I am going to be purchasing a MacBook in January and have pretty much decided on the 13in Air but do you really need 16GB of ram? It will be used for School Work, Gaming and Photo editing.

  • Significant_East_234@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I just bought the latest air 15 inches, when I installed everything and started working on it I check how much ram I was using and it reached 10g…

  • sparrow_42@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have a 13” M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. My Mac Mini and my Linux box both have 16GB RAM. The M2 Air is totally fine and I have not encountered a situation where it was hanging or lacking memory. If your gaming or video editing needs are (or may become!) heavy go for 16GB. If not, it’s totally fine with 8.

  • Stashmouth@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I would go for the 16 over 8, but also understand that MacOS doesn’t manage RAM the same way Windows does. You could give yourself unneeded anxiety if you’re one of those Activity Monitor hawks without understanding the difference between the two.

  • Kkvle@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Also a student here. I have the base model M2 Air, and it holds up well. I constantly have Notion, Word, an IDE, Safari, and Apple Music up during my work sessions and experience no slow-downs whatsoever.

    Although, if you can cough up the extra money to get additional RAM then go for it, it just furthers the future-proofing of your machine.

  • badger_flakes@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I max specd an m2 air and it’s nice for majorly multitasking tons of apps but it’s really unnecessary tbh

  • MrBenzNY@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Tech enthusiast here and I can say for regular/light use. The base configuration works just great.

    I have a souped up pc at home and a light macbook air for classes.

    I rarely use my PC because the M2 air works great for most of my uses.

    Also, M3 macbooks are coming out in a week. I suggest waiting for those to release so you can get a better price on the M2 air.

  • supenguin@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Depends what you’re doing with it…

    Photo editing may need a bit more. I’m doing some light development with mine on some side projects and haven’t hit anything that needed more than 8GB yet.

    If photo editing is your line of work and not just a hobby, go for the 16GB and I’d also bump up the storage to 512GB.

  • wuhkay@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I would do 16gb just for longevity sake. Unless you plan to upgrade in a couple years.

  • krista_weiss@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    i bought the 2019 mac pro with 8 ram and it was horrible. memory was constantly used up. couldnt even scroll on a shopping website. i made sure i got the 16 ram to avoid this

  • dubvision@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you gonna do video editing or image (photoshop etc)… or music production, you should go for 16.

  • lossofimagination11@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Another student here. I have the base model M1 Air and I have had 0 issues with the 8gb. I use Teams, Word, Safari, Discord, PyCharm (for my python projects), and even the UTM virtual machine for my linux stuff. I will usually have a good few virtual desktops open aswell so I can navigate to things quickly.

    ​

    Of course it always useful to have 16gb nowadays, but I would only recommend it if you have the extra money - good for future proofing your machine.

  • Ada-Millionare@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have a full print and design business and the base m2 work incredible for backup designers, using photoshop, illustrator and corel at the same time… Time to stop with the ram questions… Base model will work perfect for years