M2 MacBook Air - How Much RAM Do You REALLY Need?

Very informative and clear video.
Thanks a lot!

I’m on the fence. I have a 15 i7 MBP and mostly use it for light browsing and Lightroom editing. But it’s purely a hobby machine. But it’s showing its age. 4-5min running Lightroom denoise per photo. Annoying if you’re doing any amount.
So I do wonder how a m1 8/256 model would do. Finding a used 16gb seems tricky.
Torn

today i own my new macbook air m2 with 16gb / 512gb and iam happy. :)

❓Rookie question:
Is there a way to suspend tabs on Safari on a Mac as there is on Chrome on a Chromebook (an extension or Chrome itself)?

I bought an 8/256 M2 MacBook. I'll be a light user for sure, but now I wish I got 16/256, because I'm worried that having several programs open plus many many tabs will cause hiccups and slowdowns.

Any knowledgeable advice would be appreciated on this question as well as how to maximize my existing RAM.

big thanks for the quick answer in the beginning

8GB is completely fine if you're just using it as a video consumption/web browsing, emails, documents etc. If you're editing media or gaming then 16GB is probably what you need

This video is outstanding!! Thank you. I got the 15” Air in Space Gray with 16GB RAM and the 512GB SSD. It’s spectacular and I never see the spinning beach ball with 30 browser tabs, video editing, photoshop, etc all open and running at the same time. I sold my 16” M1 Pro MacBook Pro because I like this upgraded 15” Air so much more.

Thank you so much! Finally I made my decision through your video 😊

8gb of ram? 256 or 512 gb ssd? Are you guys living in 2007?

Due to the un-upgradeability of most modern laptops, I'm a firm believer in there is NO such thing as too much RAM. Buy once cry once and just max out the RAM when you buy it.

I do mainly PHP programming in Docker and I am using PhpStorm. In my case I have only 5 containers per project, max 2 projects are running at the same time and 16GB is OK. Usually 10-14GB of RAM are used and swapping is not needed. If my projects were a little bigger I would need 24GB to avoid swapping. When I run a NodeJS project with Laravel backend, 14GB of ram are used again, plus additional 3GB are swapped. I am now using only 80-100GB of disk space so I could go for 256GB drive and invest into 24GB of RAM instead of 512GB disk to reach the same price. Sadly Apple is selling the valueless memory and disks for crazy money so people have to make these stupid decisions about RAM and disk size.

This aged well 😂

Thanks. You're making me feel like my 8gb M3 base for $150 discount was a better buy for me than the M3 base with 16gb of RAM. I definitely use less than how you describe. So I think my use is within spec of an 8GB spec.

Don't buy the 8 GB version - it's a big waste of money

Playing league, discord multiple tabs at the same time and some ocasionally video editing on premier.
What do you recomend?

Tell me you dont know how swap works without telling me you dont know how swap works....

I think the Macbook pro I'm on right now is fine for running apps in Chrome. Also slack teams zoom. Maybe some video and photo editing for social media like IG. This is for a college student, and simply needs a battery. Over on the Windows side my daily driver at 4gb Ram still seems to do fine for chrome/teams/slack/zoom basic business.

how much ram should i get as a mechanical engineering student? as in for 3d modelling cad. i dont think id use it much as a student

Now i will buy macbook air m2 base model i will use it for programming ( back end dev ) 8gb will be enough for me !? Please someone help me with my decision ..

If i'm using a Windows computer, I want to have 16GB of RAM in it.
With Mac, I'm comfortable with 8GB due to how conservative macOS is with RAM.

got the 16gb version for the same price as the 8gb so im happy with my purchase

8gb of ram ages way better than a 256gb ssd

You need 128 gb ram with m3 max

Office work with 5 app running, swap 500-900mb on 8gb m1 macbook

I have 8gb ram and I run 5 desktops with around 5 chrome tabs on every desktop on average. Also 4 to 5 apps running all the time but somehow it works fine, no issues so far.

Thanks a lot! Ur's really helps!

what if i just buy a base model m2 mba for editing only but rendering on a seperate pc? would it be okay? or should i still go for 16 gb of ram

Cheers very much. Good info. I'm at the crossroads, looking at all the signs right now. Thinking Pro (for the first time ever).

8gb is enough for almost every tasks. How do you even do crazy multitask like what he did in 13 inch screen? If you use external monitor then don’t get a laptop. Mac mini is much cheaper.

I choosed the base model with 16 GB !
over 40 Tabs in safari, Swift5 , over 20 tabs in Microsoft Edge and listening to Musik and no problems!!!
The Mac is still cold!
I will never go back to intel or amd!!!

Will a Mac mini perform better?

on my macbook pro I am using 14GB and 4GB swap just on a normal day lol

Great video, thank u.

