You’ll do better with a private sale than a trade-in. It’s a sunk cost now, so the best way to approach it is not to dwell on your initial purchase decision, but instead maximize the selling price of the 8GB M1. One question is are you sure 16GB will be enough, since you came from a 24GB iMac?
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Need advice - replacing M1 Mac mini 8GB with the 16GB model
- Thread starter VitoBotta
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The iMac (late 2017 i5) was still OK, but I was tempted by the performance claims of M1. This M1 Mini is a lot faster than that iMac apart from when the memory issue occurs.
I'm upset because I shouldn't have listened to those guys on YT and I should have gone with 16GB. I was stupid to believe that 8GB would be enough for what I do.
Good for you that you ordered from Apple.... I wish I had done the same
I live in Finland. AFAIK I can't just return it and replace it with another model if I buy from a physical store. I could have done that within 14 days if I had bought it online.
I haven't noticed a particular pattern if there is some specific app(s) that causes the problem. It's just when I have several things opened at the same time. Like I said in the original post I am using several electronified web apps that I use all the time. I am going to try to use them in Safari instead, to see if there is any difference in memory usage.
Well 16GB is the max for now.... so there isn't much choice. I am starting to think that I should have kept the iMac for a while longer still...
Sorry. Yes, I see major slowdowns when the memory pressure is high so that's the problem. Otherwise I wouldn't care. Hope this answers your question more directly.
How does it compare to your previous computer... because in reality, that is what matters here... did the new system improve performance over the old machine or stay the same, or get worse? If you're better off now than you were before, then it's not so much a loss as premature.
Yes, 16GBs may help with your situation but then again, it might not. And the reality is, choosing 16GBs merely because it is the most you can get doesn't mean it serves your needs. Honestly I would wait until the other Macs are announced before swapping the device. These models were only ever intended to be entry level models. Lest we forget, a SoC will always be faster than a non-SoC by virtue of the design. Take out the SoC and they are identical to their predecessors in most ways.
These are technically the slowest ARM Macs that Apple is ever going to make. I wonder how many people would have thrown money at Apple if that simple statement was in the forefront instead of buried under all the schmaltz.
Honestly... the smart buyer will wait to see all the offerings before making a purchase decision. Now is the time to restrain yourself, not jump quickly at a 16GB model just because it's the most memory you can get on these things. Remember, these M1 Macs aren't going anywhere... you will still be able to get one a year from now... and maybe even cheaper because everyone will be selling theirs when the new toys come out.
You mentioned that you saw red. But did you actually experienced slow down? Just curious. Edit: okay I see you mentioned you saw slow down.I bought the M1 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage less than two weeks ago, and I am regretting not buying it with 16GB of RAM. I should have gone with 256GB of storage (adding storage is easy) and more memory
Unfortunately I didn't buy from Apple or anyway online, but from a physical store of an authorized reseller, so I can't just return the unit. I am waiting for a more precise quote, but the reseller told me that I could trade it in for around 75% of what I paid because "it's not new anymore and it's activated". This upsets me a lot.
I would like to change the 8/512 with a 16/512, which normally would be the exact same price. But now I would lose around 250 euros if I trade it in with them. I could otherwise try to sell it privately, but I am gonna lose some money anyway.
What would you do? The problem I am having is that as soon as I have a few things open, the memory pressure goes high slowing things down. Usually it recovers by itself when I close some stuff, but this is unusable coming from an iMac with 24GB of RAM. I lose the speed benefits quite often basically.
I went with 8GB because I stupidly believed some reviews on YT that led me to think that 8GB would be enough. Some guys did a lot of stress testing with many heavy things running at the same time without any problem with 8GB. How on earth did that work for them?
For example until ten minutes ago I had these things open:
- iTerm
- Safari with a few tabs
- Chrome with one tab for dev
- Calendar
- Todoist
- Apple Notes
- Typora
- VSCode
- SourceTree
- Slack
- Messenger
- Carbon Copy Cloner and Backblaze in background
- A few electron apps
As soon as I opened a Chrome tab with the dev tools open, the memory pressure went quite high and I had to close some things. Most of the things I listed are optimized for Apple silicon (including the electron apps, which are just web apps that I need open all the time) and most of them are quite light actually. So the load is not even comparable to what those guys did in those YT video. I have no idea of why the difference in memory performance with the 8GB but it upsets me.
Should I change the 8GB with a 16GB and lose some money? OMG I hate this. I wish I hadn't listened to those stupid videos. I usually buy as much RAM as I can afford (buying it not from Apple) but in this case I can't even add any.
To anyone who is reading this and is planning on buying a current M1 Mac, please, don't buy one with 8GB unless you keep a very few, very light things open at the same time.
