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How important is 32gb of RAM?
- Thread starter UBS28
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I personally think 16gb should be the lowest offering these days. I noticed that I'll be down to 1-2gb of available memory and not really doing anything but having a few different apps open. Between Safari, Mail, Discord, and a few other chat apps. I would think that 8gb would be far too little ram even for doing the most basic of things.
I have machines with each. Eight is totally fine for basic use. I edit RAW photo files and render short home movies using that amount. Again, if you aren’t looking at memory pressure, you aren’t seeing the full picture.
It's nice to avoid those little hiccups that arise from paging, swapping or processing semaphores which may be RAM related or in a chain of operations to execute. My current experience with 40 GB is that more is better assuming that you don't care about cost. I'm tempted to bump this desktop to 96 GB of RAM to see what that feels like.
Definitely not saying that 8gb won't work just fine, I just feel like 16gb seems to be the sweet spot for memory if you don't need more than that for specific purposes.
It's a luxury for sure. But it's an issue in the Apple Hardware Ecosystem where RAM is much more expensive compared to other hardware solutions. Getting a system with 4 or 6 RAM slots that are accessible makes it so much easier to get the expansion you want or need, now or in the future so it's one fewer concern about the hardware purchase.
For some it is a need.
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We've been having this discussion in my trading forum as we use a tool that uses up a lot of memory. Several have complained about performance and the general answer has been to increase RAM allocation to 12 GB. This cures the performance issues assuming that you have the RAM to do it. It doesn't use all of that but that setting gets rid of memory pressure issues within the application.
I did exactly the same! It was very satisfying (and surprisingly easy) to do it too. If only we could still do it. 😀
I had a 2008 and I maxed it to 4, and then later found out that the real max was 6 and I did that too.
Soldered in stinks but that's life in the Apple world. At some point, I will get a 16 with 32. I can't see 64 but you never know.
I had a 2007 17" that I did the exact same thing to. My MacBook and 3rd party RAM showed up on the same day, I never even turned the computer on before installing the new memory.
If you have to ask you probably don't need it. I run maths, computer vision and simulation software (often with multiple VMs open). I'll take all the RAM I can get. Unless you have a similarly demanding use profile it is highly likely 16 GB will suffice. However, the problem with current Apple notebooks is that if your use profile becomes more demanding you will need to sell your current laptop and buy something better. There is no internal upgrade path. This is somewhat wasteful in eco terms, but leads to bargains to be found in second hand kit. The alternative, if there is any risk things will change, is to swallow hard and order more (ludicrously expensive Apple) RAM from new.
I think similar to CPU performance gains slowing over the last several years RAM needs have stagnated a bit too. Historically it seemed every new machine I had RAM was double or quadruple what it had been years earlier. Not the case anymore but old habbits die hard and I'm just more comfortable maxing RAM to 32 on my incoming 13" MBP. If I was getting a 16" I wouldn't go more than 32GB though unless I needed to run many VMs simultaneously.
I had a 12” MacBook that I ran Parallels (VM) on. I maxed it out to 8G. There was no option 16G. That’s part of the reason for upgrading to a new model with 32G. If I got the 16” version, I don’t think I’d get 64G, though.
Storage space is a similar choice. I think I’ll go with 4TB.
Storage space is a similar choice. I think I’ll go with 4TB.
We hit a plateau about five years ago. Some apps are more consuming, but many (particularly at the OS level) are better optimized. People talking about Mac OS needing in 32GB in seven or ten years haven't been paying attention. The footprint of Mac OS hasn't really changed much in the past five, six, seven years. It's still ~3GB with minimal background processes running. If history is any guide, that is probably not going to change a whole lot.
You have crosscurrents in use models.
A lot of programs have migrated to the cloud and a lot more will. On the other hand, some applications are getting bigger and bigger. Operating systems are getting more efficient, taking advantage of advanced instructions in newer processors for better efficiency and applying better algorithms and squashing memory leaks.
I still say, though, if money isn't a factor, then it's better to have more.