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13" 32GB ETA? Wait or stopgap?

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splitpea

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 21, 2009
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Among the starlings
My workhorse 2013 rMBP has served me well, and I've been holding out for an upgrade to 32GB, since 16 has been barely enough in the laptop my office provided, and I want my next laptop to last several years again. But recently it's been floundering with just 8GB, and I need something beefier for a contract I recently landed.

It seems, though, that with the next generation of Intel processors on its way, that 32GB could be just around the corner. It would be a shame to drop $2500 on a computer that'll last two years when the one that'll last 5 years is 6 months away. The 15" isn't an option due to a) cost and b) back problems.

I've been considering getting a refurb 2018 or 2019 MBA with 16GB as a less expensive stopgap instead. But the Everymac database suggests the benchmarks for those models are almost identical to my current machine.

To make things worse, I'm in a bit of a temporary cash crunch.

Any thoughts on whether I should:

1) Keep holding out for the 32GB MBP

2) Buy the 16GB MBP now

3) Buy the refurb MBA now and trade up for the 32GB MBP soon

4) Something else?
 
Is the 15" with 32GB out of option? If you so desire the 32GB on the 13" I'd wait for end of October or worse.. Spring.
 
jerryk said:
Is 16GB really a limit? What does memory pressure in the activity monitor show when running your workload?
Click to expand...

I'm tired of this question every time someone says they need more memory. 16GB is not limiting now in a problematic way, but it will be within a year or two at the current rate of memory usage growth. If I'm going to drop $2k+ on a laptop, it damn well better be useful longer than that.

The OS seems to always try to keep 1.5GB free, so my 8GB Mac will sit at 6.5 while swapping like crazy, and the 16GB sits at 12GB used, 14.5 with a VM running. God forbid you also want to run a simulator at the same time for a recent phone because you're using the VM to develop an API for a mobile app, and also be able to look up docs on your browser. I'm a software developer. Do you know how much memory Android Studio gobbles even without a simulator running?
 
splitpea said:
I'm tired of this question every time someone says they need more memory. 16GB is not limiting now in a problematic way, but it will be within a year or two at the current rate of memory usage growth. If I'm going to drop $2k+ on a laptop, it damn well better be useful longer than that.

The OS seems to always try to keep 1.5GB free, so my 8GB Mac will sit at 6.5 while swapping like crazy, and the 16GB sits at 12GB used, 14.5 with a VM running. God forbid you also want to run a simulator at the same time for a recent phone because you're using the VM to develop an API for a mobile app, and also be able to look up docs on your browser. I'm a software developer. Do you know how much memory Android Studio gobbles even without a simulator running?
Click to expand...


I am a developer in ML and Android so I fully understand how much memory Android Studio uses. With that said, I do not run into memory issues on my 16 GB 2018 MBP 15, even when running a ML model providing services to a Android app on the same laptop. I routinely do such things when adding Image classificiation or Sentiment Analysis to website and Android Apps.

My guess is that the 13" with 32 GB is going to get very expensive, very quickly. To see this, price out a 13" with 16GB and 512GB SSD vs a 15" with the same the configuration. You find out the costs get pretty close, and you get things like a dGPU and more cores with the 15". So if you do stay with the 13" expect to pay very close to the what a 15" will be and get less performance.

Best of luck.
 
splitpea said:
I'm tired of this question every time someone says they need more memory. 16GB is not limiting now in a problematic way, but it will be within a year or two at the current rate of memory usage growth. If I'm going to drop $2k+ on a laptop, it damn well better be useful longer than that.

The OS seems to always try to keep 1.5GB free, so my 8GB Mac will sit at 6.5 while swapping like crazy, and the 16GB sits at 12GB used, 14.5 with a VM running. God forbid you also want to run a simulator at the same time for a recent phone because you're using the VM to develop an API for a mobile app, and also be able to look up docs on your browser. I'm a software developer. Do you know how much memory Android Studio gobbles even without a simulator running?
Click to expand...


