16” M1 Pro, how much ram for developers?

[nbjustforfun]

I'm happy to have deleted the 16GB order to upgrade the ram.
This is my Activity monitor with just a light swifui project on Xcode and my company's Android app on Android Studio.
I have: Xcode, iPhone 13Pro simulator, Android Studio, Pixel 4 simulator, MS Teams, 8 Safari tabs.
I consider this a light workflow.

That memory usage does not really tell you much. Mac OS will use what ever you throw at it. Yellow means nothing no a days with the M1 chips. It just means apple is saying- why is all this memory just sitting here. Let’s use it for something! If I had 32gb it will still go to yellow. FYI ur swap is 0 which means what u have loaded is not needing to swap to ssd. Even if it did swap to ssd who cares. SSD’s r so fast now a days u barely notice and the old school stats on “wearing it out” is not relevant to todays SSD’s.

 

[CalMin]

Not a software dev, or an advocate for folks spending money needlessly, but if you’re using the machine to make a living then the extra 400€ shouldn’t be a big deal. If you don’t get it, you will always wonder - especially on that first day when you experience a slowdown.

 

[tdbrown75]

You cannot compare an intel MacBook to an M1 MacBook from a ram usage perspective. Intel, definitely more ram. M1 memory management is way more fine tuned and efficient.

FWIW, my 2019 MacBook Pro I9 used less memory than my M1 Max does, at least according to the memory monitor.

Tim

 

[Appltsla]

This is my activity monitor after an average day. So yeah 15gb of swap memory used on 32gb of ram. The photo was taken a few minutes before the whole MacBook crashed on me and restarted, which happens once every couple of day. M1 might be more efficient and it could be just 10gb of swap memory used, but why not just pay a little more for 64gb if it’s your money making tool. My company just ordered all 4-500+ iOS engineers a M1 max 64gb each.

 

[TinyMito]

Mobile dev here professionally and as a hobby, worked on both Android and iOS native projects, as-well as React Native. You can get away with 16GB but the experience won't be the best, my advise is to get at least 32 GB. When you run Emulators and or Simulators as-well as your IDE(s) and multiple tabs you quickly go through that RAM.

I personally ordered 64GB as I usually have many projects open and I use mostly InteliJ based IDEs that are resource intensive. I allow them to use a lot of memory which is great for indexing and more.
For reference, I am on my Mac Pro with 96GB RAM, currently 53GB RAM in use and that's with just 1 Android Emulator running. Android Studio alone uses nearly 20GB of RAM.

I have the 14" here with 16GB. This time around with M1 chip works differently and more efficient. The 16GB works pretty much like a 32GB ram system as far I tested running all rendering applications + emulations at the same time. I am quite shocked. My PC has a 32GB ram manage to keep about the same amount usage.

 

[TouchVa]

I would buy 16 inch

• Apple M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
• 32GB unified memory
• 1TB SSD storage

Just because the battery life lasts longer then 14 inch and bigger screen size.

I think this machine will be good enough for 4 - 5 years
but in the meantime if the technology goes fast, and PC can do A LOT better and cheaper then Mac.
I might build a PC and install MacOs/Windows/Linux on Proxmox VE
And use this macbook pro to remote to my new hardware.

You can't deny the batter life of the new macbook pro is Awesome!
It is what I want for traveling, I don't have to worry about battery anymore.
Just carry one device.

 

[salvatore.p]

That memory usage does not really tell you much. Mac OS will use what ever you throw at it. Yellow means nothing no a days with the M1 chips. It just means apple is saying- why is all this memory just sitting here. Let’s use it for something! If I had 32gb it will still go to yellow. FYI ur swap is 0 which means what u have loaded is not needing to swap to ssd. Even if it did swap to ssd who cares. SSD’s r so fast now a days u barely notice and the old school stats on “wearing it out” is not relevant to todays SSD’s.

SSD aren’t fast as LPDDR5, they are factors slower in read and write performances. Not taking account of latencies…

Swap, from OS’s point of view is the last way to make the system work even when the physical RAM isn’t enough for all the task running at that given time.


I cannot understand why people are advising to get te lowest amount of ram possibile even to professionals.
Moreover, we are developers with an high degree of knowledge of how the Von Neumann machine works!!