Although plenty of utilities offer help in monitoring use of VM or ‘swap’, those in Disk Utility and Activity Monitor are quite good enough for this purpose. What you want to aim for is sufficient physical memory to avoid routine use of virtual memory, when you’re going about your normal tasks. Selecting memory capacity is the simpler of the two decisions. They’re not normally used in production, but the mini is my mainstay for looking at everything M1.

My two M1 Macs are similar in specification: a mini with 16 GB of memory and 500 GB SSD, and a MacBook Pro with the same. I also have a secondary Intel system, a MacBook Pro 16-inch, which has 16 GB of memory and 500 GB SSD, and is mainly a fallback and for testing laptop-specific issues.

As I’m a bit of a hoarder, that has an additional 10 TB of SATA SSDs attached to it. My main production system is an iMac Pro with base specification, which means 32 GB memory, 1 TB internal SSD. This article considers whether that strategy works when buying an M1 or subsequent Apple Silicon Mac.įirst, let me explain what I’ve done in my four current Macs, so you know where I’m coming from. With Intel Macs, it has been popular to buy as little as essential in a new Mac, and enhance or upgrade them using third-party products. It’s common knowledge that Apple doesn’t exactly discount pricing on internal memory or storage options.

Mac mini m1 add ram