Apple will start providing free anger management classes, but only on devices with 16Gb of RAM.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Who’s 8GB/256GB good for in 2024?
- Thread starter Chuckeee
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
As you can see in this video, it is enough to have many browser tabs running and a few simple programs to exhaust the 8 GB limit...Memory or SSD these days is very cheap and applications have increasing demands. A lot of people don't know how much the performance of the processor decreases when there is not enough memory. And they will never know because they think it is normal.
First of all, that video is garbage, and has already been pointed out as such:
The reason people will think that is normal is because they won't notice a performance hit. What you fail to realize is that the only people who would a) have a workload even close to what was shown in that video and b) would notice something like that comprise an extremely small yet overly vocal minority of the overall user base. The people behind that video were already called out in the other post, so they really shouldn't be viewed with any authority, especially since they were applying x86/Intel/Windows logic to Apple Silicon. With Mac OS (even when Apple still used Intel), memory pressure is the metric to be focused on rather than just how much memory is in use.
Last edited:
Using M1 Macbook Air with 8GB/256GB.
112GB still available, since i got all the music and pictures in the cloud..
And it runs very fast and smooth for what i use it for (mostly browsing the web, some excel, taxes, light picture editing)...
Buying anything bigger would have been wasted money.
4 years and it feels like it runs as fast as the day i bought it. So i really can't complain.
Will likely buy a new one once they release OLED ones. so maybe in like 2 years.
At that time i will probably take 16GB, because i expect RAM usage to increase with AI stuff.
But 256GB should still be enough for me.
112GB still available, since i got all the music and pictures in the cloud..
And it runs very fast and smooth for what i use it for (mostly browsing the web, some excel, taxes, light picture editing)...
Buying anything bigger would have been wasted money.
4 years and it feels like it runs as fast as the day i bought it. So i really can't complain.
Will likely buy a new one once they release OLED ones. so maybe in like 2 years.
At that time i will probably take 16GB, because i expect RAM usage to increase with AI stuff.
But 256GB should still be enough for me.
I disagree. I think there are far too many people here who tell buyers to buy Macs with more memory than they need.
Using up lots of RAM and storage is a “talent” in the way that spending lots of money is a “talent.” My family all use 8/256 machines and none of them complain about it.
I should add — I use my 16/256 Mac for photography. If I open a folder of about 750 45mp RAW images in my editor — DxO PhotoLab — my total memory usage only hits about 7 GB, and that’s with a few browser windows open as well. If I open Photoshop at the same time, then I will use more than 8 GB of RAM. The Mac will page back and forth from flash very fast, so only a little delay occurs.
If you edit photos professionally all day long and you keep several photo editors open at once for your workflow, then I can see the benefit of 16 GB RAM. Storage is another story, because I only keep about 80 GB of RAW photos in local storage before I move them to my external SSD and NAS RAID drive. There’s no point in keeping all of my TB’s of RAW photos in local storage.
My first Mac was an SE with two 1.4 MB floppy drives and 1 MB of RAM. So, yeah, 8 GB sure is a lot.
Why? Voting will not give an answer. The classic argument against voting and democracy in general is that stupid and ignorant people are allowed to vote and these people usually are the majority of any population.
The best we can say about voting was stated by Winston Churchill years ago: "Democracy is a poor form of government, but everything else is even worse."
The conclusion in memory seems to be that 8/256 GB is OK for casual users who are using the Mac's built-in apps and not pushing any limits. Most of these people are just reading emails, doing web browsing and shopping on Amazon.
If you are doing more than 16/512 seems to be a fit for 90% of the Mac users unless you have some very specific need, something most people don't do.
Voting owuld just be a survey of how many people here fall into each of those three categories. The sample would be very biased because few casual users are reading Macrumors.
"90 percent of users" voted the most.
In 2024.
Dunno what to say.
Ok, I can see how some people can get by with 8/256
But 90 percent? Not buying that.
In 2024.
Dunno what to say.
