Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
new 16 Macbook 16GB or 32?
- Thread starter jerryk
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I was looking at this one: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/del...rationid=2339e06c-858f-4646-9728-8bdffa795e85
But, ya, you're right, after getting close to same specs, prices are somewhat closer.
The choice between the 16Gb and 32Gb option is the one giving me the most annoyance. I can get a great deal on the 2nd tier model with the 8 core, 16Gb, 1Tb and 5500, going for the 32Gb option will cost me a lot more as I will lose the discount going BTO. I am going to swap my current Mac Mini 6 core i5 with 32Gb for the 16" as I am out on the road much more than I was earlier in the year. I use lots of office and web based stuff so no photo/video work.
Just looking at Activity Monitor with all my stuff open seems to suggest I need more than 16Gb, is that correct?
Just looking at Activity Monitor with all my stuff open seems to suggest I need more than 16Gb, is that correct?
Your activity monitor actually shows the opposite.
Also remember, the more RAM you have the more the OS will use. If you had 64GB RAM you can easily use more than 32GB RAM for example but it doesn’t mean you benefit from it or need more than 32GB RAM - it is designed to use RAM when available.
You’d probably be fine with 16... most of that RAM is speculative cache. It is difficult to interpret what your need is since RAM management is very complicated and basic macOS frameworks will gladly grab more RAM if they see that there is plenty free.
Last edited:
I always find it funny how people are saying "Get more RAM, you have to have more RAM!" No, you don't. If you aren't using it, its wasted money. And the "future proofing" is nonsense. If we get to a point in time where 32GB of RAM and up are needed to run Apple's OS we are a ways out from that. 16GB is plenty of RAM in most use cases and will last many, many years.
I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now and I think I’m going to get the 32GB model. Photoshop and VM can certainly take advantage of this increased memory footprint. I’ve had a 16GB 2012 rMBP and a 2015 rMBP for the power at least 7 years (the 2012 is actually STILL my daily driver) and I can see that even with 16GB it’s getting a bit harder to do efficient RAM memory management.
Not having user replaceable is annoying for sure, but it’s been this way for at least half a decade. Apple isn’t going to change, but I guess we can take solace in the fact that they have basically cut the upgrade price IN HALF and while ss memory and RAM has gotten quite a bit cheaper in the past 1-2 years, Apple is certainly sacrificing some margin on these machines offerings.
Not having user replaceable is annoying for sure, but it’s been this way for at least half a decade. Apple isn’t going to change, but I guess we can take solace in the fact that they have basically cut the upgrade price IN HALF and while ss memory and RAM has gotten quite a bit cheaper in the past 1-2 years, Apple is certainly sacrificing some margin on these machines offerings.
Just bought the new 16" Pro, went with the 16GB RAM and the stanard-size SSD. Even though I occasionally work with some large databases (some of them hundreds of gigs in size), I think you need to be doing high-end 4K pro-level video work, or be running VMs, and maybe some compiling, to both regularly take advantage of 32 or even 64 GB RAM and to really need that realtime speed. For my large databases, what I need is a good SSD, and Apple has those, plus Thunderbolt 3 makes for a great combo. Apple and their SSDs are really good and robust, never had one fail, ever, even with some processes running for days at a time. If you're buying 64 GB Ram, you should know how to terminal up a RAM disk (hello diskutil) and actually use the damn thing, or you're likely wasting a ton of money.
I determined the money is better spent on a really fast external thunderbolt SSD. Right now a decent 2TB Thunderbolt 3 drive is ~ $800, which affords you blazing fast read/writes at ~ 2500 MB/s and tons of swappable storage. Consider carefully your use case and realistically how many times you'll be using that extra RAM. If you're not shooting tons of video in 4k, or don't have a ~$30,000+ RED 8k camera with big files derived therefrom, or you aren't testing programs/apps in OSX and Win10 in VM, or aren't waiting for the compile bar to reach zero, it's a strong bet you are wasting a lot of money.
I determined the money is better spent on a really fast external thunderbolt SSD. Right now a decent 2TB Thunderbolt 3 drive is ~ $800, which affords you blazing fast read/writes at ~ 2500 MB/s and tons of swappable storage. Consider carefully your use case and realistically how many times you'll be using that extra RAM. If you're not shooting tons of video in 4k, or don't have a ~$30,000+ RED 8k camera with big files derived therefrom, or you aren't testing programs/apps in OSX and Win10 in VM, or aren't waiting for the compile bar to reach zero, it's a strong bet you are wasting a lot of money.
Last edited:
16 GB may be enough today, or even in a year or two. But who knows, you may still use this computer in 3, 4, 5 or 6 years. By then you may wish you had chosen 32 GB of RAM. One of the "features" of this computer is that you can't upgrade literally any part of it, so you have to "upgrade" it before you even buy it.
Your memory pressure is green with no spikes of yellow, or worse yet, red. So you have enough memory.
If you did not have enough you would see spikes of yellow indicating a lot of paging activity, or red indicating excessive paging. Paging is normal. But when it gets too high the system spends all it's time de-allocating memory from one process and giving it to another over and over, instead of doing useful work.
10 years! Wow that’s a long time, if I was considering keeping it for that long, I would upgrade RAM for sure.
Same thought. But really in 10 years the system will be ancient. Probably by then MacBook Pros will have long been running some sort of Apple processor and a new version of Mac OS that does not support Intel processors
I used my 2008 MBP 17 until 2018 when the screen died. It wasn't my primary laptop - I used it as a secondary to store my video library and watch videos as it was easy to slap in a large SSD but I still used it. My 2014 MBP is almost six years old and has been used daily since purchased. I expect it to last at least another four years.
Same, I’ve kept my 13” MacBook unibody since 2009, albeit I was able to upgrade the hdd to larger SSD, as well as max out ram to 16Gb. So they can last. With these MacBooks as everything is non-upgradable I am strongly leaning towards the 32gb now even though I admit I won’t be benefitting from it from day 1.
The memory pressure tool is an excellent way to judge your memory usage/needs. If you are staying as low as your screenshot shows and are only using the apps you listed then you will be wasting your money going BTO and loosing your discount.
If your workflow isn’t getting close to using 16GB of RAM usage today (most actually can even survive on 8GB) it is unlikely that even in several years time that you’d need more. Most software vendors are still working on the principle that most people have 4-8GB RAM.
In 3-5 years vendors may start developing software on the assumption that people have 8-16GB as the norm.
The likelihood is that everything of the laptop has aged by 5-10 years to the point you want to upgrade rather than you finding yourself that you are running out of RAM.
Almost 6 months later now after launch, doing the 32gb for a refurb is still pretty tough from both a cost and availability perspective. If it was a bit cheaper of an upgrade I'd go for it, but because I need the 1TB hard drive too, I've ruled it out. I'm just waiting on a 16gb RAM model now.