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That’s the question of the moment — should you go for 8GB or 16GB of memory in your new Apple M1 computer? I looked at all the videos available on the subject. Two things usually come out of them: completely absurd usage comparisons, or “just buy as much as you can afford.”
Anyway, after all that I was none the wiser. So I ordered the 8GB model and ran a few tests over a typical workday. I carried on as normal — meaning I didn’t open more or fewer apps than usual. At certain points during the day I noticed some slowdowns. Nothing dramatic, but enough for me to notice.
So I opened Activity Monitor to take a look at the memory tab. Here’s what I found:
You see those little yellow spikes? Those indicate that the system was running low on memory. It had to slow certain tasks down and make maximum use of disk memory (swap in everyday terms).
In this screenshot you can see I’m using almost as much swap as RAM.
This screenshot was taken a few moments later. I wasn’t necessarily doing more things, but you can clearly see I was right at the system’s limit (red spike).
The moral of the story? Test it yourself over a typical day with the apps you normally use!
It’s a safe bet that memory demand will decrease as apps get optimised and stop running under Rosetta.
You’re probably now wondering what apps I have open simultaneously on a typical workday. So let’s not waste any more time, here they are:
- Slack beta silicon version
- Microsoft Teams
- Outlook beta silicon version
- Excel
- Table Plus
- VS Code
- Safari (5 tabs open)
- Google Chrome (10 tabs open)
- Reeder
- Tweetbot
- Apple Mail
- Notion
When Docker becomes compatible, it’ll need to be added to the list.
The computer is connected to an LG 5K display and the MacBook Air stays open to take advantage of both screens. This detail matters, because the GPU memory is shared with the CPU memory.
If you find yourself in this usage profile, then I can only recommend investing in the 16GB RAM model.
