I’m planning to purchase a Macbook Air (M2), and I’m not sure which of the ones above I should upgrade (for future-proofing) on the customization page — I can only afford 1 and IDK which is more important. It’ll be for the usual day-to-day stuff: sheets, browsing, movies, and The Sims 4 lol. No video editing, coding, or music production.
This is the 1st laptop I’ll purchase for myself and I’ve never had any experience with Macs either, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
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SoC means “System on a Chip”.
Normally we have everything separate. The CPU only does processing, and needs external support components to actually do something useful. Memory and storage are external, and so are things like video cards. You can remove the video card and put a better one in its place.
In an SoC a lot of stuff is built in, which may include memory, storage, cell phone/wifi functionality, 3D acceleration, video playback, and so on.
The upside of a SoC is that it’s all very compact and very tightly integrated. The downside it’s that it’s all bundled together. You can’t upgrade those parts because they’re an inseparable part of the system.
On a Mac M2, I think the memory and storage are fixed from the factory and can’t be upgraded afterwards.
In general, more memory never hurts. Performance drops extremely noticeably if you ever are in a situation where you don’t have enough, and in general is likely to be the thing that limits the longevity of the system the most. CPUs these days improve slowly, a 20% faster CPU is nice but not groundbreaking. But having too little memory to work may make things completely unusable.
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