I did see that with very little use - like a few Chrome tabs + other background apps that run by default it will quickly consume the 'standard' 8GB of RAM. But it does use SSD swap, so that's interesting. With a local frontend workflow (build and running unit tests), lots of Chrome tabs open, docker running a few containers, VSCode, Spotify, and other programs running in the background I haven't seen it use more than '~12,5GB' of RAM. Can say for some frontend builds I was getting ~60% speed increases from my 2y old Dell XPS 15. Running the native arm node.js on this machine is extremely performant. Also, I noticed that the 16 GB model barely uses less than ~7-8GB RAM but I'll get to that later.Ī lot of my development work implies running VSCode and node.js locally for frontend workflows. I went for 16GB of RAM because some of my development workflows require running multiple docker containers locally, and we all know how much memory docker consumes. So buying an M1 laptop didn't make sense - since I can use my laptop when I need portability. I don't like staring into small laptop screens, so for using both my monitors and also having more ports I have chosen the Mac Mini instead of the MacBooks.Īlso, I am working remotely and already have a Dell XPS 15 laptop.

I wanted to use it with - 2 big monitors (M1 MacBooks support only one external display - although there are workarounds). Why I choose the M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM

Android studio for mac m1