What you do want to avoid is using swap space on disk, as that will slow your Mac down, and persistent use of swap increases workload on the internal SSD, in turn shortening its working life. You can see tentative figures in this article. In fact, comparing similar loads on that Intel model against my M1 Pro suggests that you don’t need to make any additional allowance for GPU use. A naive approach might be to add that to the main memory total to arrive at the amount of memory needed for your new Apple Silicon Mac, which in my case would then be 40 GB. The graphics card in my iMac Pro has 8 GB of dedicated memory, which remains about 90% in use fairly constantly. The good thing about Unified Memory is that it’s used far more efficiently than in Intel Macs. This is made more complicated by the fact that Apple Silicon Macs don’t have dedicated video or graphics memory: instead, they come with Unified Memory, which means that their main memory is shared by the GPU, Neural Engine, and everything else as well as the CPU. Neither are there any external options, unlike storage.

If you’re one of the lucky few who simply buys the top of the range, then this article isn’t for you, but for the rest it should help you strike the right balance between performance and cost, whether you’re looking at an M1 MacBook Air, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, iMac, or Mac Studio.Īs Apple Silicon Macs use memory mounted in the chip carrier, what your Mac comes with is all it’s ever going to get. This makes it even more important that, when choosing your new Mac, you get its specification right. To obtain best performance and engineering optimisation, all Apple Silicon Macs come with memory and internal storage which are fixed and can’t be upgraded later. Gone are the days when one of your first questions about a new Mac was its expandability.

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