I am going to be purchasing a MacBook in January and have pretty much decided on the 13in Air but do you really need 16GB of ram? It will be used for School Work, Gaming and Photo editing.
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I would do 16gb just for longevity sake. Unless you plan to upgrade in a couple years.
I need at least 64Gb. How much do YOU need tho?
I just bought the latest air 15 inches, when I installed everything and started working on it I check how much ram I was using and it reached 10g…
Also a student here. I have the base model M2 Air, and it holds up well. I constantly have Notion, Word, an IDE, Safari, and Apple Music up during my work sessions and experience no slow-downs whatsoever.
Although, if you can cough up the extra money to get additional RAM then go for it, it just furthers the future-proofing of your machine.
I have a 13” M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. My Mac Mini and my Linux box both have 16GB RAM. The M2 Air is totally fine and I have not encountered a situation where it was hanging or lacking memory. If your gaming or video editing needs are (or may become!) heavy go for 16GB. If not, it’s totally fine with 8.
I would go for the 16 over 8, but also understand that MacOS doesn’t manage RAM the same way Windows does. You could give yourself unneeded anxiety if you’re one of those Activity Monitor hawks without understanding the difference between the two.
Could you elaborate a bit on that please? I’m curious what the difference.
I max specd an m2 air and it’s nice for majorly multitasking tons of apps but it’s really unnecessary tbh
Tech enthusiast here and I can say for regular/light use. The base configuration works just great.
I have a souped up pc at home and a light macbook air for classes.
I rarely use my PC because the M2 air works great for most of my uses.
Also, M3 macbooks are coming out in a week. I suggest waiting for those to release so you can get a better price on the M2 air.
I have a M1 mac air with 16 gb and it was worth it. I’ve never once had an issue with things being slow except for SOME video games on high graphics (I now have a proper gaming pc, so not using it to game anymore)
Ofc I never had 8gb ram so I can’t tell you if its significantly better, but iirc its only like 200 or so extra? and I enjoy it lol
Had the 8gb of RAM. Never had any issues.
You might need the extra RAM for gaming. I have an 8 year old MBP with 8 GB RAM, and the only time it overheats is when I do video editing.
If you gonna do video editing or image (photoshop etc)… or music production, you should go for 16.
The classic question never goes out of fashion in this sub.
Another student here. I have the base model M1 Air and I have had 0 issues with the 8gb. I use Teams, Word, Safari, Discord, PyCharm (for my python projects), and even the UTM virtual machine for my linux stuff. I will usually have a good few virtual desktops open aswell so I can navigate to things quickly.
Of course it always useful to have 16gb nowadays, but I would only recommend it if you have the extra money - good for future proofing your machine.
i bought the 2019 mac pro with 8 ram and it was horrible. memory was constantly used up. couldnt even scroll on a shopping website. i made sure i got the 16 ram to avoid this
It’s different with unified memory.