Mac M1 users - does RAM amount make a difference?

[lineweight]

Anyone out there using an M1 machine; did you go for 8GB or 16GB of RAM and have you seen anything that suggests it makes a difference?

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, lineweight said:

...did you go for 8GB or 16GB of RAM

I would go at least for 32 GB RAM, but that isn't so far supported by any available M1 based hardware yet. - So the rule of thumb is usually the more RAM the better, especially for memory hungy tasks, or tasks where a bunch of apps are concurrently used in a workflow.

3 hours ago, lineweight said:

...and have you seen anything that suggests it makes a difference?

Well this highly depends on the software tools you use and what you finally do with the software. - Let's assume you would use Publisher and that would be stable, let's further assume you would make some big page sized photo book and embbed all your huge images. And you also switch between the Affinbity apps on the fly to accomplish several tasks. That would be a situation where it is essentiell to have enough RAM so the overall working flow keeps to be fluid.

Or assume you are doing some three tier app development locally, where a bunch of software is envolved at the same time, aka the huge database runs in the background, the huge appserver is started in parallel as backend and your big IDE is started and connected with all of the needed local running services here etc. The whole needs a bunch of memory  in order to run fluidly and fast without much blocking and swapping then.

So it always depends what your main daily, or possible future usage is here. - But as said before, usually the more RAM the better, since then you are on the more secure side.

 

[lineweight]

Yeah - it's just that I've seen some commentary that suggests conventional RAM wisdom doesn't necessarily apply to these M1 hardware - that previous assumptions don't necessarily hold, and that 8gb will actually be fine for most things. So that's why I'm interested if anyone has real world experience either way.

[jmwellborn]

1 minute ago, lineweight said:

Yeah - it's just that I've seen some commentary that suggests conventional RAM wisdom doesn't necessarily apply to these M1 hardware - that previous assumptions don't necessarily hold, and that 8gb will actually be fine for most things. So that's why I'm interested if anyone has real world experience either way.

When I purchased my new MacBook with the M1 chip Apple advised me to go to 16 gb RAM versus the 8gb RAM after I told them what I planned to use it for (all three Affinity apps).   I am extremely glad I did.  I can whip back and forth between Photo, Designer, and Publisher really fast, and have so far never had an issue with the beachball of death.  Moving multiple jpgs (sometimes 60-70 at a time) is a breeze.😊   I'd go for the 16 if money is not an object. 

[lineweight]

2 minutes ago, jmwellborn said:

When I purchased my new MacBook with the M1 chip Apple advised me to go to 16 gb RAM versus the 8gb RAM after I told them what I planned to use it for (all three Affinity apps).   I am extremely glad I did.  I can whip back and forth between Photo, Designer, and Publisher really fast, and have so far never had an issue with the beachball of death.  Moving multiple jpgs (sometimes 60-70 at a time) is a breeze.😊   I'd go for the 16 if money is not an object. 

Thanks.

Of course, it might be that it would also have been fine with 8gb!

In any case...I have decided to go for 16gb to be safe.

[jmwellborn]

@lineweight  Good move!