Sure, we all grumble about what Apple charges for a RAM upgrade. But I can’t imagine why any serious user/working pro would avoid the upgrade to 16GB RAM. The other reason to get 16GB is if you ever want to run another RAM-intensive application at the same time as Lightroom Classic, such as Photoshop.įor consumers and casual users, an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB RAM should actually work great. I am not sure if more RAM helps tethering, although it should help if you want to flip quickly between images you just shot, to figure out which one is the best. If Lightroom Classic has access to more than 12GB RAM, it can build RAM caches of nearby image previews and other data for instant access, instead of reading it off slower storage. Although Lightroom Classic can run on 8GB RAM, its system requirements recommend “16GB or more.” That is for performance reasons. The second factor is Lightroom Classic itself.

The point at which the memory management system hit its hard limits will still come sooner than with 16GB, even if you don’t see it right away. Same with an 8GB Mac - under a heavy load, compared to 16GB RAM, the 8GB M1 Mac uses more CPU to compress/decompress RAM, and more SSD space and I/O to swap RAM to VM, so there is a price. It’s like a basketball player who is able to play through pain, still able to score 30 points instead of their normal 32 - but eventually it will catch up with them. That does not mean everything is OK, because what’s actually happening is the Apple Silicon Mac is faster at using compressed RAM and SSD virtual memory to compensate for not having enough real RAM. What tests have indicated is that if you run the same task on an 8GB RAM Apple Silicon Mac, it may benchmark almost as well as on a 16GB RAM Apple Silicon Mac. Like, everybody knows you can’t get away with just 8GB and enjoy doing that particular workload. Suppose you have a task that, for many years, would not perform well on an 8GB RAM Intel Mac or PC. In general, compared to Intel processors, Apple Silicon appears to perform better on minimal RAM. One about the Apple Silicon Macs in general, and another about Lightroom Classic in particular.

Apple m1 chip lightroom