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16" MBP - is 16GB Ram enough?

dmaxdmax

dmaxdmax

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 26, 2006
776
176
My sense is that getting the base amount of ram is nearly always a mistake. It's only offered so they can show the lowest price possible for "starting at $1,200" or whatever. If this computer is to last a minimum of 6 years (like the one it's replacing) is it a given that 32GB is worth it? I'm not going to guess what it will be used for in 3+ years. She's in college now - who knows what she'll need in actual life.

TIA
 
My 2011 came with 8gb. When running Parallels and Windows, it was running out of memory. An upgrade to 16gb fixed it. No longer run virtualization and have never run into memory pressure problems. Checking the memory utilization on her current machine should give some clues. If I was buying a new machine I would stick with the 16gb since I’m pretty sure that it will not be a problem.
 
16gb is more than enough for 90% of tasks.
Unless you're running several virtual machines or doing some hardcore content creation on a dialy basis, 16gb will do fine.
And if the RAM 'runs' out you still have a blazing fast ssd for a pagefile.
 
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seinman said:
If you have to ask, the answer is yes, it's enough. If you needed more, you'd know that already.
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I phrased it badly. Will is likely be enough in 5 years when we’re up to 10.19 and several new generations of Photoshop and other apps?
 
I have not seen a major change in memory usage for specific applications over time when they are used in the same way.

Increased need for memory would typically come from you using new applications (e.g. starting to run VM) or use existing applications in a new way (Photoshop with much larger images). Only you know this.

@seinman advice is good advice and the advice I would also give. If you need it you know it. For the other 90% of the users 16GB is enough.
 
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16 is great 32 is even better but not really necessary. I have an air with 16gb.. runs amazing. Fan almost never turns on.
 
I have a Mac Mini with 64 Ram and it made no difference. If I get a MBP today, I would get it with 32 MB of ram at least, the reason is that in the future, if I sell it, it will have more value. If you can get the 32 it will be great even 16MB of ram works for everything unless... you are into motion graphics in 4K like in After Effects and such.

But 16 would do for school. Even I believe that the wear and tear of the school will cause enough damage to the computer that having 32 GB of Ram will make no sense.
 
dmaxdmax said:
I phrased it badly. Will is likely be enough in 5 years when we’re up to 10.19 and several new generations of Photoshop and other apps?
Click to expand...

Maybe.. If it's not, it's probably not worth budgeting for. You pay a high premium for this stuff when you have to buy it through a configure to order option. I always budget around the next 2 years of use, since things become much more uncertain past that point.

At 5 years you are approaching vintage status (typically 5 years after discontinuation), where repair service availability is limited based on the availability of parts. Considering the move toward cpus running Apple's version of ARM instruction sets, I don't expect the latest versions of these third party applications to support whatever you buy today in 5 years unless you run Windows and are willing to accommodate the fact that Apple doesn't maintain bootcamp drivers indefinitely.


apple_unreal said:
I have a Mac Mini with 64 Ram and it made no difference. If I get a MBP today, I would get it with 32 MB of ram at least, the reason is that in the future, if I sell it, it will have more value.
Click to expand...

Why do you guys offer this kind of advice? It comes up on here quite often, and it reads like complete and utter ******** to me. Right now Apple charges $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB on a mac mini or $600 to go to 32GB. The base model starts at $799. You will not recoup anything close to that upgrade cost in a few years even under normal circumstances. With Apple switching hardware, you will recover less.
 
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I'm running 64 GB and am using 50% of it at the moment. I'm currently running three virtual machines (2 macOS and 1 Windows 8.1). It's pretty cool to be able to do this.
 
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As long as you’re not doing heavy video editing or photoshopping 16GB is plenty. I’m a power user running Citrix for work, 10+ tabs, a couple of remote desktops, outlook, watching an mp4 movie, 2-3 excel files, and 2 word files, etc.. and plenty from 16GB.
 
pshufd said:
I'm running 64 GB and am using 50% of it at the moment. I'm currently running three virtual machines (2 macOS and 1 Windows 8.1). It's pretty cool to be able to do this.
Click to expand...


Same - with a totally maxed configuration it’s amazing to have the ability to just randomly play around with different projects and operating systems, all without taking any sort of performance hit. Gimme this machine with a function bar and the touchbar moved up (or taken away) and I’d be 100% happy with this baby for quite awhile.
 
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