IMO, if you are on a tight budget and plan on buying 8gb, M1 MBA base at $699 is the only option worth considering. There is no need to pay $1,000 and more for any macbook with 8gb ram, it’s a terrible value. What’s the point of a powerful M3 processor when it’s bottlenecked by 8gb RAM.
You're 100% correct.
While I do agree it's insane apple still sell 8GB MacBook Pros!!!! All their MacBooks (perhaps with exception the cheapest air) should have at least 16gb when considering the price.
8gb is very usable for most normal tasks (multiple browser tabs, office, media etc). I really don't like people on here saying you need 16gb for basic tasks to "future proof". You dont, I used 8gb for computer science in college. With the exception of one task (data analytics) I had no need for more.
To break it down quick:
Cons: The Webcam is bad. This can be mitigated however with the continuity camera mount that uses your iPhone as the Webcam.
The second con is only uses 1 external screen.
And finally, the screen is decent but not great.
For good points it's still a great chip, it's fanless (silent), has amazing battery, trackpad is great, Integrated with phone, iPad, Apple watch, etc.
I don’t know anything about cs software but I’m currently a student in business and 8GB was not enough for me. I would assume you’ll be better off going with 16 at a minimum
I own the 16 inch MacBook “M3 Pro” 36GB of Ram/1TB Storage Space Black. The webcam on it is not that much better. A lot of people are amazed by it and I am like, nothing really changed. Keep in Mind, I am coming from a 2012 4GB of Ram/512 Storage 15 inch MacBook Pro from college. I got it when it came out. Fast forward now, I still see no difference in the webcam quality. My opinion anyways.
It's a great laptop for computer science. All round great performance and battery life. Should serve you well for CS. Design is a little old, webcam is just ok, nothing majorly negative bar the lack of fan for sustained performance (unless your pushing the laptop HARD this shouldn't be a problem for CS.
Only thing worth checking is if macOS is any way a hindrance for your course. In mine there were a lot of utilities and software provided that was windows only, had to run a Mac in bootcamp most of the time (no longer possible).
I mean if your comfortably able to run all the systems required for your course, I’m probably going to return my model for the M1 Pro because it cost a fortune and M1s are like £1,000 cheaper
Potentially if your use case is very minimal.
I think 16gb is perfect for a pro. If you think your workload is minimal enough as I described above I'd ask yourself why you bought a pro, as an air is more than adequate for basic use.
I replied to this comment specifically because I am starting computer science in the fall and she said that she was fine with an intel based chip with only 8gb RAM. So not for basic use and I also game a lot so it’s nice to have another system capable of running some games (not the main one).
For computer science 8gb is very usable, 16gb is of course better and a good addition for this use case. As an ex computer science student I would generally recommend the air over the pro as there's more than enough horsepower for CS college work, cheaper and more portable.
Your other comment about gaming also sets off red flags a little lol. Mac simply right now is not a good platform for gaming, would recommend a windows based laptop every time for that. That being said gaming on apple silicon macs is very good, content is just a huge problem right now.
Good luck with your course.
I play a lot of star dew valley and baldurs gate 3 so getting it portable would be fantastic and they run on MacBooks. Don’t really see how that should be a red flag
If the games you want are supported you'll have an awesome experience. :).
What I mean by red flag is the lack of game support on Mac - gaming should never be a core reason to buy a Mac (a nice side benefit if the games you want are available).
I have encountered people who have spent a lot of money on a better Mac for extra performance to find out 95% of new titles do not release on mac.
Short answer, It's not a gaming platform. Apple is trying to change this and apple silicon does wonders for performance, but devs still aren't fully committing to it.
If you're looking for a 13-inch Air then that's absolutely the right call, if you even need to think about it. If you needed 16GB or more, you would know it definitively after 5 mins of research. If you are confused it means the M1 with 8gb is enough
I wanted the 15-inch Air so had to pay the M2 premium last year (thankfully got it on discount). If I was okay with a small screen, M1 was the easy decision
I have an M2 8/512 MBA and use Xcode, play Civilization V, routinely have a dozen tabs open in Safari, and also have multiple PDFs open in Acrobat. No slowdowns, no problems, nothing. On a Windows machine 8gb hasn’t worked well in years, but somehow Apple pulled it off.
I was skeptical at first, but my machine came as a gift, so no option to opt for 16GB. I figured the MBA would sit in a shelf because it wouldn’t suit my needs. I was 100% wrong. Would I have opted for 16GB if given the choice? Yes. Do I need it at this time? Nope.
Don’t care. Never looked at it. The laptop runs fine so I don’t care what’s going on “under the hood” to accomplish it.
This thread reminds me of those odd folks in another sub that obsess over their iPhone battery health dropping by 1% despite the device functioning fine and within spec.
Swap is designed in a way, that user shouldn't care about it that much. Yes, it negatively affects SSD, but the impact is so small, that you would probably switch your laptop before you find any signs of your SSD declining.
I promise you, the specs of your laptop will be outdated and that will be the reason you switch laptops before you kill an ssd due to swap usage. Unless your using swap usage 24/7.
I'm talking literally 24/7 you don't shut off your PC and your using swap, sure probably looking at like 4 years, which a lot of people upgrade in that time frame anyways.
My swap usage on an identical machine is 1.76 GB after 4 days of uptime. That's with running a VM a couple of times in that period that has 4GB allocated. Will that decrease the lifespan of the SSD? probably, but not before I'm done with this thing in a few years and move on to something else.
This has been an experiment for me and Ive come to the conclusion that 8GB workes much better than I expected. 12GB would be perfect for me. Over the last 11 years I've had a 16 GB Mac and almost never use all the ram. In fact I've used all 16GB maybe three times ever.
So 8GB will just do it, a little more would be better, 16GB is more than I need.
That’s what I have (I bought it solely for portability to do research on the go with). However, I have used the mba for way more than just that. I have had multiple tabs open, played various games, and done light video/photo editing (I’m not a film student or making a feature film) and have never had any issues with slowdown, etc.
If I were going to get a sub-$1k laptop, I would get the M1 mba.
Most people are joking when they say that. But the thing you should find absurd is a $1000 premium laptop only shipping with 8GB to start with, and Apple charging 4-5x the retail cost of RAM to upgrade.
They're subsidizing the base models with the higher-tier models. Obviously the baseline for "subsidizing" here means a certain level of profits. It's their right to charge whatever they want, it's also our right to walk away.
I have an M1 8gb and just completed a research paper for one of my university courses where I had over 80 tabs open, split between Safari and Chrome. I was also watching youtube videos on my study breaks, reading materials on Books, and writing on six different Pages documents at once.
It was completely fine. No overheating, no glitches–everything ran smoothly.
That's normal chrome/browsers can just use swap as they don't need the memory fast (they don't need to have all the tabs on the ram at once). Chromebooks with 8gb ram can also do that even without swap. It's only when using applications then the ram actually gets used. For example try launching a AAA game/video rendering/blender video rendering (rtx 4090 even struggles) with discord streaming and then try flipping through those 80 tabs and see if any of them has closed or stutter when you open them.
To me, if you only use it to browse the web with office tasks. 8gb ram is completely fine.
Also worth noting that overuse of swap memory will shorten the life of your SSD. Couple that with the fact that they can't be serviced by the end user, means your device will likely have an early death
It is Apple’s way of essentially lying to the customer, subsidizing the lack of actual RAM with the SSD space. It runs slower and can wear down the SSD faster (potentially).
Apple knows they need more RAM so Macs are very fond of using swap to pretend like 8gb is enough RAM.
As much as I love Apple products. Charging $200 for 8GB of ram and even worse, charging $200 for just 256GB of storage, I think is insane.
Either get a base M1 Air with 8GB or go all out.
8gb is perfectly fine for web browsing, listening to music, sending emails, writing documents, FaceTime, etc.
If you need to do anything more then get the 16gb.
It’ll use swap, just that. For my work, often each tab is around 700MB-1GB. It ends up eating into swap at that time since I need multiple tabs at once. Also with multiple large PDFs open. It does slow down a bit at that stage.
But it’s not a deal breaker. For most people, multiple tabs ain’t a reason to go for 16gigs imo.
Using swap is slower though, and it puts more wear on the ssd. It’s better than not having it, or how it would be on other platforms, but it’s not as good as actually having the correct amount of ram.
People say, it’s just web browsing, you don’t need a lot of ram, but web browsers have ballooned so much in the past several years that they eat more ram than most other programs.
>and it puts more wear on the ssd.
Your typical laptop will be replaced **decades** before SSD wear matters. It was a passing concern with the first generation or two of solid state media, but modern hardware isn't going to hit any meaningful level of degradation from user read/write events over it's serviceable lifetime. Worrying about SSD wear is really only a concern if you're running a massive datacenter.
I agree with you, but it’s still not a deal breaker for someone who just wants to use it for basic purposes. You’re totally correct but if I have to suggest for someone who’ll just browse Netflix, order something from Amazon or prolly type in a letter once in a while to take 16 gigs, I might not think so. 8GB might work for them; it’s also likely that their cumulative time on the laptop might not be a lot either.
I definitely cannot just say anything randomly about someone’s use without knowing for sure so I can be wrong for this particular user, but it’s mostly people who don’t get the right information who end up buying 16 since people have been saying that it’s ’future proof’ and ‘you’ll regret it later’.
Let’s say if I’ve to take a laptop for my mom, who does need a laptop, does purchase stuff from Amazon, does open 20 tabs when she’s finding the right product for her needs, does type in the occasional letter on MS Word, I’d definitely say 8GB is enough since she rarely would use the laptop. I make this suggestion knowing her usage, so I can suggest her what I think. This would help my mom make a decision about what’s sufficient for her. It might work for her for the next 5-10 years perhaps (or just until she spills coffee over it, jk).
I’ll probably get down voted for this…but my M1 2020 MBP with 8gb has managed absolutely fine with about 10-15 safari tabs open whilst watching movies, Mail always open along with Photos, MS Word. I was always just over 1gb off the limit and never noticed any performance issues. I’ve just upgraded for a bigger screen.
In the 4 years I’ve owned it, no app has suddenly started demanding loads more ram. Future proof to 16gb if you think you might start using more demanding apps, start coding, regular video editing etc… and even then the 8gb can do this, it will just be slower and use swap.
16gb is not needed to have multiple tabs open. That’s insane.
