MacBook 14’’ 32G/512G vs 16G/1TB, which’s better?

[Arktika]

Recently I want to buy a 14-inch MBP, mainly for daily use in medical research.

Commonly used software: image / video processing, Adobe(PS AI AE..), Final Cut Pro, SPSS, R ,Windows virtual machine is required as well.

10+14/（32G/512G）vs（16G/1TB）
which is the better choice？
Could you please give me some advice🙏

 

[Wando64]

If you are a heavy user of FCP and Adobe, and use a VM as well, IMO the 32GB are justified.

Whether you can live with only 512GB is for you to know.
How much do you need that extra storage while you are on the go?
How do you feel about carrying an external SSD with you?

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

More RAM is objectively better. More space just allows you to store more files, which can easily otherwise be handled with external drives.

 

[russell_314]

If you can live with less on device storage 32 GB of RAM is better. The internal SSD (Like the RAM) is not upgradable. If an SSD becomes mostly full is slows down considerably. If you can manage with external drives or cloud storage but that can be a PITA when you're away from home. Only you know what you keep on your drive so.

 

[throAU]

It depends on your requirements.

 

[TechRunner]

Another vote for more RAM. You can always add more storage (external), but you can't add more RAM.

 

[wonderings]

So a big thing here that no one seems to be mentioning is you will not be able to run a VM of Windows on an M1 Mac. You need an Intel Mac in order to run any regular version of Windows 10/11. You can get a Windows 11 ARM OS, but that is not the same and your apps may not work as Windows 11 ARM only emulates X86, so if the app works the performance will probably not be all that great.

 

[Wando64]

32 gb is best because ram are always better than hard disk

Unless you need storage space, in which case the disk is better than RAM.
Or unless you are hungry, in which case pizza is better than both RAM and Disk.

 

[SeenJeen]

32GB. NVMe external drives are getting very affordable these days.

 

[5425642]

Make sure that you don't overbuy. This has been debated so many times. RAM 16GB is good for the most if you don't know how much you need then you maybe just need 16GB?

 

[throAU]

32 gb is best because ram are always better than hard disk

Very much depends if you need high speed access to large files more than you need RAM. Sure you can add drives externally but doing so completely ruins the work-anywhere-without-crap-plugged-in portability of the machine.

My baseline is typically using around 450-500 GB of storage, so for me 500 GB is completely non-viable.

 

[MrAverigeUser]

I am not an expert...
but M1 seems to need less RAM than Intel-machines for the same performance. PLUS the SSD is that fast that nowadays 99,9% of users will not feel a difference between 16 and 32 RAM. Some serious publications showed that there is in fact no or not a big difference.

BUT: because you will threat a lot of data, the SSD will be at heavy use (plus the swap). So - more space on the SSD will be better for the SSD not only because of the many data but also because of the read/write by swap. Since you cannot exchange easily the SSD more space on the SSD would be my choice.

So 16 GB RAM and 2 TB SSD seems to be the best... and for Windows you can purchase a 2015 non-retina MBP 15" from the money you did not throw out by the window... and the 2015 non-retina you can upgrade SSD- wise yourself ... that will spare even more money.

here are two good YT-statements of a honest guy about both MBP:

and about perhaps the best MBP for your Intel-based programs:

 

[wonderings]

Really not sure why anyone is recommending an M1 Mac when running Windows is required according to the OP. If you have to have Windows I would check out the refurb store and buy the most powerful MacBook Pro you can. More RAM is better for running a VM. Hard drive space while great, if needed can be moved to the cloud or external. The M1 Mac cannot run Windows in VM or in bootcamp.

 

[Lasermoon]

I went for the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max with 32GB and 2TB
with no apps running the computer uses 16GB just to tick over, leaving 16GB for when you open apps
In the past my other MacBooks had 512GB which was never enough, 2TB is plenty now.

As for Windows, just buy a cheap Windows laptop

 

[MrAverigeUser]

I went for the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max with 32GB and 2TB
with no apps running the computer uses 16GB just to tick over, leaving 16GB for when you open apps
In the past my other MacBooks had 512GB which was never enough, 2TB is plenty now.

As for Windows, just buy a cheap Windows laptop

M1 MBP need much less RAM than Intel- MBP....
That is one of a lot of advantages of the apple silicon M1 processor.

 

[Basic75]

32 gb is best because ram are always better than hard disk

32GB is best because there are reasonable ways to add external storage later, a possibility that does not exist for RAM. The M1 Pro and M1 Max are a large jump in processing power over their Intel predecessors, a large jump that will not be repeated any time soon. So all M1 Pro and M1 Max machines, as long as they have enough RAM, can have a nice long useful lifetime.

 

[Basic75]

M1 MBP need much less RAM than Intel- MBP....
That is one of a lot of advantages of the apple silicon M1 processor.

Why? x86 has better code density than ARM, and applications' data structures will not change because of the architecture. Where is this saving supposed to come from?

 

[SeenJeen]

x86 has better code density than ARM

Based on what evidence?

 

[Basic75]

Based on what evidence?

I had considered this common knowledge but checking the applications on my Mac shows it's not as clear cut as I thought.

