Obviously I haven’t actually done it myself with an M1 Mac either, but as good as they are, they aren’t magic. If you have n GB of RAM and job requires 2*n GB of RAM to be active and available, you’re going to run into problems no matter the architecture. Paging to/from the SSDs is fast, but it’s still an order of magnitude slower than RAM access.
But, now you’ve given me something to test once Fusion is available
I’m honestly really hoping for fall 2021. That’s not too optimistic if the vaccines work as well as tests indicate they should. Fingers crossed.
You should not only consider current usage, but also possible future usage.
If you only “write”, access the web, answer emails and manage your documents, 8 GB might be OK.
But since we tend to keep our Macs for a long while: Photography? Video editing?
When I bought my last MBP, I never considered editing video…and then I bought a drone and found myself editing 4K footage (I should have gotten a bigger SSD!!!).
At least in my trials with the M1 Air I got much better battery life than what I’m used to. At least a full day of work, where my 16" Mbp might give me 3 hours at the most. Again I’m thinking there’s some rogue process going on with my stuff. While the Air didn’t necessarily get as hot as my 16", I can’t say that it stayed cool either
The processor speed had a massive bump from that i3 to the M1, too.
I’m wondering how many people that talk about the 8 GB M1 being as good as a 16 GB Intel might have been “defensively” buying 16 GB hardware before, and now they’re (effectively, not consciously) realizing that the processor was the bottleneck rather than the memory?
It’s always hard to figure out exactly where the problems are. Especially in the modern computing environment, slow processors (along with network I/O, disk I/O, etc. to a lesser extent) running a number of tasks can cause things to back up and exert memory pressure, just as much as (if not more so!) than having a single task or two that overloads the RAM.
Just to add further, I have to run an Excel spreadsheet for work with lots of data and lots of macros. It sometimes seized up or took 30 mins on my 8GB iMac. Pretty much the same on my PC at work which has 12GB I think.
Anyway, finishes in about 10-15 mins on my 8GB M1 Macbook Air.
Again, probably impossible to say exactly what this is due to, but I assume its a lot to do with processor/thread management.
But to reiterate, it is also just snappier generally.
Going back to my iMac is difficult. Although I did see a beach ball on the M1 when running a Python script! I get so confused by Python paths/installations I don’t want to meddle but maybe I’m not running the new M1 native Python yet.
I purchased a temporary M1 which I’ve just returned (as my 16GB is arriving soon) and for development work 8gb was not enough. I was constantly receiving out of memory warnings when using PyCharm, Word, Excel and Safari together. I had to close one of them for the system to run well. My use case is more demanding than average as I’m doing a lot of data analysis.
It was the Air. It didn’t struggle with the workload before running out of memory. It also didn’t slow down over time if I had less programs open, and didn’t get hot. I didn’t try rendering 4K or anything, I’ve another computer with fans for that!
I’m getting a 16GB Air, it’s on the way in the mail now.
Regarding heating up: my M1 Air finally got hot during a task that my previous MacBook would have died performing: downloading 20 video files about 400MB avg in size, many them in parallel. It is the ONLY time it’s gotten hot, the rest of the time it’s cool as a cucumber.
Anyone has experienced using an 8GBRAM MacBook Air for design apps like Figma, Photoshop, and Affinity apps? Wondering if it’s good enough for a UX Designer.
Not planning to upgrade from my 16" MBP, but a friend is contemplating if its enough as her 13" MBP died recently. Her budget can only cover the base model of the M1 MBA.
My wife is using a 10-year old MacBook so bought her an M1 MacBook Air for Christmas (arriving on Thursday). I bit the bullet and got 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Not so much for now but more so she could still be using this machine many years down the road. Figure I am paying up front to save more money down the road.
Does she WANT to be using the same machine many years down the road?
Seriously, some of us DO. Some of us DON’T. (Unusually for me, I’m resisting handing back a 2015 15” MBP - partly because of the hassle of rebuilding my life on a newer machine (but mostly because an M1 offer isn’t forthcoming).)
As far as future proofing goes, we need to be honest with ourselves. I need to be truthful to myself and say I’m going to keep a laptop for three years tops then I’m going to want a new one.
Me, too - usually. Of course the M1 transition has mucked things up - to the extent that I don’t know when my employer would even offer a M1 16" MBP (should it be announced).
Having said that, my personal MBP is a 2011 13" - with memory added and the hard disk replaced when it failed with a SSD.
Ran in to issues with the 8GB M1 Mac mini today, though in fairness, the 16GB wouldn’t have helped.
Onedrive ran in to a bug and I ended up with almost 45GB of swapfiles, with more being created as I watched. Not sure what was happening, so I ended up deleting and removing, and switching to Insync instead, as Onedrive had been giving me some minor grief recently anyhow.
With the 8GB RAM, I’m now seeing ~3GB of swapfiles in /Voumes/VM and that’s with my normal workflow in place. Doesn’t seem to be any slow down, but that might indicate I’m hitting memory limits.
File syncing seems to be a cause - that, and Microsoft it seems.
