I am a low-skilled person all around and was able to replace my ram, hard drive, and battery! That's no longer possible, so it makes sense to me to make a small investment upfront and hold onto it a while. An extra $200 is adding ~15% to the cost? That's like adding guacamole to your burrito! Wayyy worth it!įor the past few years, I've gotten the best phone, ipad, and laptop (within reason!) I could afford and planned to keep them as long as possible.Īlso, up until relatively recently, it was possible to open up a macbook and replace hardware.
#Macbook pro 8gb vs 16gb ram upgrade#
$200 for rm upgrade ends up costing an extra $4/ month if your machine lasts 4 years (most last much longer!).Īnother way to look at it is- average macbook costs about $1500 after tax. For those who plan to keep their machine around several years, most of these upgrades cost close to nothing over time. I have a 9 year old MBP that's still going strong. That all said, good luck with nursing school & the NCLEX.Įven with the coming ARM shift, an Apple laptop can last close to a decade for most users. I/we recommend the Nebo app for note taking. She recently acquired a 7th gen iPad and wished she had it at the start of nursing school. She had tabs on the external monitor and whatever other program on her MBP. Additionally, I would recommend an external monitor for those tabs you mentioned. I know this will probably be a bit overkill, but it will help your studying/homework flow. I would recommend a 2020 13” MBP w/ a quad-core (2.0 GHz kind), 16 GB RAM, & 512 GB SSD. Although 8 GB of RAM was enough for the past two years, she did experience some lag and thus frustration when one of the several open programs wasn’t responding quickly. Over the past two years she used a refurbished 13” Early 2015 MBP w/ 8 GB RAM, 2.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, & a 256 GB SSD. My wife recently graduated from nursing school and currently working on her BSN.
#Macbook pro 8gb vs 16gb ram free#
But it’s like Apple makes near free money having 8GB as standard default, and charging $200 for the 16GB upgrade. It costs Apple a few dollars more to make it 16GB. In fact Apple should be ashamed of itself selling 8GB RAM-16GB should be standard. And macOS does the best it can with RAM compression and so on, to make 8GB work.īut 16GB in 2020 is the optimal amount. It depends on workflow (specific apps and data). That extra work uses battery and even heats up the drive more, possibly inching closer to the threshold for fans. But the CPU is still now doing more work, because it can’t just read data off RAM, it has to swap back and forth with RAM and storage, back and forth, back and forth. That’s why 8GB doesn’t feel slow for people. Now, with super fast storage, swapping doesn’t feel very slow, especially with document based workflows. If I only had 8GB RAM, that means my laptop would be swapping data with storage. With macOS + background utility apps (eg Alfred, Magnet) + several safari tabs and windows, I’m using 11GB RAM.
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