Is 8GB RAM enough?

24 thoughts on “Is 8GB RAM enough?”

• As Macs become more mainstream I think the definition of "Pro" needs to be looked at. Most "Pro" machines aren't sitting in creative studios, they're attached to a dual screen dock in large offices across the country, in their thousands – that's the bulk "Pro" market. The workload demand is nowhere near that of a creative machine (though MS Apps are memory hogs – especially Teams & Outlook) and storage is centralised and managed so even 256GB is plenty.

  That said, Apple's biggest barrier to market, is Apple. The weak base specs & upgrade gouging are going to hurt it. A base model with 12GB RAM (two of the M3 Pro's 6GB RAM packages), a downgraded 256GB SSD (dual NAND – the M3 Pro has 4 for 512GB) and the ability to drive two 1080p panels would have made a perfect, corporate M3 MBP. But no, it's Apple.

• NO.

• My experience says 8 is not ok. Just dinking around on my 16GB Intel imac, I find that my “Memory Clean” app frequently reports less than 8GB free. I have better things to do than cleaning memory. This is just a marketing exercise on the part of Apple to keep the base system price artificially low, and extract an additional $200 from mac buyers who know better.

• Great explanation as always 👍🏻 16GB is definitely the minimum I get for PC… although saying that I recently upgraded mine to 32GB which really helped with gaming and video editing.

• go always with 16gb. my air has 16gb and pro max has 32gb. should be ok for the next 5years

• If 8GB is enough for a consumer they should buy MacBook Air for $1k. Yes 8GB is enough for some use cases but this does not justify apple's move here. It is comical that this Pro labeled machine has 8GB ram.

• It is not enough. I am watching you with only one Chrome window in my 8Gb RAM mac and I am using 1,29GB of swap. There is no other app opened in my mac.

• A small technical quibble: 16GB on a Windows machine, at least one specced for gaming, is likely at least 20GB when you add in the memory on the Graphics card. On the Mac, that is included in the 8GB base memory making the difference to be made up by more efficient usage even more stark!

• If my own buying experience is anything to go by Apple's up-spec marketing strategy will backfire in them big time. By making the up-spec decision so consequential (on the one hand it is stupidly expensive to up-spec, on the other if you buy too low you are locked in and cannot upgrade) and giving no clear guidance on what you need or even how to make the decision, you make it very easy to decide just to postpone hitting 'buy' and view a few more Constant Geekery videos instead! I do not see how Apple do not get this: they must see hordes of people going into the shop multiple times, spelunking around trying different combinations of up-spec options and then giving up and buying nothing!

• Great video, I make buying decisions based on CG videos. So here's a dilemma, I multitask big files in multiple applications rather than single large files in single apps. SO for £1700, did I make a mistake buying a 16GB RAM 1 TB SSD M2 15" Air or should I have bought an 8GB 0.5TB SSD 14" M3 Pro?

• Short answer: No. Long answer: No, not enough.

• It’s not ok, stop pretending that 8gb of ram is good! phones, even there own iPhones and iPad pros have the same ram amount. 8gb on maybe.. maybe the air that’s ok ish, even then, Apple are using 6gb slots, so why not start at 12g Ram, its not huge, but better. TBH anything that has a Pro behind the name, eg tailored to professionals. Nothing under 16g ram, that should be the standard. Ram swapping with destroy your SSD faster and apple made the SSD’s soldered onto the board, so SSD died, you need a whole new board!
  Now let’s look at Apple, the CPU and GPU utilise the same ram! There isn’t seperate VRAM. So you want to game, swapping will be real, ram made a big difference.
  Do people not comprehend how cheap ram is?? Look up ram, that’s a consumers price! Imagine how cheap a company can get it when bulk buying / manufacturing

• Apple are scamming their users for long long time. The price of extra RAM and SSD are ridiculous. 16 GB and 1TB should be the base.

• No

• my 512gb m2 air has been plenty for my relatively light day to day professional tasks.. I also like to think that the dual channel ssd also helps some.

• The 14-inch base M3 Machine should start at £1,699 (UK) with 18GB of RAM and 512GB, go up to 1TB at £1,899, and then get the M3 Pro chip with 18GB and 512GB for the £2,099. Apple aren't a charity, I know, but their £200 price bumps for ram are obscene, and a Pro should have Pro specs out of the gate, and 8GB just isn't. One might argue that even 16GB isn't really Pro at this point.

• This machine is called “pro”! And you don’t call a machine with just 8GB ram pro in 2023 sorry Apple. They increased the base ram to 18 in other M3 models and why not giving at least 10-12 gb ram to this base model? Yes, maybe Mac behaves like 26 gb when you operate with a browser and a word document, but you can not really run a virtual machine in it as you do in a 16gb pc. That’s a tricky comment.

• You are buying this laptop to use for the next 5 years. It is hobbled by the 8GB of ram, you intentionally didn't actually try to do anything that needs the ram. It is a scam to get you to buy another laptop soon, after you get mad at your new one. The POINT is that 8GB of more ram costs Apple less than $20, so no, I'm not paying $200 more for it when the price is already so high it should include it, I'm not paying 10 times the price of the ram to Apple. 900 percent profit margins for Apple here. Put the ram in the base spec. No buy from me. Apple has contempt for their own buyers, that is clear.

• Saying that unified memory is an advantage when it comes to comparing Macs to PCs is a little incongruous as we do not count the graphics ram in the overall total. In your example you show a PC that would have, at least 16Gb and a 4Gb graphics card. Yet we still call that a 16Gb PC not a 20Gb PC, so whilst the data does get duplicated and that copy operation takes time, it does not represent a reduction in the amount of ram we were claiming.
  On the whole though I agree that the MBA 8Gb is a great machine with loads of power for the tasks it is aimed at. But the MBP is not suitable for the target market and is going to upset quite a few of their customers especially when you consider its lack of upgradability after sale.

• No. Next…

  I know someone with an M1 who tells me 16GB is not enough for what he runs, he is a gamer.

• In 2023, a Pro machine with a base 8GB of ram should not be around… how much future proof this one gets? if its upgradeable then maybe…

• Thanks for the video…

• This showed up in my home page. After watching, I disliked and set my home page to not recommend this channel. This is for lame Apple apologetics.

• My imac 2017 came with 8gb but also has 4 gb of video ram… I have got 16gb ram upgrade ready to fit when im brave enough (Screen has to come off) as it does run out of mem when using photo edit software…

Comments are closed.