Usage is under 6GB, and while swap is still 0 your Mac has already started compressing some memory pages even with this light load. Your recommendation to go for 16GB in any new machine is definitely the right one.
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Mac mini M1 RAM advide 8GB vs 16GB?
- Thread starter James2McGill3
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Personally, I upgraded the RAM in my 2020 M1 MacBook Air to 16GB because I could afford to. I'm not terribly worried about the RAM usage on my machine as it doesn't seem to follow any logic that I understand.
Currently I have the Finder, Messages, Safari (with 8 tabs open, 6 are Macrumors), Music, Activity monitor and Transmission, which I don't think is many applications, but according to Activity Monitor, I'm using 10.5GB RAM.
I think the old adage is correct. If you can afford it, buy it. You'll thank yourself in the future.
Currently I have the Finder, Messages, Safari (with 8 tabs open, 6 are Macrumors), Music, Activity monitor and Transmission, which I don't think is many applications, but according to Activity Monitor, I'm using 10.5GB RAM.
I think the old adage is correct. If you can afford it, buy it. You'll thank yourself in the future.
I'd even argue 16 GB isn't enough and I wish Apple made affordable AS machines with more than that. You can never have too much RAM, especially if you want to use your machine for a longer period of time.
Luckily, today SSDs are way, way quicker than HDDs used to be so if you run out of RAM and your M1 has to swap, it won't feel as bad as it used to back in the good old days but still.
That's obviously only true if you can afford it. If the extra cost hurts, you will be fine with 8 GB for now. But you might regret it eventually.
I have 10 friends with Mac around me. All they do is Spotify, Netflix, YT, Word and that is absolutely it. Apple knows their customers - most of them are just internet browsers, who really don't need 16 GB.
It depends entirely on your usage. I know a professional *gasp* photography studio that still have PowerPC macs with Adobe Creative Suite 2 and it’s still perfectly fine. Hint: they don’t even come close to 8GB of RAM.
Another studio I know has Adobe Creative Suite 4 and 6GB of RAM. Still works fine for them on Windows 10.
I would get 16GB because 7-10 years is a long time and you know applications always add more features that require more memory. And since the memory is soldered on there is no option to upgrade it. With a mini, I would trade a smaller disk for more memory since you can attach external drive(s).
I sure would not buy an M1 mini now. Wait 2 weeks and see if there is something better. Also, the price of the M1 unit will drop as they try to get rid of old inventory.
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For long term usage, 16GB is what I’d recommend. Even if you have no plans to be using heavier apps, you never know what sort of hobbies you might pick up, or what your job may require, etc.
I’m so glad I got my M1 MBA with 16GB RAM. Recently I’ve been using Citrix for some school projects, and it’s the first time my RAM has been consistently hanging out in the yellow.
I’m so glad I got my M1 MBA with 16GB RAM. Recently I’ve been using Citrix for some school projects, and it’s the first time my RAM has been consistently hanging out in the yellow.
There are still some memory leaks in Monterey and having extra RAM helps with that. The bugs will eventually get fixed though.
If you're going to use it for work then I would say get 16GB and maybe even 32 depending on your kinda of work. I would disagree with some people that you need 1TB built in. You can always get external drives or network shares to store finished projects with the internal 256GB drive plenty enough for your current project(s). Now of course if you're editing an 8K movie then my advice will change to max the machine out, you can afford it.
For now for your stated usage I think 8gb would be fine. Later though you may wish you had 16gb if your usage changes, new versions of MacOS which might work better with more memory, etc. Keep in mind that 7-10 years is a very long time in tech.
Here is another way to think about it though. Forget the idea that you will need to use it for 7-10 years. Get 8gb now and later if you find it is too constraining then get another one that has 16gb or whatever. If you want to hold down costs then later if you need 16gb get a used or refurb M1 Mini 16gb. With new Mac Minis likely soon (maybe M2 and/or M1 Pro) it will probably be easy to find an M1 Mini 16gb for a good price in the future.
I’ve heard about the memory leaks, but I’ve had zero problems with them so far. Looking at activity monitor, I’m sure it was just Citrix being a huge memory hog. It’s pretty laggy and slow (through my browser), and I’m not sure if it’s because the M1 isn’t powerful enough to handle it or because Citrix is just that slow.
The memory leaks are in Monterey and discussed in the Monterey and Apple Silicon forums. I just reboot every couple of days on my MBP (has 32 GB of RAM). I'm staying on Big Sur on my M1 mini until the folks on the forums verify that their problems are resolved.
This decision is actually quite simple. If you can't say for certain that 8GB is enough, get 16GB.
When viewed over the time you will use this computer, buy one less cup of coffee each month and the cost of the RAM upgrade is paid for. It's actually only $2.40 per month over seven years.
When viewed over the time you will use this computer, buy one less cup of coffee each month and the cost of the RAM upgrade is paid for. It's actually only $2.40 per month over seven years.
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I got apps reloading on my M1 12.9 iPad Pro with 8GB RAM and Macrumors say 8Gb RAM is enough. Quite funny forum.
EDIT: I didn’t realise I’d replied to this thread only three months ago suggesting the issue I’ve found myself in would happen.
Just throwing my hat in the ring. I picked up the 8GB/256GB model last year and I’ve just sold it. While the computer was perfectly fine for day-to-day use, and even video editing and photo manipulation etc. Over time the way in which I used the computer changed and I was running into stutters and freezes.
