If you have an old Mac and it is possible to upgrade the RAM this might be the solution you need, but we suspect that the RAM in the majority of our readers’ Macs can’t actually be updated. If these are issues you are encountering then you might be thinking that you need more RAM in your Mac.

Un-responsive apps and apps freezing or crashing.

‘Your system has run out of application memory’ message.

If your Mac is using the majority of the RAM available you may experience problems such as: For normal use 8GB really should be enough. You shouldn’t actually need 16GB or more RAM unless you use really power hungry apps. You can opt for anything from 16GB RAM to 128GB in the Mac Studio.

But we still advise that you get the maximum amount of RAM you can afford when you buy a new Mac – you can do so as a build to order option at point of purchase. This should mean that 8GB RAM in a M1 Mac isn’t the same as 8GB RAM in an Intel Mac. The good news is that this means that it works much more efficiently and you should see speed benefits. Because the memory is accessible by both the CPU and GPU it can be allocated where it’s needed, and there is no performance hit because swapping from one to the other is instant and there is no need to copy data over as it’s instantly accessible. There are benefits to Unified Memory though.

It’s why your new M1 or M2 Mac probably needs a cleaner app, options for which we will discuss below. Instead, the memory is integrated into the same package that contains the chip.īecause of this you need to make sure you get enough memory when you buy your Mac because this memory cannot be upgraded. There’s no memory slot or slots on the motherboard, nor is there an area where a memory chip has been permanently soldered on. This means that in M1 and M2-series Macs the memory is a part of the architecture itself. Instead all Macs with Apple’s own silicon inside use Unified Memory which is shared among the hardware components.

Now that Apple is producing its own processors – the M1 and M2-series of chips – the company no longer uses RAM in the traditional sense.

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