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16" MacBook Pro RAM: 16GB or 32GB and Why?
- Thread starter 16bitplus
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I'm guessing the original poster made their decision.
I just bought a 16 inch MacBook Pro last month when it was $400 off...got the 8 core model with 16 GB of ram..with the discount...I don't regret the decision one bit...
I just bought a 16 inch MacBook Pro last month when it was $400 off...got the 8 core model with 16 GB of ram..with the discount...I don't regret the decision one bit...
If you want more RAM, get a Windows Desktop and just add cheap aftermarket RAM. I have a 2008 Dell Studio XPS with 48 GB of RAM running Windows 10 and I put my applications that need a lot of RAM on that system and run my other stuff on my MacBook Pro. The two systems are connected by Synergy so it feels like it's one system.
No, there are very few reasons to have 32GB of RAM (of course, having a lot of money and "just because I can" being two of them).
Games don't benefit from it.
Chrome/safari tabs mostly don't benefit from it.
Rendering doesn't benefit from it on a consumer level, and even on Pro level, as Youtuber Dave Lee said, "I've spent 10 hours editing my video, I don't really care whether it takes forty minutes or an hour to render".
Rendering 3D models does benefit from quite a bit, but in this case, you would probably be going for 64GB instead.
Games don't benefit from it.
Chrome/safari tabs mostly don't benefit from it.
Rendering doesn't benefit from it on a consumer level, and even on Pro level, as Youtuber Dave Lee said, "I've spent 10 hours editing my video, I don't really care whether it takes forty minutes or an hour to render".
Rendering 3D models does benefit from quite a bit, but in this case, you would probably be going for 64GB instead.
Absolutely agree. At the beginning of the pandemic I had to buy a laptop to work from home and needed as soon as possible so I went for the high end model because of the 1TB hard drive. Any change led to delivery being delayed by weeks, so I didn't configure it with 32 of RAM.
With a delay of a few days only, I'd have gone with the base model, upgrade the RAM and leave the base GPU. 16GB is ok, but I sometimes have 3/4GB of swap with a lot of tabs open in Safari/Chrome especially if I'm debugging something with the inspector.
Xcode and the simulators are also taxing on RAM, but either I do web development or iOS, otherwise 32GB would have been absolutely necessary
I bought the stock model with 16GB RAM. There was a discount for this specific model. If I upgrade RAM to 32GB, price gets increased by the upgrade as well as I don't get the discount. So there was a considerable price difference. I haven't noticed any performance problems at all. I use Xcode with multiple simulators opened, Android Studio with emulators running most of the time. I'm kinda glad I made this choice.
Firefox benefits from it. There's a performance slider that controls the number of processes from two to eight. Higher performance uses more processes and also more memory.
The other big benefit is that just about everything you touch gets cached so large file copies are very, very fast.
One of my main trading apps is set to using 12 GB of RAM. I have a friend that trades and uses the same setting. But my large memory system runs on a 2008 Windows Desktop and has six DIMM slots and RAM is cheap so I can put 48 GB for very little money. If you want a lot of RAM for very little money on a Mac, then the 2008-2012 Mac Pros might be the way to go as they have up to 12 DIMM slots and the DDR3 ECC RAM sticks are really cheap.
Test machines I used in my former job were typically allocated a TB of RAM.
I'm just pissed at Apple for not allowing us to do something basic, like swap out RAM chips when we need to.
Soldering them to the motherboard is just a slap in the face to consumers. If a RAM chip goes bad (which they are known to do), the laptop is practically toast.
That being said, I'd buy one with 32GB of RAM. No-brainer for those like me who use virtual machines, or those like you who do major video work.
I can't believe Apple still charges $2000 for an 8GB laptop these days; ridiculous.
Soldering them to the motherboard is just a slap in the face to consumers. If a RAM chip goes bad (which they are known to do), the laptop is practically toast.
That being said, I'd buy one with 32GB of RAM. No-brainer for those like me who use virtual machines, or those like you who do major video work.
I can't believe Apple still charges $2000 for an 8GB laptop these days; ridiculous.
I do some video work and photoshop/photography. I currently have an iMac Late 2015 and would like to replace it. But I'm torn between getting
- the high end standard spec
- Getting a BTO with more VRAM and RAM
- or see if I can wait till the end of the year with maybe a new 16" comes out this year
- the high end standard spec
- Getting a BTO with more VRAM and RAM
- or see if I can wait till the end of the year with maybe a new 16" comes out this year
If I were in the market for a 16" MacBook Pro, I'd go 32GB minimum. Why? Because you can't change your mind later and the regret of having spent the additional $400 and not needed it will be way less painful than the regret of not having spent it along with the limitations you might feel as part of your workload. I can't really vouch for spending the additional $400 on top of that ($800 total from 16GB) to go for 64GB given that, at that point, a 27" iMac might be a better value proposition. But it totally depends on how powerful you need a portable Mac to be and whether or not there's a more powerful desktop that you also use (as that, to me, would greatly influence how beefy your portable Mac really needs to be).
