15" MacBook Air: How much RAM do you REALLY Need?

this video is brought to you by software keep get your Microsoft products at a discounted price Apple only gave the base 15-inch MacBook Air 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of SSD and even worse when we opened it up we confirmed that yes it only has one SSD chip meaning the storage is really slow so what happens if you spend extra money an upgrade to 512 gigs of storage or if you go up to 16 gigs of RAM well in this video we'll show you the real world differences and that will give you guys real recommendations on who should spend the extra money instead of just some theoretical stuff now you might think who cares I'll just wait a little bit longer for my transfers but that's not going to be the whole truth first let's run our standard SSD speed test dang guys look at that difference right there now the base one is going to speed up a little bit on a second run and we ended up settling at 1538 right compared to 3000 390 over double and as far as their read speed it is almost double if you spend the extra 200 bucks going up to the 512. now here it seems like we have double the speed but let's go ahead and plug in our external SSD and now I'm going to transfer our PC test folder over here as you see it's 117 gigabytes and we started transferring at 1.3 gigabytes the fastest the sac could do and now it's slowed down to about 260 because most ssds after he wrote enough they slow down dramatically it's almost done here and Pam that just got done I cannot believe this that's probably the longest it's ever taken five minutes and 40 seconds and guess how long the 512 model took 57 seconds yes more than five times as fast not just that twice as fast difference we saw before now if you're thinking I don't care about transfer speeds I'm not going to do a big transfer as well this is going to affect your real world performance as well but before I get into that if you like working on documents spreadsheets or slideshows our sponsor software keep is giving our viewers 25 off genuine 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to do so and running our web browsing performance test the performance is almost identical so if you're just running one or two basic things at a time the base model is perfect for you but most people are going to open up a bunch of tabs uh they're gonna have different applications they're not closing and that's when you start getting into some stuff now before I open up a few things I'm going to run this Baseline export as our last test without having anything else opened up and in Lightroom here or other applications that use both CPU and GPU we could even see a difference with nothing else opened and that's because even the 16 gig model is using over two gigs of swap our base 15 inch air is using over four gigs of swap but overall it's using less Ram because the MacBook itself and Mac OS is limiting how much RAM Lightroom can have access to which is going to slow it down now if you don't know what swap is basically if you don't have enough RAM it will use your SSD in order to act like Ram so the computer doesn't crash like they did a long time ago but it can keep working and that is where that slow SSD that I showed you in the beginning really starts to come in our 1300 MacBook took 2 minutes and 20 seconds compared to 1 minute and 17 seconds on the upgraded model so there you're spending a little bit more money it doesn't seem like as good of a value as 1300 bucks now but the performance is almost twice as good and this is just with Lightroom open and now what I'm going to do is open up 10 web browsing tabs here I have my Google Drive I'm going to have YouTube opened up here maybe with the video that I'm listening to in the background I'll have a few different website lights opened up that have a decent amount of media and then some simpler ones and I have two of my email accounts opened up like I typically do and as you guys can see I'm using Safari not Chrome which actually uses more memory so that's a tip if you have the base MacBook use Safari so right here I have 10 tabs open a lot of you guys say 10 I never have 10 I have 30 I have more but I want to keep it simpler for those of you guys that might not push it as hard just know your results will be worse so as far as opening up things right now you guys see right here it took a little bit of time to load up and that's just with web browsing tabs I have my emails I want to open those Google drive both of them were quick so far not bad but let's go ahead and open up Lightroom classic bam both of them loaded it up just fine now I'm going to switch between these images here let's go back into Safari there you guys saw it took about three seconds or so and then it had to kind of load it up whereas this one was still instant not just with one program open and here in my Google Drive the 16 gig model super responsive still let's try the base one you guys see that it's already choppier slowing down so the system is getting worse in terms of performance see super smooth that one was laggy and that is just with 10 tabs in Safari now the next I want to do is re-export this and let's see how long it takes this time wow guys we are already at 8.8 8.9 wow guys look at this this MacBook is almost finished compared to that one right there all right guys so this time around the 16 gig model only took a second longer one minute and 18 seconds compared to 3 minutes and 32 seconds for the base one so this thing dramatically slowed down and now the difference is getting closer to Triple but with that said I'm never just sitting around waiting for something to export keep in mind there's only 50 images it would take much longer so if you had for example 200 300 400 this thing would take ages I would be using the system so I'm gonna go ahead and run that one more time and let's check out the responsiveness is if you're multitasking like most people will so let's go over here let's open up Safari all of that right there you guys saw all the stuttering let's go into our Tesla here pretty smooth that it's open once it's opened up reloading there relearning there but not too bad this page is open up just fine YouTube right there bam the whole video had to load back up not crazy so surprisingly but keep in mind this is Safari Chrome would be much worse and by the time I open up Google Drive it's reloading again now the stuttering is really quite bad oh my goodness this is making it be very frustrating let's check out our 16 gig I have to run this again because it's so fast at doing this test all right let's open it up not perfectly smooth but look at this everything's open none of this changed none of the video went away extremely smooth here let's check Google Drive bam instant super smooth while it's exporting wow guys a lot of that is just dramatically slowing down and while we're multitasking I ran the speedometer test here and you guys could see that the base model instead of being the same web browsing performance well now it is almost half the speed that it was previously and that's all affected by that slow Swap and the lower amount of RAM and if we take a look well right now we're at six gigs of swap I saw it was almost at 10 gigs earlier but it's probably trying to lower the ram that Lightroom needs if I open this up we are still exporting that is incredible here I've done already like four times bam and right here we have seven minutes and 16 seconds compared to a minute and 18 that is if you have the web browsing tabs open and you're multitasking while your export is happening that affects the base model whereas the other one well it is basically unchanged so should you spend that extra 200 bucks or 400 and if you can only do one which one should you get well in previous videos I showed you guys more tests some video editing tests some photoshop tests um some logic stuff like that the videos were very long but in this one I just want to sum it up because in video editing you'll have a very similar performance to the Lightroom over here for xcode well it is not as RAM dependent and it does a great job with swap so if you're doing a little bit of coding I wouldn't worry about it as much and if you're doing logic well there if you're doing very simple projects 16 gigs you don't absolutely have to have it but if you start doing plugins and you want to really Excel then you definitely do need 16 gigs now what's interesting is that Apple where their configurations are set up they have a 8 gig 256 the slow SSD model and the 512 so they're basically admitting that hey the base model it shouldn't be like that if you're going to upgrade anything you should upgrade your storage and I would say that if you're somebody that wants smooth multitasking smooth web browsing you're not trying to get maximum performance I would do that now if you could do both as I showed you guys here the experience is much better if you're multitasking if you're doing productivity heck this is just Safari in one professional application if you do Photoshop and Lightroom stuff can get even slower so I would do both if you can but if you cannot I would say it would be worth just getting the better SSD not only does it keep your eight gigs running much faster longer you also get double the storage so that would be my recommendation to you guys and hopefully this shows you guys how big of a difference you can get just by upgrading that and I would highly recommend it but like I said in the beginning for some people if you're just doing Simple a few web browsing tabs you're not doing too many stuff or you just have one thing opened at a time you could get away with it but the value is not as good when you're talking about bang for the buck performance go and click that Circle above to subscribe we're gonna have other comparisons and other great videos for you guys check out that video right over there and software keep below and I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Max Tech

Views: 260,020

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Id: dAtolsHZWT4

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023