There is no arguing or questioning the overall performance and efficiency gains that the arrival of Apple Silicon has brought to Macs Suddenly, Apple computers hardly need to ventilate their interiors for a general use, and their battery lasts several hours longer. optimization of unite storage, memory, CPU and GPU on a single chip (or SoC, system on chip) has paid off.
This leads me to say that even a basic MacBook Air M1 can be perfect for any user who doesn’t have specific or demanding needs, although in late summer 2022 we’re starting to see what can be a bottleneck: the 8GB of RAM in these base models.
A decade with 8 GB base is already enough
The experience that my colleague Antonio Saban told Xataka is clear: he changed his MacBook Air M1 from 8 GB to a 16 GB and was able to check how the memory management improved significantly:
What a snag the M1 gives me when I forget to close tabs (not everything in Edge is tabs, it’s also web apps that I replace Electron apps with, to save RAM). I still recommend 16 GB even if your uses are not very demanding. pic.twitter.com/YfaTNYEfRe
—Antonio Saban (@Ansamor) March 29, 2022
MacBook Air M1 8GB dying. It’s not normal, but I was slow with this usage. Memory pressure has peaked in the past 30 days, and it shows. pic.twitter.com/v7Xcx77YTZ
—Antonio Saban (@Ansamor) December 20, 2021
Antonio’s use of his MacBook is that of many of us: several tabs open in the browser, as well as some applications that also depend on web engines (We don’t like you at all, Electron). And the problem is that browser engines are generally not well optimized. We can talk about Safari, but Chrome is the browser that the vast majority of people use.
Does that mean Macs with 8GB of RAM aren’t enough? That’s not it either, a basic user has plenty with those 8GB. I have 16GB in my Mac mini M1 and I could work just fine with 8, although my computer would suffer a bit more. Those of us who have many tabs open in the browser should start thinking about how these tabs will behave in 3 or 4 years, with their respective future versions of macOS.
Saban himself says it in his experience: It’s been a decade since Macs shipped with 8GB of RAM.. Maybe it’s already the time when the base models of Mac will have 16 GB of memory, mainly to guarantee their good long-term performance. Because if you’re going to buy a Mac with 8GB, it should be able to last you a decade, not three or four years at most if you’re a big fan of open tabs.
