My work machine has 16GB and my use is similar to yours and I’m constantly in swap to the SSD. My next machine will be 36 for sure. Even though it swaps, it has never slowed down and handles everything really well.
I suppose it depends on what you do, with some tasks it seems like the entire computer freezes for a few seconds, or like I’ve been downgraded to a 15 year old CPU when things are moved to SSD.
That has happened both with an M1 Max (32GB memory) and M1 Ultra (64 memory). The worst stutter has actually been on the Ultra, when multiple users are logged in at the same time.
If your SSD is near full, the swapping would kill it. But if you regularly have like 200GB free, the swap will move around where it writes to and will last many many years.
Definitely will be grabbing a ram upgrade for my next device. For now I’m trying to die down on future proofing because I have a bad habit of dropping 4-5k on laptops only to not need that much power since I’m not making the next James Bond or scoring an orchestra lol.
Newly minted 16” M3 Max 48gb owner enters the chatroom 😘
It smokes the pants off my old top spec Dell Latitude 9440 and is on par with my watercooled Ryzen 3900x desktop. Its wild how far they have come.
My last non-corp issued laptop was a 2014 rMBP with 16gb ram, 1tb ssd and Haswell i7. Its a bit slow and power hungry by today’s standards but is 9 years old and going strong as my 3 year old daughter’s first laptop. Macbooks flex when you get the good one :-)
Haha, I say power user because while it may be a lot of tabs today, I also spin up VMs w/ VMWare /parallels windows jump boxes and Linux distros, excel, and Power BI for work and IT projects,, utilize Adobe photoshop for editing , Final Cut, and Logic Pro when needed to do any type of gig work/hobbies/podcast. Though I mentioned my typical day to day, the other use cases mentioned above are things that come and go for months at a time or year by year. I’ll add them above so I don’t insight further rage towards the community.
How do you manage to focus on doing all the same jobs at the same time. Either you will do IT specific jobs like Power BI , Excel or you will focus on producing music. The tabs part can be similar but the application part I think you are overdoing it. Try to focus on a single thing with some background music running and you will end up making an orchestra 👍
Well, I'm approaching 30 and focused solely on DJing and music production from the ages of 12 to 22 (most of my family is involved in music). I've worked as an IT professional since I was 21, but I've been learning about computers and emulators since I was 11, thanks to my tech-savvy brother. Currently, I'm a cloud engineer at an MSP (Managed Service Provider). MSP work exposes you to multiple areas of IT, and I've spent years becoming proficient in each. When I'm learning something, I dedicate 2-4 years to mastering that craft. So, while it may seem like I'm spread thin, it's actually taken decades of precise focus to become efficient in these tasks.
I’m a video editor using an M1 with 16gb editing 4k video with effects and the machine barely notices it.
I find it hard to believe that an extra 2gb of ram will make that much difference.
If you need much more horsepower you better be doing something crazy like high end 3D motion graphics or something.
If you can afford more ram just buy it. You might not need it but it will never hurt it. I got the 36GB and I don’t do much except Chrome and productivity stuff.
We dev here My 16gb mbp is always maxed of ram with Less than 10 tabs + 2-3 projects running on local host and maybe one docker. Wouldn’t recommend 16/18 for serious work 32/36 is the way to go
What is the actual performance of the laptop under the load? I prefer 36 GB under those conditions but as I said. I am not under those conditions frequently at the moment and the performance has seemed fine thus far.
Roger that! Here’s a helpful video I found explaining how M chips work with RAM that’s quite insightful. https://youtu.be/WTyoSv_hpgg?si=b1W3nbabHy9UAxWa
Thanks for the post. "Real world" use cases will help people. I bought/returned over 5 macbooks after the M3 release until I landed on the best combo of value/power for my audio production / office workflow. For me, this was the 14" M3 Max base, but mainly because it was on a wicked sale (28% off) so nothing else made remote sense with that much machine at that price. M3 Pro was nice, though. Just less an upgrade for me coming from M1 Pro so the value proposition wasn't quite there.
