64GB RAM is not a wise buy, and here's why

[BeatWilson]

Yeah i debate on actually buying a 2.3ghz I9 32or64GB Ram, top specced video card with a 1tbssd.

I run alot of tabs at once.... Thats a problem of mine. Im constantly reading and researching, but when im not doing that... I make music so...Sometimes, depending on what genre of music i am creating i could be running like 20 instances of VST's(Virtual Plugins) in Ableton. Maybe Running a couple other programs in the background..

Right now i am typing on my Late 2011 Macbook Pro with 16GB Ram. I got like 10 Tabs open. Yeah i know... just close them.... but its just how i learn. so for me i feel like i could benefit from it. Im not sure if its completely neccesary to be honest but if some new vst's or updates came out for music programs that make them more demanding than having that ram is nice. Going from 32 to 64 isnt really that much. If im basically gonna spec out everything and im spending this much money, which is insane by the way) then i mine as well spend the extra 200CAD for the ram.

I just really hope that these machine done have issues with the logic boards, or anything like that. Expensive ass product....

 

[Stephen.R]

Who says I care. They can do what ever they want, but when people ask about getting memory, I offered my opinion

You don't care but made a completely irrelevant and misleading comparison to 'make your point'? Ok.

 

[Glockworkorange]

Depends on how you look at it, some would say it’s insane to spend so much on a MacBook and not go for a cheaper laptop option like a HP or Dell.

but given if one is prepared to spend up to 3k on a premium laptop then increasing that cost by another 7-10% that might make the machine last a couple more years then it may be worth it.

but yes for me my priority would be a laptop that can do what I want (run multiple VMs) comfortably without getting stressed and loud annoying fan noise — I might be prepared to pay a premium price for this, but only if it does what I’m after.. otherwise maybe as someone else suggested I should give up on the laptop dream and get a desktop like the IMac Pro for my needs. (Not that that comes cheap either)

Fair enough! When I wrote that post, I thought the increase cost of RAM was in the thousands. It's not--it's in the hundreds, so I tend to agree with you.
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Yeah i debate on actually buying a 2.3ghz I9 32or64GB Ram, top specced video card with a 1tbssd.

I run alot of tabs at once.... Thats a problem of mine. Im constantly reading and researching, but when im not doing that... I make music so...Sometimes, depending on what genre of music i am creating i could be running like 20 instances of VST's(Virtual Plugins) in Ableton. Maybe Running a couple other programs in the background..

Right now i am typing on my Late 2011 Macbook Pro with 16GB Ram. I got like 10 Tabs open. Yeah i know... just close them.... but its just how i learn. so for me i feel like i could benefit from it. Im not sure if its completely neccesary to be honest but if some new vst's or updates came out for music programs that make them more demanding than having that ram is nice. Going from 32 to 64 isnt really that much. If im basically gonna spec out everything and im spending this much money, which is insane by the way) then i mine as well spend the extra 200CAD for the ram.

I just really hope that these machine done have issues with the logic boards, or anything like that. Expensive ass product....

Chrome or Safari tabs?
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Think it's pretty obvious that it's currently applicable to only a very small number of people, and those people will know who they are? Still going to see people recommending 32GB and 64GB to people who are browsing Facebook to 'future proof' their purchase, though 🙄

If you're already over $3K (US) and the increase is $400.00, might as well go for it.

You've had that 2011 for 8 years. I mean, if you're going to keep this one for 8 years? I think you just buy it.

 

[Stephen.R]

You've had that 2011 for 8 years. I mean, if you're going to keep this one for 8 years? I think you just buy it.

Exactly. Even from base, it's $800 to max out - about 27.4c/day if you keep it for 8 years, and it has $0 value at the end. Which it won't, unless it's physically destroyed.

 

[BeatWilson]

Fair enough! When I wrote that post, I thought the increase cost of RAM was in the thousands. It's not--it's in the hundreds, so I tend to agree with you.
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Chrome or Safari tabs?
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If you're already over $3K (US) and the increase is $400.00, might as well go for it.

You've had that 2011 for 8 years. I mean, if you're going to keep this one for 8 years? I think you just buy it.

Chrome Tabs. Yeah 8 years. I had to get a PC Desktop In-between for a bit so i could use my Macbook for Browsing the net, djing and minor music production. Before i used to heavily use it. Now that these ones are more powerful and have a hopeful keyboard i maybe willing to buy another apple product. I just hope it lasts as long as this one did. I had to get this one repaired twice. Both i believe were logic board issues that could of been make by overheating. Thats pretty good. Very surprised its lasted this long.

But once again.... 32gb ram or 64... save a couple hundred or not.

 

[Hazmat401]

personally I find it incredible. I can give 32gb to my parallels VM for crunching PowerBI reports beyond compare. I currently give Windows 16gb and max it out regularly.

