I am purchasing a MBA 15 for someone and dealing with the high cost of upgrading RAM and storage. My personal system is a Mac mini M1 with 8/256. I use it for browsing the web and office 365 apps. The specs on my mini are fine, except for Excel.
Unfortunately I use Excel heavily for work and it bogs down whenever I use a “large” file. For Excel “large” means a file of about 3mb or a file with more than 10,000 rows. I often get the spinning beach ball when I copy a large amount of cells. (See Update 4 below for an explanation)
I am buying the MBA15 for someone who will use Excel and might need to work on large files. They will be using other software, but I don’t know yet what system requirements are needed. They might need to run Windows in emulation, but I am not sure. The system will be for personal use as well.
Given the knowns and unknowns a PC is probably a better choice from a resource utilization perspective, except that she currently uses a Mac and doesn’t want a PC. The aesthetics matter and there’s no denying that a Mac is a nicer computer, with a great keyboard/trackpad, beautiful display, good speakers, 18 hour battery life and no fan noise.
So, while I would save money by getting a base model, it’s possible that I would be wasting money by not buying a robust enough Mac to meet her needs. The next level up is the Macbook Pro, but it’s 14″ rather than 15″ and while it’s faster and already has a 16/512 RAM/storage, it’s more costly than upgrading the MBA and likely more computer than she needs.
So I am going to get the MBA 15 with 16/512 to avoid bottlenecks that would hobble the Mac. It’s galling that Apple sells MBAs with such minimal specs. I know their target market is for consumers of content not producers. But the cost difference between selling an 8/256 vs 16/512 is minimal. Retail – the bump from 8gb of RM to 16, and 256gb of storage to 512 is less than $50 combined.
I know that Apple designed the MBA to be fan-less, and that requires the processor throttle to prevent overheating. That’s a design decision that I understand. MBAs are supposed to be lower powered than the Pro devices, but in exchange you get lighter and thinner laptops. I’m OK with that since I get something in exchange for giving up something.
But I don’t understand why Apple would build a computer that is capable of performing better, for nominal additional cost, and yet Apple causes it to run worse just to charge people an exorbitant sum to correct a deliberate self-inflicted error in base specs.
Personally I am beginning to regret getting the Mac mini. I have to see whether one of my PCs can run Excel better. If not, then it’s an Excel issue. But if so, given that none of my PCs are as modern and fast as the M1 chip in the Mac Mini, then it’s a resource issue caused by Apple selling computers with insufficient base specs.
When I bought the M1 Mac mini I hoped it would suffice for 5 or 6 years. But if Excel continues to bog down I will have to decide what to do. I checked my resale value a few months ago. I paid $700 for the mini in Dec of 2020. Apple said the trade-in value was $180. That’s 74% depreciation in only 2.5 years. I don’t think the Apple Silicon line of computers will hold their value as long as the Intels. Apple updates them every year or so, which I think affects their resale price. (I just checked again. The trade-in value is now $305. Strange that it would increase. So the depreciation is $395 or 56% over 2.5 years. That seems about right.)
The person I am buying the MBA for also holds onto their computers for a long time. So I think, despite the rip-off prices are for upgrades, it will be worth it in the long run to spend the money and do the upgrades on RAM/Storage. I wish I had at least upgraded the RAM on my mini back in 2020.
Update:
At the moment (June 2023) Apple is offering several education discounts which almost offset the cost of the upgrades. There’s a $100 discount on the base model + $20 discount on the SSD upgrade + $150 gift card, which can’t be used on the Mac purchase but it’s still worth $150. In addition, if you have an Apple Card you get 3% in cash back on the whole purchase.
After all that, the cost of upgrading storage and RAM to the MBA 15 is reasonable. Can’t argue with that.
Update 2:
I opened the same Excel file that gave me trouble on the mini, but this time I used a 7 year old PC with 20gb of RAM. Delays were insignificant. So I conclude that 8gb or RAM is not sufficient for my needs. I should have spent the money to get the 16gb RAM upgrade when I bought the mini. 8gb works fine for everything else I do, just not Excel. Unfortunately for me I use Excel for work every day.
I’m glad I got the upgrade on the MBA.
Update 3:
I opened Activity Monitor to watch the effect of a problematic Excel file on my system resources. The file has 3 tabs – the first is only 59 rows of text. The second has 28,284 rows and 23 columns of text & numbers, with no formulas. The third has 28,281 rows and 22 columns, two of which are formulas.
The task is: highlight and copy all data in the second tab, open a new tab, copy/paste values-only in the new tab. Time to complete: 34 seconds.
In Activity Monitor at the start Excel used 479mb of memory, 474mb of disk space and .8% of CPU.
During the task the Mac shows the following:
- Memory use went up to 877mb and memory pressure went from green to yellow. When I delete the new tab memory use dropped back to 497mb. Memory pressure stays at yellow.
- Disk space appears to be unaffected.
- Excel CPU rises to 100% and only drops down to 33% once it’s done. If I delete the additional tab (which is values-only so there are no new calculations) the CPU use drops down to .7%.
Update 4:
The above results were weird. I expected Excel to max out memory but instead it maxed out the CPU. In any event doing the above was useful. I found out via Activity Monitor that a background utility I use called Keyboard Maestro consumed 3.9GB of memory! I have to figure out why.
When I closed the utility there was no delay on Excel. I still feel that I have too little RAM, but in this case it doesn’t appear to be an Excel issue.
vegchili 