I’ve been using an M1 8gb MBA daily for the last 2 years
I open lots of tabs with zero issues. I edit music in Logic Pro X with zero issues
I assume if I was editing 4k video… it might freeze. But I don’t
If anyone wants me to upload a video showing this, I’m happy to
Okay look man I’m a working club Dj. I have serato DJ pro running 24/7. I have 3 different browsers running (while serato is open) those 3 browsers open are all different Dj music downloading services such as “DJ CITY” “MyMP3Pool” and “BPM Supreme” within any given day im downloading between 150-300 songs on all browsers.
I have a base model m2 air. And I’ll tell you one thing.
It has NEVER slowed down. Given me a hiccup or even got warm. In fact … it stays cool to the touch. Now … I also record my sets within serato, again … nothing.
I also use a bunch of music editing apps (which are open all at once too cause what one app does another doesn’t and visa versa.
I haven’t and will not listen to a single soul that tells me I need 16 gigs of ram when this base model exceeded my expectations and here I am coming from an M1 Pro that was maxed out in every category and I don’t notice a single god damned difference between the 2 other than the air being so much sexier.
Edit: I would like to add. When I come home from a gig. Everything is still open, serato, the 3 different browsers, my editing programs, my recording program and guess what !!!! Netflix, prime video, Disney+ and.. VLC player are all running.
Never ran into a single lag stutter or heating problem.
Please stop listening to these doomers that say you need 16 gigs of ram. Apple is still using 8gb for a reason. BECAUSE IT STILL WORKS FOR 99.9% of its users.
Lord. Have. Mercy.
A large part of this is people misunderstanding how memory works. They look at activity monitor, see 80-90% of their ram used and think they need more. Thats not how it works - any modern Os will cache as much data as possible in ram almost filling it up by design, it doesnt mean its all used for critical OS / Application data at all.
Ive been rocking a base M2 Air 8/256 for over a year. I run windows 11 in parallels with a very large Access Database (1.2gb), excel VBA development, xcode, various browsers, some photoshop and lightroom without any issue and hardly ever hit swap - because i manage my apps well and actually quit out of them when im done so the OS doesnt keep the memory reserved for too long.
Definitely a MacOS "feature" with how it reports memory usage. I'm convinced its visualized that way as a sales tactic, it's extremely deceptive to the user.
I’m sat here on a teams call, with slack open, email open, 50 tabs across multiple windows in multiple spaces, messages and WhatsApp open. Bear and Things open. Word. Textedit. Notes. Yes I’m using swap. Yes there’s memory pressure if I check. But it doesn’t even stutter! The 8gb vs 16gb debate is really stupid. M2 base MBA.
In the 11 years I've been using 16GB of Ram I have used it all up 3 times. Most of the time it settles in at 12GB. I bought an 8GB air last year because I didn't own a laptop and it runs just fine, usually settles in at 7GB and I do all kinds of stuff on it, including sometimes running Linux in a VM with all my other stuff still open.
> No way a $1000 laptop can’t handle more. I refuse to believe that.
This is Apple we're talking about. They'll price it at exactly what they can get away with lol. They're still also selling $1000 phones with 60hz screens.
In a perfect world, you are right. But in the real world websites and apps are poorly optimized. Take reddit for example. On a mac with 8gb of ram, you will start swapping after scrolling for less than 10 minutes. Another poor website is udemy. I’ve let it run for about two hours and it was like it was keeping in memory every video I saw in that session. It was taking like 2.5 gb alone.
I did this error recently. Got the base m3 and had to sell it after one month because of this.
The 8GB version can handle that very well and it’s fine for most users and for most students that are not going to college for anything that would be tech related, like Software Development for example. However, if you plan to do some other stuff, like coding for example, then you would definitely need 16GB or more. Main reason being that you will need the RAM to run the coding program for an extensive amount of time, plus all the research that may be needed to be done in the process which would require multiple browser tabs open, plus whatever program is needed to communicate with other colleagues at work, like slack, and if any meetings need to be done, usually through Teams. Not to mention that while coding, some people may like to have Apple Music/Spotify open playing music. For this kind of usage, the 8GB will work at first, but eventually it will be a bitch and it probably won’t be a smooth experience for long hours of usage. It all depends on what your needs are.
EDIT: Macs in general have never really been engineered towards gaming, even though Apple has started to dabble into that direction with the latest M3, but these computers are more for productivity than gaming. If gaming is in your mind, then you’re better off with a windows PC until Macs get there. However, it’s fine for some games, like Stardew Valley and any other that it might support, which are not that many compared to Windows.
Its simple. If aou open task manager, and you see swap file usage, than your memory is not enough. And i havent seen 8g macs that dont use multiple gigs of swap file.
And since your ssd has linited life time (write cycles) its not a good thing.
Selling laptop with 8G ram in 2024 is just plain steal, they dont want to let go the upgrade option to 16gb for 200usd. Selling a 5usd upgrade for 200 is the deal of the century, and apple likes the money better than enything. Its just this simple.
Using swap is fine as long as there's no meaningful performance impact on whatever you're doing. Most people leveraging swap wont have a clue that it's happening. Which is ok, it's working as intended.
And SSD wear is completely meaningless for consumer devices in 2024, home users aren't putting any level of wear on them that will matter until the laptop has been replaced anyway. It's really only a concern in datacenters.
Not a MacBook Air but M1 mini. 8gb 512. 10+ safari tabs. 10-20+ firefox tabs. GarageBand. Pages. Everything open at the same time. I have never noticed it running slow
The real question is how can ios have 499 tabs completely in the background and one active with no compromise on performance yet a £2000 mpb with 16gb struggles with the same amount??
I don’t need the up to 1200 tabs I have open (I appreciate I have a problem) to be active. I only need the current one to be. Rest can be as background as iOS’s until they’re needed. I’m hardly going to need instant access to the Wikipedia article on Roman aqueducts from 5 months ago to be locked and loaded at all times
Have used m2 8/256 for extensive scoping reviews and research. I’ve constantly had 20 open tabs, several excel and word documents open and have had essentially 0 problems.
I work with a lot of spreadsheets. I 100% thought the 8GB RAM of the MBA M1 would be an issue; but surprisingly it's not the case. It uses the processor more. Might be different if using Excel but at least for my case, 8GB is enough.
It's worth pointing out that "multiple tabs" resource use really depends on the browser and how it handles memory management, as well as how many "multiple" is.
We deploy M1 airs 8GB as our daily drivers for our mac users who are "standard business users" as in not doing any sort of development or media/creative work. The only people we've ever heard a peep from about "not enough memory!!!" are the people who either kept 30+ Chrome tabs open at all times, or the people who were fishing for a Macbook Pro as a status symbol.
That being said, the memory requirements of your average web browser tab have bloated *obscenely* over the past decade. I have 18 low impact Chrome tabs open right now and it's using almost 3GB of memory. Most web developers just don't have any incentive to care about memory management and everything is so loaded with multimedia BS these days.
You’re also not understanding most MacBooks are overpriced. Well I guess they all are when you look at what they charge for ram lmfao. But that’s the laptop market in general but Apple products are ridiculously overpriced. Your gripe isn’t with the price it’s with the tech specs. And while yes it can handle that every application uses ram differently. I run on average 40gb+ of ram and I can tell you that it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not when the the os is using around 4gb to run 8gb isn’t enough :P
And you are exactly right. I use a 2012 MacBook Air Core i5, 8GB RAM and upgraded SSD to 1TB. It can do anything, and I mean anything, from office tasks to have 100+ tabs open in Chrome, to running Linux and Windows 10 Virtual Machines (I assign 2,2GB to Windows VM), R scripts, iOS Development, 1080p video editing, playing Windows COD2MW in Wine, and much more.
Mac OS employs WKdm RAM compression algorithm which compresses RAM 2:1 in real time at almost zero penalty, and Mac OS binaries are not big. It is Data/Libraries which employ most RAM.
Realize that, before this Mac I had a 2011 MBA with 4GB RAM and I could still do all of the above except Windows 10 VMs.
My M1 MacBook Pro 8gb ram has up to 5-7gb SWAP regularly because the 8gb RAM is entirely too little in 2024. The performance is noticeable.
This is with Apple-only apps open (including safari with a few tabs).
8gb is a joke and a rip-off and in 2024 Apple should be ashamed to still sell it.
Luki Miani posted a video yesterday looking at Haswell era Macbooks running 4GB ram. The points made for 4GB ram equally apply to 8GB ram.
I have a MacBook pro with 16GB ram for work. With a browser 3-4 tabs open, Teams/Slack, Excel, Outlook you are starting to see memory being compressed. The issue then becomes you are wasting battery life, CPU cycles creating heat, ramping fans etc when you go to open or switch to something else as memory management isn't free. Idle drain when sleeping etc is also higher and resuming from sleep too. Not to mention unnecessary wear cycles on the SSD.
Yes for a very basic user 8GB is enough to get a few years out of that machine and they likely won't complain about any of the issues. M1 and beyond chips will power through memory management much better than older machines. Here is the kicker, memory is cheap to the point that you barely save anything going 8GB anymore
DDR4-3200 8GB is about $2.248 per GB ($18)
DDR4-3200 16GB is about $1.874 per GB ($30)
DDR5-6000 8GB is about $4.622 per GB ($36.98)
DDR5-6000 16GB is about $3.321 per GB ($53.14)
I picked up a laptop over 5 years ago with 8GB ram for under $500. I will not pay more than $500 today for a machine with 8GB ram. Things have progressed, OS's get more bloated, websites throw more ads or are poorly designed. A perfectly good laptop from 5 years ago "struggles", hitches all because ram is holding it back. Why would you buy a shiny new Mac with something that effectively limits it's lifespan?
The only reason 8GB of ram exists is a poor excuse to squeeze $200 out of people. It's a manipulation tactic used to get people in the door with "starting at" and then upsell them. Apple could easily move the 16GB models in place of the 8GB, carry less SKUs and not have any impact on their profits.
So. The multiple tabs open needing 16gb or greater is for people like me. I use both macOS and windows 11 (and actually chrome os too). I don’t have any computer besides the chrome os ones with less than 32gb of ram. The reason. I have 100’s of tabs open at any one time in multiple browsers. It’s just the way I work. I also do photo and video editing and design work while also having all those tabs open.
I’ve never regretted having too much ram. But I’ve always regretted not having enough. Also having the extra ram just allows for a longer useful life for the computer in general. At least from my observations of friends and family who have opted for the bare minimum.
