I am buying a Mac Mini with a 27" screen. Most of what I do on my 2017 iMac is research, no video editing—Safari with lots of tabs opened. The iMac has 24GB of memory and uses lots of it:
Do I really need to spend the extra $500 for the Pro? I don't feel like a pro. I'm retired.
Don't worry about the "memory used" on your iMac.
Macs are designed to use most of the memory they have even when doing light tasks so if your iMac had 128 GB RAM you would probably find it "using" 100 GB RAM.
The base model is a bargain and the only attractive thing about the mini. Once you start adding exorbitantly priced memory or storage it quickly becomes an expensive item.
I use the base model for editing 4K videos etc. so you should have no problems if you are simply searching the web.
In the Activity Monitor display, Memory Used is memory that is really being used. Cached Files shows the amount of free RAM that is being put to work caching data. The theory is that if the cached data is needed before the RAM is, the Mac will get a performance boost from not having to wait for a slow (by RAM standards) SSD or HDD to load the data into RAM. If the demand for RAM comes first, the Mac dumps some of the cached data to free some RAM.
Here, the Mac was
24 GB was plenty for what you were doing at the time you took the screenshot.
I would not conclude from that that 16 GB would necessarily be enough for all the workloads you might run on a new machine. I certainly would not advise you to buy a machine with 8 GB of RAM when there's a good chance that you would overload the memory system by 100% or more.
I would get the base model + additional memory for $300 savings.
Customizable options are available online only. You should also aware that memory can’t be added later by anyone, anywhere.
One more thing: the 24GB memory option automatically classifies you as “pro-retired”. Otoh, 8GB bolts you in as “happily retired but tight on money” and 16 is fomo (fear of missing out)-retired. Choose carefully 😁, all the best…
FWIW, there are some authorized Apple dealers that do stock MacMinis in a variety of RAM and storage configurations.
If you live in the US, one good choice would be B&H Photo which has a wide variety RAM and Storage combos for MacMinis and they are a very reputable dealer. There are others around this was just an example.
Thanks. The first store did not make this option available to me, so I did not know that I could simply get this much storage. Very helpful.
True, but I believe OP was referring to bricks & mortar stores of which B&H has only one, NYC.
How much memory is enough?
