One of the most important things you can do
when buying a new MacBook is configuring it
with the right amount of RAM.
Too little and performance will suffer,
too much and you're just wasting your hard-earned cash.
Not to mention, Apple solders the RAM on their MacBooks
so it can't be upgraded later on if you change your mind.
So here I have three different M2 MacBook Air
with no other upgrades apart from RAM.
There's an 8GB, a 16GB, and 24GB model.
And hopefully by the end of this video,
you'll know which one you should go with.
If you are in a rush and need a summary, here you go.
But I do encourage you to watch this whole video
because I do go into a lot more detail
and explain exactly when and where you should upgrade.
So firstly, it's really important to understand
how the RAM is used on these Apple Silicon MacBooks
because it's actually a little bit different
to traditional laptops.
If you didn't already know,
RAM stands for random access memory
and its purpose is to provide your computer a place
to store information it's actively using
so that it can be accessed quickly.
Imagine a builder using a tool belt.
The more slots or gigabytes of RAM his tool belt has,
the more tools or data he can store in it for quick access.
RAM is essentially the exact same thing.
However, where Apple Silicon MacBooks
differ from typical laptops
is that they use something called unified memory.
And this means that not only are your programs
and apps using the Ram,
but the actual components on your MacBook are as well,
like the CPU and the GPU.
And depending on what you're doing
and how many apps you have open at once,
all of these separate things can compete
for the available RAM.
So who is fine with just 8GB of RAM?
Well, a lot of people actually.
Many MacBook Air users don't push their machine hard enough
to warrant the extra cost of upgrading to 16GB of RAM.
Here's a pretty typical scenario in my opinion.
If you have 10 browser tabs open,
some emails, a Word document,
a large PDF document,
100,000-row Excel spreadsheet,
Spotify, and Slack all running at the same time,
I didn't really notice a difference
between 8 and 16 gigabytes of RAM
because the DDR5 memory Apple uses on these MacBooks
is incredibly fast and macOS is quite good
at utilizing something called swap memory
once available RAM is used up.
And for those of you asking,
no, I don't believe the additional swap usage
in this scenario will significantly shorten the lifespan
of your SSD.
And if you do want to learn more,
I did make a video on this topic that I will link.
Also, even if you do something more intensive
every now and then like some video editing
or possibly even compiling some code,
8GB will still be able to get it done.
So don't feel like you have to upgrade.
Now that being said,
just because 8G may be fine for you,
it doesn't necessarily mean you should choose that option.
There are quite a few situations
where I definitely do recommend getting at least 16B of RAM,
especially if you're going to be pushing this machine
a little harder than just web browsing and emails.
For example, just running the macOS operating system itself
uses over 3GB of RAM
before you even open any other apps or programs.
I've always said that going with 16GB of RAM
is one of the best upgrades you can make
because it gives you that extra headroom for future proofing
or in case you're using a particularly RAM-intensive app
or doing tons of multi-tasking.
So with that being said,
let's have a look at how the different RAM options compare.
Starting off with some creative workflows.
In general, if you are doing anything creative,
you're going to have a much better experience
with at least 16GB of RAM.
Now starting at the top music apps like Logic Pro
can often be bottlenecked by the CPU.
So you may not see a big difference.
But this really does depend on your workflow.
I mean, if you have tons of different music libraries
or large Ableton projects, for example,
you should consider upgrading the RAM.
Unfortunately, I don't have the skill or knowledge to go
into depth for music production.
So I do recommend doing some further research
on your specific workflow and the specific apps
and plugins, for example, you're going to be using.
Moving on, pretty much anything Adobe related
will benefit greatly from the extra RAM.
Adobe apps are typically pretty RAM hungry
at the best of times.
And as you can see here,
anywhere from 30 to a whopping 50% faster with 16GB of RAM.
Now again, all of this really depends
on your specific workflow.
I mean, I've seen some pretty complex raw files
in Lightroom eat up over 30GB of RAM, for example.
Moving on to video editing,
obviously you're not going to be doing
anything super intensive on this machine
but some basic and even more complicated timelines
up to about 4K resolution work pretty good.
So a good indicator of how the RAM options compare
is by using something called PugetBench
which puts the MacBooks
through a series of real life timelines,
renders, and workflows
and gives you a score at the end.
At first glance, we can immediately see
the 16GB RAM option is about 24% faster than 8B,
but the 24GB RAM option doesn't really see
that much improvement over 16GB.
And this is why I don't recommend upgrading
to 24GB of RAM here.
It's just too expensive
and you'll get diminishing returns when compared to 16GB.
And at this point, it is better to simply get
the 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook
if you're doing frequent video editing.
