RAM Usage on MBP

[ModusPwnin']

I'm hoping to run Solidworks through Parallels occasionally on a non-TB 13in 2016 MBP. Thus, I'm leaning towards getting 16gb of RAM. However, I know that over 90% of the time, I won't be needing that much RAM, so I'm wondering: how exactly does macOS utilize free RAM? Does macOS take advantage of the extra RAM to do anything behind the scenes, like pre-loading commonly used programs, or using the extra RAM as cache for the processor? If so, will this negatively affect battery life?

 

[viljamip]

I'm hoping to run Solidworks through Parallels occasionally on a non-TB 13in 2016 MBP. Thus, I'm leaning towards getting 16gb of RAM. However, I know that over 90% of the time, I won't be needing that much RAM, so I'm wondering: how exactly does macOS utilize free RAM? Does macOS take advantage of the extra RAM to do anything behind the scenes, like pre-loading commonly used programs, or using the extra RAM as cache for the processor? If so, will this negatively affect battery life?

Yes, macOS tries to utilize all of the RAM available. I have pretty much always over 20/32GB used in my iMac and more if I do something that requires more. You can go to Activity monitor and it tells you what your RAM is used for. I read some where that doubling your RAM capacity adds about 10% of its power usage. I'd estimate that the low power RAM used in the MBP will use at most 20% of the whole systems power so it is safe to say that you will see a battery life decrease of about 1-5%, which is hardly noticeable. Especially as the non-TB easily gets past 10h in light use.