Is the base model Mac enough or should you upgrade?

The MacBook Air used in this video: https://amzn.to/40HPd1p

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Is 8GB of RAM enough or do you need to upgrade when buying a new Mac?

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple’s base models and how 8GB of RAM is not enough for a modern computer. Many users are unsure if 8GB is enough for their needs and unless you already own a Mac there isn’t an easy way to tell, it’s something you have to try and test yourself. We’ve seen a lot of questions online from people that are about to buy a new Mac asking if 8GB would be sufficient for their use case, and a lot of times the responses are overwhelmingly stating that 8GB is useless and you should avoid the base model Mac computers at all costs.

While we agree that upgraded RAM is usually a good idea it’s also good to keep in mind that the base model Macs perform pretty well with just 8GB of RAM. And since this is something a new user can’t really understand unless they see it for themselves, we figured why not do a stress test on our 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.

We start with a YouTube video and a bunch of browser tabs and then proceed to launch Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects and a bunch of applications. We play music, run some video editing… at what point does a base model start to freeze?

Conclusion – is 8GB enough?

The answer is yes… and no. After launching some heavy applications like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects the 8GB of our MacBook Air was pretty quickly consumed. But that didn’t slow it down. When your computer runs out of memory it’ll use swap memory, which basically means it taps into your hard drive and utilizes that for the inactive parts of data that are kept in your computers memory. Traditionally this is something that slows down your computer quite a bit since swapping memory back and forth from a hard drive will never be as fast and efficient as the physical memory in your computer. But in our test we couldn’t really even notice a difference. There was no noticeable effect on swap memory being utilized so it seems that Apple has done a great job optimizing the performance here. The fast internal SSD drives are most likely to thank here, even though we blew way past our 8GB limit the SSD took over, the MacBook Air was using swap memory like a champ and everything we ran during our stress test continued to work smoothly.

Now this was only about 10 minutes of using the computer. We were shocked how well things worked, but it’s possible that if we kept using it for hours and added more taxing tasks to the mix the computer would eventually start to slow down.

Main difference between 8GB and upgraded models?

One of our daily drivers is an M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of ram. So comparing that with this base model MacBook Air, what’s different? How does upgraded RAM affect your Mac’s performance?

In most everyday use-cases they perform the same. The M1 is shockingly capable and like we saw during our stress test, 8GB with the fast memory swap using your SSD can perform pretty darn good. The difference really shows up when doing heavy 4K video editing or motion graphics in After Effects. After Effects and its RAM preview is miles better on the MacBook Pro compared to our MacBook Air. So anything that’s extremely taxing on your computer you’ll start to see a difference, but for students, basic browsing and casual video/photo editing 8GB will be just fine. However, if you plan on keeping your computer for several years it’s always a good idea to “future proof” it and upgrade the specs as much as your budget allows.