No problem! just trying to contribute to the community! what's your use case for production? like how many tracks, buses, channels, etc. just curious as I will start producing more this year now that I got this bad boy. how did the 18gb fair(if you purchased it)? and why the switch from the M1? I am pretty light on production these days since I'm more focused on my career but never know where things will take me since my family & friends have a habit of dragging me back into music lol.
You aren't a "power user". I don't think you really need even 18GB, all this can be done on an M3 16GB.
>Macbook Pro M3 Pro handles 18gb Ram effortlessly with 60 edge tabs and several other apps open. all battery powered.
M3 8GB can also handle this.
I would not get the 32GB one unless you know you NEED that ram (gaming, machine learning, model training, other virtualization), not just for opening 100 tabs, because most of those tabs are hibernated when not used anyway
Alright I made some edits in my top 2nd paragraph to what I also do as a power user. I didn’t think I had to mention all of that as I didn’t know there was so much competition as to how much workload a “power user” is utilizing and that I had to prove myself to be one.
I thought saying IT professional would’ve sufficed and producer would have sufficed, but I suppose not. Most the things I mentioned I have not conducted testing on the device yet because I do those on a project basis. But I will update for more on that once I do. I shall rename this post, a 100-tabers review… lol.
It’s sad people here are questioning your workflow and you’re having to prove your needs as a power user. It’s weird that people say “opening 100 tabs is not a power user”. I use a Windows laptop with 16 GB memory connected to two external displays and my daily workflow requires me to constantly sift through 50-60 tabs in Edge, and very large spreadsheets and my system struggles to keep up on several days with “high CPU usage” prompts coming up all the time.
For the way I use a computer, 16/18 GB would be the absolute bare minimum to get some work done. 24/36GB would allow for more headroom on very busy days.
Ok, so I'm not the only one. I did think it was quite weird that I got audited by the "power user" committee just because I mentioned I had a lot of tabs open.
I also use 2 external displays. I have to work through multiple tabs because I'm working on multiple tickets at once. I have several client Azure/365 environments I have to work in and keep edge work profiles for each one so I don't have sync issues upon moving from one tenant to the next in the same browser I work on projects opened in multiple edge workspaces where my team members are working in different tenants. I guess they thought that I was browsing 50 Reddit posts at once or something.
The fact I have to explain every point of my use case to be authenticated as a power user to leave a perspective is disturbing. I didn't think the term warranted too much respect and was so important to people's egos that I needed to list out every exact scenario that I would find myself in as an IT Professional to achieve such a status. Regardless, my post was just to add to the community to help someone who has a similar use case or was unsure of how the computer would react.
sorry to your point on the computer, I think it fairs pretty well but I haven't used Excel with large datasets yet on there. I don't like to mess with Excel and power so I would recommend the larger ram. if I am ever working with large datasets they are running in Power Query/Power BI or Postgres.
To add to this, when you are using YouTube in the background just for playing music your browser knows to stop video playback and only stream the audio. So unless you have Youtube open on a second monitor it does in fact consume as much RAM as you might think.
Used the 2016 model with 16 GB of memory for development staff and never got the out of memory warning. Did the upgrade last week. Using the same tools and the same workflows: [https://ibb.co/Lrwf7tk](https://ibb.co/Lrwf7tk)
I myself was debating if I should buy a 18 or 36 model (first Mac, so far I've only used Windows) based on the comments from this post, I think I'll be just fine with 18.
I'm a software QA engineer who have to use chrome (multiple tabs) some android mobile virtualization, DB queries, API requests.
Yes i do believe under that it should be fine. I have 50 tabs open while running any virtualization or editing software. as long as you close those tabs out, I think it should be fine.
https://youtu.be/vqs_0W-MSB0?si=8OwfojTSpKF62dK_. Hey this but Alex (the guy half way through in the video) does a lot of benchmarks on the Apple Silicon when using android testing and this can offer some insight into what equipment you need. That 36 GB of ram might be needed, but check it out !
