jl1997 wrote:
My 2016 MacBook was an 8gb intel. I am looking at the 14‑inch MacBook Pro: 16GB memory, 512GB storage.
because that worked fine until the end other then the fan kicking in and I there have been so many advances with m1 and m2 is it necessary to jump up to the 16gb?
Unless you're doing very lightweight stuff, I would recommend getting at least 16 GB of RAM. You can't expand the RAM on Apple Silicon Macs after the fact, so whatever you get now, you'll be stuck with forever.
I am a student so will have windows softwares, google docs, regular 1 hr zoom meetings, streaming movies, would like to start using garage band. I’ll have multiple apps open at the same time - typing on word while going back and forth with research on safari/chrome (and music playing a good amount of the time).
Apple Silicon Macs don't support Boot Camp, and won't run the Intel version of Windows, either dual-boot, or in virtual machines.
You can run Windows 11 in a virtual machine (e.g., a Parallels Desktop VM), but only Windows 11 for ARM. It has some support for running off-the-shelf Wintel applications via emulation or translation, but there are limitations. See the Microsoft and Parallels sites for details.
I’ll be moving over a lot of music and photos. Probably around 275gb total with all files.
I’m a bit concerned about the air not having a fan.
The absence of a fan on the 13" and 15" MacBook Airs should not be a big issue, unless you are running lots of lengthy computing loads (that might cause the Airs to throttle sooner than the 14" and 16" Pros).
The difference between the entry-level models (13" and 15" Airs, 13" Pro) and higher-level models (14" and 16" Pros) boil down to several things.
- The 14" and 16" MBPs have more ports – three USB-C (Thunderbolt) ports instead of two; a HDMI port and a SDXC card slot where the entry-level machines have none; a MagSafe 3 charging port (also found on M2 Airs, but not on M1 Airs or on any 13" M1/M2 MBP).
- The 14" and 16" MBPs can drive more than one external display (see specifications for details).
- The 14" and 16' MBPs have miniLED-backlit displays with support for playing prerecorded HDR video content. The pixels are packed closer together than on the other machines, so you might want to crank the preferences one notch towards Bigger Text to keep text readable.
- The 14" and 16" MBPs can be purchased with more RAM. RAM = 8/16 for M1, 8/16/24 for M2, 16/32 for M1/M2 Pro, 32/64 for M1 Max, 32/64/96 for M2 Max.
- The 14" and 16" MBPs have faster GPUs and faster multi-core CPU performance (which might matter for long batch jobs that use all cores, but not so much for many interactive applications)
