Don’t Fully Spec Your M2 MacBook Air Out

One thing I'd be careful about with newer machines is the storage is getting fast enough that many tasks that a few years ago would dramatically slow down if the system had to swap now only slowdown a little or even not at all. (This applies both to Mac and PC).

I've seen plenty of tests where people would get two or three M1 Macs configured identically except for amount of RAM and put them all through the same load tests, and not see performance differences anywhere near what most of us would expect. What they do so is that the low RAM machine is swapping a lot, the medium RAM machine is swapping a little, and the high RAM machine is not.

I'd worry that if I got a machine with just the amount of RAM I need to not see noticeable slowdowns during my more intense workloads, and with just enough storage for what I actually use with some room for growth, it will swap and even though I might not be noticing it will be increasing wear on storage.

AppleCare, which can now be renewed indefinitely instead of limited to just adding 2 years of coverage past the standard warranty, does not look like it covers SSD wear, and an out of coverage SSD replacement on most Macs nowadays I believe would be a logic board replacement which is not cheap. The Mac Studio has the storage modules on separate cards plugged into sockets on the main board, so maybe it will be relatively cheap to get Apple to replace those when the originals wear out, but that's still just speculation.

Thus, if you are buying a Mac and you want to keep using it for many years it might be worth considering SSD wear. There are two ways to reduce it. One is to get enough RAM to handle your workloads without any swapping--and don't forget that if you plan on using the machine for years to allow for growth in your work. I think I'd figure out the minimum RAM needed to not have more than minimal slowdowns from swapping, then double that twice (if possible). One doubling to stop swaps, and one doubling to allow room for future needs while remaining swap free.

The other way to reduce SSD wear is to get a bigger SSD. Generally the bigger the SSD the more total blocks can be written before it starts to fail.

I'd avoid getting smaller RAM and smaller SSD together unless I was going to just run the system itself off the built in storage and have all the user stuff on external drives.

Weird article. I don't see why you would necessarily need a more powerful CPU just because you need more RAM. Java is quite RAM hungry. Intellij eats up a lot of it, then whatever else I have running at the same time, 16GB clearly isn't enough even though the base M1 is more than fast enough. It's not like I'm compiling a massive C++ project here.

I’ve had the same conclusion [0] as the title though not as the article. I want to have max RAM but I’m actually totally fine with only 256GB. I’ve been using the 12” MacBook since 2017 with 256GB storage and it’s only half full, mostly because of these 2 reasons.

- It is a work machine and I do not store personal files on it

- It is most often used when out of office

I didn’t even consider the 14” even though the price difference is relatively small because I value portability more than processing power. When I want power, that’s what my Mac mini/studio are for.

[0]: https://legendofcode.com/blog/speccing-the-m2-macbook-air

And here I was thinking about buying a base model M1 air just because.

It would be nice to be able to add music to my iPhone, play around with the iTag things and I don’t do enough hacking lately to matter if it only has 8 gigs of ram.

The only problem is there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my current laptop and I’m not sure I really want to spend twice as much (I did some serious bargain shopping and upgrading to get a pretty decent laptop for around $500) for a MacBook with a smaller screen and less ram/storage.

IDK, money just sitting around gets eaten away with inflation and I haven’t had a Mac since the ‘90s so maybe…

I don't see _how_ Apple missed multiple external displays with the m2. Not even worth purchasing.

Personally, I’d compromise on the storage but go higher on the RAM. My reason for that is that these are sealed machines, and so with less RAM even if I don’t notice a performance issue due to fast SSD, there’ll be lot more paging and swap use. So, if one intends to use these machines for long, I mean 5-10 year long, then I believe as high RAM as possible and some comprise in storage is better. IMHO of course.

I think that the most interesting point was about the storage pricing, if I understood correctly.

I was more or less forced to go for 1TB when I (very recently) bought my M1 Air to replace a repaied-and-failing aged Intel MBA.

But 16GB still feels like plenty for the coding I am doing, including some Java. Not that I have pushed the new machine very hard yet.

> Let’s start with the fact that the M2 MacBook Air is most likely the most expensive Air ever.

The original Air was starting at 1799, with a hdd. Add an extra 1000 dollars for the SSD.

Just like then, this Air is not the most basic Mac anymore. It has different trade-offs.

defintly need the bump in memory. as for disk thats tough because the higher you go the more expensive it is. i think keeping the standard cpu is fine.