APPLE SILICON

Who Really Needs 16GB In Their M1 Mac?

Not me, and probably not you.

Rene Ritchie’s YouTube video 8GB vs 16GB for M1 Mac — The TRUTH About RAM! takes 10 minutes to say that virtually everyone should pay the $200 upgrade price for 16GB of RAM when buying a new M1 Mac. From the video:

…Those benchmarks and tests can maybe help us figure out what we need, but maybe also hurt us into thinking we can just squeak buy under the line of what we’ll eventually require.

All that to say, and to explain, that my recommendation is this: get 16 gigabytes if you can possibly afford it.

…It really is called future-proofing for a reason. So unlike a lot of things where I will tell you that if you need higher-end machines, if you need pro-level specs, you’ll know it. In this specific case, I’m doing the exact opposite.

Rene’s premise is that computer RAM has always been a major performance bottleneck, so it must also be true for M1 Macs. He provides no meaningful analysis, relying on the fact that since this is the way we’ve always done things (buying computers with as much RAM as possible), we should continue to follow this pattern with Apple silicon Macs. By that logic, doctors should still be applying leeches (which, fun fact, were used in Western medicine until…