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M2 Air help - 8 or 16 GB?
- Thread starter GabbiDB
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- macbook air m2 ram
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Super disappointing the upgraded stock MBA didn’t move to 16/512 instead of 8/512. Should not have to BTO to get 16GB in 2022.
I agree. It’s not like you can simply add it later.
With the base M1 Pro and up having 16GB as base (and LPDDR5 to boot), we can see where Apple is going. The 8GB base RAM is just a ruse to get people to pay for those juicy RAM upgrades, or to prematurely nudge people to buy a new system a few years from now.
Completely agree. Truly disappointed that Apple didn’t even have a higher tier preconfigured model with 16GB of RAM. It’s worse in markets like my country where we don’t have access to BTO option, so we cannot get 16GB even if we wanted to pay for it.
Depends on what you consider “basic”. Web browsing of today is no longer basic, with highly complex and multimedia sites that people are consuming. Web pages can easily take up gigabytes of RAM nowadays.
Maybe if one uses a computer only for simple word processing and emails, sure. But even what people consider to be “office tasks” are no longer that simple, with zoom video calls, documents collaboration and continuous messaging being the common tasks of today.
I mean my computer usage is mostly that, and maxing out 8GB on my machine is not uncommon. I myself am amazed as I didn’t think my tasks were that RAM intensive before, but it is what it is. On my new Windows laptop with 16GB of RAM, things are more fluid due to less swap being used thanks to the 16GB of RAM being filled up.
I agree with you. 16GB makes a huge difference. For me "basic" is web browsing with less than 10 tabs and office and streaming videos( Netflix, YT, etc).
8GB on an M1 is fine for basic uses. I have several base model M1 Airs (7 GPU Cores; 256 GB SSD; 8GB RAM), but I use them for basic testing and IT purposes. None of them are my daily driver for longer than a quick spell. For my M1 13" MacBook Pro, I have 16GB. For people I recommend an M1 or M2 to, 16GB is my minimum. Would you be okay on 8GB? Probably. But, if you want this thing to last you a while, I'd go with 16GB or 24GB (especially since you can't upgrade it after the fact).
What do you do with your MacBook?
I use Xcode and Unity on 8GB and have no issues at all. Even handles all the particles and lighting effects.
Runs Microsoft office applications. Sometimes photoshop. Has a remote control software kept running in the background, among a few other things. No Xcode or anything like that. Still memory is always in yellow range when things kick in.
Mostly because of application support. Sometimes can also be hardware incompatible with Mac.
Well, I dont have that issue on 8GB for whatever reason and it's snappy enough.
No doubt.
Put in as much RAM as you can afford for your estimated and expected length of use.
Simply, they will serve you better a longer time. If that is preferable.
I usually max my desktops 'as much that I can afford', because I want to keep them some time as well.
Not so much my portables. They are also lighter in usage. But 16GB IS light usage today.
Get 16GB as a minimum. If you can, get 24GB. Three years from now, software and website demands for RAM will be higher, and your Mac will have higher resale value.
So you recommend people getting 1500 Gb of RAM on the Mac Pro just because they can afford it?
It’s kind of sad that “upgrading” to M2 with 24GB would cost me $700 aud assuming I got insanely good deal at selling my 16GB M1 with 1TB storage. Otherwise I’d consider.