I’m very new to Macs and am considering buying one. I will be mostly using it for web browsing and Zoom calls for lectures which are 60 minutes long. Some of those lectures, about 5%, might need some basic editing like trimming some dead air time. I am thinking of using iMovie to edit the videos.
What would you recommend? Would the M1 8GB base model be sufficient? Or should I go for the M2?

If you’re still struggling just download more ram.

Like 4 gb ram in iPhones beat upto 12 gb android ram just because of optimisation similarly 8 gb ram in MacBook is same as somewhere 20 gb of windows if you don’t believe go check what 8 gb ram MacBook can do windows 16 gb ram cannot do even 24 gb

Planning to buy macbook air m1 base model. My current workflow is:
Browser with ~15 tabs, Intellij(for coding), discord, ms to-do app.
I'll use fl studio & some graphic designing tools later. What do you think?

I hope you advise me. I am confused. I study computer science and use the laptop for web programming, flutter, and in machine learning . Who would be more suitable for me? MacBook air m2 or windows laptop like Asus TUF F15 budget not more 1300$

guys, 8gb is not enough if you are not doing nothing. let me yell you my experience; I generally have 5-6 safari tabs open, spotify open, whatsapp open, and an excel file open, with this I average 8gb ram full and 3-5 gb swap at all times. Gestures between apps is always choppy, swapping between the safari tabs as well; when you are listening something these movements makes the sound choppy and repeat in short intervals and cause crack sounds from the device.


So if you are not using only one safari tab 8gb is nowhere enough.

Have 8GB 2018 Macbook Pro Touch Bar i5 and doing great for me. Even can do some easier video edits in After Effects (not that video editor), use Photoshop, Illustrator etc, but mainly using Sublime for coding part. Only thing today is battery. Using many many tabs at once. But i'm exited for M3 chip and looking for possible update. If M3 arrives I believe Macbook Air will be great one with 16gb 512ssd. Only thing is the missing fan... will it affect a lot if at some point I want to Edit more videos.

Downside is, that newer Macbook's gives you less usb-c ports (MBY M3 will change it). Currently have 4 of them by default and it's great. 3 should be default as minimum.

SO true what you said about rendering is only a fraction of work

Is 8gb/512 m2 enough for light work? I’m a teacher, and will be using it mainly for taking video conferences, playing music/movies/reading papers n such

With all the effects 🎬. . . 24gb probably

I've bought and gone through maybe ten different laptops and I find the sweet spot in both MAC and Windows to be 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD.

Simple analogy :-

Light users - MacBook Air M2 15inch 8GB Ram with 512GB space.
Light to Medium users - MacBook Air 15inch M2 16GB with 1TB space (this is what I got)
Heavy user - just buy a MacBook Pro M2 Pro 14inch 16GB with 1TB. 

I find MacBook Pro 16 Ultra is just overkill for what I am doing and it's just too heavy.

I bought an external Samsung M.2 - 2TB and attached to my Hagibis USB-C Hub SSD Enclosure which cost me less than USD$170.00. (Upgrading from 1TB to 2TB on MacBook Air 15 cost is another USD$400!!!). Can you imagine I have 2TB SSD space that comes with an external hub which allows me to connect to other devices and extend my screen for less than $170.00.

My last Apple laptop I use was MacBook Pro 15 inch Retina Display Early 2013 - I just retired few weeks ago - it is still working well except for battery which I could not bother changing it.

Never upgrade your SSD space for any Mac to the max is it's totally not worth it. For RAM upgrades, it really depends on what you do mostly. I am currently using MacMini 2018 (Intel) with 1TB HDD and 8GB RAM. After 5 years using it, it's still running fine. I do heavy PS work but no video editing. This machine will most probably last me another 3-5 years before it goes into the hall of fame. Hahaha....

I am a full time teacher and part time game dev. I occasionally use Parallels to run Windows, and spend a fair amount of time developing in Unity and Construct 3. I almost always have 17 - 18 GB of RAM in use. 24 GB of system RAM is exactly right for me for right now. 32 would be overkill, and I would be using swap with only 16. I know the video-production-centric users out there might feel they can use more GPU cores of the Macbook Pro for rendering, but for my game dev use the macbook Air with 24 GB is cheaper and more performant than a 16 GB macbook pro. The pro is sub par for my use case in every respect that I care about.

The key here is that for me 24 GB of memory enables me to do everything without constantly relying on swap memory. 16 GB wouldn’t be enough. Assuming the 13” mba I bought lasts for another ten years like the previous one did, even 24 GB is going to get tight in short order.

Bottom line: 24 GB is the best deal around for most people if they are planning to keep their laptop for 5+ years.