so you're in the market for a new Mac and you're on the fence about whether or not you should spend the extra cash on built-in upgrades like a larger SSD or more RAM well if you're new to the channel my name is Chris and I'm a software developer who was recently in your shoes also watching YouTube videos just trying to get other opinions on things like eight gigs of ram versus 16 256 gigs of SSD versus a terabyte and so on and so forth and what I noticed was that a lot of the videos left out a crucial piece of information for a decision like this and that is swap memory usage now understanding swap memory usage is critical for decision like buying a new Mac and it can save you some serious cash to better understand swap memory usage let's start with ram and SSD now Ram stands for random access memory which is like the short-term memory of your computer it's quick and Powerful but forgetful since you can't store files or documents on it think of ram like this whiteboard Pretend We're in an online classroom and I'm showing you how to solve an extremely complex equation everything I read on this whiteboard will stay here as long as it's needed but once it gets wiped clean it's gone forever an SSD stands for solid state drive which is like the long-term memory of your computer it's fantastic at remembering things but can and does get cluttered over time think of it like writing on this chalkboard we can write as much as we want on it but sooner or later we'll need to erase everything to be able to reuse it and as we write and erase over time the chalkboard starts to get smart judged and messy making it much harder to write on similarly to how writing and rewriting onto the chalkboard damages it over time the repeated writing and rewriting of files and data onto an SSD causes damage resulting in loss of storage capacity and it becoming slower over time now what about swap memory usage well let's go back to the online classroom example assume I'm walking you through another extremely complex problem on the Whiteboard and run out of space we obviously need more space to finish the problem so we start writing the chalkboard to finish it and sure this allows for more work to be done while the Whiteboard is out of space but it'll all end up getting erased to make room for the next problem swap memory is the same thing when your workflow overloads your macbook's RAM swap memory comes into play and similarly to how we use the chalkboard for additional space for the problem your computer recruits the internal SSD to temporarily write data that should have been done with ram if there was enough space now for the vast majority of people swap memory usage isn't that big of a deal because it's unlikely that you'll use a significant amount of it during normal use and even if you do it takes a tremendous amount of read and write Cycles to have any noticeable negative effect on the SSD however if you're part of the group who work on power hungry tasks like heavy multitasking rendering all day or 4K editing it is likely that you'll run into a noticeable slowdown and damage to your SSD and this is when upgrading from 8 gigs to 16 gigs of RAM or more should be considered so what's my recommendation well if you're part of the 90 to 95 who won't be using your new Mac for rendering all day running a dozen apps at the same time or multitasking for hours and hours on end using a ton of memory three trust me when I say just save your money and go with the base model MacBook Air with 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of SSD storage if you're part of the five to ten percent who know that they have heavier than average workloads or you just have the extra cash to spend I do recommend upgrading to 16 gigabytes of RAM but hardly ever do I recommend paying the offensively overpriced rates for built-in SSD storage upgrades if anything buy an external SSD like the Samsung T5 or the Samsung t7 Shield both have one terabyte of storage and can be picked up for under a hundred dollars at the time of this video and to put this into perspective I used a base model MacBook Air for the first year and a half of my full stack Development Career when I would have multiple Chrome browsers open several tabs each multiple apps and several instances of vs code open for coding while running servers at the same time without any issues it wasn't until I started adding 4K video editing and rendering that the swap memory usage caused enough damage and slow down over time that forced me to upgrade and even then as someone who prefers to save as much money whenever possible I chose to upgrade to an M1 MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage and I also picked up a couple of external ssds for that additional storage