Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
M1 MBA owners with 8Gb... any regrets not getting 16?
- Thread starter radamo
- Start date
-
- Tags
- macbook air 13 memory
- Sort by reaction score
Always... if I had the money, and maybe even if I didn't, I'd get the most memory, storage, and horsepower in a MBA available. If I ever replace this 2015, that's what I will do, as long as they continue to be reliable, as you can't replace anything anymore..
With the M1 chips, I think 8GB is fine for most. Having said that, I have an Air with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD..
Even Xcode is fast on my 8GB MBA.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised. It works well on Big Sur.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised. It works well on Big Sur.
In my short amount of usage (first few days of ownership) it appears as fast or faster than my 2019 27" 5K iMac with an i9 and 40Gb of ram. I am very impressed.
I agree. Those Chinese computers are really bad. The MacBook Mini is incredibly slow.
You might want to try it with 8Gb and see if it fits your needs... Mine has not bogged down yet. It is very impressive.
If this is the case you never needed anywhere close to that much RAM
The iMac has an intel chip and is RAM hungry. The MacBook Air has an M1 and 8Gb. The Air is the machine I said never bogs down.
I'm in the same position. I'm a light user, but it is not uncommon for me to have 20+ safari tabs open while performing other light usage tasks. To further complicate matters, I plan on keeping this purchase for about five years. I keep going back and forth between 8GB and 16GB of RAM. I know it is only a matter of $200 but I am having difficulty figuring out which way to go.
I have two M1 MacBook Airs. One of them has 16GB and one of them has 8GB. The former is to be used as my standard Apple laptop heading into the Apple Silicon era. The latter is used for testing purposes (OS betas, different partition/drive configurations, etc.). Certainly for my respective purposes, the 8GB Air is fine. Similarly, if you're buying these systems for work or an office (and your uses are web browsing, Internet, and e-mail), 8GB was and IS still fine for Intel Macs and Intel PCs. Hell, in many companies, the 256GB SSD + 8GB RAM combo is commonplace for the standard laptop configuration (i.e. the one that everyone gets unless their computing needs are extra). Were it me and it were my personal machine (and not one used for the purposes I've detailed here), I'd go 16GB; mainly for future-proofing and because you can't later upgrade it. But if you know your needs are going to be minor, then it's fine. We're not talking about 16" MacBook Pro money here either (so, if you feel you need more, you'll be more likely to rectify it sooner than if you skimped out on the RAM upgrade on a higher-end Mac).
The YouTube videos testing the difference between 16 and 8GB seem to show that for your use case 8 will be WAY more than enough. This architecture is pretty efficient.
I got an m1 MBA to bridge the gap between my Intel 27" iMac and the 14/16" MBP sometime this year. It's handled everything pretty well with 8gb, even big Photoshop and illustrator files, 900gb iMovie saves etc.
I bought my 8/7 256 8GB Air soon after launch. There weren’t any deep looks into how it behaved with Adobe Creative Cloud. Open Illustrator, inDesign and Photoshop and you’re done.
I also found myself constantly watching activity monitor, that itself made me return (after 6 months, thanks to the extended COVID returns policy).
A 6 month review led me to order an 8/8 512 16GB Air.
I also found myself constantly watching activity monitor, that itself made me return (after 6 months, thanks to the extended COVID returns policy).
A 6 month review led me to order an 8/8 512 16GB Air.
no regrets with 8gb, but then again I am a basic user; web browsing/videos/online financials/emails/messages/numbers/pages/photos. fastest computer I've owned in 26 years.
Still waiting on it turning up. My iMac (Intel) handles the same workload just fine with 16GB, so I think I’ll be ok
The power usage is also just insanely good.
My wife got a base model Apple refurbished M1 Air, 8GB RAM, and I have the 2020 i5 Air with 8GB RAM. Just for kicks, I installed coconutBattery on both, which lets you put a display in the menu bar to see how many watts you're using, among other things.
Then I fired up Maps on both machines and did one of those 3D city flyover tours on each machine at the same time. They're pretty demanding and try for a high frame rate, so I figured it would be a good test.
My i5 got through it fairly smoothly, but with some dropped frames. Her M1 looked smooth as butter the whole time. When it was all done, my i5 Air was pulling I think around 16 watts and hot. Hers was pulling about 4.5 watts and cool to the touch. In other words, <30% of the power usage and with better performance.
In short, I've got a laptop just over a year old that now feels like crap by comparison.
Last edited:
I am less than a week in, but wow, this thing just keeps chugging. It sips battery and powers through everything that is thrown at it. I see beach balls more often on my 2019 iMac i9 with 40Gb of Ram!!! I don't think I have seen one beach ball on the M1 Air 256/8.
People here oversold me on 8GB , so I got work MacBook Air with 8 GB of ram and while the machine is ok fast, it is for sure not super snappy. it is always paging and memory pressure is always in high yellow zone as it does not have enough memory. This is after opening Microsoft outlook, teams, 1-2 excel and word documents and 20 safari tabs and 5-10 edge tabs, Cisco vpn, Webex,some Apple apps like mail, calendar, messages etc. I am not sure if this is considered heavy or power work, but I wished I order 16 gb model.