M1 MacBook Pro Configuration

[KevinXuzio]

Hey there,

 

I am purchasing a Mac for the first time (typically a Windows user)

 

I am curious what specs would be necessary for the OS for general use, some work load such as development environments, some video/photo editing etc

 

The options I'm curious about are RAM and SSD size, do I need 16GB of RAM, or would 8 typically be sufficient with Mac OS - also, does storage get eaten up on Mac OS as quickly as happens on Windows?

 

Thanks in advance for any help :) 

[NinJake]

If you're not doing anything too crazy. An air or pro would be sufficient with 8gb memory and 256gb storage. You can buy an external solid state drive and use that for your main storage.

 

If you do think you'll push it, you may benefit from the cooling fans on the pro. The m1 mac is so efficient thermally though you may never have the fans activate anyways.

 

If you want to upgrade the storage to 500gb/1tb or the memory to 16gb go ahead, I just don't think you'll get as much of an advantage/performance increase compared to similarly spec'd windows machines.

[Misguided Penguin]

As far as I know Mac Big Sur has a minimum spec of 4gb of ram meaning that the OS probably uses about 2-3gb. I have used Macs in the past for coding, 3D modeling and a lot of other maker workflows and 8gb has always been enough a little close at times but always enough. As for storage my brother has a MacBook with 256gb of storage and since he edits/stores 4K photos on it he is always low on space so I would recommend a minimum of 512gb of storage. My brother is also able to edit his 4K photos with 8gb of ram.

[NinJake]

Unless you or your brother have specifically used the new M1 mac architecture, I'd be wary as to what your experiences have been or what your expectations are w/o testing or researching yourself. @Misguided Penguin

 

I still believe you'd be fine with 8GB ram and minimal internal storage especially if you'd be fine with a small external solid state drive. If external storage isn't in your wheelhouse then once again go ahead and upgrade the internal storage but it will cost you a lot more. It comes down to what type of projects you're working on... will you get a docking station... will you be working 90% of the time at coffee shops or something...

 

If most of the real heavy work will be done at home on a dock, I can't think of any reason why you would need more internal storage.

[Zando_]

I use an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB unified memory (important to note that it's not normal CPU only RAM, the CPU and GPU share the memory) and a 256GB drive. I mostly do general office software multitasking and we use Dropbox for our work files (which I can push to offline if it ever gets larger than my storage can handle), and after that + a buncha random apps and some other files I still have 97GB free. I do have (carried over from my 2019 MacBook Pro, waiting for VMWare Fusion to work on Apple Silicon) a 1TB external SSD for VMs and such though, as those rapidly chew through space. 

 

It really depends on what you're doing and what you can afford. Higher spec = more breathing room and higher resale value down the line. My laptop was on the business I work for, so within the budget I have I chose more memory over storage, as I was worried about the swap issues M1 Macs were having (fixed now AFAIK, plus it was mostly an issue with unoptimized apps running on Rosetta 2 to begin with). As the others mentioned you'll defo want more storage if you're doing anything with photos and especially video - most editing programs process and then store the project uncompressed, making high res footage absolutely massive, hell even 1080p projects can get huge. I'd upgrade the memory to 16GB as well if it's not an uncomfortable stretch tbh, as again it's shared between the GPU and CPU, and video editing programs will want to use the GPU. Also just any chunky apps + multitasking are much smoother with more RAM, as even on a fast SSD swap is much slower. That said macOS is very good with dumping stuff from RAM if it needs to, so if you can only pick one the storage upgrade is probably the better choice.