- [Narrator] Since Boot Camp is not yet possible
on the new M1 Macs,
most people are turning to virtualization software,
such as Parallels,
to run Windows 10 on a Mac.
For now, Parallels is only able to run the ARM-based version
of Windows 10,
which is an issue for some
because many apps are not yet compatible
with ARM versions of Windows.
That being said, Parallels is working
on new updates and Windows 10
has only recently announced its own version
of x64 emulation,
which essentially means you should soon be able
to run any Windows app within Parallels.
This is great for people needing
to use a specific application
that only works in Windows or test something in Windows
even though they currently use a Mac.
Now, I've had heaps of people ask
if they should get an 8 or 16-gigabyte RAM model
of the new M1 Macs specifically for running Parallels.
And this the first 8 verse 16-gigabyte RAM video
where I can confidently say yes,
you should get a 16-gigabyte RAM M1 Mac.
My full answer is that depending
on what you plan on doing within Parallels,
you may be okay with eight gigabytes
but keep watching the video to find out which choice
is best for you.
By the way, I made a video a few weeks ago showing you
how to download and install Windows 10
on your Mac via Parallels.
Make sure you check that out
if you need any help.
And a link to download Parallels
will be in the description of this video.
So I think the best way for me to show you guys
how much RAM you're going to need
is just by showing you on both of these machines.
So these are both M1 MacBook Airs.
This is the space gray eight-gigabyte RAM version
and this is the silver 16-gigabyte RAM version.
Now, as you can see,
we do have Windows 10 running via Parallels
on both of these machines.
The software versions,
the build numbers of Windows,
everything is the exact same, no other programs are running.
And if we go into the settings for Parallels
on both of these machines,
you can see I've allocated four gigabytes of RAM
on the eight-gigabyte RAM Mac
and doubled that, so eight gigabytes of RAM
on the 16-gigabyte Mac.
Now, I think this makes sense
because Parallels themselves
only recommend allocating a max of four gigabytes of RAM
and obviously, on the 16-gigabyte version,
I wanted to double that to see
if we could see any real-life differences.
And obviously, with the processors,
I've just allocated four or 50%
of the total available processors on both machines.
So that is exactly the same.
Now, if we move over to Activity Monitor
on both devices,
this is where it starts to get interesting.
So for those of you who have a keen pair of eyes,
you are immediately going to see
that you should be going with the 16-gigabyte version.
Over here, again, we're not doing anything.
This is just Windows sitting on the desktop,
no other background program.
We're not doing anything at all.
It's already using up all of the available RAM.
You can see here Windows 10.
It's using about eight gigabytes of RAM.
And in terms of memory available,
we've only got about a gigabyte free
and we are using a, it's not a huge amount
but a fair amount of swap memory.
And you can see just the actual memory pressure here
is a lot more than the 16-gigabyte version,
even though we're using double the amount
of RAM on Parallels over here.
So moving to the 16-gigabyte version,
you can see again Windows 10
is taking pretty good advantage of the available RAM.
But this still leaves us with about five gigabytes free
and you can see,
we're only using about 380 megabytes of swap,
which again, I won't touch on swap in this video.
It's not a huge deal or issue
but the main thing here
is your memory pressure is a lot less.
Now, you can actually allocate more or less RAM
to these virtual machines.
I've tried on the eight-gigabyte version,
allocating the full eight gigs of RAM to Parallels
but it doesn't really work very well
because the issue I ran into was with macOS,
it was almost completely unusable.
It would take ages to load stuff,
videos would stutter,
so it just doesn't really work very well at all.
And like I said before, you might be able
to get away with the eight-gigabyte version for Parallels
and virtualization but only if you're doing small tasks
inside Windows 10.
If you need a program or anything
that requires more than about four or five gigabytes of RAM,
you really need the 16-gigabyte model.
So what we'll do now is we'll do a few quick tests
and we'll just see if we can see any kind
of real-life performance gains we can see
with the extra 50% of RAM on this machine.
So first of all, we will do Geekbench.
Now, obviously, this is a very CPU-intensive test,
so we probably won't see any difference
but it will be interesting nonetheless.
Okay, so as to be expected,
pretty much exact same score there, so no surprises.
So we'll move on to the next test.
Okay, so it's about half an hour later
and I did a few benchmarks in Geekbench
and also Cinebench.
I also tried to get 3DMark working from Steam
but there was some issues there with x64.
You still can't emulate x64 apps in Windows 10 Arm,
running on Parallels for some reason,
even though I'm using the correct build.
Hopefully that's going to come out in the next few weeks,
some support for that.
But it doesn't really matter
because I couldn't really see any real-life differences.
Now, as you can see here,
I've changed it up a little bit.
So I've opened a few programs in macOS.
So I have Chrome opened up
and I'm playing a 4K video.
I've also got some shopping tabs open.
So really nothing too crazy.
I've also got the Photos app open just sitting there
and I've also got Mail open.
So literally, just three apps, nothing else.
And then if we go into Parallels on both machines,
again, we've got a couple of tabs open in Microsoft Edge
and some File Explorer windows as well
but nothing crazy.
Now, if you come here and look
at the Activity Monitor again,
you can see that there's a pretty decent spike
in memory pressure on the eight-gig model
versus a relatively low memory pressure
on the 16-gigabyte RAM version of the M1 Mac.
And this doesn't tell you everything
but it does tell you that you're going to be maxing out
the RAM over here very, very quickly.
Now, like I said at the start of the video,
a lot of you might be able
to get away with the eight-gigabyte version
if you're just doing some light stuff
in Windows 10 and there's nothing too important.
But these days, a lot of apps actually require a minimum
of eight gigabytes RAM
or even six gigabytes of RAM to run properly
and you're just not going to be able to do that at all
on the eight-gigabyte version.
Like I said before,
there's a lot of glitching, a lot of issues
if you do allocate eight gigabytes
to Parallels on this machine.
Whereas over here, as you can see right now,
we've allocated eight gigabytes
and there's absolutely zero issues.
We've got heaps of multitasking capability left
in both macOS and Windows 10 on Parallels.
Now, if you're some kind of developer or coder
or even a video editor
and you do need to do anything,
even remotely intensive in Parallels,
definitely, without a doubt, get the 16-gigabyte version.
You will not be disappointed
because I can guarantee you,
you will be bottlenecked
if you get the eight-gig version.
Anyway, guys, that's it for me for this video.
Just a short and straightforward one today
just because I was getting a lot of questions on this topic.
If you have any questions,
you want me to do any specific tests,
let me know in the comments section below
but apart from that,
I'll catch you guys in the next one.