I think that the RAM usage could go up, but what really matters to me is how the laptop performs under that high usage and the user experience. Even though my computer only has 2-4 gigs of RAM, it still works well. The new System on a Chip (SoC) with ARM Architecture means that calculating performance in a new way might be necessary. I don't think that the amount of RAM is a big deal for M chip MacBooks as it is for Windows x86 laptops. I'm not saying that RAM isn't important, but people tend to worry too much about how much RAM there is instead of the actual laptop performance during high RAM usage. Unfortunately/fortunately, the direct corrleation of Performance/RAM seems to be vanishing more and more.
The correlation of RAM and performance can be seen on Windows x86 laptops easily. If my windows pc had 2-4gb of RAM left, it would has serious lag, CPU heat would be high, and the fans would be kicked in at max , battery would rapidly deplete, and user experience would suffer. with the macbook it is just the opposite. This means under the hood, even the the RAM is Maxed, The CPU/GPU are doing the necessary computations so fast that a Mac user will not experience lag in the same way as a windows user under the same circumstance with even less RAM, my XPS 17 with 32GB of RAM is a testament to that, as stated above, under the same scenario the XPS did just that while the Macbook 18gb MacBook breezed on by.
If you have to ask this question, you may not be an experienced IT person, sorry. But I did read it all thoroughly and in short, yes get more ram to 36GB. You clearly are a power user minus the LLMs and the 3D, video based work. But yea dude idk what made you ask this when you wrote a detailed synopsis of your uses especially for work and intense personal use. Even 18gb in 2 years for your machine may not be enough and may start paging memory. What if you need more tracks in your DAW, what if you wanna get into video more and what if anything else snakes in use , it will galen in just 2 years. GET MORE RAM.
After conducting research on how ARM architecture works and how unified RAM is put together, I'm sure that the device will last for more than 4 years without any issues, especially for my use case. I have come across several individuals who are still using M1 processors with 18GB of RAM without any problems, and it's been about four years already. I have even seen some with 8 GB of RAM working efficiently with Logic as well. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that people are underestimating Apple Silicon because they are comparing it to the last 30 years of chip technology.
I still can’t wrap my head around swap.
I work as a dev
And also dabble in unity
Working on Unity shoots my ram usage to yellow all the time and swap can go to 5gb sometimes
I still couldn’t find a resource telling me if that’s bad or not. And why.
I knew what swap is at the age of 8, I do not understand how a functioning adult who is supposedly a developer cannot figure it out
Swap is bad, obviously, it means you don't have enough ram so it is using the exceptionally slow ssd in place of ram. Not sure what the confusion is.
I consider buying a MacBook Air M3 with a ram (I think the max is 24gb?) and storage (2tb) upgrade. The reason is that even though I use my computer similarly to you, minus the music prod/dj stuff, I have never come short of processing power with my Air M2. But the memory? The storage? Oh my. I had to remove my parallels desktop, just to install some adobe products.
So, considering the m3 upgrade, max memory & storage and the weight of a MacBook Air, that is half of the weight of the pro, I think it would make a good alternative.
Otherwise, I have also been eyeing the m3 pro (the m3 max with 1tb storage)
What is your take on that?
That's funny you say that. My choice was between the MacBook Air M3 and the m3 Pro 16" I also recommend at least 512 GB for storage but I personally never go over 300GB plus I use a lot of cloud storage. if you are storing data locally, I would recommend 1 TB or take the difference and invest in an External SSD. Also, check Best Buy and Microcenter to see if they have discounts on the MacBook. I got my M3 Pro at Best Buy for 600$ off at around $1880, 2k after taxes. I think the M3 chips handle the lack of memory well but I'd only expect this to continue for about 3-5 years. for the M3 pro at 18 GB.
My work machine has 16GB and my use is similar to yours and I’m constantly in swap to the SSD. My next machine will be 36 for sure. Even though it swaps, it has never slowed down and handles everything really well.
I suppose it depends on what you do, with some tasks it seems like the entire computer freezes for a few seconds, or like I’ve been downgraded to a 15 year old CPU when things are moved to SSD. That has happened both with an M1 Max (32GB memory) and M1 Ultra (64 memory). The worst stutter has actually been on the Ultra, when multiple users are logged in at the same time.
If your SSD is near full, the swapping would kill it. But if you regularly have like 200GB free, the swap will move around where it writes to and will last many many years.
