Macbook Pro (2021, M1 Pro)- 16GB or 32GB ram?

Forums › Mac OS › Macbook Pro (2021, M1 Pro)- 16GB or 32GB ram?

Aaroona

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#295755 20-Apr-2022 23:17

Yes... this is one of "those" threads.

I am wanting to get some opinions from people with direct experience in using the M1 Pro/M1's with 16GB of ram, and how they are find it holds up.

I have bought a MBP with 16GB, and have found that I can quite easily swallow up the ram and start paging with just using Chrome and a couple of other apps open. I don't ever recall MacOS being so hungry, even with no apps open.

Has anyone here regretted purchasing the 16GB? or bought the 32GB and realised you could have saved the money?

I do run a couple of VM's now and then, one being Windows as I have a couple of Windows only apps. But the VM isn't running all the time. The other being Ubuntu etc. just for testing, but again, not running all the time.

The machine doesn't appear to slow down much, if at all, while paging with the 2-3GB, but unsure what this will be like over time.

michaelmurfy

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#2904606 20-Apr-2022 23:36

I've got a M1 Macbook Pro with 8gb of ram and I must say I don't experience ram exhaustion (with Firefox, even Photoshop running and other apps). MacOS is very good with ram management so often you'll find it caching rather than really using ram.

This depends on your workload. I don't personally use Chrome, or Chromium based browsers but from memory these are more memory hungry compared to Firefox or Safari for example.

Even with 8gb of ram the Macbook Pro I have is by-far the best laptop I have ever had and have considered replacing my desktop machine with an Apple Silicon mac of some sort in the near future.

Also just note - with M1 being ARM based you'll find that VM's are mostly a thing of the past. Even on my Windows desktop I built it for virtual machines but rarely run any. It is worth looking into what is chewing up all your ram, I personally use istat menu's to keep tabs on this.

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lxsw20

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#2904611 21-Apr-2022 00:31

Much like the old windows superfetch, MacOS keeps things cached in ram as long as that ram isn't actually needed by anything else from my understanding. I suspect what you're seeing is normal behaviour. As you've said its not causing any performance impact.

alasta

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#2904822 21-Apr-2022 12:32

Mine is 16Gb and I have no performance concerns whatsoever, but admittedly I'm not a power user. I was actually seriously considering the cheaper 13" with 8Gb but figured it's not very future proof.

Aaroona

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#2904824 21-Apr-2022 12:37

The more I think about this, the more I'm leaning towards just keeping this one, and if I end up running into issues later down the track, I will bite the bullet and upgrade.

I was running a couple of VM's this morning, and while a bit of paging was there, it was still performing within the limits I needed it to.

So it could be possible this is a bit of the old ev "range anxiety" type deal.

I've been making do with an 8GB Windows PC, so should be fine with this.

simophin

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#2904834 21-Apr-2022 13:24

If you happen to be a developer and use one of Jetbrain's IDEs, then 32G is a must.

Aaroona

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#2904835 21-Apr-2022 13:26

simophin:

If you happen to be a developer and use one of Jetbrain's IDEs, then 32G is a must.

I'm not currently a developer, but I was looking to dip my toes into the world of iOS developement at some stage... Would you still expect 32GB is a must in this case?

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simophin

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#2904841 21-Apr-2022 13:34

Aaroona:

simophin:

If you happen to be a developer and use one of Jetbrain's IDEs, then 32G is a must.

I'm not currently a developer, but I was looking to dip my toes into the world of iOS developement at some stage... Would you still expect 32GB is a must in this case?

Yes. Running iOS simulators is also a resource heavy.

16G is ok if you just doing development. But I find that a lot of commonly used apps are Electron-based, and they consume huge amount of memory: Slack, M$ Teams, etc. I have to constantly close some of them, or some Browser tabs (Firefox also consumes heaps) to make up some memory for my memory hungry Android Studio/Emulator. You'll get by OK but 32G means you don't need to care about memory usage at all.

Aaroona

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#2907020 26-Apr-2022 17:43

simophin:

Yes. Running iOS simulators is also a resource heavy.

16G is ok if you just doing development. But I find that a lot of commonly used apps are Electron-based, and they consume huge amount of memory: Slack, M$ Teams, etc. I have to constantly close some of them, or some Browser tabs (Firefox also consumes heaps) to make up some memory for my memory hungry Android Studio/Emulator. You'll get by OK but 32G means you don't need to care about memory usage at all.

Having used the machine a bit more, I see what you mean. I don't use MS Teams (often) or slack on this machine, but have a few (like 30-40 odd) tabs open, plus a couple of other apps (RDP, Signal, Messenger/mail apps) and can start to chug through it fairly easily.
I'll see what I can do about returning, but its through JB Hifi, so I might be stuck with selling it as my only option, if I decide to go with 32GB.