Macbook Pro RAM and VMware/Parallels

[shaunp]

Here's a question for those of you that rely a lot on Fusion/Parallels or other apps that use tons of RAM.

Are you are finding the current 16GB limit in the rMBP too limiting, and if so what would you want? Personally I'd like 64GB as I regularly use over 40GB on my nMP, but I need to take lab stuff with me and squeezing it all into 16GB is a bit of a bind.

I would be interested to see if I'm alone in these thoughts or if a few of us think Apple (plus Intel and the RAM manufacturers) need to up their game here. We know they won't, but let's pretend that they might.

 

[maflynn]

16GB is more then enough for my needs, running numerous Vms and OSX. I have not got anywhere near saturation of my ram usage.

 

[yjchua95]

Here's a question for those of you that rely a lot on Fusion/Parallels or other apps that use tons of RAM.

Are you are finding the current 16GB limit in the rMBP too limiting, and if so what would you want? Personally I'd like 64GB as I regularly use over 40GB on my nMP, but I need to take lab stuff with me and squeezing it all into 16GB is a bit of a bind.

I would be interested to see if I'm alone in these thoughts or if a few of us think Apple (plus Intel and the RAM manufacturers) need to up their game here. We know they won't, but let's pretend that they might.

When I'm doing 4K video editing, 64GB of RAM suddenly seems quite little on both my nMPs.

But then, heavy work is meant to be done on workstations, not laptops.

 

[shaunp]

When I'm doing 4K video editing, 64GB of RAM suddenly seems quite little on both my nMPs.

But then, heavy work is meant to be done on workstations, not laptops.

Agreed, but I can't always take my nMP with me. The workloads themselves aren't that heavy, CPU isn't pushed to max constantly, but the RAM requirements are very high. As I said at the beginning of the post, I was talking about virtualisation and the need for more RAM for mobile test labs.

 

[Freyqq]

DDR4 is suppose to double the max ram on laptops. So, I'd expect 16GB dimms when DDR4 is the new standard.

 

[happyfrappy]

16GB is plenty for my needs with my 2012, on my old 13"(2010) 8GB got extremely cramped before the processor felt slow.

In my opinion it *really* depends upon what kind of tasks you'll be doing from within VMWare/Parallels, Windows 7/8 itself eats ~2GB of RAM and the pie of what you've given the virtual machine gets smaller. On an 8GB Mac you'll feel it the much faster as the processor gets pegged via virtual memory.