I also have the base mini. I think I have almost as much app as you have opened. Including IntelliJ as well as Xcode and backblaze. I see red say 5% of the times. But I have never experienced slow down. Oh and I’m still indexing photo for both my and my wife’s iCloud account. She has about 450Gb of photo and I have about 150GB along with about 1.5TB of additional data for backblaze to sort through.
- Firefox one tab playing Udemy video
- Xcode running iOS simulator
- Backblaze activity doing initial back up
- Logged into two account (both actively indexing iCloud photo downloading original photos)
- Discord
- Spotify
- Intellij
- 1password
- Calendar
- Apple notes
- Apple mail
- Safari with four tabs
I see no red at all in memory pressure. 6.5GB used memory with 5.5GB swapped.
Something else you want me to try to get it into red? I'm just very curious cause I'm usually able to run a YouTube 4k video and playing Netflix on top of this. I guess the only thing I'm not doing is Chrome. This is also driving an external HDD, and two 2k monitor. I don't notice any change (or slow down) in performance as of now.
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90-95% of the time this computer is a lot faster and more responsive than the 2017 i5 iMac I had before. So I am still very happy about it. It's just annoying that sometimes it slows down quite a lot because of memory issues. Right now I am trying to remember to close stuff when I no longer need it
Yes, I see serious slowdowns when it's red. I don't know why this is happening to me and not to you if you also run a lot of stuff. I am also trying to use Safari tabs instead of separate Electron apps for things I keep open all the time (even if compiled for ARM), and it seems to be better now. Hopefully it stays that way...
Why not try Apple’s trade-in programme?
You may get a good price for your machine.
The process is very simple (I used it for my 12 Pro Max) so I’d consider it again.
You may get a good price for your machine.
The process is very simple (I used it for my 12 Pro Max) so I’d consider it again.
Interesting! I didn't even think I could trade it in with Apple directly! how does it work? I just send it to them by post? Don't they need to check it first?
It looks like you can only trade in in a physical Apple Store, right? Here in Finland there are no official Apple Stores unfortunately.
Nope.
They send you a trade-in “kit” which consists of packaging, and you send it off.
They check it, then basically process it as a refund against your purchase. So, you order the model of computer you want, and select the trade in option. You will then be given a price for your trade-in computer. As long as your computer is in mint condition (which of course it will be) you’ll get the stated quote as a refund. You can try it now, just to see what they will offer for your current machine.
Maybe a silly question: do you really need all those apps open at the same time? It’s not like they’re 100% related - if you’re seriously coding, you’re not going to be Whatsapping, chatting on Slack, tweeting and using Messenger at the same time. You can include Mail and Calendar in that list... A desk is never big enough if you don’t tidy up once in a while. 😀
It kinda reminds me of the ‘octopus’ in the gym with 8 dumbbells around his bench... 😄
I run a similar load throughout the day.I bought the M1 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage less than two weeks ago, and I am regretting not buying it with 16GB of RAM. I should have gone with 256GB of storage (adding storage is easy) and more memory
Unfortunately I didn't buy from Apple or anyway online, but from a physical store of an authorized reseller, so I can't just return the unit. I am waiting for a more precise quote, but the reseller told me that I could trade it in for around 75% of what I paid because "it's not new anymore and it's activated". This upsets me a lot.
I would like to change the 8/512 with a 16/512, which normally would be the exact same price. But now I would lose around 250 euros if I trade it in with them. I could otherwise try to sell it privately, but I am gonna lose some money anyway.
What would you do? The problem I am having is that as soon as I have a few things open, the memory pressure goes high slowing things down. Usually it recovers by itself when I close some stuff, but this is unusable coming from an iMac with 24GB of RAM. I lose the speed benefits quite often basically.
I went with 8GB because I stupidly believed some reviews on YT that led me to think that 8GB would be enough. Some guys did a lot of stress testing with many heavy things running at the same time without any problem with 8GB. How on earth did that work for them?
For example until ten minutes ago I had these things open:
- iTerm
- Safari with a few tabs
- Chrome with one tab for dev
- Calendar
- Todoist
- Apple Notes
- Typora
- VSCode
- SourceTree
- Slack
- Messenger
- Carbon Copy Cloner and Backblaze in background
- A few electron apps
As soon as I opened a Chrome tab with the dev tools open, the memory pressure went quite high and I had to close some things. Most of the things I listed are optimized for Apple silicon (including the electron apps, which are just web apps that I need open all the time) and most of them are quite light actually. So the load is not even comparable to what those guys did in those YT video. I have no idea of why the difference in memory performance with the 8GB but it upsets me.
