Slack is set to run on full screen, Spotify is in the background, and only then the 8GB model displays the familiar spinning wheel of death. For the needs of the test, 12 applications are set to run simultaneously, 20+ Safari tabs are opened, 6 Safari windows are set to play YouTube videos. To see at what point there will be a difference in the performance of the 8GB model compared to its 16GB sibling, both Mac machines are pushed to the edge. However, the 16GB of RAM really is a game-changer when it comes to multitasking.

Multitasking and overload testsįrom the Geekbench 5 test results above it becomes clear that the more RAM would not affect the real raw processing power of the 16GB M1 MacBook Air model. So, in order to decide which one is worth it more, we need some more test results. These results show no significant difference in the performance of the two tested machines, considering the difference in their RAM capacity. The 8GB single-core test scores at 1728 points compared to 1733 points for the 16GB. In a test run in the Geekbench 5 cross-platform benchmark, the 8GB model obtains 7582 multi-core points in comparison to the 7586 points of the 16GB model. So, without further ado, here is how the M1 8GB Air compares against its 16GB variant: Geekbench 5 Benchmark Macbook Air M1 8gb vs 16gbĮven though both MacBook Air models aren’t that different, pushing them to their limits can help you decide which one of them can fit your needs best. As time goes by more and more developers will have optimized there apps and you can expect to see your Mac to run faster, with less ram and longer battery life. Also, since only a small percentage of apps have been optimized for the M1 chip they tend to be very resource intensive on all Mac Silicon. MacOS keeps getting new updates which helps performance. However with these new M1 chips in the upcoming year, we will be seeing something which looks like the exact opposite. This is an inevitable part of a computer’s life cycle. Usually over time programs evolve with more features and become more ram intensive. To many this may seem like a backward step when upgrading from an older Mac, however, the M1 architecture has been constructed to take advantage of more swap memory as the newest generation of SSD have a considerably faster read-write speed and are more resilient to heavy use. This brings up the question of how healthy is this for your SSD. More than a few of our users have seen up to 10GB swap memory used when multitasking.

Is the 8GB M1 MacBook Air powerful enough?Įxpect both models to use a considerable amount of swap memory.

Buying 16gb of Memory for futureproofing.

Macbook air 8gb vs 16gb ram