What do you use your Mac for?
I truly believe that 8Gb of memory is plenty for about 95% of the customers.
This may seem strange. What if you have a ton of open apps? What if you have a lot of tabs open on Safari? What if you stream video while browsing browsing Facebook?
Apple has spent the last fifteen years perfecting the iPhone operating system. Even the most powerful recent iPhone only has 6Gb of memory, yet it has no problems with performance. It has less memory than the most powerful Samsung phone, but can easily put perform it.
There are two secrets: one is that Apple has an extremely fast bus to move files from SSD storage into memory. The other is that Apple is able with its silicon chip to develop a highly efficient way of moving unneeded bits of programs in and out of memory. This couldn’t be done under an Intel chip. With Intel, the entire program is either in memory or not. With Apple Silicon, only a stub of the program has to be in memory.
I’ve mentioned this video comparing the 8Gb MacBook Pro to a 16Gb MacBook Pro before. If you watch that video, you will see the 16Gb Mac using more than 8Gb of memory for a test. You’ll see the 8Gb Mac with just a few hundred kilobytes of free memory while the 16Gb one still has several gigabytes free. Yet, that 8Gb Mac finishes almost every task within seconds of the 16Gb model. The only task where the 8Gb fails is the final one where a file larger than 8Gb is being created. The 16Gb Mac can hold the entire file in memory. The 8Gb Mac cannot.
If these were Intel based machines, the 8Gb Mac could not keep up. If this was an OS other than an Apple OS, the 8Gb Mac would have been left in the dust. An Intel Mac with 8Gb gets overwhelmed easily. Even a power user can overwhelm a 16Gb Intel Mac. You must have 32Gb.
However, this is far from true on Apple Silicon running an Apple OS. It’s a new world we have to get use to.
Back in 1966, I went into a Ford dealership with my dad to buy a new car. There in the center of the showroom was a red Mustang Fastback. It was the coolest car I’d ever seen.
Of course, Dad being a dad, went for the “practical” and bought a Ford Falcon. The Mustang had a 289 cubic inch V8 and it could move. The Falcon had a 200 cubic inch inline 6 and I could out run it. The Mustang had a bigger engine. Therefore, it was faster.
A few years ago, I bought a VW GTI. It has a 2.0 liter engine. That’s only 120 cubic inches. Yet, this GTI can easily out perform that Mustang. How could a car with an engine 40% smaller than that anaemic Falcon blaze so fast?
Technology. My GTI can use the little displacement it has with high efficiency. And get way better gas mileage in the process.
That’s the difference between the M1 based Mac and the Intel based Mac. That Intel chip is based on the 80386 that came out in 1985. That x86-32 bit architecture became the basis of the x86-64 which plagues Intel to this day. The way x86 handles virtual memory is highly inefficient.
It didn’t matter when you’re taking about desktops plugged into a 20Amp wall socket. There’s plenty of power! Just use more juice and RAM.
It became an issue when your computer fits in your pocket. It’s why Apple started to make its own silicon. It’s why it was lucky that Mac OS X which became the basis of the phone’s operating system was based upon the Mach kernel (although the OS wasn’t fully a micro kernel).
Making its own silicon allowed Apple to make something that was much more efficient. The architecture of the OS allowed Apple to handle what little memory there was with absolute efficiency.
So, it gets back what you’re doing with your Mac. If you’re rendering animation, you need all that power and GPU. You need a massive amount of memory just to hold the frame you’re rendering. Otherwise, you just don’t need 16Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb of memory any more than my GTI needs that 4.8 liter engine of that 1966 Mustang to perform.