I don't mean to speak for Jerry, but I think the reason for the question is because many people don't understand how macOS uses memory, and there are gobs of people who will tell you that macOS is simply unusable on 8GB. Then other forum members read those posts and believe it, and perpetuate the myth too. I think it's worse because the 15" ships with 16GB minimum and then people who have that machine see that macOS is routinely using more than 8GB of memory and think "well of course it wouldn't work with 8GB" without understanding what macOS is actually doing with the memory.

Very obviously that's not the case, macOS will work for many people with 8GB.

It seems that you do know how memory works on macOS, but that almost certainly puts you in the minority.

Just look at the threads about CPU usage or memory usage and see how many posts it takes before anyone asks about Activity Monitor. And when that does come up, how many posts before correct advice is provided to focus on memory pressure and not memory used.

I was going to ask you about memory pressure too. It's nothing to be offended about, it's just that it's unusual that folks really do need 32GB of memory.
 
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Howard2k said:
I don't mean to speak for Jerry, but I think the reason for the question is because many people don't understand how macOS uses memory, and there are gobs of people who will tell you that macOS is simply unusable on 8GB. Then other forum members read those posts and believe it, and perpetuate the myth too. I think it's worse because the 15" ships with 16GB minimum and then people who have that machine seen that macOS is routinely using more than 8GB of memory and think "well of course it wouldn't work with 8GB" without understanding what macOS is actually doing with the memory.

Very obviously that's not the case, macOS will work for many people with 8GB.

It seems that you do know how memory works on macOS, but that almost certainly puts you in the minority.

Just look at the threads about CPU usage or memory usage and see how many posts it takes before anyone asks about Activity Monitor. And when that does come up, how many posts before correct advice is provided to focus on memory pressure and not memory used.

I was going to ask you about memory pressure too. It's nothing to be offended about, it's just that it's unusual that folks really do need 32GB of memory.
Click to expand...

This is good advice.
Spend some time looking at Activity monitor and review your needs.
I have 32gb on my machine, and don’t need it 80% of the time, but I definitely do need it for the other 20%.
And I can say I use my partners 8gb ram MBP the odd time, and for general use it is more than fine.
 
You're right, I snapped unnecessarily, and I apologize for that.

I got a little frustrated by what in this place always seems like like a predictable derailment of the conversation. IMO "do you need it?" is a distraction from the original question. But that doesn't excuse my tone.

Anyway, back to the original question: how best to end up with a computer with 32GB RAM in the long term AND one with at least 16GB in the short term, in a cost-effective manner?
 
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If it's still limping along, I would hold off.

My guess is that we'll get 32GB options for the 13" in the second quarter of next year. You're right that the benchmarks of the Air are not much better, and since you're in a cash crunch the loss you take on the Air if/when you trade up will be unpleasant. Worse, the Air likely performs worse under sustained loads because of cooling limitations, it doesn't have direct cooling for the CPU.

But hey, Apple gives 14 days no questions asked returns in many countries, so I would actually consider buying it and giving it a shot. That's what I did on my initial Macbook purchase. I was on the fence between a 4GB Air and an 8GB Pro and opted for the Air. In real life I was able to see memory issues and so returned it and picked up a Pro. Apple's return policy was invaluable in that regard. I hate to see people taking advantage of it but I think this is worthy scenario.
 
I don't think the CPUs/motherboards in the 13" support 32GB - unless I'm out of touch.
Anyhow I can't see it happening anytime soon (unfortunately).
 
The Mercurian said:
I don't think the CPUs/motherboards in the 13" support 32GB - unless I'm out of touch.
Anyhow I can't see it happening anytime soon (unfortunately).
Click to expand...

Next MacBook Pro update is rumored to be a redesign, starting with possible 16 inch. I can't see why they would keep limiting the 13 inch to 16 gb if they do a total redesign.
 
On a side note, 32GB of LPDDR4x is probably going to be quite expensive...
 
The Mercurian said:
I don't think the CPUs/motherboards in the 13" support 32GB - unless I'm out of touch.
Anyhow I can't see it happening anytime soon (unfortunately).
Click to expand...

I thought the CPU was limited too, but according to Intel's documentation the current 13" CPU (I5-8279U) does support 32GB.