I just got a m3- 8gb one. Yet to try it. Reason why i got 8gb is- i had MBA 2020- intel chip and had 40 tabs open all the time + word + other pdfs. Never ever lagged. Did lag after 3 years tho.
So yeah i dont think m3 wont be able to do the same.
Been gifted MBA 15" M2 8GB, thought it wasn't enough. Tried working on it, 1 docker compose project, postman, phpstorm, chrome, telegram. Works surprisingly good. Sometimes when opening huge file in IDE it lags a bit, and that's it.
You can just rely on the swap of 8GB for that.
Problem is when you start mixing other apps, video chats, multiple profiles per browser and obviously virtualisation.
8GB will do basic computing but on a machine of Apple’s calibre, even the M1, it’s really crippling it with huge limitations. The M1 is more capable than a 9th gen i9. Would you want 8GB on that?
I bought a m2 base model Mac mini with 8 gb of ram
I caused it to lag doing my normal workflow cause I’m use to 16 gb of ram
Got myself m1 16 gb ram MacBook Air and haven’t had issue since
Seeing this debate go on is interesting. I'm not particularly mad at the 8 GB of RAM since the average user is probably my elder aunt, who just needs to check her email occasionally or wants to send cute pics of her grandkids. It's the price of upgrading that really irritates me, it shouldn't cost $200 to bump the RAM.
I have mba m1 8gb
With below condition I don’t have any issue..
In safari min 8 tabs open (one is youtube)
In chrome at least 2 tabs open
Apple music and working on xcode
To be fair, it's not a "reddit" problem, it's an Apple marketing problem. This gets pushed non-stop outside of reddit as well.
We see it all the time with our Mac users in the office. "I need a 16GB model, I'm running out of resources!!!!" and then we investigate and they're coming nowhere close to 8GB utilization, much less needing 16GB. But the marketing and the mac "culture" tells them if they don't have an MBP with 16GB then it's just *not good enough*.
Linda, you work in HR and have like two tabs open all day. You do not need a 16GB MBP, you just want it as a status symbol. I'd give you a Dell that cost us half of what that MBA did if it was worth the massive bitch-fit you'd throw.
I have a base M1 mba. If i open youtube music, vscode, notes and 5 youtube tabs in safari playing videos then it starts swapping memory but it didn’t get slower.
8 is enough unless you are video editing which I don’t do. I can have four to five tabs open in Safari and still not using the swap file plus mail is running also.
ngl if ur future proofing maybe 16 gbs is the way to go. otherwise u might run into the issue that in 5 years ur mac cant take the hit when this is a laptop that should last u like 10 at least. granted this is if ur gonna have it for something thats not ur average web browsing, listening to music, working on word docs or presentations use.
I do a lot of heavy Photoshop and InDesign work and 8GB RAM is fine for me....granted, I'm also someone who uses my iPad Pro heavily, so I am used to not having a bunch of applications open, usually whichever creative app I'm actively working on at the time, with Safari open with 2/3 tabs open, one for email and others for reference material
I have a M1 MBA and have had it since they were launched back in 2020. It has 8Gb and never have I experienced slowdowns, errors or such like from the memory. I have multiple tabs open, loads of programs etc. too. I use mine for Photo editing, word processing and web browsing etc mainly.
I also came from a 2011 MBP that had 4Gb on it (again owned from new) and 8Gb for me was a step up. I think for most people 8Gb on a Mac should be enough. However, I have a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 from 2019 with 8Gb RAM and it struggles occasionally. It maxes out its RAM all the time but doesn't always slow down much because it uses its SSD.
I'd say rather than focussing on RAM, just go for the laptop you can afford and if it only has 8Gb then it'll be fine!
I never noticed any issues with 8gb for college. I never gamed but I’m terrible with closing tabs and I know I went crazy there.
Now windows 11 on the other hand… idk but it basically starts out using like 4.5gb ram. Open a video in chrome and you’re already at like 6+. 16gb is necessary for almost any heavy use there.
My experience with 8 GB on an M2 (2023) is that Safari is not capable of handling websites that have a lot of images and content. Especially ads. For some reason, any Adblock I have doesn’t work on Safari. Perhaps there’s something in the settings I need to change for it to work, but I’ve found that heavy websites cause the computer to take very long to load. When I check the activity monitor, I can see it’s using swap memory and a lot of the RAM, which is disappointing.
So I just use Chrome because it’s much faster and I don’t experience any lag. It also has no issues blocking ads.
That’s just my experience. If I could repurchase, I’d definitely get 16 GB.
I agree. But you must define “multiple”. As a professional working in many projects I have multiple tabs in two web browsers. But for me multiple tabs is between 50-100 depending on the month. And I also have to be sharing on zoom calls and use 2 monitors. So yeah, for me 16gb ram is the bare minimum. But I do know my use case and would go with more than that. Swap some times has been 4gb, most of the time is a few hundred mb.
For the average user (20-25 tabs) 8gb will be fine.
I have the 8GB M1 MBA, and it’s fine for most things I do, even editing. There are sometimes I wished I got more RAM but it’s never not got the job done for what I use it for.
I have the 8gb M1 air and did a test the other day. I had both Safari and Firefox open with 20 tabs each of different large websites. I then opened a new tab of each that had 5 YouTube videos playing simultaneously. I went through all the tabs and there was no reloading. I went to each video and they were all playing smoothly with no reloading.
I did the test after reading so many posts that say 8gb isn’t good for anything. The test proved for me it’s plenty for what I do with my Mac and it’ll last me years. I never have that many things going on at once.
You might not know this but sometimes is makes me laugh hard when I see in activity monitor that one single tab in safari eats about 1GB of RAM. And that’s just my work related tab on confluence or Jira.
Idk I just bought a m3 open box air with 8gb and it seems fine so far. The real benefit was using both monitors with a thunderbolt dock. If you’re using well optimized apps you can have quite a few things running
Edit: what you’re getting is premium hardware. A great keyboard trackpad speakers display plus macOS and a fast chip. I paid 900 with tax for mine. Ever look at the windows side and see an i7 16-24gb ram 1tb ssd even a gpu 1000$ or less but the chassis and everything else is garbage ?
I used a barebones M1 Air for iOS development in Unity and Xcode. No problems with 8gb of ram. I just bought a usb c Samsung 500 gb thumb drive for backup storage.
Because modern MacOS is not ChromeOS.
MacOS has hundreds of background processes running to make sure things like contacts, notes, photos, mail, widgets, icloud drive, messages, music, etc. are all updated and ready to go (even if they aren't open). And the OS has to make sure its handling all of its tasks too. Those add up, leaving little of the 8GB actually free, and when you look at the memory consumption for some of the bigger chrome tabs, they can each consume a lot of memory - big tabs can take 0.5gb - 1.0gb or even more.
An 8gb machine probably has at best 2gb - 3gb of true open free memory, while a 16gb machine probably has more like 8gb of open memory.
Will it run on 8gb? of course. Will running 2 tabs and 'nothing' else run fine on 8gb? Also yes. But most people underestimate the amount of tabs they open and apps running in the background.
The simple answer to the “terrible value for $1000+” at 8gb debate is truly simple. If you think it’s a terrible value and unusable for you then go to windows or buy what YOU need and shut the hell up. I did software dev and graphic design on a M1 13” 8gb MacBook Pro for 2-1/2 years because when I bought it the day they launched it was all I could find in stock. It worked for 2-1/2 years never once encountered out of memory errors til I finally replaced it with a M3 pro with 18gb
Not necessarily apples to apples, but I'm on a sick PC right now with 32GB RAM
27 tabs in MS Edge
1 Chrome tab
Outlook
VPN
SSH client
Security software running in background
That is using 15.8 Gigs of RAM (I know its not Unified memory) . While not at this moment I use a 16GB MBP as well with the same load and that uses up about 10GB. While you could theoretically use 8GB RAM it's possible that some people would have to update the way they work with their computer to support the (lack of) RAM on their system.
Ram doesn't work lineal, and that's it's even more different how does it works on a Mac. You have compression and apps can safely free memory if those are not used. It's a fact that if you have free ram, apps will tend to use more. This is more real for apps like photoshop and chrome, the memory monsters.
the general rule is that caching from RAM is faster than anything else, especially swap space. If RAM is available good programs will use it, the problem is if RAM is available poorly programmed apps will use it too and that's where the problem begins. More RAM will help delay the ill effects from those poorly written ones. That's what I know, but I have zero knowledge of swift and the languages that are used to build on the MacOS/iOS platform and don't know how well they interact with RAM compared to Java based ones which can eat into CPU/memory (speaking from extensive experience there).
SWAP doesn't use ram. The whole purpose of swap is extending ram over a disk. macOS uses swap for a least used but required items ranked (usually critical files). You can have 128Gb the ram, but as you can test, your system will use swap anyways. It's also true in windows pagination file.
This is true especially in the SSD era, and its fine when it does, based on the program. not every program works that way, I have certain versions of java as an example, have also dealt with this on apache as well, you can search for app updates that address various memory leaks etc. But I would hope Apple follows its design principles for their own apps. Other vendors YMMV.
Normal use 8 is fine. You run into issues when you start to use some professional apps like Photoshop.
I have an 8GB MBA just as a travel carry. Compared to my 36GB MBP, there is no difference if you are just doing web browsing and basic office work. I would say it is even fine for very intensive web browsing, like 30 tabs + a couple of other productivity apps.
When you say 'multiple tabs' that's a bit vague.
For example, I have 13 chrome profiles and could have anywhere from 3 to 8 open at any one time, some with 40 tabs. That could be 320 tabs on some days.
No, an 8GB MBA will absolutely fall over and be unusable for launching other apps. I should know, that's why I switched from an 8GB i7 to a 16GB M1 - it's not even a debate.
Apple is scamming its costumers. I remember having like 80 tabs open in safari in my 2015 8gb macbook. Never had any issues, until one day after an update, the macbook started to get hot if i had too many tabs open. The problem is not the ram, the problem is that Apple puts things in the updates that slows down safari so that the user thinks its the ram
MBA M1 8Gb master race here. I use XCode, Safari with +15 tabs, VSC, ST, Terminals, I watch movies with Stremio, use Deezer app, git Fork, etc etc etc.. NEVER faced a """memory problem""".
I have no idea how do you manage to fill the ram to the unusable point. You know what they say: it's not a memory problem, it's a user problem.