I like to keep my MacBook Pros for ten years and you want to go with more if possible.
For me...I would have lost the $400 discount and had to pay the RAM upgrade...$800 ain't worth it for me...my computer is running great...
I'm not suggesting that the average consumer actually needs 32GB RAM or more, but it's a bit more complicated than just looking at Activity Monitor to see how much you're typically using.
Although you may not be able to see it in usage monitoring applications, modern operating systems use virtually all of your RAM all the time for file caching. This memory is simply marked as less important by the OS and will be replaced/discarded when needed.
This means that having tons of RAM actually will subtly speed up your system even if you don't do anything super RAM-intensive. Do you need 32GB? No. But a system with 32 or 64GB may feel noticeably faster than a system with 16GB even if you're not pushing it.
Although you may not be able to see it in usage monitoring applications, modern operating systems use virtually all of your RAM all the time for file caching. This memory is simply marked as less important by the OS and will be replaced/discarded when needed.
This means that having tons of RAM actually will subtly speed up your system even if you don't do anything super RAM-intensive. Do you need 32GB? No. But a system with 32 or 64GB may feel noticeably faster than a system with 16GB even if you're not pushing it.
I went with 64GB because I need to run Parallels and a virtual machine with 32GB ram assigned to a Linux OS VM or a Windows Server VM in order to demo my product to customers. That gives me plenty of room to run the virtual machine and have plenty of ram for macOS and other applications. I tend to keep my machines a long time so I tend to buy higher than I need. I also went with 2TB so I would not have storage constraints.
The return on investment will be very very low without an actual workload. Excessive RAM used to be beneficial for most users to aid in keeping your data cached in RAM vs pulling it off a slow HDD. Apples NVME SSD nowadays mitigate that.
Typically (not always) if your using a laptop for a program that is starting to REQUIRE the recommended 32gb of RAM you'll find other bottlenecks in the hardware too. For example Adobe Premiere/After effects. If you are working with 4k 10bit video with a lot of effects on a laptop you are putting yourself at a disadvantage right out of the gate. It would be much more advantageous to use a system that has all the components for that task (workstation)...desktop CPU with more cores to speed up export, 10Gbit ethernet for external media storage, a display that can actually display the project in its native output resolution and color depth (also important if you are the colorist too), better cooling for the export process, etc etc. Its not impossible its just not optimal...
Regardless 32gb of RAM won't hurt anything and if you have the disposable income than go for it. The realist in me says not too but the geek in me would definitely do it.
Typically (not always) if your using a laptop for a program that is starting to REQUIRE the recommended 32gb of RAM you'll find other bottlenecks in the hardware too. For example Adobe Premiere/After effects. If you are working with 4k 10bit video with a lot of effects on a laptop you are putting yourself at a disadvantage right out of the gate. It would be much more advantageous to use a system that has all the components for that task (workstation)...desktop CPU with more cores to speed up export, 10Gbit ethernet for external media storage, a display that can actually display the project in its native output resolution and color depth (also important if you are the colorist too), better cooling for the export process, etc etc. Its not impossible its just not optimal...
Regardless 32gb of RAM won't hurt anything and if you have the disposable income than go for it. The realist in me says not too but the geek in me would definitely do it.
my chrome tabs disagree. i'm pushing 28gb ram on chrome alone. it gets worse once you allocate ram space to parallel
Are you looking at how much ram is used,or ram pressure? I have an iMac w 40gb. The system uses much of that even when I have very little stuff open. But ram pressure is green. Macao’s will use the available ram, doesn’t really mean you need that much ram. More ram will never hurt, but most will get very little benefit going beyond 32.
yeah i know what you on about, i have both 32 and a 16gb mac, same workflow, although ram pressure is green on both, with 28/32gb, and 11/16gb. i definitely can feel the sluggishness on the 16gb with the same amount of programs and tabs.
Do you still feel that difference between 16gb and 32gb with ram pressure green on both?
I just moved from 16gb 2017 to 16gb 2019 and the 2019 is clearly faster, although cpu load is less than 50% on both machines. The only difference is 2 extra cores (that generate extra heat).
I keep a bunch of things open, but usually no VMs or anything like that, wondering if I should have gone with 32gb!
32GB (or, if you can afford it and think you might need it, 64GB); you can't upgrade it aftermarket. Once that logic board has been configured with the RAM and storage that it has, that's it! Better to get more than you think you need up front than buy less than you'll actually need and spend your entire time owning it regretting not having splurged.