I started to push the Mac more, demanding more of it. This wasn’t the computer’s fault, this was mine for expecting too much and being too cheap to upgrade to the 16GB version originally.
If I could go back and re-buy I certainly would have gritted my teeth and paid the extra for the 16GB upgrade. I likely would also go for the 512GB storage too, but if I was it choose only one upgrade it certainly would have been the RAM. This would have likely meant that I could have continued using the computer for many more years, rather than just the one year I got out of it.
Now I’ve had to go through the trouble of selling my Mac mini, loosing around £100 on it‘s value, and need to purchase and re-setup a new Mac when I choose one in the future.
Just throwing my hat in the ring. I picked up the 8GB/256GB model last year and I’ve just sold it. While the computer was perfectly fine for day-to-day use, and even video editing and photo manipulation etc. Over time the way in which I used the computer changed and I was running into stutters and freezes.
I started to push the Mac more, demanding more of it. This wasn’t the computer’s fault, this was mine for expecting too much and being too cheap to upgrade to the 16GB version originally.
If I could go back and re-buy I certainly would have gritted my teeth and paid the extra for the 16GB upgrade. I likely would also go for the 512GB storage too, but if I was it choose only one upgrade it certainly would have been the RAM. This would have likely meant that I could have continued using the computer for many more years, rather than just the one year I got out of it.
Now I’ve had to go through the trouble of selling my Mac mini, loosing around £100 on it‘s value, and need to purchase and re-setup a new Mac when I choose one in the future.
Mac OS works a little differently than Windows in this regard. It is much happier to find ways to "use" the RAM that exists on the system, regardless of how critical the data that it's storing in RAM actually is.
A workload that used 6GB of RAM on an 8GB Mac could very easily wind up using 10GB of RAM on a 16GB Mac. Based on usage alone, it's difficult to really tell how much active working memory is actually required for acceptable performance. Memory Pressure is a much better metric on Macs and gives a clearer picture of how heavily the memory is actually used.
(On the Unified Memory Architecture, GPU processes from Chrome, etc will be listed separately from the main process and it will appear as though they both have their own independent pools of memory. If you click on the process on Activity Monitor, it will show how much of that RAM is actually shared between the parent process and the GPU process. In Chrome's case, the majority of that memory is usually shared, and the UMA does a good job of preventing it all from needing to be allocated twice. You can also see metrics such as "real memory size" which shows how much actual physical RAM is being occupied by the process after the compressor and swap have done their jobs).
It is worth noting that Apple Silicon Macs apparently do memory compression in hardware now (at least based on reports that examined the A14 and the M1). This is a huge improvement over the Intel based macs, and means that the performance hit will certainly be smaller than it was in the past. I've found that the new Macs can generally handle workloads that push the memory pressure into the yellow more easily than the old Intel Macs could.
Swap, however, is a different story. DRAM latency is about ~300 CPU cycles, whereas swap can be estimated to be around about 300K to 1mil cycles. In other words, swap is plenty fast if it's just swapping out inactive memory from various apps and browser tabs you haven't looked at for hours. But as soon as it starts swapping heavily (and memory pressure enters the red), it's going to take a major performance hit.
How much RAM is enough? If you're just browsing the web and editing documents, 8GB is plenty (I do software development on an 8GB Mac, and you'd be surprised how well Mac OS can handle tight memory constraints). But applications also get heavier with time, and 8GB is on the lower end these days. You'll be happy with either, but if you have the extra money to spend, 16GB is definitely more future proof in the long term.
A workload that used 6GB of RAM on an 8GB Mac could very easily wind up using 10GB of RAM on a 16GB Mac. Based on usage alone, it's difficult to really tell how much active working memory is actually required for acceptable performance. Memory Pressure is a much better metric on Macs and gives a clearer picture of how heavily the memory is actually used.
(On the Unified Memory Architecture, GPU processes from Chrome, etc will be listed separately from the main process and it will appear as though they both have their own independent pools of memory. If you click on the process on Activity Monitor, it will show how much of that RAM is actually shared between the parent process and the GPU process. In Chrome's case, the majority of that memory is usually shared, and the UMA does a good job of preventing it all from needing to be allocated twice. You can also see metrics such as "real memory size" which shows how much actual physical RAM is being occupied by the process after the compressor and swap have done their jobs).
It is worth noting that Apple Silicon Macs apparently do memory compression in hardware now (at least based on reports that examined the A14 and the M1). This is a huge improvement over the Intel based macs, and means that the performance hit will certainly be smaller than it was in the past. I've found that the new Macs can generally handle workloads that push the memory pressure into the yellow more easily than the old Intel Macs could.
Swap, however, is a different story. DRAM latency is about ~300 CPU cycles, whereas swap can be estimated to be around about 300K to 1mil cycles. In other words, swap is plenty fast if it's just swapping out inactive memory from various apps and browser tabs you haven't looked at for hours. But as soon as it starts swapping heavily (and memory pressure enters the red), it's going to take a major performance hit.
How much RAM is enough? If you're just browsing the web and editing documents, 8GB is plenty (I do software development on an 8GB Mac, and you'd be surprised how well Mac OS can handle tight memory constraints). But applications also get heavier with time, and 8GB is on the lower end these days. You'll be happy with either, but if you have the extra money to spend, 16GB is definitely more future proof in the long term.
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I got a 16 GB mini running Big Sur. Yes, Monterey does use more RAM - I have a 2021 MBP with 32 GB of RAM and it routinely uses 16-20 GB of RAM for programs and the rest for cache.