Your starting point should be based on your Mac’s current internal storage, complete with your full Home folder. You have more latitude in choosing the size of its SSD, but here considerations become more complex. It won’t work quite the same, because of its Unified Memory, but that should at least get your Mac into the right ballpark. That sets your target for physical memory, aiming to let your new Mac also avoid using VM as much as possible. It’s harder to tell whether reducing the amount of real memory will result in significant use of VM, and tricks like creating a large RAM disk can’t accurately simulate the effect of less RAM. That should mean that sticking to the same amount of physical memory in your new system performs similarly, and uses VM seldom, if at all.

Confirm that there’s no “Swap used” in the Memory tab of Activity Monitor too. If it’s KB, then your Mac hasn’t used any VM since it last started up. When you’re working normally, with all your mainstay apps busy, open Disk Utility, select the boot Container, and look at how big the VM volume is. 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 ssd upgrade