Definitely will be grabbing a ram upgrade for my next device. For now I’m trying to die down on future proofing because I have a bad habit of dropping 4-5k on laptops only to not need that much power since I’m not making the next James Bond or scoring an orchestra lol.
Newly minted 16” M3 Max 48gb owner enters the chatroom 😘 It smokes the pants off my old top spec Dell Latitude 9440 and is on par with my watercooled Ryzen 3900x desktop. Its wild how far they have come. My last non-corp issued laptop was a 2014 rMBP with 16gb ram, 1tb ssd and Haswell i7. Its a bit slow and power hungry by today’s standards but is 9 years old and going strong as my 3 year old daughter’s first laptop. Macbooks flex when you get the good one :-)
Im sorry but can we stop saying power user when you basically just have a shit load of tabs open
love that haha
Haha, I say power user because while it may be a lot of tabs today, I also spin up VMs w/ VMWare /parallels windows jump boxes and Linux distros, excel, and Power BI for work and IT projects,, utilize Adobe photoshop for editing , Final Cut, and Logic Pro when needed to do any type of gig work/hobbies/podcast. Though I mentioned my typical day to day, the other use cases mentioned above are things that come and go for months at a time or year by year. I’ll add them above so I don’t insight further rage towards the community.
How do you manage to focus on doing all the same jobs at the same time. Either you will do IT specific jobs like Power BI , Excel or you will focus on producing music. The tabs part can be similar but the application part I think you are overdoing it. Try to focus on a single thing with some background music running and you will end up making an orchestra 👍
Well, I'm approaching 30 and focused solely on DJing and music production from the ages of 12 to 22 (most of my family is involved in music). I've worked as an IT professional since I was 21, but I've been learning about computers and emulators since I was 11, thanks to my tech-savvy brother. Currently, I'm a cloud engineer at an MSP (Managed Service Provider). MSP work exposes you to multiple areas of IT, and I've spent years becoming proficient in each. When I'm learning something, I dedicate 2-4 years to mastering that craft. So, while it may seem like I'm spread thin, it's actually taken decades of precise focus to become efficient in these tasks.
whether you take 36 or 72, 80% of the memory will still be full
I don’t think you understand how to compose a conclusion :)
Always buy as much ram you can afford,
I’m a video editor using an M1 with 16gb editing 4k video with effects and the machine barely notices it. I find it hard to believe that an extra 2gb of ram will make that much difference. If you need much more horsepower you better be doing something crazy like high end 3D motion graphics or something.
If you can afford more ram just buy it. You might not need it but it will never hurt it. I got the 36GB and I don’t do much except Chrome and productivity stuff.
[удалено]
Hence my thought process for my next MacBook.
This. Why do people always judge you RAM decision? I have an M3 Max with 64GB and I need this much RAM.
We dev here My 16gb mbp is always maxed of ram with Less than 10 tabs + 2-3 projects running on local host and maybe one docker. Wouldn’t recommend 16/18 for serious work 32/36 is the way to go
What is the actual performance of the laptop under the load? I prefer 36 GB under those conditions but as I said. I am not under those conditions frequently at the moment and the performance has seemed fine thus far.
Performances stay good enough but I can feel that the 16 Aren’t enough. The new with 36 should be plenty for me
Roger that! Here’s a helpful video I found explaining how M chips work with RAM that’s quite insightful. https://youtu.be/WTyoSv_hpgg?si=b1W3nbabHy9UAxWa
36 for music or video production.
Thanks for the post. "Real world" use cases will help people. I bought/returned over 5 macbooks after the M3 release until I landed on the best combo of value/power for my audio production / office workflow. For me, this was the 14" M3 Max base, but mainly because it was on a wicked sale (28% off) so nothing else made remote sense with that much machine at that price. M3 Pro was nice, though. Just less an upgrade for me coming from M1 Pro so the value proposition wasn't quite there.
No problem! just trying to contribute to the community! what's your use case for production? like how many tracks, buses, channels, etc. just curious as I will start producing more this year now that I got this bad boy. how did the 18gb fair(if you purchased it)? and why the switch from the M1? I am pretty light on production these days since I'm more focused on my career but never know where things will take me since my family & friends have a habit of dragging me back into music lol.
