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Will have to go with an Mac Mini M1 8gb, still doable?

Kaikidan

Kaikidan

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 3, 2017
182
168
Wel... I know basically everyone on the internet will tell to avoid the base 8gb model like the plague, but that's not an option on my country, base model costs like 2000USD (no joking) and 2600USD for the 16gb model, so yeah.... it's 8gb or nothing, still managed to find one for like 1200USD. Since 16gb is not an option, people who are rocking a 8gb model, how are things going for you? Do you find it lacking? Anything to be aware of?

Obs. I'm, coming from a late 2014 2.6ghz, 8gb model on an 1080p monitor that I use as my daily driver till today and manage to do everything I need even thou it's pretty slow. I believe that even the base M1 will be a huge upgrade in usability in my case (and will justify purchasing an 4k display), but if there is anything to be aware of... please tell me.
 
It's totally fine. I literally just traded in a M1 mini 8GB version to Best Buy as I'm upgrading to Mac Studio. In the mean time, I'm using a base M1 Air as my daily driver, and still use a Late 2014 2.6Ghz 8GB model as an iTunes/Plex server.

Even crazier, I use these M1s to drive the Pro Display XDR. 99% of the time it's fine. Occasional UI dropped frames, but most folks would never notice.
 
I have a base model M1 Mini paired with a 2K monitor (I'm currently shopping 4K monitors) and it's fast and stable, and never wanders out of the green for memory pressure. Having said that, my uses are light compared to many.
 
Kaikidan said:
Wel... I know basically everyone on the internet will tell to avoid the base 8gb model like the plague, but that's not an option on my country, base model costs like 2000USD (no joking) and 2600USD for the 16gb model, so yeah.... it's 8gb or nothing, still managed to find one for like 1200USD. Since 16gb is not an option, people who are rocking a 8gb model, how are things going for you? Do you find it lacking? Anything to be aware of?

Obs. I'm, coming from a late 2014 2.6ghz, 8gb model on an 1080p monitor that I use as my daily driver till today and manage to do everything I need even thou it's pretty slow. I believe that even the base M1 will be a huge upgrade in usability in my case (and will justify purchasing an 4k display), but if there is anything to be aware of... please tell me.
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Where do you live? Those prices are insane.
Your Mac Mini late 2014 has a dual-core CPU so M1 is a big jump. Anyway 8GB is a strong bottleneck nowadays and it has no sense to pay an expensive price for a machine with a bottleneck. Go for 16GB model or check for a 2018 model.
 
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Andrea Filippini said:
Where do you live? Those prices are insane.
Your Mac Mini late 2014 has a dual-core CPU so M1 is a big jump. Anyway 8GB is a strong bottleneck nowadays and it has no sense to pay an expensive price for a machine with a bottleneck. Go for 16GB model or check for a 2018 model.
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Welcome to Brazil
 
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Just look at the memory graph in Activity Monitor on your current machine. If it's in the green all or most of the time, a 8 GB M1 machine will work just as well. If it's mostly orange or even red, an M1 machine won't help you. Sure, the RAM is faster and the memory access patterns are a little different, but the new architecture doesn't magically add memory.

I'd say that the 8 GB model is fine for most people who don't already know that their memory requirements are above average. My mom uses the 8 GB Mini for browsing and photo editing, running her business, Facebook, stuff like that, and the machine feels no different from my 16 GB Air, unless you really open everything you ever do at once.
BTW cheap laptops are still being sold with 4 GB of RAM.
 
Is this so needed to have Mac? I mean, if there's no specific dodgy work for that then look on IBM PC (Windows), or you could even DIY build
 
Toutou said:
Just look at the memory graph in Activity Monitor on your current machine. If it's in the green all or most of the time, a 8 GB M1 machine will work just as well. If it's mostly orange or even red, an M1 machine won't help you. Sure, the RAM is faster and the memory access patterns are a little different, but the new architecture doesn't magically add memory.

I'd say that the 8 GB model is fine for most people who don't already know that their memory requirements are above average. My mom uses the 8 GB Mini for browsing and photo editing, running her business, Facebook, stuff like that, and the machine feels no different from my 16 GB Air, unless you really open everything you ever do at once.
BTW cheap laptops are still being sold with 4 GB of RAM.
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Yeah, normally I have the monitor tittled with the browser open on half the screen, an ssh terminal conected to my home server on "(1/2)/3" half of the screen and some other aplication on the last quadrant, that´s how I generally use mine, nothing too intensive.

appltech said:
Is this so needed to have Mac? I mean, if there's no specific dodgy work for that then look on IBM PC (Windows), or you could even DIY build
Click to expand...
I work a lot with commissions, Drawing on the ipad and airdropping files, links and having the continuity between mac,ipad,iphone and etc... I cannot imagine my workflow without the mac, specially now that I will have acess to sidecar and universal control. I have a pretty decent windows machine with an ryzen 2700, 16gb of ram and a 980ti, plus a homeserver for network storage and all, but still my most used machine is the mini even thou it´s pretty old and slow compared to the windows one and even the server one. never got used to working on windows, comming from linux since the early 2000´s I fell more at ease on a unix like system.
 
