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RAM debate 16 or 32
I'm getting ready to upgrade my studio with a Mac Mini m4 and wondered how much RAM you all would recommend. I'm thinking 16GB.
I mainly use Bitwig and often have up to 6 tracks, some tracks with several chained devices. My current iMac i7 seems to run it easily with 24GB and I've never had any issues in the past. Considering the M4 will be such a huge step up, I'm thinking I can get by easily with 16GB.
Would love feedback on this if anyone is using a Mac with the "M" chip.
Thank you!
Comments
Generally the advice is to get as much RAM as you are willing to pay for.
That said, I do all my development work on a Mac Mini M1 with only 8Gb of RAM, and I typically have XCode, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, a million Chrome tabs, Audacity and iTunes and Slack open at the same time and I have yet to notice a hiccup.
So in reality you can probably survive with 16 Gb. Although for heavy multi-track audio work it's perhaps the lower limit?
I think the Scaler dev runs a rig with 128 GB, but that was a year or two ago.
I have 64 GB and feel it’s just about adequate. Windows eats ram for breakfast.
get as much RAM as you can afford. I have 32GB on PC and run Ableton, its fine.
Thanks for the reply! That sounds about right I guess. I heard something that suggests the newer chips are more efficient with RAM so that helps a bit.
Worst case is I could bounce some tracks to audio.
Yeh, this is a factor since Apple charges $400 for an extra 16 gigs.
The m4 mini base model will be equipped with 16 GB ram. So maybe the 200$ upgrade will get you 32 GB.
O right! Thanks for the reminder. was just looking at the M2 on Apple site but the new M4 is supposed to change the RAM configuration.
ouch
FWIW I had a MAcBook Air M1 with 8GB and it ran all the software without any issues including very large Logic Pro projects, largish Bitwig projects and DaVinci Resolve. With DaVinci Resolve the only place I noticed an issue was using the watercolour filter (that thing just eats everything up). I tend to go a little overboard in using plugins on my audio channels so I do tend to push the upper levels of the capabilities a bit. I moved from a MacBook Pro 16” i7 with 16GB of RAM to the MacBook Air and the difference in capabilities was very noticeable. Personally, for what you’re using it for, I would say that 16GB RAM on the M4 device will see you in a very good place.
16 is all you need
Save the money and get a 4TB SSD and Thunderbolt enclosure.
Thanks a lot! Really helpful!
Ha, I just picked up a Crucial 4TB SSD! I'll check out Thunderbolt enclosure since I have no idea what it is.
If you want to do anything with AI/LLM locally then you better get 32GB at least. A lot of models won't even run with less. And the M4 chipset works quite well for that purpose.
1024 gb.
16 has been fine for my needs since the M chips were released. Never had any issues with music, video, or photo editing apps all of which I use heavily.
why is the apple RAM so expensive?
This could be the question that starts a whole entire philosophical thread.
Because ordinary average people still treat buying a new Apple computer like they did with Win98se.
Because the ram is integrated in the cpu, not the motherboard. This makes it much raster.
i don't think the extra RAM you can buy for a Mac is that much different in application than a PC? isn't it just soldered to the motherboard rather than using slots? I will admit i haven't had a mac for 15 years so maybe i'm wrong here?
This is correct for Intel Macs, which had RAM soldered to the motherboard (for seemingly the sole purpose of shortening their upgrade cycle). But I believe Apple Silicon is a System on Chip (SoC) design where the CPU, GPU, and RAM all live together. Not sure how big of a difference it makes in real life but hey, hype is hype!
@gkillmaster for what it’s worth, I’m running a MacBook Air M2 with 8gb of RAM. My Ableton projects sound similar to yours, perhaps a bit more demanding depending on the devices you typically use — my template opens every project with a multi-sampled MPE drum kit, a second sampled drum kit track for percussion, three instrument tracks (Meld, Wavetable, and a multi-sampled vibraphone), an External Instrument device grouped with an audio track, audio tracks for vocals and guitar, and a resampling track set up on a crossfader. I have the fancy Hybrid Reverb and Echo devices on send tracks and every track has at LEAST seven insert effects, including some heavier fare like pitch correction and multi-band distortion.
This setup is admittedly much heavier on CPU than RAM, but in two years I’ve never had any performance issues with 8gb and the base M processor, even when I’m swapping devices around during playback! I’ve heard Bitwig is well optimized so I fully expect 16gb will serve you well.
ah ok got it, then yeah, the RAM probably runs faster since its integrated in the same one chip, so yeah the upgrade RAM price is whatever Apple wants it then. Not knocking Apple, if money wasn't an issue i buy one.
Thank you for this!
This right here. I max’d my M1 Pro Max with 64G and now don’t regret it at all because I can run larger models. I will max it again on the next purchase and max the GPU cores as well. I know it costs lots more but it future proofs for so many different scenarios.
'ordinary average people'? lol
Tends to be my way now too. I max out and then go for a loooong time with what I have. Then when it starts to get dated it is a massive mystical leap forward the next time I upgrade. My current music desktop rig is about ten years old and it still does what I want with minimal pain, aside from the fact Microcock won't let me update the OS by the end of next year, sigh.