New Computer Day - Macbook Air M5

[Jarick]

Picked up one of the new Macbook Air M5 models this morning and setting it up now. Looking forward to seeing how it works compared to my old Macbook Air M1!

I've had my Macbook Air M1 for several years and it's still performing really well, but my memory and application needs have outgrown the base model specs (256 GB drive and 8 GB memory). I found just launching a couple browser tabs and having a couple things running in the background like UAD Console would eat up all my physical memory pushing me into disk memory, and then between Logic Pro and a few other apps almost my entire disk was full all of the time. Also the original M1 had issues with HDMI output so the new model should work better with my ultrawide monitor.

So I picked up the new base model which has 512 GB drive and 16 GB memory. Thought about bumping those up again but I want to see how this one does first.

 

[Jarick]

First hurdle - the Mac refuses to see the UAD Apollo Twin despite uninstalling and reinstalling twice. MOTU M4 is plug and play. Very strongly considering just ditching the Apollo at this point given how much of a pain it is.

But outside of that, wow the computer is noticeably faster zipping around even just web browsing and stuff. Sites are loading faster and you can go back and forth with zero lag. It's also nice having the Activity Monitor memory showing green all the time with a lot of memory available.

 

[Chocol8]

Yeah, I think 16 gb is the minimum ram for a happy Mac experience. Apple left the default too low for too long which just hurts customer experience.

 

[mavrick102000]

Agreed. 8GB RAM is only good for surfing with a few tabs open and will usually maintain normal performance. 16GB has been bare minimum even in a frugal corporate environment for at least a decade to ensure core functionality doesn't suffer while multi-taksing particularly if you're using MicroSlop products.

The new SIlicon-based Macs are fast, but the shared memory for some of the graphics allocation, makes me want to bump them up to 24GB so I would be left with the base 16GB RAM for Logic and Plug-ins and other OS tasks with rarely any concern.

I'll be it still performs very well for you. Bummer on the Apollo interface issues.

 

[Jarick]

Agreed. 8GB RAM is only good for surfing with a few tabs open and will usually maintain normal performance. 16GB has been bare minimum even in a frugal corporate environment for at least a decade to ensure core functionality doesn't suffer while multi-taksing particularly if you're using MicroSlop products.

The new SIlicon-based Macs are fast, but the shared memory for some of the graphics allocation, makes me want to bump them up to 24GB so I would be left with the base 16GB RAM for Logic and Plug-ins and other OS tasks with rarely any concern.

I'll be it still performs very well for you. Bummer on the Apollo interface issues.

I've got a new computer waiting for me back at the office too, which will bump me from 8GB to 16GB on Windows 11. I do a ton of multi tasking and a lot of memory intensive work with Power BI so looking forward to some improvements there too.

 

[mavrick102000]

My corp laptop has 64GB. I was surprised that corporate went nearly all 64 GB on Windows and 32 GB on Macs for Devs to avoid performance complaint issues. I was surprised as I was used to 16GB max except for the power users.