Amazon have good discounts (in the UK/USA).
Do you have a local Amazon (no pun intended)....the shopping site...?
 
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MarkC426 said:
Amazon have good discounts (in the UK/USA).
Do you have a local Amazon (no pun intended)....the shopping site...?
Click to expand...

Amazon here (the shopping site XD) is kinda meh, they got there WAAAAAY after the market was already dominated by a company named Mercado Livre which is basically the local equivalent of the Amazon US in variety, delivery time, logistic etc.. etc.. and was there that I bought mine, normally people who sell in this site bought the machine in a bestbuy/walmart and mannaged to bring them here without paying the import fees and are resseling it (also why the 16gb is still expensive since it's a custom order on the apple site that takes more time to delivery and requires the person to stay WAY longer on travel), still 5300BRL/1140USD for the 8gb, bought it yesterday 9am, got it today 13PM, will be testing the machine tonight.
 
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Have you never tried ordering from the US Amazon site..?
Just login with your local Amazon details, it could be cheaper.
 
MarkC426 said:
Have you never tried ordering from the US Amazon site..?
Just login with your local Amazon details, it could be cheaper.
Click to expand...
Down here we have custom's fees that makes the ordering too expensive.

But OP clearly made a fuzz out of nowhere. Stated that MacMini was U$2k when in fact he bought by U$1k.

No sense
 
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Fravin said:
Down here we have custom's fees that makes the ordering too expensive.

But OP clearly made a fuzz out of nowhere. Stated that MacMini was U$2k when in fact he bought by U$1k.

No sense
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The 8gb one, on grey market. The 16gb one isn't even worth purchasing even in gray market because of the price. If you buy one on the oficial stores, with taxes, knowing that it WILL have support from the store if something goes wrong, then the price I said which is the oficial one is what you will have to pay, which can be easily verified here: https://www.apple.com/br/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini

Also the isue was not the value per se, it was if people where having problems using the 8gb one, since that was the one I had the money to buy.
 
My M1 mini is the base model with 8 GB. I have two 4k monitors attached using scaled resolutions. Mainly used for content consumption with the odd bit of digital art here and there.

I was frequently seeing memory pressure in the yellow even though the only app I had open was Safari with about three tabs or so - specifically when watching video content on YouTube or Twitch for example. No slowdowns though, so admittedly I wouldn’t have noticed had I not sought out the memory info in Activity Monitor.

I recently switched from Safari to Chrome, and surprisingly, since making the switch my memory pressure is in green most of the time now. I always thought Chrome was the RAM hog, but in my case it seems Safari is hungrier especially when on YouTube and Twitch. Maybe an issue with those specific websites on Safari, who knows?

Sometimes if I’m handling obscenely large images (talking over 10k pixels wide) whilst having a video open in the background, the audio will begin to stutter, like a scratched CD or something. The computer recovers fast though, and typically when I‘m handling images that large it’s by accident not intention (I often upscale wallpapers in Pixelmator Pro and sometimes the resolution goes crazy high).

If I were to buy again, I’d get 16 GB RAM, but like you budget was a concern at the time I bought it and I’ve no serious regrets about getting base. Storage is expandable with external SSDs and because it’s a desktop computer, it’s not as much of an inconvenience to have them attached all the time as it would be with a laptop.
 
I used it for some time now and it works pretty well, browsing the web with an youtube video playing, having my ssh connection with my home server open, transfering files to the NAS, listening to plexamp, discord, and some other minor apps open it was in the green, ram presurre only got to yellow when I opened a 4k video on plex and when I opened whattsap app (really bad optmized, 500mb of ram for a single chat window), otherwise it's running great, tried some tasks that my old machine didn't liked a whole lot to do, like converting a 650 page artbook from pngs to pdf or compressing calibre books pictures and it did it without breaking a sweat. yeah, perhaps RAM may be a problem on the future when i add more apps, but for now seens to be doing reasonably well for my use, I want to keep it until the M3 are ready, I think that it will work fine until then.
 
I had many issues with the 8GB due to my usage as developer for which that amount of memory is just not enough. I passed it to my wife which does a lighter usage and it's been awesome for her.
 
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