Krazy Ken before but really enjoyed that.

 

[yoak]

Yes, I would never have watched it due to the crazy front picture, but it was a nice video. Thanks for posting. I only really use Final Cut (but with 8K and 6K footage), and after watching a few videos (Every Day Day, Techcrunch) I'm starting to realise I can get away with a base model with 512GB Storage. Which means I can get it quite fast.

The only thing I haven't seen is how the system would work if you have the material on an external SSD, as that's usually how I would work.
Anyone seen any videos of that, or can take an educated guess?

 

[johannnn]

Yes, I would never have watched it due to the crazy front picture, but it was a nice video. Thanks for posting. I only really use Final Cut (but with 8K and 6K footage), and after watching a few videos (Every Day Day, Techcrunch) I'm starting to realise I can get away with a base model with 512GB Storage. Which means I can get it quite fast.

The only thing I haven't seen is how the system would work if you have the material on an external SSD, as that's usually how I would work.
Anyone seen any videos of that, or can take an educated guess?

Not really educated. But I doubt RAM changes just because the files is on an external drive. Or am I wrong?
I have a Samsung T5 and I really love it. Haven't plugged it in to my M1 yet though.

 

[manuel.s90]

8GB review. Everything looks good. At 13min he's talking a bit on the 8GB.

Thanks for that video! Absolutely amazing how powerful that machine is. After having seen this, I doubt I'll need more than 8 GB for my web development purposes.

 

[jdb8167]

8GB review. Everything looks good. At 13min he's talking a bit on the 8GB.

I just got my 8GB. Just booting macOS and 6GB has been claimed. However, from just "casual usage", I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, even when it's swapping. I guess it helps to have an extremely fast chip, together with a +2GB/s SSD.

No, I don't do any video editing or gaming. But I was afraid that 8GB wouldn't be enough for casual usage. It's definitely enough.

Surprised at how "slow" his SSD was. I'm guessing that higher than 256 GB you get some parallel read/writes. He got around 2000 MB/s write and 2600 MB/s read. On my 1 TB SSD in my M1 MacBook Air, I'm getting 3000 MB/s write and 2750 MB/s read. Quite the write difference.

 

[torncanvas]

I only really use Final Cut (but with 8K and 6K footage), and after watching a few videos (Every Day Day, Techcrunch) I'm starting to realise I can get away with a base model with 512GB Storage. Which means I can get it quite fast.

I’m not sure what your plan is for RAM, but if you’re working above 4K, I’d urge you to get 16GB. Watching a couple 6k and 8K tests, there’s definitely occasional stuttering. And some footage didn’t even load.

 

[yoak]

I’m not sure what your plan is for RAM, but if you’re working above 4K, I’d urge you to get 16GB. Watching a couple 6k and 8K tests, there’s definitely occasional stuttering. And some footage didn’t even load.

My plan was 16, but the waiting time is really long now where I live. I ordered a 512GB with 8GB of RAM (I know, it feels crazy just writing it) since I can get it in 3-5 days AND they have a 60 day open return policy where I found it. Figure I can play around a try it out (and stop spending hours on forums and Youtube "researching" M1s)

 

[yoak]

Not really educated. But I doubt RAM changes just because the files is on an external drive. Or am I wrong?
I have a Samsung T5 and I really love it. Haven't plugged it in to my M1 yet though.

No, more worried how the slower SSD performance will affect the editing experience

 

[TopLista]

My plan was 16, but the waiting time is really long now where I live. I ordered a 512GB with 8GB of RAM (I know, it feels crazy just writing it) since I can get it in 3-5 days AND they have a 60 day open return policy where I found it. Figure I can play around a try it out (and stop spending hours on forums and Youtube "researching" M1s)

Got the same exact version because it was the only one available for in-store pickup where I live, haha ;P So far the 8gb has been great and the 1 extra GPU core is also a nice bonus!