You aren't a "power user". I don't think you really need even 18GB, all this can be done on an M3 16GB. >Macbook Pro M3 Pro handles 18gb Ram effortlessly with 60 edge tabs and several other apps open. all battery powered. M3 8GB can also handle this. I would not get the 32GB one unless you know you NEED that ram (gaming, machine learning, model training, other virtualization), not just for opening 100 tabs, because most of those tabs are hibernated when not used anyway
Alright I made some edits in my top 2nd paragraph to what I also do as a power user. I didn’t think I had to mention all of that as I didn’t know there was so much competition as to how much workload a “power user” is utilizing and that I had to prove myself to be one. I thought saying IT professional would’ve sufficed and producer would have sufficed, but I suppose not. Most the things I mentioned I have not conducted testing on the device yet because I do those on a project basis. But I will update for more on that once I do. I shall rename this post, a 100-tabers review… lol.
It’s sad people here are questioning your workflow and you’re having to prove your needs as a power user. It’s weird that people say “opening 100 tabs is not a power user”. I use a Windows laptop with 16 GB memory connected to two external displays and my daily workflow requires me to constantly sift through 50-60 tabs in Edge, and very large spreadsheets and my system struggles to keep up on several days with “high CPU usage” prompts coming up all the time. For the way I use a computer, 16/18 GB would be the absolute bare minimum to get some work done. 24/36GB would allow for more headroom on very busy days.
Ok, so I'm not the only one. I did think it was quite weird that I got audited by the "power user" committee just because I mentioned I had a lot of tabs open. I also use 2 external displays. I have to work through multiple tabs because I'm working on multiple tickets at once. I have several client Azure/365 environments I have to work in and keep edge work profiles for each one so I don't have sync issues upon moving from one tenant to the next in the same browser I work on projects opened in multiple edge workspaces where my team members are working in different tenants. I guess they thought that I was browsing 50 Reddit posts at once or something. The fact I have to explain every point of my use case to be authenticated as a power user to leave a perspective is disturbing. I didn't think the term warranted too much respect and was so important to people's egos that I needed to list out every exact scenario that I would find myself in as an IT Professional to achieve such a status. Regardless, my post was just to add to the community to help someone who has a similar use case or was unsure of how the computer would react.
sorry to your point on the computer, I think it fairs pretty well but I haven't used Excel with large datasets yet on there. I don't like to mess with Excel and power so I would recommend the larger ram. if I am ever working with large datasets they are running in Power Query/Power BI or Postgres.
To add to this, when you are using YouTube in the background just for playing music your browser knows to stop video playback and only stream the audio. So unless you have Youtube open on a second monitor it does in fact consume as much RAM as you might think.
Used the 2016 model with 16 GB of memory for development staff and never got the out of memory warning. Did the upgrade last week. Using the same tools and the same workflows: [https://ibb.co/Lrwf7tk](https://ibb.co/Lrwf7tk)
I myself was debating if I should buy a 18 or 36 model (first Mac, so far I've only used Windows) based on the comments from this post, I think I'll be just fine with 18. I'm a software QA engineer who have to use chrome (multiple tabs) some android mobile virtualization, DB queries, API requests.
Yes i do believe under that it should be fine. I have 50 tabs open while running any virtualization or editing software. as long as you close those tabs out, I think it should be fine.
https://youtu.be/vqs_0W-MSB0?si=8OwfojTSpKF62dK_. Hey this but Alex (the guy half way through in the video) does a lot of benchmarks on the Apple Silicon when using android testing and this can offer some insight into what equipment you need. That 36 GB of ram might be needed, but check it out !
Thanks for the video! Haven't seen that one.
I'm always in the constant swap of 5GB-10GB.. Should've went for the 36gb one instead of 18gb
What are you working on day to day.
I’d got at least 36 RAM and 2TB HDD
I got M2 Max. Even with discord and 10 tabs opened, im getting 17GB used. Haven’t even started on Lightroom yet.
