Benefit of 16GB of RAM

[appleguy2019]

While I feel SSDs are a noticeable upgrade I think I'd rather have a HDD and more RAM than an SSD with less RAM.
Personally, I've never really seen a ton of benefit by upgrading or choosing a faster processor. To a lesser extent, even the SSD. Like the difference between SATA and NVME. But I can always tell a HUUUUGE difference when upgrading RAM.

I recently upgraded my grandma's HP all in one desktop and it has a Pentium for christ sakes. I put in 16GB of RAM (maxed out) and a SSD. Some people I told that I did it thought it was a waste due to the CPU, but to me CPU matters far less than RAM does. In terms of importance for performance I'd rank it RAM > Disk drive type > CPU cores/clock speed.

I couldn't even imagine having to use a 4GB machine. It's just not possible for me, even doing general tasks. The slightest perceived slow down is painfully obvious to me. I always say life is too short for slow computers and bad pizza. If my computer is slow or the internet is slow/down, it's going to be a bad day for me. First world problems, I know. If that's all I have to complain about I must be doing pretty good in the scheme of things. To some people that's probably insulting.

 

[Stephen.R]

The Memory Pressure is... wait, what?? Is that green?

If you're happy that it takes 3/4 of your available memory to have a whopping 5 browser tabs open doing.. nothing, (we can *see* that none of them are playing video, despite your claims of "VoD") and a media player open.. doing nothing, well good for you I guess. That screenshot certainly implies that Safari at least, is doing much less caching (or at least less in-memory caching) than on a machine with more memory.

If you give macOS more memory, it will reward you with a faster computer. Even on a brand new Mac mini with a half-TB SSD (which is no slouch) macOS will cache files up the wazoo if you let it.

As I write this, mine is using around 30GB for file cache; which is about half the memory it has. Coincidentally my 2011 MBP, doing essentially nothing but serving iTunes, also uses about half it's total memory (~8GB) for file cache.

Will they "work" without as much memory? Well they'll turn on and run programs, sure. But they will rely on reading from disk a lot more often to achieve the same thing.

Given that OP was asking about a laptop, and from Apple at least, that means non-upgradable RAM, I maintain that recommending the minimum amount of RAM available is bad advice.

 

[RobbieTT]

Dude, green is green with no swap history at all. MacOS will cache when RAM is free, even on the 4GB example you can see some web pages are cached. If you imply that 4GB on an older machine cannot run and certainly not with the latest software then someone will smack you with a few facts. I back my assertion with a real-world example, taken today, from a machine that runs 24/7 as a media client. Bait and switch all you like but these machines are out there, proving that your assertions are rather hollow with a hint of downright misleading.

 

[Howard2k]

If you're happy that it takes 3/4 of your available memory to have a whopping 5 browser tabs open doing.. nothing, (we can *see* that none of them are playing video, despite your claims of "VoD") and a media player open.. doing nothing, well good for you I guess. That screenshot certainly implies that Safari at least, is doing much less caching (or at least less in-memory caching) than on a machine with more memory.

If you give macOS more memory, it will reward you with a faster computer. Even on a brand new Mac mini with a half-TB SSD (which is no slouch) macOS will cache files up the wazoo if you let it.

As I write this, mine is using around 30GB for file cache; which is about half the memory it has. Coincidentally my 2011 MBP, doing essentially nothing but serving iTunes, also uses about half it's total memory (~8GB) for file cache.

Will they "work" without as much memory? Well they'll turn on and run programs, sure. But they will rely on reading from disk a lot more often to achieve the same thing.

Given that OP was asking about a laptop, and from Apple at least, that means non-upgradable RAM, I maintain that recommending the minimum amount of RAM available is bad advice.

How much time do you spend each day on an 8GB system?

 

[cube]

You can play low end games on Phenom X3+GT720+4GiB.

