I post this here rather than in a new thread as hopefully many photographers will be following this. My mac is now getting very slow & I’m thinking of replacing it with a new one. Is anyone running one of the latest imacs with 8Gb ram and if so how well does it handle resource hogging apps such as Lightroom?
I have both M1 Pro and M2 MacBooks, both with 8Gb RAM - both run Lightroom, latest version, with no issues whatsoever.
ATB, J
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As @Osiris says, M1 and M2 Macs will not have a problem.
They work in a very different way to the old Mac Intel chips / systems. Back then if you had to use swap it was considered bad but now with SoC and the speed of SSD drives, the ability to write ridiculous amount of TB’s to them before they fail means you can heavily use swap and notice no drop in performance or reduction in drive life.
I’m using a MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 16gb of Ram and at the moment I have 15 apps open including photoshop, LR, Capture One and Photoshop classic… plus safari with 10 tabs etc etc. Now, activity monitor is showing as amber and I have around 9gb of swap in use… possibly due to me editing a 3.5gb psb file and the MacBook neither gets warm or slows down. My old intel MacBook would have been crying out in pain 
and my SSD drive is showing as having 98% of it’s life remaining and that’s after nearly 3 years of use!
So an M1/M2 with 8gb ram would run LR no problem. I’d wager you could use that 8GB or RAM plus 10gb swap and it still wouldn’t slow down. I stopped looking at the Activity monitor etc a long time ago and just use it and trust its ability to manage memory very effectively. I edit big files at times and I don’t recall it slowing down.
Oh, and if you buy from apple and change your mind within a couple of weeks etc, just take it back. They’re very good like that. I had a screen repair on a previous MacBook Pro and told them it was urgent as it’s a work computer… they said just to buy a new one and return it when mine comes back from repair which would be less than 10days and a full refund would be given. Just mirrored everything over… saved a potential headache!
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@A-Fin and @Osiris
Thank you both for your comments which are very encouraging. I was concerned that if I had to go for 16Gb RAM then the cost increases still further.
I would start at the 8gb and use it hard for two weeks and if you don’t notice it slowing down… good to go. I would be surprised if it did, the memory system is very different now and as I say, I don’t worry about using a lot of swap.
As @Osiris and @A-Fin say, no issues with just 8Gb of RAM on a M2 Air, it doesn’t get warm or slow down, if you are going for an new iMac, you will have no problems.
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I always thought continually writing to a SSD was a SSD killer. Hence the advice not to defragment SSD.
I use DXO software, increasing memory from 8 to 16 had no effect on the speed files where processed.
However, if I was buying new hardware, I’d probably go for 16. In 5 years time, 16 might be required to run future versions of LR.
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That’s interesting. I have used DXO as well as Lightroom and my current mac is getting slower at processing with photo programs; it is an intel 2017 machine & the OS can’t now be updated. It has just 8Gb ram which is insufficient these days. I’m pondering the next step. I’m also finding browsers are slow to load the first time.
It did used to be but the modern Mac SSD’s seem to handle thousands of TB rewrites without impacting on health.
The Mac Pro I had, as well as a Mac mini 2018 with 32GB were both significantly slower than the 16GB ram M1 I have. If you pushed the RAM into swap, it used to grind to a halt. Any Mac that is pre M1, which is the new Apple Silicon, would need a lot more RAM than the new breed of Macs with Apple Silicon.
Below is a screenshot of the health of a 3yr old MacBook Pro M1 Pro 14" laptop that uses swap a lot. It’s routinely connected to a 28" Wacom Cintiq and a 28" Eizo monitor. I don’t baby the laptop at all. When I bought it I was concerned at first when dropping from 32GB to 16 but I needn’t of worried. It was significantly faster.
Edit - Confirmation of TB written so far (53.2). At 2% this would mean over 2500TB rewrite life. The rest of the Laptop will be long gone by then.
That’s right, it would slow down. A 2017 Mac was pre Apple Silicon. It would have been based on the Intel chipset the same as my old Mac mini 2018. That had 32gb RAM & 8GB eGPU and struggled to do half of what I do today.
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Below is a screenshot of my PC when DXO 3 is running, the memory is constant at around 40%, hardly moving when sliders changed to alter stuff. There is a slight bump when the file was saved, which took around 10 seconds. Before DXO was loaded up, the memory usage was 29%.
I’d say the CPU is the limiting factor. My PC is probably about 8 years old.
My PC was slowing down, caused by the SSD being 80% full. Upgrading to a larger SSD increased the speed significantly.
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I don’t have a MAC, but I believe the modern SSD life is less than the older ones, due to more data being squeezed into each cell.
I’m not sure where you’ve read that in terms of SSD Lifespan. But one of the big pluses of the new Macs is SSD speed and lifespan. Lifespan is certainly not getting worse. You just have to compare NVMe M.2 to the old eSata disks. Those old disks died after a few hundred GB.
For the 1TB SSD drive in the M1 Mac I have (3yr old machine), it has a 2500TB rewrite life. That, depending on usage is between 5 - 50 years.
The most common SSD are TLC, which don’t last as long as SLC SSD, maybe the MAC uses SLC.
According to tech reports they use TLC SSD drives but Apple keeps the exact details under wraps. But I can only go off experience.
I’ve rewritten 50+TB already but lifespan has only dropped 2% so maybe there is more going on than meets the eye. The Ram & System management of new SoC designs with Apple Silicon are so different from Intel Macs, let alone PCs, it’s not really possible to make direct Ram comparisons. As I say, work that used to require 32-48GB Ram is now being done with 16GB ram faster and, without the Mac even getting hot. I can’t remember the last time I heard the fans.
Anyway, we’re hijacking the camera thread so … apologies all!
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No need for you to apologise, I hi-jacked it in the first place, so my apologies! Thanks all for your input.
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It’s my thread.
So we don’t need to apologise. 
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Oh… that’s good
And… I just found out that the M1 or newer Macs do use TLC SSD but the drives also use SLC cache that reduces wear which results in wear performance similar to MLC. Techies believe the 1TB SSD in an M2 Apple Machine will have an approx lifespan of 20yrs. That’s probably 12-15 years more than I need as I’d be trading in every 3-5 yrs anyway.
I’m currently rewriting 1.4TB a month and they say 10TB a month would result in an approx 6 year lifespan. If you’re processing 4k animations of 15 mins or more (after Effects or Motion 5) you’d write 100GB per render… 10 renders per day and then you’re up to 1TB per day. But… and it’s a big but, you would’t render onto an internal drive you’d use an external Thunderbolt 3 or 4 NVMe Drive which can be easily replaced.
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I’ve just seen your question and then skip-read some answers. To give you a definitive short answer, a new iMac with 8GB of ram is fine for even the latest Photoshop. One always wants faster, but it’s fine.
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I totally agree, it’s a great camera, still today IMHO.
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