the battery life is legitimately amazing.

My first week with the 8GB base-spec M1 MacBook Air revealed the following: My day-to-day experiences with 8GB on the M1 MacBook Air

It is mightily, mightily impressive for most people. Once again, that’s probably not an everyday use case, but it does demonstrate how far you can push this new configuration of 8GB of RAM. The result was not a “single sign of sluggishness”, and he was only able to slow the Air down after opening 12 apps, 24 Safari tabs and six Safari windows (all of which were playing 2160p YouTube videos). He was “actively reckless” during the test, leaving multiple apps open and opening as many Safari tabs as he fancied. Over on 9to5Mac, Stephen Hall pushed the 8GB M1 MacBook Air to “ the absolute limits of my normal workload”. But, then, would you really opt for anything less than 16GB if that kind of video work is your bread and butter? Clearly, if you’re into heavy video editing work, 8GB is going to cause you issues. In that scenario (which is, incidentally, pretty niche), the 8GB M1 took eight minutes longer to complete the task than the 16GB model. In all three tests, the 8GB version lagged behind its 16GB big brother, but it was only the 8K export to 4K in which it was comprehensively crushed. His experiments focused on Xcode, video exporting and Lightroom. And it has drawn a raft of opinion from people who really know their onions when it comes to specs, benchmarks and really putting these machines through their paces.įor instance, YouTuber, Max Tech, recently conducted a 20-minute deep-dive into the difference in performance between 8GB and 16GB of RAM on an M1 MacBook Pro: The RAM debate for M1 Macs is interesting, though. I genuinely don’t care how high a computer’s Geek Bench score is if it helps me become more profitable as a creator. This is partly because I’m not smart enough to understand what all of those numbers mean, but mainly because I’m far more interested in how devices feel during everyday tasks.

If you’ve read or watched me before, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of benchmarks or spec deep-dives. If your finger is hovering over the ‘buy it now’ button for a new M1 Mac but you’re totally confused about which RAM option to opt for, I’ve got some real-world experiences that’ll help you with your decision. What a head-scratcher, right? Imagine if you bought the 8GB version only to find out later that you should have spent that extra £200… It’s a choice you need to get right first time, too, because there’s no user upgradability. The price difference between 8GB and 16GB on the new M1 MacBooks is £200. **CHECK OUT MY GUIDE FOR THE M1 PRO vs THE M1 MAX CHIPS HERE**

Macbook air 2020 lightroom performance