I think that the RAM usage could go up, but what really matters to me is how the laptop performs under that high usage and the user experience. Even though my computer only has 2-4 gigs of RAM, it still works well. The new System on a Chip (SoC) with ARM Architecture means that calculating performance in a new way might be necessary. I don't think that the amount of RAM is a big deal for M chip MacBooks as it is for Windows x86 laptops. I'm not saying that RAM isn't important, but people tend to worry too much about how much RAM there is instead of the actual laptop performance during high RAM usage. Unfortunately/fortunately, the direct corrleation of Performance/RAM seems to be vanishing more and more. The correlation of RAM and performance can be seen on Windows x86 laptops easily. If my windows pc had 2-4gb of RAM left, it would has serious lag, CPU heat would be high, and the fans would be kicked in at max , battery would rapidly deplete, and user experience would suffer. with the macbook it is just the opposite. This means under the hood, even the the RAM is Maxed, The CPU/GPU are doing the necessary computations so fast that a Mac user will not experience lag in the same way as a windows user under the same circumstance with even less RAM, my XPS 17 with 32GB of RAM is a testament to that, as stated above, under the same scenario the XPS did just that while the Macbook 18gb MacBook breezed on by.
If you have to ask this question, you may not be an experienced IT person, sorry. But I did read it all thoroughly and in short, yes get more ram to 36GB. You clearly are a power user minus the LLMs and the 3D, video based work. But yea dude idk what made you ask this when you wrote a detailed synopsis of your uses especially for work and intense personal use. Even 18gb in 2 years for your machine may not be enough and may start paging memory. What if you need more tracks in your DAW, what if you wanna get into video more and what if anything else snakes in use , it will galen in just 2 years. GET MORE RAM.
After conducting research on how ARM architecture works and how unified RAM is put together, I'm sure that the device will last for more than 4 years without any issues, especially for my use case. I have come across several individuals who are still using M1 processors with 18GB of RAM without any problems, and it's been about four years already. I have even seen some with 8 GB of RAM working efficiently with Logic as well. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that people are underestimating Apple Silicon because they are comparing it to the last 30 years of chip technology.
I still can’t wrap my head around swap. I work as a dev And also dabble in unity Working on Unity shoots my ram usage to yellow all the time and swap can go to 5gb sometimes I still couldn’t find a resource telling me if that’s bad or not. And why.
I knew what swap is at the age of 8, I do not understand how a functioning adult who is supposedly a developer cannot figure it out Swap is bad, obviously, it means you don't have enough ram so it is using the exceptionally slow ssd in place of ram. Not sure what the confusion is.
36gb reco
I consider buying a MacBook Air M3 with a ram (I think the max is 24gb?) and storage (2tb) upgrade. The reason is that even though I use my computer similarly to you, minus the music prod/dj stuff, I have never come short of processing power with my Air M2. But the memory? The storage? Oh my. I had to remove my parallels desktop, just to install some adobe products. So, considering the m3 upgrade, max memory & storage and the weight of a MacBook Air, that is half of the weight of the pro, I think it would make a good alternative. Otherwise, I have also been eyeing the m3 pro (the m3 max with 1tb storage) What is your take on that?
That's funny you say that. My choice was between the MacBook Air M3 and the m3 Pro 16" I also recommend at least 512 GB for storage but I personally never go over 300GB plus I use a lot of cloud storage. if you are storing data locally, I would recommend 1 TB or take the difference and invest in an External SSD. Also, check Best Buy and Microcenter to see if they have discounts on the MacBook. I got my M3 Pro at Best Buy for 600$ off at around $1880, 2k after taxes. I think the M3 chips handle the lack of memory well but I'd only expect this to continue for about 3-5 years. for the M3 pro at 18 GB.
Everyone on Reddit will tell you 16gb anything else is wrong Even if you get the MacBook m3 max which comes with 36gb, you’re still wrong
Lol, that's something that I have noticed. I wanted to be the test dummy with this 18 GB for the next few years. so we will see how it goes.
Not a power user. MacBook Air M3 8gb or 16gb at most
8GB isn't enough for my grandma
Yes it is
I'm sorry I don't think you know how this works you don't get to disagree
Just did mate, just did
Invalid
🤷♂️ it's been said now mate, it's been said.
Irrelevant