I can give Windows 4 cores and 32gb of ram inside MacOS. Incredible.
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most of my “focus time” work is on cross country flights. And as a 300k Mile a year flyer... I’m not the only one. Lots of professionals doing real work in the sky.

I can relate... I’m more of a regional guy but I spend many nights in hotel rooms

I hope you are in First class pretty often

 

[Glockworkorange]

Chrome Tabs. Yeah 8 years. I had to get a PC Desktop In-between for a bit so i could use my Macbook for Browsing the net, djing and minor music production. Before i used to heavily use it. Now that these ones are more powerful and have a hopeful keyboard i maybe willing to buy another apple product. I just hope it lasts as long as this one did. I had to get this one repaired twice. Both i believe were logic board issues that could of been make by overheating. Thats pretty good. Very surprised its lasted this long.

But once again.... 32gb ram or 64... save a couple hundred or not.

Dude, if you plan on keeping it that long, max it the F out. When I originally started commenting on this thread, I thought the RAM upgrade was thousands of $'s. It's hundreds though. I know that's still not "cheap," but if you're going to try and keep it 8 years? Go for it!

 

[sat24]

2TB just seem like a lot? Or is it actually easier to fill up than most realize?

I would suspect someone who does photography and has a lot of RAW files also.

I got 32GB and 2TB. I find it is much easier to fill up space on the SSD than on the RAM as I shoot 4k60 footage on GoPro7 and also own a 42MP DSLR (a7r3). Also with SSDs, you do not want to fill up more than 70% of their capacity. I use VMs, but lightweight ones (linux) which dont need more than 4GB. I will run a Windows one with 8-16GB in parallel. So that still leaves 12-20GB for the Host.

 

[BeatWilson]

Dude, if you plan on keeping it that long, max it the F out. When I originally started commenting on this thread, I thought the RAM upgrade was thousands of $'s. It's hundreds though. I know that's still not "cheap," but if you're going to try and keep it 8 years? Go for it!

yeah dude. use it for video, music production, and djing for a bit. then once it becomes to old use it only for djing and browsing again, then let the cycle continue. It was between this or speccing out a Desktop PC. Then buying a 13/14 inch whenever they come out or if i decide earlier. Still debating. Ill waiting a couple hours i guess before pulling the trigger. Im not a big fan of Windows OS but i grew up off both, so being able to swap out parts is a big up for me. I just wish Apple kept allowing us to upgrade the ram instead of them having to do everything. Oh well. I keep debating for now.

 

[Rafterman]

Sounds like a lot of justification for not wanting to shell out the extra cash.

Sorry, but if you do a lot of multitasking, especially of heavy end programs ;like viddeo editing, or run VMs, 64GB is golden. Even if you do a lot of light stuff, but have a lot of apps open at once, 64GB will make things smoother.

 

[CM_1986]

From a pure value stand point which base is better? The 512 or the 1TB?

 

[Sanpete]

The biggest memory hog on my machine right now is MacRumors, at over 2GB.

I like to keep at least 34 tabs open in Safari, plus several in Chrome. That by itself uses half my 16GB, and I'm at over 13GB right now doing nothing demanding, though I imagine a lot of this is just stuff claiming memory, not actually using it. Running a photo or video editing app at the same time can be tight. So I'd like more RAM just for casual, nonprofessional use. But I doubt I'll be moved to spend the additional $400 for it.

 

[Ryan P]

Have been putting off an upgrade waiting for this MacBook revision, but wasn’t expecting 64GB option.

Went with 32GB, cancelled order and then moved to 64GB. Been struggling to make do with 16GB, with heavy swapping out to SSD, having to restrict how many applications I am running, how much RAM I assign to virtual machines, and restarting apps just to free up memory. Have actually had OS X tell me I have run out of memory on multiple occasions. The performance issues have cost me money for sure.

Maxed out everything else as well other than SSD. Hopefully this is fast enough that I don’t need to consider the new Mac Pro.

 

[kmahmood]

Sounds like a lot of justification for not wanting to shell out the extra cash.

Sorry, but if you do a lot of multitasking, especially of heavy end programs ;like viddeo editing, or run VMs, 64GB is golden. Even if you do a lot of light stuff, but have a lot of apps open at once, 64GB will make things smoother.

Agreed, very well put.

I'm sold on 64GB RAM with an i9 for my use case of running VMs, multi-tasking, lots of apps open and browser tabs and for the 5-10% increase in cost, it's worth it alone just to have the feeling of 'infinite RAM' if nothing else knowing that's not a memory limit I will be hitting anytime soon (unless I get really carried away with VMs).

I would go ahead and place the order - only waiting to see reports of thermal performance and absence of loud fan noise all the time when coping with high workloads which is THE single most important thing for me.

 

[Zwhaler]

My point was if you purchase 64GB now to cover your basis and "future" proof you are bottlenecking yourself because in 3-4 years when 64GB may be more feasible the rest of your MBP will have a 3-4 year old graphics card and processor.