I found a crazy build:

 

[LogicalApex]

Also, this seems like a weird sentence. For a computer to last 10 years it must have been made a decade ago.

But, completely anecdotally: I made a 2011 MBP last 7 years.. you know how? It had 16GB of RAM. With 8 it would have been unusable years ago.

I could have worded it better, but the reality is people here tend to vastly over spec their computers. There isn't a need to do this IMHO especially when you combine technical advancement with the realistic shifts in industry focus.

In the worst case scenario, you could end up swapping to disk on an 8GB machine. With the speed of the SSDs in the latest MacBooks you'll be hard pressed to feel the pressure of swapping to disk for average use cases. In addition to this, modern OSes are very smart about managing what's in RAM versus what's swapped, including compressing where possible, as they are able to take advantage of this speed increase with minimal performance impact.

More RAM is useful for memory intensive scenarios, but if you're not in that use case then you can very likely skip it. RAM usage isn't going to go up dramatically anytime soon.

If we were following memory usage demands prior to everything going mobile first computers today should be at 32GB minimum and "power users" should be using between 64GB and 128GB of RAM. But we're still sitting on 8GB for average use cases as we have for at least a decade.

I don't use Chrome but if you need 16GB of RAM for a browser with a couple of tabs open I'd switch browsers. I can get FF to use over 2GB of RAM across 10+ tabs with RES infinite scrolling on and show images active and scrolling 10+ pages down... Surely, Chrome isn't that inefficient?

 

[wegster]

Simply not true. If 8GB wasn’t enough for most people it wouldn’t be the base configuration of the 13”. Otherwise people (myself included) wouldn’t be able to use 8GB.

Your logic just doesn’t work.

His logic works fine, although it's possible your understanding of computing does not.
OSes use whatever memory is required by the OS and drivers, programs, (graphics memory as well if integrated), and beyond that, rely on virtual memory, which is effectively swapping RAM to the hard drive/SSD, or using a file on the HD/SSD directly in place of 'real' memory. While SSDs are significantly faster than old spinning platter HDs, they still don't have the bandwidth (read as speed when using as memory) than actual RAM/DRAM has, so - things get slower. If you've also believed you only 'need' a 128GB SSD, because Apple offers it - well, you may well run into issues where you simply cannot launch a program at all, while dealing with spinning beachballs constantly.

Chrome and some other apps in particular are memory pigs, so while lower RAM used to be fine for 'general users,' it's easy enough to gobble up 8 or even 16GB of RAM without running compilers and dev environments, VMs, etc. Photo and video editing of increasingly higher resolution videos will also benefit hugely from having more RAM to use as a working buffer in memory, vs swapping to/from SSD.

Someone posted earlier how to check using activity monitor. No matter what you may 'feel,' and it's nice you have an opinion and all, but facts are facts - go check for yourself, and understand your opinion appears to be rather less than fact-based.

I routinely can max out my 16GB 1TB SSD MBP even before launching VMs, depending on my given workday, as can and do others.

For anyone not trying to justify their specific 'Apple knows best' opinions, open the most applications you're likely to use, and load whatever files (or tabs with actual content, play movies, whatever), and check in Activity Monitor actual memory usage, or a tool like iStats to note not only memory pressure (simplest way to see what's going on now Apple has minimized details in Activity Monitor), as well as page ins and outs. Page in/outs are when active memory has been 'moved' to SSD, either due to inactivity of a given app, or when another active app needed memory. If this happens in the latter case - guess what, your system is slower than it 'should' be or would be with more physical RAM. If you're seeing a bunch of yellow and/or red spikes or graph color in Activity Monitor for Memory Pressure - you could indeed benefit from more physical RAM than you currently have.

Note this isn't saying everyone needs > 8GB of RAM, but better to check your own usage, and allowing for some amount of growth in file formats (i.e. higher res videos, photo editing, etc.) which will consume more RAM when edited and often viewed, as well as the general growth in size and RAM requirements for non-web/cloud applications you may continue to be running, and decide for yourself.

