#Apple 16gb ram macbook pro pro

It’s for this reason (and that screen size) that I have reverted back to the Intel MacBook Pro for video editing, but the fact the M1 Air beat it during the render test gets me incredibly excited about my future Mac lineup. The 16” MacBook Pro destroyed the Air when it came to the export test, but that was the only potential hint that 8GB of RAM is a bit dicey if you’re running concurrent, heavy-duty tasks.

That’s why I was so interested to see how the 8GB M1 MacBook Air would stack up against it. Despite all of the heat and fan noise during intense rendering and exporting, it’s an absolute monster, performance-wise. For the last year, my trusty 16” MacBook Pro has been a video production workhorse. The Final Cut Pro testĪ massive part of what I do involves video editing. ‘RAM’ just isn’t’ a thing for me anymore with this MacBook Air. I don’t really know what’s going on beneath the hood to make RAM such a non-issue, but Apple really has done a fantastic job at abstracting it away from my particular workflow. A case in point: I’ve not bothered installing iStat Menus simply because I don’t need to know what the computer’s doing it just works.įor me, 8GB doesn’t feel like a constraint – it feels like just another number attributed to the system-on-a-chip that is the M1.

I’ve reached the stage where I don’t think about memory at all. I’ve never experienced any form of sluggishness and it hasn’t crashed, misfired or beach-balled me once. But the M1 Air does everything else, including Lightroom and Photoshop work. Hands up, I’m still using the 16” MacBook Pro for video editing, but that’s mainly because of the screen size. It has all but replaced my 12.9” iPad Pro (more on that in a future article), and is the first thing I use while sitting on the couch during my early morning routine. Since then, I’ve used the laptop extensively and pretty much as my only device.

I missed the four ports I have on the 16” MacBook Pro.

the lack of a single core of graphics power didn’t seem to matter and.

the battery life is legitimately amazing.

My first week with the 8GB base-spec M1 MacBook Air revealed the following: My day-to-day experiences with 8GB on the M1 MacBook Air It is mightily, mightily impressive for most people. Once again, that’s probably not an everyday use case, but it does demonstrate how far you can push this new configuration of 8GB of RAM.

#Apple 16gb ram macbook pro windows

The result was not a “single sign of sluggishness”, and he was only able to slow the Air down after opening 12 apps, 24 Safari tabs and six Safari windows (all of which were playing 2160p YouTube videos). He was “actively reckless” during the test, leaving multiple apps open and opening as many Safari tabs as he fancied. Over on 9to5Mac, Stephen Hall pushed the 8GB M1 MacBook Air to “ the absolute limits of my normal workload”. But, then, would you really opt for anything less than 16GB if that kind of video work is your bread and butter? Clearly, if you’re into heavy video editing work, 8GB is going to cause you issues. In that scenario (which is, incidentally, pretty niche), the 8GB M1 took eight minutes longer to complete the task than the 16GB model. In all three tests, the 8GB version lagged behind its 16GB big brother, but it was only the 8K export to 4K in which it was comprehensively crushed. His experiments focused on Xcode, video exporting and Lightroom. And it has drawn a raft of opinion from people who really know their onions when it comes to specs, benchmarks and really putting these machines through their paces.įor instance, YouTuber, Max Tech, recently conducted a 20-minute deep-dive into the difference in performance between 8GB and 16GB of RAM on an M1 MacBook Pro: The RAM debate for M1 Macs is interesting, though. I genuinely don’t care how high a computer’s Geek Bench score is if it helps me become more profitable as a creator. This is partly because I’m not smart enough to understand what all of those numbers mean, but mainly because I’m far more interested in how devices feel during everyday tasks. If you’ve read or watched me before, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of benchmarks or spec deep-dives. If your finger is hovering over the ‘buy it now’ button for a new M1 Mac but you’re totally confused about which RAM option to opt for, I’ve got some real-world experiences that’ll help you with your decision. What a head-scratcher, right? Imagine if you bought the 8GB version only to find out later that you should have spent that extra £200… It’s a choice you need to get right first time, too, because there’s no user upgradability. The price difference between 8GB and 16GB on the new M1 MacBooks is £200. **CHECK OUT MY GUIDE FOR THE M1 PRO vs THE M1 MAX CHIPS HERE**