When it comes to rendering though,
the M2 chip has those fancy hardware encoders and decoders
which typically don't really rely on the GPU or RAM
as long as you're using a supported codec
which I think most people will be.
And that's why there's barely any difference here.
There are some instances where the extra RAM does matter.
But again, I don't think many people are doing this level
of video editing on this machine.
But like I always say in these videos,
rendering is only a tiny fraction of your work.
I mean, you'll spend 95% of your time in the timeline
actually editing
and that is where you will notice a huge difference
between 8 and 16 gigabytes.
For 3D workflows, you'll see a decent boost
in CPU and GPU performance but only for short renders,
anything longer than a few minutes,
and the amount of RAM you have doesn't matter as much
because it's pretty useless
if the CPU and GPU are really hot
and throttling their performance to stay cool.
The 24GB option performed the best here.
But again, just like video editing,
it's really not an upgrade that makes sense
for this particular workflow
which I doubt anyone is doing a lot of on a MacBook Air.
Moving on to gaming,
even though some synthetic benchmarks showed no difference,
I did notice an improvement when playing actual games.
For example, Tomb Raider.
I was able to get a significantly higher FPS
with the 16GB RAM option.
And the reason for this is simple.
Those synthetic benchmarks don't need much RAM to run,
only about 1.5GB,
compared with most actual games like Tomb Raider
that can easily use 8 to 10 gigabytes.
Not to mention the RAM you need
just to run your Mac's operating system,
which all adds up to about 13.5GB of RAM total
in this example.
And this is also why upgrading
from 16 to 24 gigabytes made no difference
because the games you'll be playing
just don't need that much RAM.
Now all of these tests were done
with no other background apps open
and this typically is not indicative of real life
because you'll almost always have other apps
and programs open in the background.
For example, some browser tabs, Discord,
or even Photoshop.
And once I repeat some of these same tests
with apps open in the background
which all use up some of the available RAM,
you can see the difference can increase substantially.
In particular, the 8GB RAM version will really struggle
and will use a ton of swap memory.
Now I can't go into too much detail here
as there are infinite combinations of workflows
and background apps.
It's just important to note that
depending on what apps you have open in the background,
it may impact overall performance significantly.
So if you are the type of person
to have a lot of background apps running
while you use your main app,
upgrading your RAM is definitely something
you should strongly consider.
So, how about 24GB of RAM?
Who should get this upgrade?
Well, I really don't recommend it for many people
especially because 16GB seems like the best bang for buck
in terms of performance gains and price.
And like I already showed,
if you're doing anything intensive
like After Effects video editing
or complicated Lightroom workflows that need a lot of RAM,
you are often better off getting a more professional machine
like a 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook.
However, if you know for a fact
your workflow requires a lot of RAM
and is not otherwise intensive on the CPU or GPU,
then 24GB could be a good upgrade for you.
For example, developing and coding.
You may not see a big difference when compiling code,
but for those running applications on the DOCA
or multiple IDEs, for example,
they will often need a lot of RAM.
Another great example are those
who frequently run virtual machines on their MacBook.
For example, using software such as Parallels.
24GB of RAM allows you to assign plenty of RAM
to whatever virtual machine you're running
while having plenty left over
to run the virtualization program within macOS,
and obviously also run macOS itself.
Also, if you are a hardcore multi-tasker,
you'll need at least 16BG,
but I would also consider 24GB.
Take me for example.
Right now I have about 25 Fox and 15 Chrome tabs open,
the mail app, Discord, Notions,
Slack, Excel, and Photoshop
on my 16-inch MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM.
I'm using about 25GB of RAM just sitting on the desktop,
not actively doing anything.
And my MacBook is barely warm
nor is it using much of the CPU or GPU,
which means these apps aren't really that intensive
and the only bottleneck is the available RAM
to run them all.
And if you do anything similar on your MacBook,
that 24GB RAM upgrade is a pretty good option.
Now in case you're wondering if you should upgrade the RAM
to 16GB or the SSD to 512 gigabytes,
I always recommend upgrading the RAM first.
You might have seen that whole slow SSD controversy
for base model M2 MacBooks
which I have made a video on and I will link that below.
I do recommend watching that if you haven't already.
Because of this though,
there have been some people out there recommending
to upgrade the SSD instead of the RAM to solve this issue.
But that is flat out wrong.
I mean, sure.
You'll get a faster SSD going from 256 to 512 gigabytes,
but it still won't be anywhere near as effective
as simply having more RAM.
And there you have it.
Hopefully this video has answered some of your questions
about how much RAM you will need.
If you have any questions, let me know down below.
But apart from that,
I'll catch you in the next one.