8GB RAM is OK for my wife, who does a lot of work for her classroom - creating presentations and light graphics work (think icons, not massive photoshop or video editing), but not for me and many others, and it's quite likely on her next refresh, we'll still go to 16GB as we do indeed keep out systems 4-5 years. YMMV as always.

 

[cube]

8GiB is not average use nowadays. It is casual use.

 

[LogicalApex]

Chrome and some other apps in particular are memory pigs

Surely, Chrome uses RAM in an efficient manner, but technical users are overly obsessed with "free RAM". RAM is absolutely useless sitting idle. So, buying 64GB and only ever using 32GB means you have 32GB sitting there being absolutely useless and only burning electricity. If you're an application like Chrome if you fill that extra RAM with infrequently used browsing tabs (including loading common websites before the tab is even opened) you can vastly speed up the browsing experience. If that RAM is needing by another application you can immediately shed it when the OS asks for the memory or if it can swap it out to disk.

But if a user looks as Activity Monitor or Task Manager they'll see lots of "in use" RAM and assume Chrome needs all of that RAM equally which is far from the case.

Unless, Chrome is horrendously engineered, but since the same code runs on Android devices with 1GB of RAM I'd assume my understanding of how this works is sound. A quick Google search agrees: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/prerender

 

[Howard2k]

His logic works fine, although it's possible your understanding of computing does not.
OSes use whatever memory is required by the OS and drivers, programs, (graphics memory as well if integrated), and beyond that, rely on virtual memory, which is effectively swapping RAM to the hard drive/SSD, or using a file on the HD/SSD directly in place of 'real' memory. While SSDs are significantly faster than old spinning platter HDs, they still don't have the bandwidth (read as speed when using as memory) than actual RAM/DRAM has, so - things get slower. If you've also believed you only 'need' a 128GB SSD, because Apple offers it - well, you may well run into issues where you simply cannot launch a program at all, while dealing with spinning beachballs constantly.

Chrome and some other apps in particular are memory pigs, so while lower RAM used to be fine for 'general users,' it's easy enough to gobble up 8 or even 16GB of RAM without running compilers and dev environments, VMs, etc. Photo and video editing of increasingly higher resolution videos will also benefit hugely from having more RAM to use as a working buffer in memory, vs swapping to/from SSD.

Someone posted earlier how to check using activity monitor. No matter what you may 'feel,' and it's nice you have an opinion and all, but facts are facts - go check for yourself, and understand your opinion appears to be rather less than fact-based.

I routinely can max out my 16GB 1TB SSD MBP even before launching VMs, depending on my given workday, as can and do others.

For anyone not trying to justify their specific 'Apple knows best' opinions, open the most applications you're likely to use, and load whatever files (or tabs with actual content, play movies, whatever), and check in Activity Monitor actual memory usage, or a tool like iStats to note not only memory pressure (simplest way to see what's going on now Apple has minimized details in Activity Monitor), as well as page ins and outs. Page in/outs are when active memory has been 'moved' to SSD, either due to inactivity of a given app, or when another active app needed memory. If this happens in the latter case - guess what, your system is slower than it 'should' be or would be with more physical RAM. If you're seeing a bunch of yellow and/or red spikes or graph color in Activity Monitor for Memory Pressure - you could indeed benefit from more physical RAM than you currently have.

Note this isn't saying everyone needs > 8GB of RAM, but better to check your own usage, and allowing for some amount of growth in file formats (i.e. higher res videos, photo editing, etc.) which will consume more RAM when edited and often viewed, as well as the general growth in size and RAM requirements for non-web/cloud applications you may continue to be running, and decide for yourself.

8GB RAM is OK for my wife, who does a lot of work for her classroom - creating presentations and light graphics work (think icons, not massive photoshop or video editing), but not for me and many others, and it's quite likely on her next refresh, we'll still go to 16GB as we do indeed keep out systems 4-5 years. YMMV as always.

Again where are all the posts from people with 8GB running out of memory? Maybe you can show me.

I know how MacOS uses memory.

And for the record, I’m not saying nobody needs more than 8GB. Very obviously some people do. But obviously not most people.

 

[wegster]

I have a computer with 280 Words of RAM. It was built in the 1970s but still works.

I have a handful of old computers as well. Few are able to stream and view 4K videos, let alone edit them, however.

They used to say 2GB was enough. Then 4GB and now 8GB. I see a pattern.

Yep, and there's some truth behind it as well, not just 'buy more.' Someone made a good point previously about the move to retina, and it applies to other higher resolutions as well, especially for those with integrated GPUs using any amount of shared system memory. That alone can account for a 4x or more increase of memory usage. Same multipliers apply to editing photo and video files a much higher resolution. Video in particular is brutal, as for general sanity of the user, you need to have a reasonable working buffer size (think at least a few minutes always loaded into memory where you're editing, and do the math on 720p vs 4K or 5K). Viewing, outside of the graphics memory needed for a given resolution, isn't as bad as it might be, considering on-chip codecs nowadays and faster CPUs, but there's little replacement for physical RAM for any editing work.

Even beyond the file formats, technology moves on. A GPS used to be a dedicated box with antenna hanging off of it and a two-tone display. Obviously, this isn't the case any longer, and the same applies to macOS and applications. While it would be nice to think that code get optimized to be smaller, more efficient, and faster 'by itself,' the reality is especially for consumer computing, code is much more rarely optimized as there's no money in it versus adding new features and capabilities, which themselves are not always 'the most optimized possible,' plus dealing with new formats, more complex programs - it does in fact all add up. CPU speed increases and Moore's Law in general kept us somewhat sheltered from this as developers, as does cloud and VM-based scaling for performance, meaning that 'good enough' code/programs/services can be made to run 'well enough' but just need more memory, more CPU power, virtual CPUs, threads, etc...but it's not 'free' meaning even things like MS Office or Skype from today won't necessarily run well, if at all, on a 10+ year old system with a few GB.

I don't necessarily like the above statements, as someone who has spent a fair amount of my early career heavily optimizing code for performance and scale, but it is what it is, and should at least be acknowledged. Even Linux's base requirements have grown upwards since the 0.x series of kernels, and other OSes and applications certainly have as well.

 

[pcd213]

I didn't realize that this would be such a controversial thread! How do I put the genie back in the bottle?

 

[wegster]

You can't measure "real world performance" without data.

As in:

Do something typical, check memory pressure.

Do something more demanding, check memory pressure.

rinse and repeat, with increasingly memory-hungry "things" that you would expect to use the computer for.

Anything less than actually measuring memory usage and "pressure" is just feel good anecdotal "well it feels fast", "it works" and means nothing. Actually that's not true, it means one thing. It means the person is more interested in feeling good about what they have than knowing if they have enough memory for what they do/want to do.
[doublepost=1563084423][/doublepost]
Sorry but I disagree.

Some applications are definitely written to be economical on resources.

But Chrome, a popular (despite what you or I think about it) browser is anything but economical.

Electron apps, which are basically Chrome plus a heap of javascript, are even worse than Chrome.
[doublepost=1563084663][/doublepost]

Also, this seems like a weird sentence. For a computer to last 10 years it must have been made a decade ago.

But, completely anecdotally: I made a 2011 MBP last 7 years.. you know how? It had 16GB of RAM. With 8 it would have been unusable years ago.

Yep. Measure for yourself and stay away from assumptions of 'Apple would make the base model bigger/faster if *I* needed it,' as they don't define your usage and expectations, and they also have to build to a price point allowing for their relatively high profit margins at time. Even if they know most users are not 'best served' with the base models, consumers think starting out 'Oh, I can get an Apple for $X,' and then either trade in/up later or option it where it's now much higher than $X.

Same on the 2011. Had the top CTO 2011 MBP, added a pair of SSDs, 16GB of RAM, and it's still a competent-ish system.

The push to mobile is only part of the equation, and only applies to some (usually simpler) apps. Few people are doing CAD, heavy video editing (I don't mean apply IG filters here or simple cuts/selections ), or development on mobile devices.

Intel and others hit a definite slow-down on processor improvements that probably started soon after the Core2Duo and then the quad-core and i-series mobile chips. Combined with the move to SSDs, which were certainly a huge bump in storage/read/write performance, systems were able to remain 'good enough' for longer. What used to be a 2-3year 'must upgrade' cycle for many, me included, has moved to a 4-5year cycle, assuming the underlying system, RAM amount included, was reasonably high specced at purchase.

 

[wegster]

Again where are all the posts from people with 8GB running out of memory? Maybe you can show me.

I know how MacOS uses memory.

And for the record, I’m not saying nobody needs more than 8GB. Very obviously some people do. But obviously not most people.

Simply not true. If 8GB wasn’t enough for most people it wouldn’t be the base configuration of the 13”. Otherwise people (myself included) wouldn’t be able to use 8GB.

Your logic just doesn’t work.

The second quote is likely the reason for such strong reactions to your statements in this thread. Assuming Apple operates on anything other than price points and profits, and 'does what's best' in the base models for the 'typical user' just doesn't sit as reality with many of us.

I don't post every time I upgrade a system, but I absolutely moved from my Santa Rosa 13" MB to a MBP after 8GB (not 'officially supported' but added and worked fine) wasn't enough to get work done, and upgraded to a 16GB system, which IIRV cost me around $1K or more aftermarket for the RAM but was absolutely required unless I wanted to go back to the workstation + laptop life, which didn't work well with my job + working remote often. That 16GB system was then further upgraded to a 1TB SSD + second SSD, and eventually was retired in favor of my current system, which needs > 16GB.

I'm quite sure others have done similarly, whether by hitting storage limits, RAM limits, or CPU processing power, but we don't all join a 'here's my Activity Monitor' in a single thread so someone can later reference the reasons every time someone upgraded.

Note that even your statement of 'most people' can be argued, unless you believe you in fact represent the 'most,' i.e. semi-casual user, whether for personal or professional use, that does not run VMs, develop complex systems, do CAD, professional or heavy semi-professional video editing, etc.. No doubt the user base for Apple has changed quite a bit over the years, from mostly professional to much more casual users as the iPod, iPhone and iPads made Apple 'cool,' but I'm not so sure I'd be willing to assume or debate on the actual and real demographics and usage types of 'most' Apple users, other than to say there are cases where more RAM/CPU/GPU are needed, people should be aware RAM and computing requirements are unlikely to go down as time moves forward, and they should measure for themselves vs 'Apple's base model is surely what I need because they make it that way.'
[doublepost=1563121021][/doublepost]

I didn't realize that this would be such a controversial thread! How do I put the genie back in the bottle?

It's too late.
Maybe next we can have the handful of people liking the new keyboards and Touch Bar vs 'everyone else'?
We had the same argument when Apple didn't add the 32GB option a model or two back...

 

[Howard2k]

The second quote is likely the reason for such strong reactions to your statements in this thread. Assuming Apple operates on anything other than price points and profits, and 'does what's best' in the base models for the 'typical user' just doesn't sit as reality with many of us.

I don't post every time I upgrade a system, but I absolutely moved from my Santa Rosa 13" MB to a MBP after 8GB (not 'officially supported' but added and worked fine) wasn't enough to get work done, and upgraded to a 16GB system, which IIRV cost me around $1K or more aftermarket for the RAM but was absolutely required unless I wanted to go back to the workstation + laptop life, which didn't work well with my job + working remote often. That 16GB system was then further upgraded to a 1TB SSD + second SSD, and eventually was retired in favor of my current system, which needs > 16GB.

I'm quite sure others have done similarly, whether by hitting storage limits, RAM limits, or CPU processing power, but we don't all join a 'here's my Activity Monitor' in a single thread so someone can later reference the reasons every time someone upgraded.

Note that even your statement of 'most people' can be argued, unless you believe you in fact represent the 'most,' i.e. semi-casual user, whether for personal or professional use, that does not run VMs, develop complex systems, do CAD, professional or heavy semi-professional video editing, etc.. No doubt the user base for Apple has changed quite a bit over the years, from mostly professional to much more casual users as the iPod, iPhone and iPads made Apple 'cool,' but I'm not so sure I'd be willing to assume or debate on the actual and real demographics and usage types of 'most' Apple users, other than to say there are cases where more RAM/CPU/GPU are needed, people should be aware RAM and computing requirements are unlikely to go down as time moves forward, and they should measure for themselves vs 'Apple's base model is surely what I need because they make it that way.'
[doublepost=1563121021][/doublepost]

It's too late.
Maybe next we can have the handful of people liking the new keyboards and Touch Bar vs 'everyone else'?
We had the same argument when Apple didn't add the 32GB option a model or two back...

So to put it another way - let’s say that I’m wrong and 8GB is like a car with a flat tire. It barely works. Where are the complaints?

And yeah I suspect I’m pretty typical. I use 8GB. I use Lightroom, iTunes, perhaps 20-30 tabs of Safari, and Garagband primarily. With some Office stuff. Again, let’s pretend I’m wrong and 8GB isn’t enough for most. Where are the posts?

I think you hit the nail on the head - I think Apple has built up a larger market share on the back of the luxury prosumer market. This forum is full of “professionals” complaining that the Pro isn’t explicitly built for them, but it’s not full of prosumer users saying “why is my memory pressure graph red all the time?”

In fact, it seems to me that when there are the occasional memory threads there tend to be more knee jerk “you need 16GB” posts than “here’s how to check your memory usage in Activity Monitor”.


I don’t believe the majority are using VMs. And those that are probably understand why they need more RAM. I don’t think there is a large quantity of power users who say “I’m running lab simulations and doing Machine Learning so I need all the CPU I can get, but RAM, I really don’t know if I need that at all”

Lastly - RAM on a non-SSD system. Yeah I’d load that up for sure. That hasn’t been those case on the MBPro for 7 years maybe?

 

[wegster]

Surely, Chrome uses RAM in an efficient manner, but technical users are overly obsessed with "free RAM". RAM is absolutely useless sitting idle. So, buying 64GB and only ever using 32GB means you have 32GB sitting there being absolutely useless and only burning electricity. If you're an application like Chrome if you fill that extra RAM with infrequently used browsing tabs (including loading common websites before the tab is even opened) you can vastly speed up the browsing experience. If that RAM is needing by another application you can immediately shed it when the OS asks for the memory or if it can swap it out to disk.

But if a user looks as Activity Monitor or Task Manager they'll see lots of "in use" RAM and assume Chrome needs all of that RAM equally which is far from the case.

Unless, Chrome is horrendously engineered, but since the same code runs on Android devices with 1GB of RAM I'd assume my understanding of how this works is sound. A quick Google search agrees: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/prerender

In the case of Chrome, I tend to think it's their multi-process architecture that's to blame here:
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/multi-process-architecture
Note each tab has additional overhead running as a separate process under Chrome, and as such, it consumes more memory vs a more traditional architecture (i.e. single main process + threads). When inevitably we all wind up with more and more tabs open vs prior times, it adds up. I haven't done any recent analysis to dig any deeper on this vs i.e. Safari and Firefox, Opera etc., but it's on the TODO list.

In general, with the web evolving, ALL browsers are using more RAM today than previously, regardless (very few truly static web pages nowadays), but Chrome seems to add to that even further.

 

[Stephen.R]

from a machine that runs 24/7 as a media client

Great that tells us nothing about how responsive it is for use by an actual person.

I didn’t say it won’t run, I said it if it can’t cache any data it’s going to be slower.

How much time do you spend each day on an 8GB system?

I haven’t had a computer with 8GB of memory since I upgraded my 2011 MBP to 16GB in <checks...> 2012. Now I have a 2018 MBP15 with 16GB and a 2018Mac mini with 64GB.

and "power users" should be using between 64GB and 128GB of RAM. But we're still sitting on 8GB for average use cases as we have for at least a decade.

iMac Pro is 32-256GB. New Mac Pro will be 32-1536GB. So the “power user” part is already true.

And 10 years ago 8GB was not “average use”. In 2009 the only Mac models that supported more than 8GB were the Mac Pro and the late 2009 iMac.

Surely, Chrome uses RAM in an efficient manner, but technical users are overly obsessed with "free RAM".

No. Chrome is a resource pig. It uses more memory and more cpu cycles than Safari on Mac or the old Edge on Windows, by a decent margin.

 

[cube]

And yeah I suspect I’m pretty typical. I use 8GB. I use Lightroom, iTunes, perhaps 20-30 tabs of Safari, and Garagband primarily. With some Office stuff. Again, let’s pretend I’m wrong and 8GB isn’t enough for most. Where are the posts?

You can manage but seeing what you use the computer would likely be a bit faster with 16GiB.

 

[Howard2k]

I haven’t had a computer with 8GB of memory since I upgraded my 2011 MBP to 16GB in <checks...> 2012. Now I have a 2018 MBP15 with 16GB and a 2018Mac mini with 64GB.

There we go.
[doublepost=1563123991][/doublepost]

You can manage but seeing what you use the computer would likely be a bit faster with 16GiB.

It works fine with 8GB.

Sure it would be better with 16GB, but it doesn’t need it. It would also be better with a faster processor, faster wifi, faster SSD etc.

 

[cube]

I haven’t had a computer with 8GB of memory since I upgraded my 2011 MBP to 16GB in <checks...> 2012. Now I have a 2018 MBP15 with 16GB.

Mistake.

 

[Stephen.R]

Mistake

It wasn’t a choice really. I needed a machine from what they (reseller) had in stock that day.

I’d have gone with the 32GB if I had time to wait for a BTO.
[doublepost=1563124330][/doublepost]

There we go.

How does 8GB being insufficient 7 years ago help your point?

 

[cube]

It wasn’t a choice really. I needed a machine from what they (reseller) had in stock that day.

I’d have gone with the 32GB if I had time to wait for a BTO.

Apple needed to offer at least 32GiB RAM and 2TB SSD in the rMBP by 2015.

 

[Stephen.R]

Apple needed to offer at least 32GiB RAM and 2TB SSD in the rMBP by 2015.

My understanding is that it was an issue of power draw/reduced battery life using regular DDR4 and thus they stuck to the low power modules (which were DDR3 from memory?).

It’s not my daily driver so I’m less worried about it. I (or more specifically my business) will likely sell it or hand-me-down it to a more casual user when the AC comes to an end in ~2 years. It’s mostly a spare, should the desktop have issues and occasional travel machine.

 

[Howard2k]

It wasn’t a choice really. I needed a machine from what they (reseller) had in stock that day.

I’d have gone with the 32GB if I had time to wait for a BTO.
[doublepost=1563124330][/doublepost]
How does 8GB being insufficient 7 years ago help your point?

My point is that 8GB is sufficient today for most people and your claims are not even backed up by your own experience, never mind experiences of those who actually use 8GB systems.

 

[Stephen.R]

not even backed up by your own experience

8GB wasn’t enough 7 years ago, therefore it’s more than enough now.

Great logic there.