Ok, I can see how some people can get by with 8/256
But 90 percent? Not buying that.
So as far as a 2005 PCIe G5 goes 4GB RAM is enough. 8GB is probably overkill for most things and 16GB is only needed if you’re using a RAM disk or loading large sample libraries …
Oh wait a minute. This is the Apple Silicon forum you say?
Well forget all that stuff I just said. You need at least 16GB to do basic word processing. Maybe 32GB if you plan on having more than three browser tabs on open. And don’t even think about the 8GB base spec. That’s for the poor plebiscites and the unwashed masses who still smash rocks to make fire.
Oh wait a minute. This is the Apple Silicon forum you say?
Well forget all that stuff I just said. You need at least 16GB to do basic word processing. Maybe 32GB if you plan on having more than three browser tabs on open. And don’t even think about the 8GB base spec. That’s for the poor plebiscites and the unwashed masses who still smash rocks to make fire.
Which is still fine if you're using 20 year old computer for running 20 year old software on your cutting-edge [EDIT] 1680x1050 display, using 20 year old compressed-to-shreds media formats and browsing 20 year old websites from the wayback machine.
Since then... well, for one thing, "retina" displays become almost universal on Macs, so every single graphics asset and buffer has quadrupled in size. As for video even "full HD" was considered pretty special in 2005, now 4k is mainstream so video files & bandwidth have increased by 4x-8x before you even get on to things like HDR and HFR. Your typical web page - once mostly text, a few images and maybe a grotty 256x128 Flash (or, worse, RealPlayer!) video is now a bloated app full of 200ppi graphics, videos and animation running on a virtual machine in the browser... and many cross-platform "native" applications are actually Electron apps running their own instance of Chrome.
...and these are all things that will affect consumers of modern media and apps (e.g. with most streaming services offering 4k, and with live video previews on their menu pages), not just content creators.
All this needs more processing power so even the entry-level Macs have 8 cores c.f. 1 in all but the highest end 2004/5 Macs - running in parallel with hardware media codecs, neural processors etc. all of which need to be fed with data from RAM to be efficient. There's a rule-of-thumb for server hardware that you should have 4GB or RAM per core - the 4GB figure isn't a hill I'd choose to die on, but the principle is fairly obvious.
So, yeah, a modern mainstream Mac benefiting from about 4x the RAM of a 2005 high-end system doesn't sound far off the mark. Plus, of course, the great thing about a pre ~2012 Mac is that if you underestimated your RAM needs (or simply didn't want to pay Apple's price for an upgrade) you could add a better-value third-party upgrade after purchase.
...and, as far as storage goes, we've gone from 250 GB in that G5 to, er, 256GB - although that has been complicated by the switch from spinning rust to vastly better - but more expensive per-GB - SSDs. Still, we're way past the days when a 1TB+ fast PCIe 4 SSD cost hundreds of bucks.
The root of the problem is not the low RAM/SSD spec on the entry level Air and Mini, but the extortionate cost of Apple's upgrades - often compounded by the 8GB models being heavily discounted by retailers who don't offer BTO. The prices bear no relation to actual cost - Apple is using "artificial scarcity" to distinguish between models at a time when there's not much else they could use to differentiate different versions of each model.
However, it is hard to predict how much RAM your workflow will actually need and - with non-upgradeable RAM - trying to skimp is a potential "buy cheap buy twice" false economy. If Apple charged a more sensible price for RAM/SSD upgrades, they would be a no-brainer, the base models would rapidly cease to make sense, and it wouldn't be worth Apple's while making 8GB SoCs: there are already suggestions that the '8GB' M4 iPads are actually 12GB because the smaller LPDDR5x chips are currently more expensive, which is also the most likely reason behind the knobbled SSD bandwidth on the 256GB M2 machines.
Last edited:
that option selection was different, but not select-able!
I have both m1 8GB 256 macbook air and mac mini that never had a spinning ball
or need for more space, since others make external SSD drives,
good external SSD drives!