 

[synicalx1]

Commonly used software: image / video processing, Adobe(PS AI AE..), Final Cut Pro, SPSS, R ,Windows virtual machine is required as well.

Based on this - you're going to have way more than 1TB of data anyway, so having a 512GB or 1TB SSD isn't going to matter much since you'll still be relying on external storage a lot of the time. And at the same time you'll get a heap of benefit out of extra RAM so I'd say go for option #1.

 

[theluggage]

10+14/（32G/512G）vs（16G/1TB）
which is the better choice？

If you don't need 1TB of storage or 32GB of RAM, then the best choice would be 16G/512GB and a couple of hundred bucks in change.

Storage vs. RAM is not really a trade-off - yes, if you are processing large data/video files then the internal SSD may perform better than an external drive, and more RAM may more than compensate for that - but that is hugely dependent on exactly what data and software we're talking about. Even so - the question becomes "how much internal storage do I need to keep my work-in-progress on the internal drive?" which you can answer yourself by looking at your existing system.

I'd echo what a lot of other people have said - it is a lot easier to solve a storage shortage with external drives than it is to fix a RAM shortage.

As for RAM - ignore all the arguments about whether the M1 uses less RAM than Intel (short answer: it's just not that simple) and apply the simple rule: if you need more than 16GB RAM on your Intel system then you should get more than 16GB of RAM on a M1 Pro system, and not rely on the Unified Memory fairy to sort it out... but check out your current system and look at the memory pressure while you work (not memory usage - MacOS will always try to max that out) in Activity Monitor. Also bear in mind that, if you're using an Intel 15/16" MBP or iMac then it has a few GB of dedicated video RAM in addition to the system RAM whereas, on M1, everything comes out of system RAM - although you can't make a 1:1 comparison, the M1 will lose some system RAM to video.

There's no doubt that the super-efficient swapping of RAM to SSD can mitigate the effects of a RAM shortage, but swap is still a poor substitute for RAM and even the super-fast M1 SSD is an order of magnitude slower than RAM. Thing is, if you're investing in a new Mac, whether or not it is faster than Intel will be irrelevant in a few months time - but if it is short of RAM then it won't be as fast as it could be.

...but you do need to check that your work is being slowed down by memory pressure in the first place.

I had considered this common knowledge but checking the applications on my Mac shows it's not as clear cut as I thought.

Well, it depends how you check - but many up-to-date Mac Apps are "fat binaries" that contain both Intel and ARM versions of the code. However, that's kinda irrelevant as there is far more to RAM usage than the size of the binaries. 1GB of data - be it numbers, images, sound, video - on Intel is still 1GB of data on ARM - and while Unified Memory is more efficient than copying between system and video (etc.) RAM, that's about peed and doesn't necessarily translate into RAM savings.

 

[Basic75]

Well, it depends how you check

I used otool(1) on the fat binaries to view the sizes of the text segments for different architectures.

 

[Basic75]

...but you do need to check that your work is being slowed down by memory pressure in the first place.

That's a good starting point, and then you need to extrapolate for the next 5-10 years. For my use case 16GB is barely enough right now, so I'd never go for less than 32GB in a new machine that can't be upgraded.

 

[wonderings]

It really is difficult to compare M1 Macs to PC counterparts and specs. Saw this great video comparing a base model 14" MacBook Pro and how it out performed an i9 PC with 3070 GPU 64 gigs of ram, etc. It out performed by a large margin when it came to actually working in Premier with 4K streams that would lock up the i9 PC. Worth a watch.

 

[wys]

More RAM is objectively better. More space just allows you to store more files, which can easily otherwise be handled with external drives.

Not necessarily.

If you are working on data crunching and large datasets, or media work with a large media library, you are really really really gonna want that space.

These days, I would not buy anything with less than 1TB of space.

Additionally, I am not convinced >16GB RAM is really needed that badly either.

Commonly used software: image / video processing, Adobe(PS AI AE..), Final Cut Pro, SPSS, R ,Windows virtual machine is required as well.

This is all stuff that is gonna eat up a LOT of storage space. For reference, I have been using a 512GB SSD model MB for the past years for similar use cases (my personal image editing work PLUS personal data crunching and programming), and I have been constantly plagued by low space issues.

Installing loads of software libraries for the likes of R, Python, etc., can end up using significant amounts of space. VM's especially eat up tons of space. Docker containers are the bane of my MB's SSD, they accumulate a ton of storage usage and its usually the very first thing I start deleting when I am out of space again (and again and again). None of these are things you can simply offload to external storage devices, either. And at the same time, I have been using 16GB RAM machines for local compute for years as well, and very rarely have I ever hit memory limits, usually it only happens when you start running multiple VM's or Docker's at once, but if you are seriously doing that frequently and heavily you might need to consider offloading the work to the cloud (or on-prem resources provided by your employer) instead of doing it all on your laptop.

Also, keep in mind that when macOS is low on RAM, it relies more and more on swap (space on your SSD), but when your Mac is low on storage, you start losing swap space and suffer real consequences of OOM situations. So your computer suffers much more from low storage than it does from low memory.

tl;dr: get the 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD