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

[bungalo101]

This entire thread is a joke. It's entirely dependent on your workload and how you use your laptop. Coming from an HPC/Cloud environment where it's common to have 1TB RAM nodes, 64GB is more than welcome.

To each their own though. It's relatively simple to monitor your memory consumption and buy accordingly. We're constantly seeing users who are attempting to compute on their laptops and are are hitting limits. They either move to HPC or Cloud resources. The latter is incredibly expensive if we're talking public cloud...

 

[solouki]

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

Yeah ... that's why I'm headed to the gym right now!

 

[LoganT]

I got the Core i9 2.4ghz, 64GB of ram, 4TB, and 8 GB VRAM. I have been saving up since the beginning of January to buy it. I work in Cinema4D a lot and my current late 2013 15.4” MacBook Pro eats the 16GBs I have right up. I’m sure 32 would be fine but I also thought 16 would be fine.

With 64 it allows me to make bigger and more complex scenes to advance my artwork. The previous 15” I was saving up for actually costs more than the one I just bought and that one only had an i9, 32gb of ram, 2tb and a 4gb vega 20. I got a lot more power for effectively the same cost in this one

I usually get a new computer every 5-7 years and I don’t think I’m going to be upset that I maxed it out.

 

[PROFESS0R]

i have a 12 core 2010 5,1 Mac Pro and my current laptop performs better. We’ve come a long way Since 2010.

I may get a new Mac Pro 7,1 when it releases... I have runs that can take 13 days to complete.

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

 

[ha1o2surfer]

VMs and a few other specialized applications would use 32GB+

Not for nothing, but I manage about 30+ windows servers that handle various enterprise type applications and none of them have more then 16GB. Its odd how a number of folks try to justify 64GB when I manage servers that support thousands of employees across many locations with so much less

Well of course you don't need that much ram. AD says you want 1Core for every 1000 users and if you have more than 2000 users, they want 2GB of ram (on top of 2GB for the os)lol unless you are running larger ish databases. 32GB is more than enough for a 5k user domain with file server/dns/2 ad servers/print server.. lol

but 30+ windows installs even just running no services with 32gb would only work if you are using core. which everyone should be doing


I have 64GB (only cost $278 anyways..) of my in my laptop and my justification is also for VMs + multitasking. I'm sitting here with 5 chrome tabs, vmware running Catalina and thunderbird and it's sitting at 11.6GB of ram in windows. 16 would be too little for me and 32 would be just enough to run my entire server environment for testing inside my laptop doing nothing else. So some people do have a need I don't want to be thrifty in what I run.. maybe my test environment is doing updates and I want to jump on a game. pssfftt, no need to shut down my VMs lol

EDIT: also someone who has 238GB free of 6TB of SSD in my laptop as well. I prefer to carry around 1 machine and have no desktop. It's what I choose

 

[Macshroomer]

Its odd how a number of folks try to justify 64GB when I manage servers that support thousands of employees across many locations with so much less

Not really, there is a reason to buy a high end machine and perhaps you are not needing it then.

It is not uncommon for me to have lightroom both exporting RAW files and stitching them at the same time while I take the exported DNG files and do final ACR corrections in PS. That is usually chugging along while Photo Mechanic is open and can be butting heads with DXO PL2 exporting drone raw files for use in ACR. With my current machine running 32GB I can get into swap space pretty easily when flogging my machine like this.

64GB is a welcome no brainer, my iMac Pro has 128GB.

 

[gugy]

Well if you work with Cinema 4D, after effects and photoshop the max amount of RAM is a blessing. I’m going 64gb big time On the MBP. If it was a desktop I would go even 128gb Or more.

 

[unagimiyagi]

64 gb ram would be the single best option to prolong the useful life of your MacBook pro’s daily real life operational speed. To surf the web or do basic office type of productivity you could squeeze another 10 years out of your Mac provided everything else can last.

I say the main problem is that right now the Mac is transitioning to arm so it’s like a terrible time to max out if you are trying to time your upgrade. It would be like buying the latest and greatest gas car when electric cars are coming out en masse next year.

 

[danwells]

I wouldn't worry about ARM right now - it'll start from the MacBook Air end (or even smaller - I wouldn't be AT ALL surprised to see the first ARM Mac be a 12" MacBook type machine - maybe under 2 lbs). The kind of use that involves 64 GB of RAM is not where ARM's going for quite a while.

The second issue with ARM Macs is that a lot of their early apps are going to be iPad-derived (and a lot of big old legacy apps that also have iPad versions will only ever see the iPad version on the ARM Mac). Yes, they'll have Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom and Microsoft Office running on Day 1 - but it'll be Lightroom CC (the cloud version that doesn't print), iPad versions of Photoshop and Illustrator and Office for iPad. I'm almost sure Lightroom Classic will never make it to ARM, and the others may take a long time to reach feature parity.

Porting iPad apps (which are already ARM) using Catalyst is going to be a lot easier than porting complex Intel Mac apps full of ancient code. A whole bunch of developers are going to take the easy way out (like Twitter has done even on Intel Macs) - they're just going to Catalyst an iPad app.

 

[kmahmood]

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.

Oh dear that’s disappointing, was kind of hoping of a significant improvement on fan noise when the enhanced thermal design had been mentioned.

Maybe I should look at IMac Pro , as the thing is I’m prepared to spend big to get my high Spec MacBook Pro with 64GB ram but then it kind of sucks if I’m still having to stop VMs and apps to reduce the jet engine noise... either that or I buy a good pair of noise cancelling headphones with the laptop

 

[wallysb01]

This entire thread is a joke. It's entirely dependent on your workload and how you use your laptop. Coming from an HPC/Cloud environment where it's common to have 1TB RAM nodes, 64GB is more than welcome.

To each their own though. It's relatively simple to monitor your memory consumption and buy accordingly. We're constantly seeing users who are attempting to compute on their laptops and are are hitting limits. They either move to HPC or Cloud resources. The latter is incredibly expensive if we're talking public cloud...

exactly. I have a 384GB Linux box next to me and cloud/HPC on call when that’s not enough, but I still like to be able to pull off reasonable sized chunks of the data and analyze stuff on the go and not be piped into a terminal window of some kind all the time. 32GB was already going to be a must for me and honestly, the $400 upgrade is peanuts (less really with the institutional pricing). That doesn’t even get you a quarter of the way through the data creation steps for one sample and I’ll probably use this laptop to analyze many thousands, probably tens of thousands of samples over its life time.

And yeah, if you compare to cloud pricing, if it saves you some cloud compute time now and then, it will pay for itself pretty fast. We have individual analysts easily running multi thousand dollar monthly cloud compute bills. Too many people are chiming in based on a very different kind computer usage and probably very different budgets and funding schemes.

 

[The Mercurian]

We have queues like that at work. There's a web page listing different architectures and disk/memory/core sizing. You pick your system, then operating system and then wait until a machine is available. Then you move your environment over and run your tests and do your debugging.

I would find it very hard to work like that it would really break up my flow. Better I can do it on my own machine

 

[NJRonbo]

Wow! Do I utterly, completely disagree with the original post.

I have been pining for 64GB of ram.

Why? Because I run about two dozen programs at startup. My menu bar is so full, I have to use Bartender. Not that it's a big deal -- many people use Bartender to stop the clutter.

When I had 32GB of ram on my 15" MBP, I was pushing limits. As someone who is constantly adding and running more apps, I often saw my memory limits being pushed.

...then when I ran Parallels on top of that, I really started to max out.

No, I don't think that most people run as many apps as I do. However, if you are that kind of person who does and wants to run a VM on top of that, then you absolutely should go for 64GB of ram.

I have spoken!

 

[terraphantm]

I genuinely believe that if you need more than the base amount of RAM in a MBP, you already know it because of your workflow and most people asking on here probably won't benefit from 32GB RAM plus, or even the 16GB RAM+ on the non-MBP machines.

Of course there's such a thing as future-proofing, but we're so far from the days where buying as much RAM as you could afford future-proofs a machine. The recent Mac laptops have got lightning fast SSDs in them and by and large macOS is very efficient and runs great on even 8GB RAM.

There's also some very good posts on here which explain how an OS will use as much RAM as you can throw at it, but with these fast SSDs, you're maybe spending a fortune to see no tangible benefit. I do think there should be a sticky thread on the "should I order more memory" question to highlight the actual reasons why you may want to order more memory.

I don’t know about that. 16GB is just about adequate for me today, but 4 years from now maybe it won’t be. So I went with 32GB. Same deal with the original rMBP that I'm upgrading for. Base was 8GB and it would have been sufficient back then, but I bought 16GB for future proofing, and that certainly did help me get 7 years out of the thing.

Normally I do buy the max RAM available, but I tend to agree that by the time 64GB becomes a necessity, everything else in these laptops will be far enough out of date to make it pointless.

 

[Stephen.R]

I tend to agree that by the time 64GB becomes a necessity, everything else in these laptops will be far enough out of date to make it pointless.

This, like the memory usage issue itself, is completely subjective. What do you consider useless?

Like others here I have a 2011 MBP17, and thanks to maxing it's memory (16GB) just after purchase, I'm able to realistically give it to my wife to use now. It has a new SSD, but it's still SATA, so being able to have larger files in memory, better file caching, and less need for swapping means she can realistically use it for e.g. managing her iCloud photo library on a screen bigger than a phone, etc.

I'd argue that increases are becoming much more incremental and less groundbreaking than they were at the time of the 2011 machine's release - will there be faster CPUs, faster SSDs, more powerful GPUs in another 8 years time? Sure of course.

Will they be so much faster than what's around now, that we'll consider a 2019 machine "useless"? I highly doubt it.

 

[terraphantm]

16GB back then is about equivalent to 32GB now. Even if your 2011 supported 32GB, it would be too outclassed by the time that becomes a hard requirement. I expect the same to be the case for 64GB on laptops being produced today.

 

[Stephen.R]

16GB back then is about equivalent to 32GB now.

At the time, 4GB was "standard" for the machine. 8GB was the highest upgrade option Apple offered. 16GB is what you could do with aftermarket DIMMs - literally maxing it out.

Even if your 2011 supported 32GB, it would be too outclassed by the time that becomes a hard requirement. I expect the same to be the case for 64GB on laptops being produced today.

I literally just told you the machine works today as a usable computer because it has that memory. macOS will make very aggressive use of any free memory it can, to reduce disk/SSD I/O. My 2018 Mac mini has 24GB of files cached in memory right now, even when it can read from the SSD at ~2800MB/sec.

What is a "hard requirement"? I'm not suggesting anyone would take my 2011 machine now and say "well I'll just go do my agency work from this". I'm saying having as much memory as possible makes it useable - in general - a lot longer.

 

[terraphantm]

At the time, 4GB was "standard" for the machine. 8GB was the highest upgrade option Apple offered. 16GB is what you could do with aftermarket DIMMs - literally maxing it out.

Yeah that was Apple just being cheap at the time. 8GB was standard with other similarly priced laptops and they did make 8GB standard with 16GB being the upgrade within a year.

In terms of usability in 2011, 4GB was a joke, 8GB was adequate, and 16GB made it future proof. Today I would describe 8/16/32 similarly. 64 being overkill outside of very specific use scenarios (massive database work, running 4 VMs simultaneously, that sort of thing). I think 32 will enable these laptops to be used comfortably for 7+ years. I don't think 64GB will notable increase its usability.

 

[jerryk]

Bottom line from this thread is there are plenty of people doing professional work on MBPs that need the max memory and SSD sizes.

 

[Rafterman]

VMs and a few other specialized applications would use 32GB+

Not for nothing, but I manage about 30+ windows servers that handle various enterprise type applications and none of them have more then 16GB. Its odd how a number of folks try to justify 64GB when I manage servers that support thousands of employees across many locations with so much less

But servers often only do one or two things. My team manages 200+ servers, using VMware ESX with vMotion, and while each VM uses a small amount of RAM (because most are single task servers), the actual hardware server running ESX has 64GB of RAM and a high caopacity, high availablity disk arrays. If we ran a VM that people used for CAD, photo editing or whatever, you can be sure it would get a good bit of RAM allocated to it. Granted though, VMware RAM does not equate directly to actual RAM.

 

[mcvaughan]

Lol so funny that one person’s use case is the same as everyone else. What a silly post.

 

[ha1o2surfer]

But servers often only do one or two things. My team manages 200+ servers, using VMware ESX with vMotion, and while each VM uses a small amount of RAM (because most are single task servers), the actual hardware server running ESX has 64GB of RAM and a high caopacity, high availablity disk arrays. If we ran a VM that people used for CAD, photo editing or whatever, you can be sure it would get a good bit of RAM allocated to it. Granted though, VMware RAM does not equate directly to actual RAM.

right, exactly. separation of services has lots of advantages... small ram requirements are one of them

 

[alphaod]

I hate saying this, but I got 64GB because I am unable to upgrade it myself later. I have one or two workflows that need more RAM, but otherwise I'm probably fine with 16GB.

Also 8TB is a horrible value proposition, but well...

 

[LoganT]

I hate saying this, but I got 64GB because I am unable to upgrade it myself later. I have one or two workflows that need more RAM, but otherwise I'm probably fine with 16GB.

Also 8TB is a horrible value proposition, but well...

Of course that’s the reason to do it. If we could upgrade ourselves we’d buy the lowest option and upgrade it ourselves.

 

[Rafterman]

I hate saying this, but I got 64GB because I am unable to upgrade it myself later. I have one or two workflows that need more RAM, but otherwise I'm probably fine with 16GB.

Also 8TB is a horrible value proposition, but well...

Well, a Samsung 2.5 inch 8TB SSD drive is round $1500, so Apple's price compares reasonably.
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Of course that’s the reason to do it. If we could upgrade ourselves we’d buy the lowest option and upgrade it ourselves.

Not me, I would prefer to max it instead of having to crack it open. Upgrading is easy enough, but I start gripping hard when you have to open it and hope you son't short something out or strip a screw.