I have both m1 8GB 256 macbook air and mac mini that never had a spinning ball
or need for more space, since others make external SSD drives,
good external SSD drives!
This survey is useless. People are not geniuses to estimate the percentage of people who are satisfied with the basic config, they can only speak for themselves. You should have asked who owns this configuration and is satisfied, or which people consider sufficient for themselves.
It isn’t useless. People don’t have to be geniuses for their opinion to count. And this survey is simply about gauging opinions: how many are of one opinion vs another. That isn’t useless, it’s quite useful.
People need to be competent and know stats that only Apple currently knows to make their opinions useful and not baseless assumptions for that type of question.
If collecting other people's assumptions about other people is something useful for you, then fine, idk how tho. I've just provided examples of more useful surveys that collect usage statistics on this forum rather than fantasies about that usage.
Computing isn't about what you can do now but what you will be able to do in the future. It's always been the case that you could expand as requirements increase until recent years. Apple isn't known for making better software as years progress so much as adding increased bloat. That means each successive OS release requires more resources just to standstill. That leaves less for apps you want to run. You see the problem by just booting Sequoia on a 8GB machine. It uses compressed memory out of the door. That is a big, big problem.
The point of the survey is to collect opinions. Opinion polls are valid surveys, and they serve plenty of purposes that are useful. For one, it helps to gauge what the majority opinions are within a polling group. Which takes are more common in the group, and which are more niche. Opinion polls serve just as valid a purpose as polls about “what do you use?” do. I get the impression that you don’t like the results of this poll so far, so you want to just change the baseline of the poll or discredit it somehow. Maybe this isn’t the case, but that’s how it’s coming across to me.
For my lounge room 8/256 M2 Mac Mini is plenty to stream audio to my active speakers and video to a TV screen. I reckon I could do it with 4/128 without problems.
At my shared office we have an interior designer with an M1 8/256 running Archicad, Indesign, Email, Word, XL, web browsing without issue. An actual PRO-fessional winning awards for her projects.
My Mac at work is 8/256 M2 Mac Mini, which is plenty for Indesign, Office 365 suite and web browsing. My employees though are running PCs with Revit and noisy AF Nvidia GPUs.
At my shared office we have an interior designer with an M1 8/256 running Archicad, Indesign, Email, Word, XL, web browsing without issue. An actual PRO-fessional winning awards for her projects.
My Mac at work is 8/256 M2 Mac Mini, which is plenty for Indesign, Office 365 suite and web browsing. My employees though are running PCs with Revit and noisy AF Nvidia GPUs.
My purpose for this survey was to provide a counterpoint to the vocal [apparent minority] opinion that insisted that the minimum configuration has to be 12 or 16 GB. That’s is just their opinion and based on this survey it is just a minority opinion. Even on a Mac enthusiast site, where I would have expected a bias to a more complex baseline.
Apparently some members don’t like this survey since it does not collaborate their opinion. And apparently indicates that a minimum RAM baseline greater than 8GB is not a widely held belief.
I still don't know which sentence in the poll I should select.....
'if there was "°ME" option, I would select that!
never mind.....ignore!
Last edited:
Since I posted the survey in Apply Silicon (Arm) Mac thread I thought it was apparent that is was not related to Intel Macs.
Agreed. 👍🏻. It seems that some don’t like the data contradicting their opinions.
...instead of collecting objective data point.
I agree that most mac users are fine with 8gb since they using their laptops only for web browsing and basic tasks. I disagree that minimum configuration should have 8gb in $1000-1600 laptops. But you don't ask my opinion about minimal configuration in reality or what do i use myself, you ask "how many people like blue color?", and i cannot answer that and don't even checked results of this poll, because i only can aswer objectively about it only after i see data in "do you like blue color?" poll.
The way you design a survey always contains half the results, and I think just mentioning the price would be enough to invert the results here, just like my opinion on 8GB is entirely context dependent.