Intel® Core™ i5-8279U Processor (6M Cache, up to 4.10 GHz) - Product Specifications | Intel

Intel® Core™ i5-8279U Processor (6M Cache, up to 4.10 GHz) quick reference with specifications, features, and technologies.
ark.intel.com ark.intel.com

Perhaps there is a limit of 32GB with DDR4 and 16GB with LPDDR3?
 
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Howard2k said:
I thought the CPU was limited too, but according to Intel's documentation the current 13" CPU (I5-8279U) does support 32GB.

[...]

Perhaps there is a limit of 32GB with DDR4 and 16GB with LPDDR3?
Click to expand...

The limit here is the RAM density. DDR4 has higher memory capacity per chip, so you can fit double the RAM into the same logic board area. That is also the reason why the 15" supports 32Gb with DDR4 but not before (because they can do it within the same board space allocation).
 
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Another option is to have a desktop to remote into. You can build a hackintosh with tons of ram for pretty cheap.
 
splitpea said:
You're right, I snapped unnecessarily, and I apologize for that.

I got a little frustrated by what in this place always seems like like a predictable derailment of the conversation. IMO "do you need it?" is a distraction from the original question. But that doesn't excuse my tone.

Anyway, back to the original question: how best to end up with a computer with 32GB RAM in the long term AND one with at least 16GB in the short term, in a cost-effective manner?
Click to expand...


Windows laptop for short term...
 
lixuelai said:
Another option is to have a desktop to remote into. You can build a hackintosh with tons of ram for pretty cheap.
Click to expand...

Remote access requires a static IP, tho, right? Otherwise a Mac Mini with an aftermarket RAM upgrade (and maybe external storage instead of paying Apple through the nose?) might be a workable long-term solution too.
 
splitpea said:
Over a few years, that costs as much as a new laptop.
Click to expand...

Teamviewer is free for personal use. There are alternatives like Anydesk etc. You can probably set up a DDNS as well, some routers have that built in (higher end Asus ones for example).

I use Teamviewer and Anydesk to remote into a server back in the U.S. (I am on a work assignment in HK). Even across half the planet the performance is pretty respectable.
 
splitpea said:
Remote access requires a static IP, tho, right?
Click to expand...

Or you can use some sort of dynamic DNS and remote using built-in screen sharing tool. Many modern rooters have this kind of functionality built-in.

At any rate, what exactly are you doing with your machine? Maybe there are some better solutions (as in using cloud computing or similar).
 
leman said:
Or you can use some sort of dynamic DNS and remote using built-in screen sharing tool. Many modern rooters have this kind of functionality built-in.

At any rate, what exactly are you doing with your machine? Maybe there are some better solutions (as in using cloud computing or similar).
Click to expand...

Software development, mostly for web, but some native mobile. The latter is hardest to use the cloud for; but also the startup world is so heavily invested in Apple now that some clients' web setups don't support anything but Mac for development environments (or if they do, the effort to set up and maintain a dev instance on Linux would be prohibitive and require heavy use of skills I'm relatively weak in).
 
splitpea said:
Software development, mostly for web, but some native mobile. The latter is hardest to use the cloud for; but also the startup world is so heavily invested in Apple now that some clients' web setups don't support anything but Mac for development environments (or if they do, the effort to set up and maintain a dev instance on Linux would be prohibitive and require heavy use of skills I'm relatively weak in).
Click to expand...

From one fellow developer to another - I really don’t see how 16 GB is going to be a limitation any time soon for this kind of work. I’d be more concerned about the SSD size since modern dev ecosystems have this bad habit of copying stuff all over the place for no obvious reason. In my opinion, your worries are a bit premature, but of course it’s none of my business. Frankly though, make sure that you don’t make your environment substantially worse by trying to fix a non-issue.

Regardless of all this, I’d wait until Ice Lake 13” is available - should not be too long, it’s either this year or early next year. I just don’t see much point to buy a 4 year old CPU today, even if it’s been optimized the hell out. And maybe you will even get a 32GB option then - even though, as I mentioned before, LPDDR4X is not cheap
 
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