16g or 32g 2020 MBP??

[JohnDoe12]

@jerryk @casperes1996 @senttoschool @russell_314 @Grohowiak

Question for you all: What does having 32gs open the door to, outside of my current workflow, that having 16gs limits? Stated differently, What could I do with 32gs of memory that I can't do with 16gs?

To answer your question, smooth lag-free video editing and the ability to run multiple virtual machines are more doable with 32 instead of 16.

 

[iRun26.2]

To answer your question, smooth lag-free video editing and the ability to run multiple virtual machines are more doable with 32 instead of 16.

I ran heavy applications in both Mac OS X and Windows at the same time on only 8G of RAM. My computer was so slow having to write things to SSD instead of memory.

 

[donleon]

I mean the simple an slightly annoying answer is "Have more things in RAM".

Up to a point the argument is that you can use more RAM to keep more programs open at a time. I say up to a point because if you have 128GB of RAM and your main usage for that is to keep apps open, I struggle to think how you manage that many open programs, not to mention why.

After that point we need to look at how much RAM an individual app might consume. - There are videos on YouTube like "How many Chrome tabs before we fill 1TB of RAM", and that's a bit of fun but it's not realistic work.

To really get to a point where you're putting 32GB or more to use, you probably need to look at people running virtual machine; For example if you're developing cross platform software you could have a VM ready to run tests on another platform to make sure the code behaves well. Thus, you'd effectively need the memory for two computers.

We could also look to professional photography work with huge images. A camera might take a photo at 30 million pixels. A photographer might compose 7 pictures like that together into a single working file, and add individual layers of effects and such. And in addition to keeping it all in memory there's also the back buffer for undoing and all sorts.

In general, multimedia work can be quite hefty on all system resources, and photographers especially consume RAM more than any other system resource, though they'd probably also generally not go beyond 32 yet, but for some professionals, 16 might give some additional delays 32 wouldn't.

Could also have a workflow where having a RAMDisk could benefit, i.e. using some memory as a disk in Finder (all data would be gone on shutdowns or power drops) to have really fast data read/write for a scratch disk.

Using the iOS Simulator or the Android QEMU emulator with Xcode or Android Studio can also eat up memory, effectively the virtual machine argument again; I mostly do fine with 16GB for programming, but I can certainly see larger codebases where 32 could be beneficial.

And then of course there's processing of large amounts of data for scientific work where you can easily go to TB.

Some heavy users of Excel can even push Gigabytes of RAM on spreadsheets

Music production is also a big one; But again we're more in the professional or heavy prosumer space than the hobbyist. You can plug a guitar or keyboard into GarageBand perfectly fine with 16GB, but if you're running many plugins and effects through thousands of tracks, more memory gives a massive benefit.

With some exceptions RAM is one of those things where if you don't have enough, things slow down tremendously, but once you have enough, adding more doesn't really make a difference. - Now there are features in macOS like RAM caching that means you can still get small benefits from having a bit more than you need, but yeah.

It's often one of those "You know if you need it" things.

brother, this answered my question in a big way. Thank you.

 

[senttoschool]

@jerryk @casperes1996 @senttoschool @russell_314 @Grohowiak

Question for you all: What does having 32gs open the door to, outside of my current workflow, that having 16gs limits? Stated differently, What could I do with 32gs of memory that I can't do with 16gs?

I'm a software developer and designer.

At any point, I have the following apps opened:

Chrome open with 20 tabs
VSCode (Chromium based)
Whatsapp (Chromium based)
Slack (Chromium based)
Trello (Chromium based)
Spotify (Chromium based)
VPN
Terminal running the server, and other dev tools
Sketch with large asset files (design software)
Docker
Zoom
Various other Mac apps like Stocks, Calendar

Occasionally, I fire up a game to take a break but I have to close all my productivity apps and lose their states in order for the game to have enough RAM.

I don't even run any virtualization software.

8GB was an absolute pain. 16GB is starting to feel like a pain. 32GB is the absolute minimum for me for my next upgrade. Ideally, I'd upgrade to 64GB for future-proofing.

 

[senttoschool]

I've got people in my office editing photos and video with 8GB, so with 16 and your workflow, you'll be fine for 3 years and more.

I think your post needs more context:

1. Are they professionals or just occasionally putting something together for a PowerPoint?
2. Is the 8GB slowing them down? Would they be more productive with 16GB or even 32GB?
3. Do they have to close other apps in order to edit smoothly?

 

[PeterJP]

I think your post needs more context:

1. Are they professionals or just occasionally putting something together for a PowerPoint?
2. Is the 8GB slowing them down? Would they be more productive with 16GB or even 32GB?
3. Do they have to close other apps in order to edit smoothly?

1. They are professionals, doing occasional VIDEO and PHOTO edits for a TV broadcast channel (full HD) and OTT in Adobe apps (Premiere, Photoshop). Not talking about PowerPoints here. This is on short clips of max a few minutes. Our regular video editors use full sized edit workstations of course.
2. The 8GB doesn't really slow them down a lot.
3. Yes, they do have to close down other apps. For example, our social media guys require 16GB in order to do clipping on the live streams and to edit photo/video at the same time. 8GB doesn't cut it then.