Which isn't that bad of a thing. My Mac Pro has a 2010 processor (2x 6 core) and still works great. 64GB is a good option for those who expect 5+ years of high performance out of the machine, and it will surely deliver.

 

[pshufd]

The biggest memory hog on my machine right now is MacRumors, at over 2GB.

I like to keep at least 34 tabs open in Safari, plus several in Chrome. That by itself uses half my 16GB, and I'm at over 13GB right now doing nothing demanding, though I imagine a lot of this is just stuff claiming memory, not actually using it. Running a photo or video editing app at the same time can be tight. So I'd like more RAM just for casual, nonprofessional use. But I doubt I'll be moved to spend the additional $400 for it.

What browser? I'm running Firefox and have three MacRumors tabs open and six other tabs and it's using 623 MB of RAM. I can decrease that by decreasing the number of simultaneous threads running (you can control it between 1 and 8 and fewer threads means less RAM but less performance). Brave might be even better because it blocks a lot of the tracker code which tends to be huge).

 

[PROFESS0R]

Large dataset multivariate structural equation modeling.

What kind of work are you doing "professor" that requires a 5000+ MBP you have in route?

 

[danwells]

It's entirely based on what you're doing... Lightroom can EASILY use more than 32 GB with a large enough library (a friend of mine comes close to maxing out 64 GB with his 600,000 images accumulated over 25 years). He doesn't want to split his work to an archive library, so he accepts huge RAM usage. It's also all too possible to go over 32 GB while editing an image in Photoshop or another image editor - panoramas, lots of layers, very high resolution files...

Any video editing application will use well over 32 GB with a long enough project at high enough resolution and low enough compression(certainly not with a 5 minute video at HD resolution - but start moving towards 30 minutes or longer, or using 4K 60p and you're getting there) - if you're creating 6K or 8K footage, it'll happen faster.

While I'm less familiar with 3D, music and modeling workloads, I'm sure 3D can go over 32 GB pretty quickly. A complex enough musical project almost certainly can. As a previous poster indicates, mathematical modeling (in many fields) can.

Just because it's almost impossible to do using only Word, Safari and Mail doesn't mean there aren't other. workloads that can use an unbelievable amount of RAM. The 16" MacBook Pro performs well enough to be an only computer for a lot of this work - it's good that it has the RAM capacity as well.

 

[pshufd]

Large dataset multivariate structural equation modeling.

Cool. Amazed that you can do that on a PC.

 

[Sanpete]

What browser? I'm running Firefox and have three MacRumors tabs open and six other tabs and it's using 623 MB of RAM. I can decrease that by decreasing the number of simultaneous threads running (you can control it between 1 and 8 and fewer threads means less RAM but less performance). Brave might be even better because it blocks a lot of the tracker code which tends to be huge).

It's in Safari. MacRumors is down to 689MB right now, it varies. It's not a significant concern now because I'm not running anything else. When I edit photos or something I generally shut down other programs. But with 32GB I might not have to.

 

[Rafterman]

I would go ahead and place the order - only waiting to see reports of thermal performance and absence of loud fan noise all the time when coping with high workloads which is THE single most important thing for me.

I'm not too worried about that. The last model had fan problems and got a firmware update. I expect this one will need one or two firmare updates before its where it needs to be.

 

[nickf1]

Agreed, very well put.

I'm sold on 64GB RAM with an i9 for my use case of running VMs, multi-tasking, lots of apps open and browser tabs and for the 5-10% increase in cost, it's worth it alone just to have the feeling of 'infinite RAM' if nothing else knowing that's not a memory limit I will be hitting anytime soon (unless I get really carried away with VMs).

I would go ahead and place the order - only waiting to see reports of thermal performance and absence of loud fan noise all the time when coping with high workloads which is THE single most important thing for me.

You will get fan noise, that’s just the nature of things with the MBPs, you can’t get such a thin chassis and dissipate 80W of power efficiently without fan noise. This guy has done some early benchmarks, nothing has changed: when you load it, it has the same fan noise as before, but at least you get more power from the chips.

 

[solouki]

Ahhhh...my dream machine -- 2.8 PB RAM and 202,752 cores. Now this would be a laptop that would handle those protein molecular dynamics simulations as well as QCD calculations! But dissipating 13 MW of heat would probably spin up those fans a bit and fry the legs...

Solouki

 

[jerryk]

I went with 32GB this time. I am starting to run multiple VMs/Containers, each running different Machine Learning models and communicating with each other to form a pipeline. This lets me emulate a semi-large scale production environment on a MacBook. I configure the production VMs with 32 GB each.

 

[Rafterman]

Ahhhh...my dream machine -- 2.8 PB RAM and 202,752 cores. Now this would be a laptop that would handle those protein molecular dynamics simulations as well as QCD calculations! But dissipating 13 MW of heat would probably spin up those fans a bit and fry the legs...

Solouki

That nuclear core power brick would be a lot to lug around.