Sure, you can plug an external SSD into one of the Thunderbolt ports for fast transfer (and I'll have a list of excellent ones for you in the near future) but it's not as fast as on-chip storage. While upgrading your storage drive was possible (albeit difficult) with previous iMacs, it's impossible to do so with the new M1 chips. Even offloading storage to my iCloud Drive, I've still nearly filled the entirety of my 1TB SSD drive.

While you might not need more than 8GB of unified memory in your new iMac there is one thing that you should immediately upgrade when you configure your new machine.Ĭhances are your current system's storage is already bursting with documents, images, movies, and apps. But your money could be spent better elsewhere. If you have the money, there's no reason to not upgrade. For most users 8GB is going to be more than enough for day-to-day computing tasks. With a unified memory upgrade being so cheap, you might wonder why I'd recommend not spending the money. This number is far from the wallet-blistering Apple-tax that upgraders used to pay for factory RAM. You can upgrade to 16GB for a measly $200. However, if you're editing large 4K videos or doing other extremely intensive tasks, you might benefit from additional unified memory in your system. Reviews of the first M1 systems (the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini) show that Apple has finally been able to create a system with a base of 8GB of RAM that not only performs well but outperforms previous systems with twice as much RAM (also, it's called 'unified memory' now). Everything just works together and borrows processing from each other as needed. The CPU and GPU aren't both trying to access data pathways on the logic board. There's no memory swapping or rewriting of data between your RAM and SSD. The M1 chip can dynamically use whatever it needs, from whichever component it needs, instantaneously. Having everything on a single chip changes that fundamentally. RAM is a system's short term memory and having lots of it means you can do more and larger tasks simultaneously without slowing things down.

Traditional thinking has always said, add as much RAM as you can afford. But the more I researched the new M1 chip and how it's performed in the new MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, the less concerned I was. As someone who falls into that category, I expected to be more upset at the change.

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