8GB vs 16GB M1 MacBook — Does It Even Matter?

Mark Ellis
Mac O’Clock
Published in
5 min readDec 17, 2020

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Image courtesy of author

The price difference between 8GB and 16GB on the new M1 MacBooks is £200. It’s a choice you need to get right first time, too, because there’s no user upgradability.

What a head-scratcher, right? Imagine if you bought the 8GB version only to find out later that you should have spent that extra £200…

But who needs 16GB of RAM in an M1 Mac?

If your finger is hovering over the ‘buy it now’ button for a new M1 Mac but you’re totally confused about which RAM option to opt for, I’ve got some real-world experiences that’ll help you with your decision.

What the experts say

If you’ve read or watched me before, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of benchmarks or spec deep-dives.

This is partly because I’m not smart enough to understand what all of those numbers mean, but mainly because I’m far more interested in how devices feel during everyday tasks.

I genuinely don’t care how high a computer’s Geek Bench score is if it helps me become more profitable as a creator.

The RAM debate for M1 Macs is interesting, though. And it has drawn a raft of opinion from people who really know their onions when it comes to specs, benchmarks and really putting these machines through their paces.

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Mark Ellis
Mac O’Clock

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