Should I change the 8GB with a 16GB and lose some money? OMG I hate this. I wish I hadn't listened to those stupid videos. I usually buy as much RAM as I can afford (buying it not from Apple) but in this case I can't even add any.
To anyone who is reading this and is planning on buying a current M1 Mac, please, don't buy one with 8GB unless you keep a very few, very light things open at the same time.
PureVPN
Firefox
Safari
Chrome
Gmail on one of those
Zoom
Moodle
Panopto
Preview
Google Meet
Teams
Skype
Word
PowerPoint
Excel
QTiPlot
SPSS
Notepad
Streaming music of different types (usually Austrian/French/Danish websites with ads)
Terminal
Custom scientific software
Dropbox
I don't really see a problem or have any issues. And I don't get beachballs or any of that other nonsense.
I'm not sure that you're going to see better performance with 16GiB versus 8GiB of RAM to be honest.
I think the problem lies within the way you use the software and what combinations you use in parallel.
I'd just hate to see spend money, if it is tight, and NOT see an improvement.
I'd never recommend 16 GiB RAM to anyone (as it's nearly a quarter of the next machine, assuming the price point stays the same), unless they do very heavy computational work.
(or have 100 browser tabs open, which seems to be a fetish of the people complaining in this forum, for some strange reason.)
Thanks. I found a page on Apple's website where they list the services available in each country. Trade in is not available in Finland
At least according to that page. Maybe I can try and ask by phone.That's what I am doing now to keep things smoother... I am closing whatever I can keep closed unless I am using it now. It's better, but it's not a pleasant experience to be watching all the time what I use to prevent massive slowdowns....
And you are on 8GB too??
Yes. Are you in Åbo/Turku or Helsingfors/Helsinki? I would simply check out Stockholm supply via VikingLine.
Yes! It's a short train ride from Espoo to Turku and then over to Stockholm. There are several Apple reseller in Stockholm.I live in Espoo, nearby Helsinki. Are you suggesting to visit Sweden?
I'm glad I went with the 16GB Mac Mini. Here's a fairly typical memory usage:
Mostly web-browser tabs....1.43GB for Macrumors.com!
I do notice a bit of a slowdown when opening new apps when I am using significant swap space. e.g. I just opened Final Cut Pro and it took about 6 seconds to display the splash-screen and 8-9s to get to the edit screen. This is to be expected if some data has to be pushed to swap.
I would struggle with 8GB for my usage pattern....
Mostly web-browser tabs....1.43GB for Macrumors.com!
I do notice a bit of a slowdown when opening new apps when I am using significant swap space. e.g. I just opened Final Cut Pro and it took about 6 seconds to display the splash-screen and 8-9s to get to the edit screen. This is to be expected if some data has to be pushed to swap.
I would struggle with 8GB for my usage pattern....
I just to add most of your website with my base 8GB Mac mini, not seeing much slow down. I don't have all the fancy video/photo software since I use more of a hobbyist/software programming (I have Xcode and intellij and one note). No slow down, anything else I can do to break it? Besides kicking off one of these fancy Final Cut Pro software, which I don't have. I added your websites on top of all the stuff that I'm already done. Memory is at 6.6 and swap is at 7gb. But I still see all green and no performance issue.
Okay so I added a 5K playback on Youtube, and constantly/purposely switching between Xcode and intellij only then I'm able to get red pressure and start to feel some slowness. But I think for a normal user that's pretty extreme. I think to me, if you know who you are and what you do for living you should go 16GB, otherwise I still think it's pretty hard to break the machine.
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That would be nice (I want to visit Sweden) but not a good time to do that now
Yeah, I use a cheap Linux VPS as remote Docker engine. I wrote about it here https://vitobotta.com/2020/12/04/docker-apple-silicon/ - in the post I describe a workaround for bind mounts too, which don't work with remote containers for obvious reasons. So I am using syncthing to keep local and remote synchronized during development. It works great and I basically don't see any real difference while developing, apart from a couple of commands to start an SSH tunnel and syncthing, which take two seconds.
I am using betas with Apple silicon support for both already. I have researched if there was an M1 variant for all the apps that I use.
The EU has great return policies protected by law but...... only when you buy online. If not content you can jut return it within two weeks. If defect within half a year you are entitled to a brand new product and you don't need to accept repairs. Guarantee must be given in balance with the price and to what 'may be expected of such a product'. So no strict term of so and so many days. Not all retailers know these terms by the way......
And you don't need to accept a repair in the guarantee period with used parts.
But to @VitoBotta I would say: If it is really important buy the one that you like and is most useful. Accept the extra costs and if you make money with your work, put it on the balance of your company / work. It will be deductible and will lower your income. This means less tax. And with about 40 percent tax it might cost you in the end €150
But before all of this look also at mresell.com and see what they are willing to pay.