I dabble around in Mac development semi-regularly, and was recently looking to update my Mac Mini to an M1 mac. Finding real data on whether you should buy the 8gb or 16gb version has been difficult. Despite many articles, very few do this kind of excellent side-by-side comparison.

I will say that some of the comparisons done early in this side-by-side video aren’t quite representative. Just opening an app and switching tabs isn’t super representative of performance since a good stack will just cache the image. To do a real test requires you make the app render something: scroll, select a dialog, or do a minimal interaction with the app to see if it snaps back to life or is just showing a static cached image (like the iPhone often does).