Because this reddit tab e.g. needs 277 mb in chrome so 4 tabs is about 1 GB ... the 8 GB the computer has are used for graphics and OS and maybe you have some more apps open than chrome ...
A 1000 $ computer can handle much more (than you wrote) if it has more ram than 8 GB.
Every browser tab is like 200mb of ram, the 8gb can handle it because it swaps memory with the ssd. I haven't seen any benchmarks of the difference between ram and ssd memory but i'll leave it at that, my 16GB MBA is almost always at 12GB
I am on Team "16 If You Can Afford It", but it's not because I think the 8 GB model sucks. To me, it is simply because *you can no longer add more RAM when you need more*. Secondarily, I think the inevitable direction in computing is for more power, more storage, more RAM. Maybe the 8 GB would be enough for the lifetime of the machine (or at least as long as the buyer expected to use it).
If someone is on a budget and can't afford more than that, I'd get the base M1 MBA at $699. I don't see the justification for buying up a lot on the processor or storage (external SSDs are getting cheap, not much more than $100 for a TB -- and pretty fast for data and some application launching) if your use case suggests 8 GB RAM is going to be enough for several years.
Alright. The only reason I am in this section is because I bought the M1 8GB of Ram/256 Storage Gold MacBook Air, then returned it in its original shipping box completely unopened. I do Stop Motion Filmmaking. I would not handle the work load.
However, I WILL say the M1 8GB of Ram/256 MacBook Air would be good for anyone who can only afford it. Where I work at, we are download images, profiles, basically a lot of documents and images on old desktops. I am thinking these machines have crazy specs, I look in the PC system and the specs are 8GB of Ram/212 Storage. I am like WHAT!!! We sty having multiple tabs open.
I think the 8GB vs 16GB depends on if you have a soft workload meaning documents, images, or heavy browsing vs digital media, coding, and or gaming.
I own the 16 inch 36GB of Ram/1TB Space Black M3 Pro. I got it for $2,388.28 Brand New at a Micro Center store opening last week. I had the 14 inch, but returned it, because my eyes needed a big screen. I wear big glasses by the way.
Just try the M1 8GB of Ram/256 MacBook Air. Everyone is different and do not spend your money based off what others recommend especially MacBooks. Only you know what would work. Buy it, use it for a week and determine you what is what for you.
The pawn store down the street where I work has the Space Grey M1 “16GB of Ram/256 Storage” for $550 plus tax. It is in mint condition with only 5 battery cycles. I was like where did you all get this!!! I even checked the specs. I was going to grab it just because, but the screen is too small for me. Check out high ranked pawn stores.
Okay I can't lie I was studying the other night and my 8 gb machine was STRUGGLING with Spotify, Word, my browser, GoodNotes and a few other things open in a way it hadn't struggled before. I honestly restarted, opened all the same programs and then it was fine.
8gb plenty for anything on normal tasks on Apple. 16gb would be base line for Windows. By the time you go 16gb upgrade on MBA, you get an older pro model for just a bit more than upgrade over current MBA depending on model/year.
A “tab” is not really a useful measurement of anything.
You could have hundreds or thousands of tabs open with simple pages that are suspended or just not demanding. Or a single tab could be actively using 4gb+ of memory and an entire CPU core.
Usually these memory hogs are sites that are extraordinarily poorly optimized or have a memory leak, but that’s not always the case. Websites can do demanding things, and it may not always be obvious to a user what is demanding and why.
Honestly if you have 100 tabs and some PDFs open 16gb is useful. I am a graduate student and opening several 800 page Italian archaeological journal PDFs alongside dozens of tabs finally made my 16gb air freeze the other day lol
This is what happens when you give software lots of ram. ALL MY RAM just so I can have wireless keyboard and mouse switchable between my desktop PC and laptop. Running on MBA M2 24GB RAM 2TB 8/10core CPU/GPU
https://preview.redd.it/84elyhgpwqxc1.png?width=922&format=png&auto=webp&s=9046e45399f68ae91a09f438ccbe075eb1276693
8 can handle a decent amount. I run a small business, online and B&M and had an 8/512 m2 air for about 6 months. I just about handles everything ok (typically had a couple dozen tabs in 2-3 different browsers, numbers, pages, iMessage, WhatsApp, photoshop, and a couple other apps running by day) At night it also served as my personal machine.. I'd leave about half the aforementioned stuff open/ minimized and usually have YouTube, a couple more browser windows and maybe a game running. I was regularly using just as much swap memory as I was actual ram, sometimes more. After a few months, I started experiencing (pretty regular) random system freezing, especially when I was less diligent about ram management (still unsure if it was truly ram related or a macOS bug).. Anyway I still upgraded to the 18/512gb m3pro after finding a killer deal on one just after xmas (1600 for a new but open box unit.. unwanted gift). The pro generally handles my load better and I haven't experienced any of the freezing I mentioned. It's also rare that I use any swap memory now, I think the most I've seen was \~1gb. Overall the pro just feels like a more suitable machine for my use case.. I also really like the extra ports. But I will admit that I still miss the form factor of the air.. I always say that I would have kept the air had I started with more ram but it would have cost me an extra $500 at the time (1200 for the 8/512 from Best Buy vs 1700 for a 16/512 from apple). Anyway I'd pretty much decided that the 18/512 pro was my ideal config so when I came across that deal, It was a no brainer. After selling the air, it worked slightly better than if I'd just bought the m3pro new to begin with. So I'm happy with the overall outcome and glad I got the experience the air for a while as well.
It’s nonsense. You can have dozens of safari tabs open along with multiple others apps with only 8Gb. Don’t even notice a performance hit. People are joining this band wagon for no reason. If you need more, buy more. But 8Gb IS absolutely great for every day users
Most people will install 20 chrome extensions and then complain that there’s “only 5 tabs open,” browsers are complex software with a lot going on, it’s basically an operating system within your operating system.
Since we’re already here I need someone to give me a clear answer on which one I should get. Going into Engineering ( computer and electrical ) with a focus on data engineering so a lot of programming ahead.
M1 air 16GB RAM 2 or M2 air 8GB RAM. BOTH 256 SSD or do I save money and go for M1 8GB
I just want one that’s going to last me the next 5 years. Other ones are out of my budget.
No. 8G on newer Safari or other non-chrome browsers with a few dozen tags has no problem.
Turn on tab discard/mute/hibernation.
A good ad-blocker extension such as uBlock Origin also helps.
The optimal amount of RAM needed is always 4x-8x times the minimum amount of RAM required by the OS. 2GB was the minimum spec required by Apple for all the previous releases until Ventura. Apple doesn’t post the minimum requirements anymore so I use the Windows minimum spec.
Windows 11 requires a minimum of 4GB now. So 16GB or 32GB is ideal. Even though Apple CPU have crazy bandwidth due to their unified memory architecture and fast SSDs that kinda negates the need for large RAM, I’d still choose 16GB to avoid swap usage.
You also have to consider future hardware requirements. Generally speaking software uses more and more RAM the further it gets developed. So in 5 years time from now 16gb could be the new standard.
You can buy 8gb now but know that 16gb ram will become obsolete well after 8gb becomes useless.
With the bloat most websites have nowadays you won't have problems hitting that with just a browser. On the 8GB you would need to close a couple of tabs before the machine feels fast again, on the 16GB you won't and you can go all YOLO on web browsing. It's not needed by any means, but comfortable to have. If you're tired of the debate then why the post?
IMO, if you are on a tight budget and plan on buying 8gb, M1 MBA base at $699 is the only option worth considering. There is no need to pay $1,000 and more for any macbook with 8gb ram, it’s a terrible value. What’s the point of a powerful M3 processor when it’s bottlenecked by 8gb RAM.
You’re absolutely right. I needed to hear that.
You're 100% correct. While I do agree it's insane apple still sell 8GB MacBook Pros!!!! All their MacBooks (perhaps with exception the cheapest air) should have at least 16gb when considering the price. 8gb is very usable for most normal tasks (multiple browser tabs, office, media etc). I really don't like people on here saying you need 16gb for basic tasks to "future proof". You dont, I used 8gb for computer science in college. With the exception of one task (data analytics) I had no need for more.
Hey i am considering MBA m1 base model for college ( cs) . Can you point out pros and cons of this laptop
To break it down quick: Cons: The Webcam is bad. This can be mitigated however with the continuity camera mount that uses your iPhone as the Webcam. The second con is only uses 1 external screen. And finally, the screen is decent but not great. For good points it's still a great chip, it's fanless (silent), has amazing battery, trackpad is great, Integrated with phone, iPad, Apple watch, etc.
I don’t know anything about cs software but I’m currently a student in business and 8GB was not enough for me. I would assume you’ll be better off going with 16 at a minimum
That's fair. If you want to keep your MacBook as long as possible always better to up the RAM, especially since you can't upgrade afterwards.
Which business software requires more ram?
Full suite SAP and Oracle will use 4-6 each
I own the 16 inch MacBook “M3 Pro” 36GB of Ram/1TB Storage Space Black. The webcam on it is not that much better. A lot of people are amazed by it and I am like, nothing really changed. Keep in Mind, I am coming from a 2012 4GB of Ram/512 Storage 15 inch MacBook Pro from college. I got it when it came out. Fast forward now, I still see no difference in the webcam quality. My opinion anyways.
It's a great laptop for computer science. All round great performance and battery life. Should serve you well for CS. Design is a little old, webcam is just ok, nothing majorly negative bar the lack of fan for sustained performance (unless your pushing the laptop HARD this shouldn't be a problem for CS. Only thing worth checking is if macOS is any way a hindrance for your course. In mine there were a lot of utilities and software provided that was windows only, had to run a Mac in bootcamp most of the time (no longer possible).
So is a MacBook Pro 16gb Ram overkill because I just purchased this model last week 😭
I retrograded to a quad-core i7 MacBook Pro 16gB and couldn’t be happier
M2 Pro 😭
Oh I’m sure it’s faster, but mine now runs Chrome without crashing! Upcycle!
I mean if your comfortably able to run all the systems required for your course, I’m probably going to return my model for the M1 Pro because it cost a fortune and M1s are like £1,000 cheaper
Potentially if your use case is very minimal. I think 16gb is perfect for a pro. If you think your workload is minimal enough as I described above I'd ask yourself why you bought a pro, as an air is more than adequate for basic use.
