Not only are the M1 Macs faster, cooler, and have better battery life than virtually every comparable rival, they manage to do so with half the standard amount of RAM. How is that possible?
M2 Mac – 8GB vs. 16GB RAM – Avoid This Costly Mistake!
Apple’s new M1 Silicon Macs ship with just 8GB of RAM, and yet they seemingly perform as well as an Intel-based Mac with 16GB or more of RAM. So what’s going on? Can you really run Lightroom, Logic Pro, Final Cut, or even unoptimized apps like Ableton Live in 8GB? Is Apple’s least expensive Mac, the MacBook Air, really capable of top-tier professional performance? You bet. And a large part of that is due to its incredibly clever use of memory.
"I'm trying to do some more tests with it because it seems strange, but the memory doesn't fill up that quickly," Andrea Nepori, a tech writer for Italy's La Stampa, told Lifewire via instant message. "It's like they were able to harness the level of optimization that the iPads have, but on Macs."
First, what exactly is RAM compared to SSD storage? Imagine you’re working on a task at your small desk and you have a large filing cabinet next to it. The filing cabinet is the SSD. When you start working on your task, you grab the items you need and spread them out on the desk. The desk is RAM. It’s small compared to the filing cabinet, but you can see everything and it’s right there at your fingertips, so you can grab it right away.
