Yeah I would say one would need to have a pretty hefty work flow to see the difference. As much as I hate watching Max Tech videos, he did one where some testing did not show 32gb vs 16gb did many tasks any faster
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M3 Pro 18 or 36gb
- Thread starter Delorean2006
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I debated this in the forums when purchasing my M1Pro in 2021. I went with 16GB which many people thought would end up being too little in a Pro laptop as soon as 3-5 years of ownership. Well - I can report back that my 2021 Vintage M1Pro 16GB/1TB feels as fast and as fresh as the day I bought it. I use heavy Office, a Windows 11 VM via Parallels, Final Cut Pro (Multicam 4k 1-hour projects), Logic Pro, a massive Devonthink database and a million browser tabs. Often all at the same time!
I can see memory pressure get yellow and even red, but not once have I thought, this computer feels slow I should have bought more RAM. In fact, without the memory pressure meter I wouldn't have a clue what my RAM was doing based on responsiveness. People will also talk about SSD wear due to swap, but I haven't heard about masses of SSD failures from this so I sleep easy.
This is all a long way of saying that buying up to 32GB RAM would have been a waste up until now, and will probably not be needed for another 3-5 years at which point the CPU will be long in the tooth and won't keep up with software no matter how much RAM.
In terms of 'futureproofing' that's hard to know. I mean, the advent of on-device AI seems like the next big step in computing but could an M1Pro with 32, 64 or 96GB RAM compete with the latest generations of Apple silicon? I'll put money on an M4Pro with 18GB RAM being faster for AI than a M1Pro with 96GB RAM because of the dedicated hardware.
My point is that overpaying for RAM for 'futureproofing' could well be a waste because by the time you find that the lack of RAM is slowing down your Mac, there will be a new laptop with new features that will offer something better. It is easy to overspend unnecessarily - I'm convinced that the memory pressure gauge is put there by Apple marketing not Apple engineering!
I second this. My 2021 M1 Pro has never shown any signs of slow processing speed since I bought it nearly 3 years ago. If the memory pressure gauge gets to
this may be untrue when apple intelligence and they system use large amounts of ram.
But that would mean requiring new buyers to pay $400 for a RAM upgrade just to use AI. Wouldn’t be smart for Apple to do this.
I think this is the big unknown right now. Current AI models need lots of RAM and dedicated hardware to run well. I run Whisper locally and have also tried playing with Ollama. Both are utter RAM hogs.
Looking ahead, the NPU performance of M4 has been beefed up substantially vs M3 which checks the hardware box for on-device AI. Question is - will lots of RAM be needed as well? I don't think we will know until all the AI features coming our way are out in the wild.
I suspect that Apple will offer a pared down AI feature set for on-device AI which will have modest CPU and RAM requirements. By pared down, I mean they will deliver on all the stuff they showed at WWDC - these are modest tasks and will be super helpful to most users and should run on 8GB/16GB/18GB hardware such as iPhones, iPads and most Apple silicon Macs.
However, I'm also hoping that we will get 'Pro' AI apps coming that will need all the RAM they can get. I'm talking about the generative AI and LLM stuff which use tons of RAM. All this stuff runs in the cloud right now, but there are local uses for AI that I would like to keep on device rather than into some collective intelligence model (e.g. years of financial records, client projects from my consulting business etc.). This WOULD be a compelling reason to pay up the Apple tax for extra RAM.
I had the same thoughts when i got mine, but 18 is more than enough. I've been hammering the 14 inch M3 pro with tons of tabs, video editing, graphics stuff and I haven't run into a problem where I don't have enough. I honestly think most people are okay with 18 gigs -- I probably wouldn't go lower than though.
Go listen to ATP podcast once it gets posted. You are going to want more ram.
Been hammering it and can say I'm happy! ;-) I also get to leverage a few other machines that are better set up for my work -- so if I really need to do something intense I can always cram another 64 gigs into my desktop as needed. It wasn't worth the price jump for my use case.