 

[yoak]

Got the same exact version because it was the only one available for in-store pickup where I live, haha ;P So far the 8gb has been great and the 1 extra GPU core is also a nice bonus!

That's good to hear. May I ask what kind of things you use your Mac mini for?

 

[TopLista]

That's good to hear. May I ask what kind of things you use your Mac mini for?

I'm in academia so mostly zoom for teaching and word processing. Nothing too demanding but a fair amount of multitasking with pdfs open, websites, zoom, etc.

For my use case the 8gb is more than enough. Now I know that people are using the future proofing argument for 16gb but I'm not convinced. With more apps/software releasing apple silicone native versions I think that the RAM is not going to be pressed too much in the upcoming years.

edit; oh I also like to game here and there. I'm seriously impressed by how this MBA runs games.

 

[prmacuser]

Can anyone who has an 8gb M1 air model let me know if it worked well if we try editing a long video (90 mins)?

 

[yoak]

I'm in academia so mostly zoom for teaching and word processing. Nothing too demanding but a fair amount of multitasking with pdfs open, websites, zoom, etc.

For my use case the 8gb is more than enough. Now I know that people are using the future proofing argument for 16gb but I'm not convinced. With more apps/software releasing apple silicone native versions I think that the RAM is not going to be pressed too much in the upcoming years.

edit; oh I also like to game here and there. I'm seriously impressed by how this MBA runs games.

Nice to hear. The future proofing argument is of course something I see as well. I have a MBA 11” from 2012 and the 4gb of RAM obviously has helped to make it usable to this day

 

[yoak]

Can anyone who has an 8gb M1 air model let me know if it worked well if we try editing a long video (90 mins)?

This is not from an MBA, but a Mac mini with

Lee Zavitz:
Just so you know I ran this thing for 12hrs video editing screen capture all kinds of heavy lifting video formats and the fans never came on (that were audible) and the case of the Mac mini was cold the whole time. I also ran all this footage off external ssd. So I wasn’t even using the super fast internal drives for these tests

Watch the review here:

In the comment section he replied a question I have been looking for all over the net. How does it perform when you have your material on an external disk?
Very well he said, but he had a very fast external

 

[prmacuser]

This is not from an MBA, but a Mac mini with

Lee Zavitz:
Just so you know I ran this thing for 12hrs video editing screen capture all kinds of heavy lifting video formats and the fans never came on (that were audible) and the case of the Mac mini was cold the whole time. I also ran all this footage off external ssd. So I wasn’t even using the super fast internal drives for these tests

...

Thank you. I had seen that video too, but don't think he edited a long video. He spent about 12 hrs doing all these tasks including video editing.

 

[Soundium]

Guys, I hope you can help me with the decision.
At this moment I have the following configuration and want to switch to M1 as I don't like battery life my computer.
I am heavy Safari (tons of tabs open), Powerpoint, Excel, Word, Parallels (need windows environment) user.

A few years ago I tried MB Air with 8Gb, and it was too slow for me, so I switched to MBP with 16Gb. Now I can work without thoughts but battery life sucks, fans are going up time to time.

Should I take 8Gb or 16Gb version? Can someone do a test with 8Gb machine: Open Safari (30 Tabs), Powerpoint (8 pcs with 200-400 slides inside), Excel (2-3 files with 100-300Mb information), Parallels (if possible with Windows 10). And do a screenshot of Activity Monitor (Memory).

Thanks for your support.

 

[MK500]

I think the 8 vs. 16 thing is a future proof scenario. If you are just buying a laptop to use for a couple years and don't care about resale value; the 8GB is fine. Someday, though, people are really going to be wanting 16GB. Examples of why:

- If virtualization becomes a thing (ARM64 Ubuntu in a VM or whatever) each VM takes a big chunk of RAM.
- High end games need 4 to 8 GB of VRAM to do their thing. On the M1 this VRAM comes from the common pool.

All that said, I do not think 8GB is a limiting issue at all right now. How much RAM does an iPad Pro have?