My opinion: the jump from 16GB to 32GB probably won't make a huge difference today, especially if your workload is already running alright in 16GB. I think it'll greatly extend the useful life of the laptop, though. For example, I wouldn't want to be using an 8GB laptop today.

This is exactly why I waited for the "M1X" over the M1 Mac. Over time, apps and websites tend to bloat up and consume more memory. Especially since you can't upgrade your Mac later, buying a higher amount of RAM upfront will no doubt extend the usable life of the machine.

When I start up kubernetes, my usage for that alone goes up to 6+GB. Swapping to SSD is terrible for it's lifecycle. 32GB should have you going for quite a while unless you need/want lots of vRAM in which case I'd go with 64GB.

I have no idea why, but my 16gb M1 mac is working perfectly for me while my 16gb dell xps with linux was not cutting it. I have no idea why doing pretty much the same thing is using less memory but other people have said this too.

The M1 SSD is significantly faster than previous Macs. Could be that swapping is much less noticable now. I also have a 16GB M1 Mini and haven't noticed an issue either.

As I understand it, OSX is more efficient with memory compression, another variable to keep in mind.

I often work with large sparse matrices (which can be compressed well) and I’ve loaded up a 500 GB matrix into 64 GB of memory (although just barely, memory pressure was red in activity monitor)

RAM is something where you either have enough or you don't. When you have enough, adding more doesn't really get you anything. When you don't have enough, performance tanks.

The integrated nature of the M1 Macs gives them a much better ability to predictively swap unused content to SSD and make the most of the available RAM when things get tight while multitasking, but if you have a single task that needs 17GB and you have 16GB it's going to suffer a lot compared to if you had 32GB.

I wish Apple (and everyone else) would give up on the ultra-thin crap and make a real Pro machine that returns to upgradability at the cost of a few extra millimeters, but for now since you're stuck with what you start with I'd recommend always going at least one level above what you think you might ever need during its expected useful life.

hard to tell given that m1's address and page memory completely differently from how x86 does it. My 8GB M1 MacBook Air performs extremely well even when memory pressure is high...and it never seems to hit swap space.

Anecdotal example: I could have several Firefox tabs with active workers in the background (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.), a Zoom meeting with video conferencing on, with audio and video being routed via OBS (native), a Screen Sharing session over SSH going, and a Kubernetes cluster in Docker running, and that won't even make the MacBook hot. Nothing slows down. I could get maybe five hours out of the battery this way. Usually six.

Doing that on a maxed out Intel MacBook Pro will make it sound like a jet engine and reduce my battery life to two or three hours. It will also slow to a crawl.

I'm guessing buying a machine with 32GB of RAM is an investment into the future where workloads on m1 machines are high enough to actually give the memory a run for its money.

16GB of RAM seems so low in 2021. OTOH, hard drives are so fast on these things that maybe 16 is good enough with the SSD as overflow.

I ended up shelling out the extra $400 for 32GB, but didn't feel great about it!

I've heard from people with M1 laptops that they perform surprisingly better than Intel laptops with less RAM (on the Mac). I imagine the same will hold with the Pro and Max, although it will depend a lot on what type of work you're doing.

I am one of those people. I bought an 8gb M1 Air last month for a project (while I waited for the new models to be released). It baffles me how well this little computer performs with less RAM than I've had in a computer since 2009. I'd love an explanation of how that works. Maybe the SSD is so fast that swapping isn't a big deal?

I looked into this angle recently. The SSDs in the new MBPs are roughly 3x as fast as the one in my 2015 MBP (7.4GB/s vs 2GB/s). To contextualize, the new MBPs have roughly half as much SSD bandwidth as my MBP does memory bandwidth.

Which is to say the SSD is much closer to being as fast as RAM, which would explain why is subjectively can make better use of less memory.

It’s also possible that they’re using more and better tricks from iOS to handle memory - in which case the Intel Macs might show similar results if given similar speed disks

What kind of tricks?

Neat!

I have m1 air with 8Gb and I see that had to take 16Gb at least. Not sure about 32GB, but 16 is the minimum. Profile: JS, TS, Rust, sometimes Java.

On the other hand I've been running 16GB of ram for a while and I can't conceive of a reason why I would need more. 32GB seems like overkill. What would you do with all of that ram? Open more tabs?

Looking at activity monitor, I'm currently using ~19GB, doing nothing special (IntelliJ, 15 chrome tabs, Spotify, Slack). Docker Desktop was using 8GB before I killed it. And this is on an Intel Mac so it doesn't include GPU memory usage I believe, which is shared in M1 Macs.

This likely isn't a perfect metric, if I were closer to the limit I think MacOS would get more aggressive about compression and offloading stuff to disk but still.

Browsers generally allocate RAM with abandon but any one process is not necessarily memory bound. It just means that they are using that as page cache.

Bah IntelliJ is a pig. It's worth it, but it's a pig.

Compilation, graphics work, heavy-weight IDEs

And, if you're spinning on 16GB ram on an M1, you might be eating through the SSD powering your swap space and not know it.

indeed. From my experience, I see that my MBA uses swap sometimes, but I can't notice it. Still, I want to avoid it.

Ram is ram. Don’t fall for marketing hype and think M1 means you need less ram. If you think you need it, you still need it on M1… and I say that as someone who owns an M1 Mac.

Yes - I wish people would stop implying that the M1 magically doubles RAM and other such nonsense. I found the same. I have a game that requires at least 32GB (Cities:Skylines - mainly because of my self inflicted steam workshop asset addiction) and ended up returning the Air to wait for the next round. Decided to go all out - have a 16" 64GB M1 Max with 2TB of storage on the way.

There is something to the hype. I have no idea why but I was not doing well at all with 16GB on my Dell XPS on Linux but I'm going perfectly fine with the M1 with a few GB left over.

Consider that you always can download more ram: https://downloadmoreram.com/

/s

Figure out your hourly wage, how many hours a day you use your laptop, and whether $400 amortized over the life of the device is worth the "risk".

Same situation as you, looking at 14". Need to see what the Xcode benchmarks are like for the variety of M1 Pro processors on offer, to see if any upgrades from the base model are worthwhile.

If I was sticking with 16GB RAM I think I'd get a M1 Air instead. The smaller screen is the downside, but 300g lighter and substantially cheaper are good points.

I’m upgrading from an M1 Air (16GB) to a 14” Pro base model just for the display. Extra M1 pro performance is bonus but the M1 has already been amazing for development work past year.

Is it the resolution you've found limiting on the M1 Air? My eyesight is slowly getting worse so I'm assuming I'll have to run both at 200%. Which makes the Air a 1280x800 screen - something I last had on my 2009 13" MBP!

I’m lucky enough to still have good eyesight so it’s not limiting for me personally. Most of the time when working I’ve got it hooked up to a big 4K display though. My expectation is I’ll appreciate the new XDR display for the times I’m not on an external monitor.

M1 only allows one external monitor (you can run 2 with some docks if you turn off the laptop screen). This isn't such a problem for me as I have an ultra-wide, but lots of people with dual/triple monitor setups haven't been super thrilled.

Depends upon your workflow but I use xcode and android studio and 16gb isn't enough if I run a simulator or emulator. Definitely get the 32gb imo.

Unlikely to make Xcode any faster. Just look at your ram usage now and then forecast a bit to know.

I wouldn't go for the base model, since it has 6 performance cores, rather than 8.