But for occasional editing of short full HD clips, 8GB works better than many people think.

 

[senttoschool]

1. They are professionals, doing occasional VIDEO and PHOTO edits for a TV broadcast channel (full HD) and OTT in Adobe apps (Premiere, Photoshop). Not talking about PowerPoints here. This is on short clips of max a few minutes. Our regular video editors use full sized edit workstations of course.
2. The 8GB doesn't really slow them down a lot.
3. Yes, they do have to close down other apps. For example, our social media guys require 16GB in order to do clipping on the live streams and to edit photo/video at the same time. 8GB doesn't cut it then.

But for occasional editing of short full HD clips, 8GB works better than many people think.

I don't doubt that it "works". But I think your co-workers could really use at least 16GB of ram.

It's a small investment if they're really professionals.

 

[Pangalactic]

@jerryk @casperes1996 @senttoschool @russell_314 @Grohowiak

Question for you all: What does having 32gs open the door to, outside of my current workflow, that having 16gs limits? Stated differently, What could I do with 32gs of memory that I can't do with 16gs?

Not that much really- unless you professionally make huge tables in Excel, really complicated Photoshop projects, 3D rendering, or heavy video editing. For everything else, there could be a very minor difference, (we are talking about a percent or two levels of magnitude), or you will not notice it at all. Whether 1% extra performance in these cases is worth a few hundred extra bucks is up to you to decide.

 

[pshufd]

I don't doubt that it "works". But I think your co-workers could really use at least 16GB of ram.

It's a small investment if they're really professionals.

I have Firefox running with eight tabs open and it's using 5.7 GB and Brave with five tabs using 2.2 GB. I could restart Firefox and it would drop down to 2 GB and then start rising and I will likely do that before my day starts but it's nice if I don't have to bother for a few days. I really don't want to be forced to shut down a program. I may be doing something really important and don't want to lose work or context by having to shut things down during the trading day.
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Not that much really- unless you professionally make huge tables in Excel, really complicated Photoshop projects, 3D rendering, or heavy video editing. For everything else, there could be a very minor difference, (we are talking about a percent or two levels of magnitude), or you will not notice it at all. Whether 1% extra performance in these cases is worth a few hundred extra bucks is up to you to decide.

My workplace provides MBP 13s with top CPU specs and 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. I expect that they will go to 32 GB at some point. I guess that they feel that we're worth a few hundred extra bucks.

 

[PeterJP]

I don't doubt that it "works". But I think your co-workers could really use at least 16GB of ram.

It's a small investment if they're really professionals.

You can't upgrade 3 year old MacBooks. Of course, new guys get 16GB straight away. I was just giving an example of how far you can actually go with 8GB. Not suggesting in any way it would be ideal

 

[senttoschool]

You can't upgrade 3 year old MacBooks. Of course, new guys get 16GB straight away. I was just giving an example of how far you can actually go with 8GB. Not suggesting in any way it would be ideal

Your message was that 8GB can go far. I interpreted your original message as 8GB is really suboptimal and you should really go for 16GB in 2020.

 

[hovscorpion12]

Just as an example. I do not regularly photo edit or video edit. I do not have heavy Excel files. I've always had 16GB of RAM, however I recently took possession of a Mac with 32GB of RAM. Tried to do a mini stress test.

I have Twitter/Safari combo with 4-5 tabs open, 1 Windows 10 Parallels VM open with Windows version of photoshop. I also have the MacOS photoshop open working on a different project side by side. all of these easily pushes past 16GB. I'm not even using heavy PS projects or FCPX. Once I get back into FCPX, I will do a full stress test.

 

[PeterJP]

I have Twitter/Safari combo with 4-5 tabs open, 1 Windows 10 Parallels VM open with Windows version of photoshop. I also have the MacOS photoshop open working on a different project side by side. all of these easily pushes past 16GB.

There's a difference between how much RAM the system will use when it has plenty vs when it has little. When I do exactly the same things on my old MBP (8GB) vs my new one (64GB), the new one makes it seem like it will never work with 8GB. But it does.

Yes, 16GB is an obvious minimum when doing anything more than simple office apps these days. But most users overspec their system when it's not necessary. Myself included with that 64GB, but hey, it was a refurb that became available and I needed 32GB minimum. Not that many refurbs here in Belgium aside from standard builds, so I grabbed what I could and I'm not grumbling

 

[UBS28]

Based on what I am seeing, I should have gone for the 32gb model as I hitting the RAM limit.

But apple charges way too much money for RAM, so I decided to keep it anyway and let the SSD be used as additional RAM.

 

[ascender]

Based on what I am seeing, I should have gone for the 32gb model as I hitting the RAM limit.

But apple charges way too much money for RAM, so I decided to keep it anyway and let the SSD be used as additional RAM.

How does it manifest itself when you hit the RAM limit?

 

[Patcell]

Based on what I am seeing, I should have gone for the 32gb model as I hitting the RAM limit.

But apple charges way too much money for RAM, so I decided to keep it anyway and let the SSD be used as additional RAM.

I'm curious also as to what you are seeing in terms of a performance hit when you run out of RAM resources. Can you post of pic of Activity Monitor when you're in that scenario? Thanks!