Okay, so I’ve been rocking a new laptop lately, and one of the big questions I had going in was whether 8GB of unified memory would be enough. I mean, it sounds kinda small in 2024, right? So, I decided to really put it to the test and see how it held up in my day-to-day.
My Starting Point
First, I made sure I had nothing unnecessary running. Clean slate, you know? I checked the Activity Monitor (that’s like Task Manager for Macs) to see my baseline memory usage. It was hovering around 3-4GB just with the operating system and a few background things.
Testing, Testing…
Then I started opening up my usual apps. You know, the basics: a web browser (with way too many tabs, of course!), a messaging app, my music player, and a note-taking app. Pretty standard stuff for me. Memory usage crept up, but it was still manageable, around 6GB. No sweat yet.
- Web Browsing: I use Chrome, and opening loads of tabs is a total must. The memory pressure (the little memory piechart) stayed green with my usual 10-15 tabs.
- Messaging and Music： Slack and Spotify running in the background. No problems at all.
- Note-Taking：Taking some text notes with my typora.
Pushing It a Bit
Next, I wanted to get a little more serious. I fired up a photo editing app, not Photoshop, but something similar. I loaded in a few high-res photos and started doing some basic edits – cropping, adjusting colors, that kind of thing. Memory usage definitely jumped, getting closer to that 8GB mark, but it was still surprisingly smooth. The memory pressure in Activity Monitor turned yellow. A little concerning, but no actual slowdowns that I could feel.
The Real Challenge
Okay, time for the big one: video editing. I’m not a professional video editor or anything, but I do like to mess around with making short clips. I opened up my video editing software and imported a few 4K clips. This is where things started to get…interesting. The memory usage went right up to the max, and the memory pressure turned red. I started to see a little bit of “swap used” in Activity Monitor, meaning the system was starting to use the hard drive as extra memory. Uh oh.
- 4K Video Editing: Imported some 4K footage, added some transitions and effects. This is where things got tight.
Did it crash? Nope. Did it get noticeably slower? Yeah, I’d be lying if I said it was perfectly snappy. There was some definite lag when scrubbing through the timeline and applying effects. It wasn’t unusable, but it was far from ideal. I wouldn’t want to do any serious, long-form video editing on this setup, that’s for sure.
My Verdict (For Now)
So, after really throwing a bunch of stuff at it, here’s my take: 8GB of unified memory is…okay. It’s surprisingly capable for everyday tasks and even some light photo editing. But if you’re planning on doing anything more demanding, especially video editing or working with really large files, you’re probably going to want to bump up to 16GB. It’s all about what you do with your machine, I guess. It works for my basic needs, but if my workflow changes, I’ll definitely be upgrading.