l am about to replace my 2012 mbpr with 8GB RAM 256GB HD (still 40GB free) with either an M1 mac air / M1 macbook. my 2012 mbpr is performing fine for my requirements! (Trading using Trading software, browsing, libreoffice)
question is, which would make most difference to performance, upgrading from 256GB to 512GB HD with the standard 8GB ram, OR upgrading 8GB ram to 16GB ram with 256GB HD? l could stretch it to have 16GB RAM and 512GB HD. which of these offer the best price to performance ratio?
With the application software that you are using, it seem unlikely that any of the configurations that you propose will give any additional performance over any other. The one exception is if you are considering an SSD instead of a rotating disk hard drive (RDHD), in which case the SSD will almost always provide noticeably better performance.
8GB of RAM is plenty for most purposes, and in most cases having 16 instead won't give you a large increase in speed. (The Mac OS will cache some stuff, such as Finder windows, if you have an excess of RAM, giving you a bit of a performance increase, but it won't amount to much.) If you work with
very large files, or on projects that must cache a lot of data (e.g. complex graphics, huge databases, 3D rendering, movie editing) then you will probably see better performance with additional RAM installed as your Mac can cache things in real RAM instead of in virtual memory, virtual memory being slower than real RAM.
Having a larger hard drive will almost never provide more performance than a smaller hard drive, with the exception being if your hard drive becomes too full because it wasn't large enough from the beginning to suit your long-term needs. As your hard drive (RDHD or SSD) becomes too full, performance will decrease noticably. And, of course, as I said above, an SSD will be noticeably faster than a RDHD.
is it true that the air will be better?
The M1 MBA is only a bit slower than the M1 MBP:
However, the MBA will slow down due to thermal throttling much sooner than the MBP. So the MBA isn't as suitable for sustained use of very demanding applications. On the other hand, the MBA is thinner and lighter than the MBP and is thus quite a bit more comfortable to carry around with you. The MBA is also less expensive. So it's a tradeoff between a bit more portability and a bit more performance. Personally I went with an earlier generation of MBA's over MBP's for my office, and I'm glad that I did.