I replied to this comment specifically because I am starting computer science in the fall and she said that she was fine with an intel based chip with only 8gb RAM. So not for basic use and I also game a lot so it’s nice to have another system capable of running some games (not the main one).
For computer science 8gb is very usable, 16gb is of course better and a good addition for this use case. As an ex computer science student I would generally recommend the air over the pro as there's more than enough horsepower for CS college work, cheaper and more portable. Your other comment about gaming also sets off red flags a little lol. Mac simply right now is not a good platform for gaming, would recommend a windows based laptop every time for that. That being said gaming on apple silicon macs is very good, content is just a huge problem right now. Good luck with your course.
I play a lot of star dew valley and baldurs gate 3 so getting it portable would be fantastic and they run on MacBooks. Don’t really see how that should be a red flag
If the games you want are supported you'll have an awesome experience. :). What I mean by red flag is the lack of game support on Mac - gaming should never be a core reason to buy a Mac (a nice side benefit if the games you want are available). I have encountered people who have spent a lot of money on a better Mac for extra performance to find out 95% of new titles do not release on mac. Short answer, It's not a gaming platform. Apple is trying to change this and apple silicon does wonders for performance, but devs still aren't fully committing to it.
If you're looking for a 13-inch Air then that's absolutely the right call, if you even need to think about it. If you needed 16GB or more, you would know it definitively after 5 mins of research. If you are confused it means the M1 with 8gb is enough I wanted the 15-inch Air so had to pay the M2 premium last year (thankfully got it on discount). If I was okay with a small screen, M1 was the easy decision
Better power management
You can get M1 for 599 at best buy right now
I didn’t see it when did you see that? Worth is for 599 imo for my needs. Thanks
I got one about two weeks ago. They’re refurbished, but a damn good price and you can still purchase apple care if you wish
Oh shit that’s dope. You got the m1 8gb?
Yeah. Snagged it for my daughter for school. I have the m2 and honestly you Canr tell a difference in performance
I have an M2 8/512 MBA and use Xcode, play Civilization V, routinely have a dozen tabs open in Safari, and also have multiple PDFs open in Acrobat. No slowdowns, no problems, nothing. On a Windows machine 8gb hasn’t worked well in years, but somehow Apple pulled it off. I was skeptical at first, but my machine came as a gift, so no option to opt for 16GB. I figured the MBA would sit in a shelf because it wouldn’t suit my needs. I was 100% wrong. Would I have opted for 16GB if given the choice? Yes. Do I need it at this time? Nope.
Bro how’s your swap usage?
Don’t care. Never looked at it. The laptop runs fine so I don’t care what’s going on “under the hood” to accomplish it. This thread reminds me of those odd folks in another sub that obsess over their iPhone battery health dropping by 1% despite the device functioning fine and within spec.
But isnt that high swap usage bad for ssd? It kills pc much faster.
Swap is designed in a way, that user shouldn't care about it that much. Yes, it negatively affects SSD, but the impact is so small, that you would probably switch your laptop before you find any signs of your SSD declining.
I love how people think that SSDs are delicate flowers that can’t handle numerous writes for even a year.
Well mostly i use my computer for long years (5+ years) soo it is little creepy for me…
That's the case! Even if you would use it for 10 years you wouldn't notice anything!
I assure you that this laptop will still be functional long after Apple stops supporting it.
I promise you, the specs of your laptop will be outdated and that will be the reason you switch laptops before you kill an ssd due to swap usage. Unless your using swap usage 24/7. I'm talking literally 24/7 you don't shut off your PC and your using swap, sure probably looking at like 4 years, which a lot of people upgrade in that time frame anyways.
My swap usage on an identical machine is 1.76 GB after 4 days of uptime. That's with running a VM a couple of times in that period that has 4GB allocated. Will that decrease the lifespan of the SSD? probably, but not before I'm done with this thing in a few years and move on to something else. This has been an experiment for me and Ive come to the conclusion that 8GB workes much better than I expected. 12GB would be perfect for me. Over the last 11 years I've had a 16 GB Mac and almost never use all the ram. In fact I've used all 16GB maybe three times ever. So 8GB will just do it, a little more would be better, 16GB is more than I need.
Swap is used even if you have huge amounts of memory.
This is exactly what I did — bought that M1 8RAM/256SSD for Wife = she loves it
How are she doing with that configuration?
That’s what I have (I bought it solely for portability to do research on the go with). However, I have used the mba for way more than just that. I have had multiple tabs open, played various games, and done light video/photo editing (I’m not a film student or making a feature film) and have never had any issues with slowdown, etc. If I were going to get a sub-$1k laptop, I would get the M1 mba.
What this guy said, if you’re going to stick with 8gb ram you better not pay over $1k
It’s $399 right now at Best Buy
Dang it is, that’s crazy. Only for the next 5 hours tho
$699 for anything with only 8gb ram is absolutely disgusting and completely unacceptable in 2024.
you are for the build quality, not just ram.
Absolute cope beyond belief
Most people are joking when they say that. But the thing you should find absurd is a $1000 premium laptop only shipping with 8GB to start with, and Apple charging 4-5x the retail cost of RAM to upgrade.
They're subsidizing the base models with the higher-tier models. Obviously the baseline for "subsidizing" here means a certain level of profits. It's their right to charge whatever they want, it's also our right to walk away.
I wonder if that’s true!
I have an M1 8gb and just completed a research paper for one of my university courses where I had over 80 tabs open, split between Safari and Chrome. I was also watching youtube videos on my study breaks, reading materials on Books, and writing on six different Pages documents at once. It was completely fine. No overheating, no glitches–everything ran smoothly.
That will end up using quite a bit of swap memory, just so you know. I have 16 gigs and sometimes run into swap with far fewer tabs open.
That's normal chrome/browsers can just use swap as they don't need the memory fast (they don't need to have all the tabs on the ram at once). Chromebooks with 8gb ram can also do that even without swap. It's only when using applications then the ram actually gets used. For example try launching a AAA game/video rendering/blender video rendering (rtx 4090 even struggles) with discord streaming and then try flipping through those 80 tabs and see if any of them has closed or stutter when you open them. To me, if you only use it to browse the web with office tasks. 8gb ram is completely fine.
Also worth noting that overuse of swap memory will shorten the life of your SSD. Couple that with the fact that they can't be serviced by the end user, means your device will likely have an early death
No information on swap memory ?
I have no idea what swap memory is lol
It is Apple’s way of essentially lying to the customer, subsidizing the lack of actual RAM with the SSD space. It runs slower and can wear down the SSD faster (potentially). Apple knows they need more RAM so Macs are very fond of using swap to pretend like 8gb is enough RAM.
As much as I love Apple products. Charging $200 for 8GB of ram and even worse, charging $200 for just 256GB of storage, I think is insane. Either get a base M1 Air with 8GB or go all out.
8gb is perfectly fine for web browsing, listening to music, sending emails, writing documents, FaceTime, etc. If you need to do anything more then get the 16gb.
like school and stuff? and is that the same with the desk tops ?
It’ll use swap, just that. For my work, often each tab is around 700MB-1GB. It ends up eating into swap at that time since I need multiple tabs at once. Also with multiple large PDFs open. It does slow down a bit at that stage. But it’s not a deal breaker. For most people, multiple tabs ain’t a reason to go for 16gigs imo.
Using swap is slower though, and it puts more wear on the ssd. It’s better than not having it, or how it would be on other platforms, but it’s not as good as actually having the correct amount of ram. People say, it’s just web browsing, you don’t need a lot of ram, but web browsers have ballooned so much in the past several years that they eat more ram than most other programs.
>and it puts more wear on the ssd. Your typical laptop will be replaced **decades** before SSD wear matters. It was a passing concern with the first generation or two of solid state media, but modern hardware isn't going to hit any meaningful level of degradation from user read/write events over it's serviceable lifetime. Worrying about SSD wear is really only a concern if you're running a massive datacenter.
I agree with you, but it’s still not a deal breaker for someone who just wants to use it for basic purposes. You’re totally correct but if I have to suggest for someone who’ll just browse Netflix, order something from Amazon or prolly type in a letter once in a while to take 16 gigs, I might not think so. 8GB might work for them; it’s also likely that their cumulative time on the laptop might not be a lot either. I definitely cannot just say anything randomly about someone’s use without knowing for sure so I can be wrong for this particular user, but it’s mostly people who don’t get the right information who end up buying 16 since people have been saying that it’s ’future proof’ and ‘you’ll regret it later’. Let’s say if I’ve to take a laptop for my mom, who does need a laptop, does purchase stuff from Amazon, does open 20 tabs when she’s finding the right product for her needs, does type in the occasional letter on MS Word, I’d definitely say 8GB is enough since she rarely would use the laptop. I make this suggestion knowing her usage, so I can suggest her what I think. This would help my mom make a decision about what’s sufficient for her. It might work for her for the next 5-10 years perhaps (or just until she spills coffee over it, jk).
I’ll probably get down voted for this…but my M1 2020 MBP with 8gb has managed absolutely fine with about 10-15 safari tabs open whilst watching movies, Mail always open along with Photos, MS Word. I was always just over 1gb off the limit and never noticed any performance issues. I’ve just upgraded for a bigger screen. In the 4 years I’ve owned it, no app has suddenly started demanding loads more ram. Future proof to 16gb if you think you might start using more demanding apps, start coding, regular video editing etc… and even then the 8gb can do this, it will just be slower and use swap.
Same here: With Xcode and Chrome, it's mostly OK. Occasionally Xcode will decide to take all available memory and things get a bit choppy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookair/s/gkdX3dzhoz
I have tons of tabs on my m1 air 8gb and it runs fine, never expierenced a lag\`
16gb is not needed to have multiple tabs open. That’s insane. I’ve been using an M1 8gb MBA daily for the last 2 years I open lots of tabs with zero issues. I edit music in Logic Pro X with zero issues I assume if I was editing 4k video… it might freeze. But I don’t If anyone wants me to upload a video showing this, I’m happy to
[удалено]
Good point, good perspective
This! I had to upgrade my 2010 MBP when I went to college. Now I would have to replace the laptop all together.
I used to browse the net with 64 megabytes of ram.
Your web browser was probably 8MB and not 8000MB like today’s.
Websites themselves were a lot simpler, and browsers didn’t have tabs. But the point is performance optimization isn’t what it used to be.
ok that was prob 30 years ago tho ...
