Recently, Apple statedthat 8 GB in the basic MacBook Pro with the M3 chip is equivalent to 16 GB of RAM in other laptops, and this does not affect the performance of the computers. However, many users took this as an excuse, and the author of the YouTube channel Max Tech, Maxim Yuryev, decided find out how it really is.
To make the test as fair as possible, Maxim conducted several real tests (not synthetic ones) on two almost identical 14-inch MacBook Pros with M3. One laptop has 8 GB, and the other has 16 GB of combined memory.
Not surprisingly, a device with more RAM showed significant performance gains across the board. This is especially noticeable in tests in Photoshop, Final Cut and Adobe Lightroom Classic.
While rendering in Blender and exporting Final Cut, the poor 8GB MacBook Pro was starved of memory, and ray tracing acceleration was only available on the 16GB RAM model.
Bottom line: If you want a truly powerful machine, your best bet is to at least look at the mid-range MacBook Pro with an uncut M3 Pro chip and a 1TB SSD for $2,499. The $1,599 base model isn’t even close to worth considering.