#Mac mini memory upgrade#
#Mac mini memory pro#

And it feels kind of good to know that I got this upgrade for 25% the price that Apple charges for a built-to-order Mac Mini with 64gb. I cannot say that I have seen any use for 64gb (vs 32gb) so far, but I have seen RAM usage spike to about 20gb+ sometimes. One of the great advantages of the Mac Mini compared to macbooks are the ability to max out ram for cheap. Now I also have the first-hand experience to back it up, at least from a subjective point of view. IMO, if you spend quite a bit on a new Mac Mini (or feel that is a little slow with 8gb), it is a no-brainer to upgrade the RAM (if you got the money). I wanted to share this experience as I have noticed a tendency on forums to undervalue how much of an impact this has on user experience, and this made more hesitant to do the upgrade than what what I should have been. And I thought 'why not', kind of fun to max out the RAM for a relatively modest amount of money compared to overall price of the machine ( So, 64gb (2x32gb) costed a little over twice the price of 32gb. The reason I went for 64gb and not 32gb (which probably enough for most people) was that the RAM prices now seems to be about 50% of prices one year ago.

#Mac mini memory pro#

I also have a Macbook Pro with 8gb RAM and it feels terribly slow compared to the Mac Mini. Not having to unload anything temporarily to disk seems to make a huge impact. And as a bonus, more demanding programs like word, excel, xcode, vscode etc runs so much faster. Also, for fast switching user accounts or VM it never hurts to have some extra RAM. No need for using swap/page file on the SSD anymore, and even though the SSD is very fast this is a very good thing. I suspect that OS X are very clever when given an aboundance of RAM and for example keeps recently opened files and programs available in RAM so that the SSD dont have to reload anything. The Mac Mini also seems to drive my monitors better after the upgrade, with more fluid animations and no longer any screen tearing/choppy feeling when watching youtube videos in full-screen (tested with 4k display, and my dual 2560x1440 monitor setup). The experience of occasional lag in daily light use is mostly gone. A second here, a second there, for example when switching between and opening every-day use apps. It all seems to pop up so much faster now. The biggest benefit I have noticed is actually the feel and smoothness of the everyday experience with light use. In short, absolutely night and day, way better than I expected! I have been reluctant to upgrade before as I believed 8gb was 'enough' for a normal non-professional user like me. I got to experience how the machine worked with base 8gb RAM a couple of days before upgrading, so I got a good feel for how much this impacted performance. I recently upgraded my i5 Mac Mini 2018 from the base 8gb version to a maxed out 64gb ram (2X crucial 32gb modules 2666 mhz).