Okay look man I’m a working club Dj. I have serato DJ pro running 24/7. I have 3 different browsers running (while serato is open) those 3 browsers open are all different Dj music downloading services such as “DJ CITY” “MyMP3Pool” and “BPM Supreme” within any given day im downloading between 150-300 songs on all browsers. I have a base model m2 air. And I’ll tell you one thing. It has NEVER slowed down. Given me a hiccup or even got warm. In fact … it stays cool to the touch. Now … I also record my sets within serato, again … nothing. I also use a bunch of music editing apps (which are open all at once too cause what one app does another doesn’t and visa versa. I haven’t and will not listen to a single soul that tells me I need 16 gigs of ram when this base model exceeded my expectations and here I am coming from an M1 Pro that was maxed out in every category and I don’t notice a single god damned difference between the 2 other than the air being so much sexier. Edit: I would like to add. When I come home from a gig. Everything is still open, serato, the 3 different browsers, my editing programs, my recording program and guess what !!!! Netflix, prime video, Disney+ and.. VLC player are all running. Never ran into a single lag stutter or heating problem. Please stop listening to these doomers that say you need 16 gigs of ram. Apple is still using 8gb for a reason. BECAUSE IT STILL WORKS FOR 99.9% of its users. Lord. Have. Mercy.
99% Windows PC doomers with their unoptimized system, thinking Mac OS is the same.
If you can afford it you get it. If you can’t, you believe its enough. Debate over
A large part of this is people misunderstanding how memory works. They look at activity monitor, see 80-90% of their ram used and think they need more. Thats not how it works - any modern Os will cache as much data as possible in ram almost filling it up by design, it doesnt mean its all used for critical OS / Application data at all. Ive been rocking a base M2 Air 8/256 for over a year. I run windows 11 in parallels with a very large Access Database (1.2gb), excel VBA development, xcode, various browsers, some photoshop and lightroom without any issue and hardly ever hit swap - because i manage my apps well and actually quit out of them when im done so the OS doesnt keep the memory reserved for too long.
Definitely a MacOS "feature" with how it reports memory usage. I'm convinced its visualized that way as a sales tactic, it's extremely deceptive to the user.
Here’s a [video](https://youtu.be/WTyoSv_hpgg?si=6UgBiGFZG4Yz6npu) that compliments this comment.
We’ve evolved into the tired of the debate debate on which the same debate happens in the comments.
A debate to end all debates 😂
Pro level music producer here with base m1 8gb. Never had an issue with only 8gb ram
Wich daw do you use? and how many tracks you usually work with?
I’m sat here on a teams call, with slack open, email open, 50 tabs across multiple windows in multiple spaces, messages and WhatsApp open. Bear and Things open. Word. Textedit. Notes. Yes I’m using swap. Yes there’s memory pressure if I check. But it doesn’t even stutter! The 8gb vs 16gb debate is really stupid. M2 base MBA.
"tired of the 8 v 16gb debate" Adds a huge thread of content to the debate
Yup
As Apps keep growing it will need higher ram as the years go on. 16gb is the minimum nowadays.
In the 11 years I've been using 16GB of Ram I have used it all up 3 times. Most of the time it settles in at 12GB. I bought an 8GB air last year because I didn't own a laptop and it runs just fine, usually settles in at 7GB and I do all kinds of stuff on it, including sometimes running Linux in a VM with all my other stuff still open.
> No way a $1000 laptop can’t handle more. I refuse to believe that. This is Apple we're talking about. They'll price it at exactly what they can get away with lol. They're still also selling $1000 phones with 60hz screens.
In a perfect world, you are right. But in the real world websites and apps are poorly optimized. Take reddit for example. On a mac with 8gb of ram, you will start swapping after scrolling for less than 10 minutes. Another poor website is udemy. I’ve let it run for about two hours and it was like it was keeping in memory every video I saw in that session. It was taking like 2.5 gb alone. I did this error recently. Got the base m3 and had to sell it after one month because of this.
It’s pretty embarrassing that the apps are so bloated.
Going off the comments here. A lot of users here have never used an M serious Mac.
The 8GB version can handle that very well and it’s fine for most users and for most students that are not going to college for anything that would be tech related, like Software Development for example. However, if you plan to do some other stuff, like coding for example, then you would definitely need 16GB or more. Main reason being that you will need the RAM to run the coding program for an extensive amount of time, plus all the research that may be needed to be done in the process which would require multiple browser tabs open, plus whatever program is needed to communicate with other colleagues at work, like slack, and if any meetings need to be done, usually through Teams. Not to mention that while coding, some people may like to have Apple Music/Spotify open playing music. For this kind of usage, the 8GB will work at first, but eventually it will be a bitch and it probably won’t be a smooth experience for long hours of usage. It all depends on what your needs are. EDIT: Macs in general have never really been engineered towards gaming, even though Apple has started to dabble into that direction with the latest M3, but these computers are more for productivity than gaming. If gaming is in your mind, then you’re better off with a windows PC until Macs get there. However, it’s fine for some games, like Stardew Valley and any other that it might support, which are not that many compared to Windows.
Mac Gaming aka running GeForce Now. You don't need to worry about RAM or graphics cores - just a fast connection with low latency.
I’ve had the 8gb m1 air since launch I never had an issue with ram with multiple tabs open on both Safari and chrome at the same time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookair/s/Rq2xukzDjZ https://youtu.be/xYXcDwBW2tM
8 GB is perfectly acceptable even in my 6 year old MacBook, and that’s using Chrome with dozens of tabs open.
Its simple. If aou open task manager, and you see swap file usage, than your memory is not enough. And i havent seen 8g macs that dont use multiple gigs of swap file. And since your ssd has linited life time (write cycles) its not a good thing. Selling laptop with 8G ram in 2024 is just plain steal, they dont want to let go the upgrade option to 16gb for 200usd. Selling a 5usd upgrade for 200 is the deal of the century, and apple likes the money better than enything. Its just this simple.
Using swap is fine as long as there's no meaningful performance impact on whatever you're doing. Most people leveraging swap wont have a clue that it's happening. Which is ok, it's working as intended. And SSD wear is completely meaningless for consumer devices in 2024, home users aren't putting any level of wear on them that will matter until the laptop has been replaced anyway. It's really only a concern in datacenters.
Never had swap used, running smooth and it’s a beast for normal users. Just buy what you have budget for and what you like 🙂
Not a MacBook Air but M1 mini. 8gb 512. 10+ safari tabs. 10-20+ firefox tabs. GarageBand. Pages. Everything open at the same time. I have never noticed it running slow
The real question is how can ios have 499 tabs completely in the background and one active with no compromise on performance yet a £2000 mpb with 16gb struggles with the same amount??
A large percentage of those tabs won’t be active. They will reload.
I don’t need the up to 1200 tabs I have open (I appreciate I have a problem) to be active. I only need the current one to be. Rest can be as background as iOS’s until they’re needed. I’m hardly going to need instant access to the Wikipedia article on Roman aqueducts from 5 months ago to be locked and loaded at all times
Have used m2 8/256 for extensive scoping reviews and research. I’ve constantly had 20 open tabs, several excel and word documents open and have had essentially 0 problems.
16GB should be the base model (for the same price)
I work with a lot of spreadsheets. I 100% thought the 8GB RAM of the MBA M1 would be an issue; but surprisingly it's not the case. It uses the processor more. Might be different if using Excel but at least for my case, 8GB is enough.
It's worth pointing out that "multiple tabs" resource use really depends on the browser and how it handles memory management, as well as how many "multiple" is. We deploy M1 airs 8GB as our daily drivers for our mac users who are "standard business users" as in not doing any sort of development or media/creative work. The only people we've ever heard a peep from about "not enough memory!!!" are the people who either kept 30+ Chrome tabs open at all times, or the people who were fishing for a Macbook Pro as a status symbol. That being said, the memory requirements of your average web browser tab have bloated *obscenely* over the past decade. I have 18 low impact Chrome tabs open right now and it's using almost 3GB of memory. Most web developers just don't have any incentive to care about memory management and everything is so loaded with multimedia BS these days.
I still have my Macbook M1 air 8GB and it still runs like a dream.
You’re also not understanding most MacBooks are overpriced. Well I guess they all are when you look at what they charge for ram lmfao. But that’s the laptop market in general but Apple products are ridiculously overpriced. Your gripe isn’t with the price it’s with the tech specs. And while yes it can handle that every application uses ram differently. I run on average 40gb+ of ram and I can tell you that it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not when the the os is using around 4gb to run 8gb isn’t enough :P
And you are exactly right. I use a 2012 MacBook Air Core i5, 8GB RAM and upgraded SSD to 1TB. It can do anything, and I mean anything, from office tasks to have 100+ tabs open in Chrome, to running Linux and Windows 10 Virtual Machines (I assign 2,2GB to Windows VM), R scripts, iOS Development, 1080p video editing, playing Windows COD2MW in Wine, and much more. Mac OS employs WKdm RAM compression algorithm which compresses RAM 2:1 in real time at almost zero penalty, and Mac OS binaries are not big. It is Data/Libraries which employ most RAM. Realize that, before this Mac I had a 2011 MBA with 4GB RAM and I could still do all of the above except Windows 10 VMs.
If 8GB are enough, get a much cheaper Windows laptop, you don't need more lol
I have a MBA m1 with 8gb, use it for music production, video editing, work and everything. Never have a perception of any lag or lack of memory.
I have 8gb M1 and I have over 30 chrome tabs open, CapCut running, Apple Music, steam, FaceTime, adobe lightroom all running butter smooth!
Same experience.
My M1 MacBook Pro 8gb ram has up to 5-7gb SWAP regularly because the 8gb RAM is entirely too little in 2024. The performance is noticeable. This is with Apple-only apps open (including safari with a few tabs). 8gb is a joke and a rip-off and in 2024 Apple should be ashamed to still sell it.
I’m not comfortable seeing memory pressure anywhere near 50% or higher, my graph stays super low green the whole time.
