Love my MBA 16GB 1TB, I'm sure I could've got away with just having 8GB for my use case right now but I intend to keep this computer for a good few years so I thought best to future proof.
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M1 MBA owners with 8Gb... any regrets not getting 16?
- Thread starter radamo
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I recently got myself a base model M1 Air to use at school (teacher). Running 10-15 Safari tabs, 4-5 Chrome tabs, MS Office, Teams, and a few coding apps at once is smooth as can be on this little machine. I've been very impressed with it so far, and don't regret not getting the 16GB model 
I went straightly for it when I placed the order. It was 1362 euros including vat (taxes) and shipping but it is the fastest machine my hands have touched so far, even with not optimized programs. This allows greater productivity and most tasks are a pleasure to accomplish. Just as an example, on windows I used a software that took 6 minutes to launch. Here it takes 35 seconds and it is not even optimized for M1!
I have a base model M1 MacBook Air (so, 7 GPU core variant of M1, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD). It's not my primary Mac and it isn't going to be my primary M1 Mac either. The whole reason I have it is for beta testing new macOS releases in the summertime and doing other such testing during the rest of the year. It will never be used for even mild content creation, and will, at the very most, be used for mild content consumption. For my purposes, 8GB of RAM is totally fine.
However, if it were my sole Mac or my primary Mac (let alone my primary M1 Mac) or even a Mac of importance, I'd get 16GB, if for no other reason than future-proofing and overhead in case you ever take up a workflow that benefits from it. People erroneously like to comment about how RAM is entirely different with Apple Silicon and how you don't need more RAM and that's simply not true. RAM is much more efficient with Apple Silicon, but that doesn't necessarily negate the need to page more than 8GB of data at a given time.
I have been building PC's since the early 80's and this new architecture is just different. From everything published so far, for normal usage (even fairly high end usage) 8Gb seems to be more than enough For my own use case, as a secondary machine (iMac being primary) the 8Gb will do just fine.
I'm not saying it won't. Just that I'd opt for 16GB. Apple HAS cut off Apple Silicon iOS/iPadOS devices for not having enough RAM before. There's no guarantee that they won't do it with the Mac. That and you can't later decide on more RAM without chucking out the whole computer.
Also, the architecture is different when it comes to how data in RAM is accessed by system components (CPU, GPU, etc.) and how much of it needs to be duplicated to other places to be accessible elsewhere. That helps a little bit. But that doesn't do anything for when you're loading large files or have a lot of things running at once. That still requires RAM in numbers. RAM is still RAM.
I have to agree with this. I guess for my use case as a secondary machine with light use (normally) and occasional heavy load the 8/256 has been stellar and I don't see upgrading. Soon I will upgrade my main desktop to a Mx machine since the i9 already looks like it is out classed by the M1.
Again, I own that same base model. It's perfectly adequate for my uses. But my uses are not hefty and it's not a Mac I'm serious about for the long term outside of my testing purposes. If it was to be my primary Mac, I'd want to max the RAM out because I know that later on, I'll want to and I won't have the ability to. But few people look at the long term when buying something in the here and now. I've been bitten by that and I've seen enough people bitten by that to the point where I refuse to if this is to be a serious machine for me (which this base model M1 MacBook Air is not).
Should I get 256/512 ? Considering i'm a light to moderate user of my computer.
Get the 512 GB because in any case a certain percentage of the ssd needs to be left free. I could be wrong cause I don't remember well the exact value but should grossly be 1/3 of the overall capacity.
Web browsing, light photo editing/ video editing. I realized if I ditched the RAW photo files on my current laptop, I would have 100GB free space, even with Xcode installed, yes I also do some light coding.
Get at least one capacity size larger than you think you'll need. You cannot upgrade the storage on an M1 Mac after purchase. Same advice generally goes for T2 Macs (with the exception of the 2019 Mac Pro).
That nagging question is the main reason I went with 16GB, knowing I would essentially use it as it as a glorified Chromebook. (More accurately, a Safaribook). I've had two MacBook Pros with 8GB before and never had issues, but I always felt I should've just spent the extra coin for the RAM. Completely overkill, but I have zero worries that I made the right decision and enjoy every minute of using it.
Unfortunately, I think going on enthusiast forums where everyone is bitching about RAM is what causes the nag. I'd be willing to bet that if you were to give 90% of the members on here an 8GB MacBook Air without knowledge of the RAM that was in the machine, people would be surprised about how capable 8GB is on the M1.
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I wound up swapping to the MBP for the higher nit count on the screen (and better battery/charger) but kept the 256/8 config. I use it quite a bit and run several photo editing apps and lots of safari tabs. I don't see any memory lag at ALL. It runs better than my 2019 27" iMac with 3.6 Ghz i9 and 40Gb of ram. Just doesn't seem right. IMHO this is a really solid system design.
Nope no issues might end up getting the M2 Air if it connects to two displays but when that comes out I'll definitely spec it with 16GB.
I don't regret mine so far,
The basic configurations coming from Apple are usually above average with other computers on the market when it comes to general computer needs or even for working computation necessary
I would recommend 16GB for professional use
The basic configurations coming from Apple are usually above average with other computers on the market when it comes to general computer needs or even for working computation necessary
I would recommend 16GB for professional use
Absolutely perfect for me right now. Although it's always preferable to get one with a bit more RAM for some future proofing, I know I won't keep this one for much longer: once the next MBA with M2 come out (2022?), I know I'll want to upgrade to that anyway. Or the next MBPs. I don't keep any system for longer than 2 years anyway. So, 8GB is plenty for what I do with it.
There plenty of Youtube videos when it comes to Macs: usually 2-3 years newer Macs with 8GB destroy older ones with 16GB in every task.
As a finance major myself, I could also think about the fact, that todays $200 towards RAM could be your $200 money towards your new current Mac in the future.
So if someone is updating yearly, that person could stay on top with minimal investments towards a Mac, by selling the old one and adding those $200.