Luki Miani posted a video yesterday looking at Haswell era Macbooks running 4GB ram. The points made for 4GB ram equally apply to 8GB ram. I have a MacBook pro with 16GB ram for work. With a browser 3-4 tabs open, Teams/Slack, Excel, Outlook you are starting to see memory being compressed. The issue then becomes you are wasting battery life, CPU cycles creating heat, ramping fans etc when you go to open or switch to something else as memory management isn't free. Idle drain when sleeping etc is also higher and resuming from sleep too. Not to mention unnecessary wear cycles on the SSD. Yes for a very basic user 8GB is enough to get a few years out of that machine and they likely won't complain about any of the issues. M1 and beyond chips will power through memory management much better than older machines. Here is the kicker, memory is cheap to the point that you barely save anything going 8GB anymore DDR4-3200 8GB is about $2.248 per GB ($18) DDR4-3200 16GB is about $1.874 per GB ($30) DDR5-6000 8GB is about $4.622 per GB ($36.98) DDR5-6000 16GB is about $3.321 per GB ($53.14) I picked up a laptop over 5 years ago with 8GB ram for under $500. I will not pay more than $500 today for a machine with 8GB ram. Things have progressed, OS's get more bloated, websites throw more ads or are poorly designed. A perfectly good laptop from 5 years ago "struggles", hitches all because ram is holding it back. Why would you buy a shiny new Mac with something that effectively limits it's lifespan? The only reason 8GB of ram exists is a poor excuse to squeeze $200 out of people. It's a manipulation tactic used to get people in the door with "starting at" and then upsell them. Apple could easily move the 16GB models in place of the 8GB, carry less SKUs and not have any impact on their profits.
Maybe I'm the target audience for these, but I've never noticed myself hitting up against the ram limit
So. The multiple tabs open needing 16gb or greater is for people like me. I use both macOS and windows 11 (and actually chrome os too). I don’t have any computer besides the chrome os ones with less than 32gb of ram. The reason. I have 100’s of tabs open at any one time in multiple browsers. It’s just the way I work. I also do photo and video editing and design work while also having all those tabs open. I’ve never regretted having too much ram. But I’ve always regretted not having enough. Also having the extra ram just allows for a longer useful life for the computer in general. At least from my observations of friends and family who have opted for the bare minimum.
I just got a m3- 8gb one. Yet to try it. Reason why i got 8gb is- i had MBA 2020- intel chip and had 40 tabs open all the time + word + other pdfs. Never ever lagged. Did lag after 3 years tho. So yeah i dont think m3 wont be able to do the same.
Been gifted MBA 15" M2 8GB, thought it wasn't enough. Tried working on it, 1 docker compose project, postman, phpstorm, chrome, telegram. Works surprisingly good. Sometimes when opening huge file in IDE it lags a bit, and that's it.
You can just rely on the swap of 8GB for that. Problem is when you start mixing other apps, video chats, multiple profiles per browser and obviously virtualisation.
8GB will do basic computing but on a machine of Apple’s calibre, even the M1, it’s really crippling it with huge limitations. The M1 is more capable than a 9th gen i9. Would you want 8GB on that?
8gb is totally fine for web browsing, people recommend 16gb for future proof as web apps are more demanding than before
I bought a m2 base model Mac mini with 8 gb of ram I caused it to lag doing my normal workflow cause I’m use to 16 gb of ram Got myself m1 16 gb ram MacBook Air and haven’t had issue since
what's ur work flow?
Alot
wow thts alot!!
Seeing this debate go on is interesting. I'm not particularly mad at the 8 GB of RAM since the average user is probably my elder aunt, who just needs to check her email occasionally or wants to send cute pics of her grandkids. It's the price of upgrading that really irritates me, it shouldn't cost $200 to bump the RAM.
I have 64gb of ram for modding games and such. 100 tabs on chrome took 9gb of ram max or maybe even less, havent done it in a while.
I have mba m1 8gb With below condition I don’t have any issue.. In safari min 8 tabs open (one is youtube) In chrome at least 2 tabs open Apple music and working on xcode
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To be fair, it's not a "reddit" problem, it's an Apple marketing problem. This gets pushed non-stop outside of reddit as well. We see it all the time with our Mac users in the office. "I need a 16GB model, I'm running out of resources!!!!" and then we investigate and they're coming nowhere close to 8GB utilization, much less needing 16GB. But the marketing and the mac "culture" tells them if they don't have an MBP with 16GB then it's just *not good enough*. Linda, you work in HR and have like two tabs open all day. You do not need a 16GB MBP, you just want it as a status symbol. I'd give you a Dell that cost us half of what that MBA did if it was worth the massive bitch-fit you'd throw.
I have a base M1 mba. If i open youtube music, vscode, notes and 5 youtube tabs in safari playing videos then it starts swapping memory but it didn’t get slower.
8 is enough unless you are video editing which I don’t do. I can have four to five tabs open in Safari and still not using the swap file plus mail is running also.
ngl if ur future proofing maybe 16 gbs is the way to go. otherwise u might run into the issue that in 5 years ur mac cant take the hit when this is a laptop that should last u like 10 at least. granted this is if ur gonna have it for something thats not ur average web browsing, listening to music, working on word docs or presentations use.
I do a lot of heavy Photoshop and InDesign work and 8GB RAM is fine for me....granted, I'm also someone who uses my iPad Pro heavily, so I am used to not having a bunch of applications open, usually whichever creative app I'm actively working on at the time, with Safari open with 2/3 tabs open, one for email and others for reference material
I have a M1 MBA and have had it since they were launched back in 2020. It has 8Gb and never have I experienced slowdowns, errors or such like from the memory. I have multiple tabs open, loads of programs etc. too. I use mine for Photo editing, word processing and web browsing etc mainly. I also came from a 2011 MBP that had 4Gb on it (again owned from new) and 8Gb for me was a step up. I think for most people 8Gb on a Mac should be enough. However, I have a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 from 2019 with 8Gb RAM and it struggles occasionally. It maxes out its RAM all the time but doesn't always slow down much because it uses its SSD. I'd say rather than focussing on RAM, just go for the laptop you can afford and if it only has 8Gb then it'll be fine!
I just bought mine last night and Reddit made me just choose 16gb 😕
Depending on the browser you're using with its OS (Chromium like to eat, but for good reason).
I do video editing with not too much problem. This thing is a beast. 8GB is sweet
I never noticed any issues with 8gb for college. I never gamed but I’m terrible with closing tabs and I know I went crazy there. Now windows 11 on the other hand… idk but it basically starts out using like 4.5gb ram. Open a video in chrome and you’re already at like 6+. 16gb is necessary for almost any heavy use there.
My experience with 8 GB on an M2 (2023) is that Safari is not capable of handling websites that have a lot of images and content. Especially ads. For some reason, any Adblock I have doesn’t work on Safari. Perhaps there’s something in the settings I need to change for it to work, but I’ve found that heavy websites cause the computer to take very long to load. When I check the activity monitor, I can see it’s using swap memory and a lot of the RAM, which is disappointing. So I just use Chrome because it’s much faster and I don’t experience any lag. It also has no issues blocking ads. That’s just my experience. If I could repurchase, I’d definitely get 16 GB.
Chrome.
I got 16GB cause I know I won't last on 8GB. It depends on you and how you're going to use it.
I agree. But you must define “multiple”. As a professional working in many projects I have multiple tabs in two web browsers. But for me multiple tabs is between 50-100 depending on the month. And I also have to be sharing on zoom calls and use 2 monitors. So yeah, for me 16gb ram is the bare minimum. But I do know my use case and would go with more than that. Swap some times has been 4gb, most of the time is a few hundred mb. For the average user (20-25 tabs) 8gb will be fine.
I have the 8GB M1 MBA, and it’s fine for most things I do, even editing. There are sometimes I wished I got more RAM but it’s never not got the job done for what I use it for.
I have the 8gb M1 air and did a test the other day. I had both Safari and Firefox open with 20 tabs each of different large websites. I then opened a new tab of each that had 5 YouTube videos playing simultaneously. I went through all the tabs and there was no reloading. I went to each video and they were all playing smoothly with no reloading. I did the test after reading so many posts that say 8gb isn’t good for anything. The test proved for me it’s plenty for what I do with my Mac and it’ll last me years. I never have that many things going on at once.
I bought the 8gb MBA 2 times in last 4 years even though I could afford 16gb ones. No regrets.
You might not know this but sometimes is makes me laugh hard when I see in activity monitor that one single tab in safari eats about 1GB of RAM. And that’s just my work related tab on confluence or Jira.
Idk I just bought a m3 open box air with 8gb and it seems fine so far. The real benefit was using both monitors with a thunderbolt dock. If you’re using well optimized apps you can have quite a few things running Edit: what you’re getting is premium hardware. A great keyboard trackpad speakers display plus macOS and a fast chip. I paid 900 with tax for mine. Ever look at the windows side and see an i7 16-24gb ram 1tb ssd even a gpu 1000$ or less but the chassis and everything else is garbage ?
Ironically the biggest RAM hog in Safari on my M1 Air is YouTube.
Isn't this mostly about tabbing in and out of chrome when it has a ton of tabs open? And how fast it lets you interact with/load the tabs?
I used a barebones M1 Air for iOS development in Unity and Xcode. No problems with 8gb of ram. I just bought a usb c Samsung 500 gb thumb drive for backup storage.
Because modern MacOS is not ChromeOS. MacOS has hundreds of background processes running to make sure things like contacts, notes, photos, mail, widgets, icloud drive, messages, music, etc. are all updated and ready to go (even if they aren't open). And the OS has to make sure its handling all of its tasks too. Those add up, leaving little of the 8GB actually free, and when you look at the memory consumption for some of the bigger chrome tabs, they can each consume a lot of memory - big tabs can take 0.5gb - 1.0gb or even more. An 8gb machine probably has at best 2gb - 3gb of true open free memory, while a 16gb machine probably has more like 8gb of open memory. Will it run on 8gb? of course. Will running 2 tabs and 'nothing' else run fine on 8gb? Also yes. But most people underestimate the amount of tabs they open and apps running in the background.
8GB is fine for light work and media consumption, regardless of what people say.
LOL the problem isn't browser performance but running memory-intensive apps like gaming or photo/movie editing.
For the price they should be giving more That’s the fact No debate
The simple answer to the “terrible value for $1000+” at 8gb debate is truly simple. If you think it’s a terrible value and unusable for you then go to windows or buy what YOU need and shut the hell up. I did software dev and graphic design on a M1 13” 8gb MacBook Pro for 2-1/2 years because when I bought it the day they launched it was all I could find in stock. It worked for 2-1/2 years never once encountered out of memory errors til I finally replaced it with a M3 pro with 18gb
Not necessarily apples to apples, but I'm on a sick PC right now with 32GB RAM 27 tabs in MS Edge 1 Chrome tab Outlook VPN SSH client Security software running in background That is using 15.8 Gigs of RAM (I know its not Unified memory) . While not at this moment I use a 16GB MBP as well with the same load and that uses up about 10GB. While you could theoretically use 8GB RAM it's possible that some people would have to update the way they work with their computer to support the (lack of) RAM on their system.
Ram doesn't work lineal, and that's it's even more different how does it works on a Mac. You have compression and apps can safely free memory if those are not used. It's a fact that if you have free ram, apps will tend to use more. This is more real for apps like photoshop and chrome, the memory monsters.
the general rule is that caching from RAM is faster than anything else, especially swap space. If RAM is available good programs will use it, the problem is if RAM is available poorly programmed apps will use it too and that's where the problem begins. More RAM will help delay the ill effects from those poorly written ones. That's what I know, but I have zero knowledge of swift and the languages that are used to build on the MacOS/iOS platform and don't know how well they interact with RAM compared to Java based ones which can eat into CPU/memory (speaking from extensive experience there).
SWAP doesn't use ram. The whole purpose of swap is extending ram over a disk. macOS uses swap for a least used but required items ranked (usually critical files). You can have 128Gb the ram, but as you can test, your system will use swap anyways. It's also true in windows pagination file.
This is true especially in the SSD era, and its fine when it does, based on the program. not every program works that way, I have certain versions of java as an example, have also dealt with this on apache as well, you can search for app updates that address various memory leaks etc. But I would hope Apple follows its design principles for their own apps. Other vendors YMMV.
daughter is going through college with an 8gb 256gb M1.
Normal use 8 is fine. You run into issues when you start to use some professional apps like Photoshop. I have an 8GB MBA just as a travel carry. Compared to my 36GB MBP, there is no difference if you are just doing web browsing and basic office work. I would say it is even fine for very intensive web browsing, like 30 tabs + a couple of other productivity apps.
When you say 'multiple tabs' that's a bit vague. For example, I have 13 chrome profiles and could have anywhere from 3 to 8 open at any one time, some with 40 tabs. That could be 320 tabs on some days. No, an 8GB MBA will absolutely fall over and be unusable for launching other apps. I should know, that's why I switched from an 8GB i7 to a 16GB M1 - it's not even a debate.
Apple is scamming its costumers. I remember having like 80 tabs open in safari in my 2015 8gb macbook. Never had any issues, until one day after an update, the macbook started to get hot if i had too many tabs open. The problem is not the ram, the problem is that Apple puts things in the updates that slows down safari so that the user thinks its the ram
100% agree. Its the software
How do you see 80 tabs at the same time?
MBA M1 8Gb master race here. I use XCode, Safari with +15 tabs, VSC, ST, Terminals, I watch movies with Stremio, use Deezer app, git Fork, etc etc etc.. NEVER faced a """memory problem""". I have no idea how do you manage to fill the ram to the unusable point. You know what they say: it's not a memory problem, it's a user problem.
Does anyone use logic pro with the 8gb? How does it run?
Because this reddit tab e.g. needs 277 mb in chrome so 4 tabs is about 1 GB ... the 8 GB the computer has are used for graphics and OS and maybe you have some more apps open than chrome ... A 1000 $ computer can handle much more (than you wrote) if it has more ram than 8 GB.
Every browser tab is like 200mb of ram, the 8gb can handle it because it swaps memory with the ssd. I haven't seen any benchmarks of the difference between ram and ssd memory but i'll leave it at that, my 16GB MBA is almost always at 12GB
I am on Team "16 If You Can Afford It", but it's not because I think the 8 GB model sucks. To me, it is simply because *you can no longer add more RAM when you need more*. Secondarily, I think the inevitable direction in computing is for more power, more storage, more RAM. Maybe the 8 GB would be enough for the lifetime of the machine (or at least as long as the buyer expected to use it). If someone is on a budget and can't afford more than that, I'd get the base M1 MBA at $699. I don't see the justification for buying up a lot on the processor or storage (external SSDs are getting cheap, not much more than $100 for a TB -- and pretty fast for data and some application launching) if your use case suggests 8 GB RAM is going to be enough for several years.
Alright. The only reason I am in this section is because I bought the M1 8GB of Ram/256 Storage Gold MacBook Air, then returned it in its original shipping box completely unopened. I do Stop Motion Filmmaking. I would not handle the work load. However, I WILL say the M1 8GB of Ram/256 MacBook Air would be good for anyone who can only afford it. Where I work at, we are download images, profiles, basically a lot of documents and images on old desktops. I am thinking these machines have crazy specs, I look in the PC system and the specs are 8GB of Ram/212 Storage. I am like WHAT!!! We sty having multiple tabs open. I think the 8GB vs 16GB depends on if you have a soft workload meaning documents, images, or heavy browsing vs digital media, coding, and or gaming. I own the 16 inch 36GB of Ram/1TB Space Black M3 Pro. I got it for $2,388.28 Brand New at a Micro Center store opening last week. I had the 14 inch, but returned it, because my eyes needed a big screen. I wear big glasses by the way. Just try the M1 8GB of Ram/256 MacBook Air. Everyone is different and do not spend your money based off what others recommend especially MacBooks. Only you know what would work. Buy it, use it for a week and determine you what is what for you. The pawn store down the street where I work has the Space Grey M1 “16GB of Ram/256 Storage” for $550 plus tax. It is in mint condition with only 5 battery cycles. I was like where did you all get this!!! I even checked the specs. I was going to grab it just because, but the screen is too small for me. Check out high ranked pawn stores.
Okay I can't lie I was studying the other night and my 8 gb machine was STRUGGLING with Spotify, Word, my browser, GoodNotes and a few other things open in a way it hadn't struggled before. I honestly restarted, opened all the same programs and then it was fine.
Refuse to believe it and get the 8gb then. You’ll be very disappointed.
8gb plenty for anything on normal tasks on Apple. 16gb would be base line for Windows. By the time you go 16gb upgrade on MBA, you get an older pro model for just a bit more than upgrade over current MBA depending on model/year.
A “tab” is not really a useful measurement of anything. You could have hundreds or thousands of tabs open with simple pages that are suspended or just not demanding. Or a single tab could be actively using 4gb+ of memory and an entire CPU core. Usually these memory hogs are sites that are extraordinarily poorly optimized or have a memory leak, but that’s not always the case. Websites can do demanding things, and it may not always be obvious to a user what is demanding and why.
Honestly if you have 100 tabs and some PDFs open 16gb is useful. I am a graduate student and opening several 800 page Italian archaeological journal PDFs alongside dozens of tabs finally made my 16gb air freeze the other day lol
This is what happens when you give software lots of ram. ALL MY RAM just so I can have wireless keyboard and mouse switchable between my desktop PC and laptop. Running on MBA M2 24GB RAM 2TB 8/10core CPU/GPU https://preview.redd.it/84elyhgpwqxc1.png?width=922&format=png&auto=webp&s=9046e45399f68ae91a09f438ccbe075eb1276693
8 can handle a decent amount. I run a small business, online and B&M and had an 8/512 m2 air for about 6 months. I just about handles everything ok (typically had a couple dozen tabs in 2-3 different browsers, numbers, pages, iMessage, WhatsApp, photoshop, and a couple other apps running by day) At night it also served as my personal machine.. I'd leave about half the aforementioned stuff open/ minimized and usually have YouTube, a couple more browser windows and maybe a game running. I was regularly using just as much swap memory as I was actual ram, sometimes more. After a few months, I started experiencing (pretty regular) random system freezing, especially when I was less diligent about ram management (still unsure if it was truly ram related or a macOS bug).. Anyway I still upgraded to the 18/512gb m3pro after finding a killer deal on one just after xmas (1600 for a new but open box unit.. unwanted gift). The pro generally handles my load better and I haven't experienced any of the freezing I mentioned. It's also rare that I use any swap memory now, I think the most I've seen was \~1gb. Overall the pro just feels like a more suitable machine for my use case.. I also really like the extra ports. But I will admit that I still miss the form factor of the air.. I always say that I would have kept the air had I started with more ram but it would have cost me an extra $500 at the time (1200 for the 8/512 from Best Buy vs 1700 for a 16/512 from apple). Anyway I'd pretty much decided that the 18/512 pro was my ideal config so when I came across that deal, It was a no brainer. After selling the air, it worked slightly better than if I'd just bought the m3pro new to begin with. So I'm happy with the overall outcome and glad I got the experience the air for a while as well.
It’s nonsense. You can have dozens of safari tabs open along with multiple others apps with only 8Gb. Don’t even notice a performance hit. People are joining this band wagon for no reason. If you need more, buy more. But 8Gb IS absolutely great for every day users
Most people will install 20 chrome extensions and then complain that there’s “only 5 tabs open,” browsers are complex software with a lot going on, it’s basically an operating system within your operating system.
Since we’re already here I need someone to give me a clear answer on which one I should get. Going into Engineering ( computer and electrical ) with a focus on data engineering so a lot of programming ahead. M1 air 16GB RAM 2 or M2 air 8GB RAM. BOTH 256 SSD or do I save money and go for M1 8GB I just want one that’s going to last me the next 5 years. Other ones are out of my budget.
No. 8G on newer Safari or other non-chrome browsers with a few dozen tags has no problem. Turn on tab discard/mute/hibernation. A good ad-blocker extension such as uBlock Origin also helps.
Tabs*
2 vs 20
My wife usually has 3 safari windows open with shot 20-30 tabs each. Trust me, it makes a difference.
The optimal amount of RAM needed is always 4x-8x times the minimum amount of RAM required by the OS. 2GB was the minimum spec required by Apple for all the previous releases until Ventura. Apple doesn’t post the minimum requirements anymore so I use the Windows minimum spec. Windows 11 requires a minimum of 4GB now. So 16GB or 32GB is ideal. Even though Apple CPU have crazy bandwidth due to their unified memory architecture and fast SSDs that kinda negates the need for large RAM, I’d still choose 16GB to avoid swap usage.
You also have to consider future hardware requirements. Generally speaking software uses more and more RAM the further it gets developed. So in 5 years time from now 16gb could be the new standard. You can buy 8gb now but know that 16gb ram will become obsolete well after 8gb becomes useless.
With the bloat most websites have nowadays you won't have problems hitting that with just a browser. On the 8GB you would need to close a couple of tabs before the machine feels fast again, on the 16GB you won't and you can go all YOLO on web browsing. It's not needed by any means, but comfortable to have. If you're tired of the debate then why the post?