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Who actually bought 64gb ram and why?

D

d4z0mg

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 13, 2020
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The title isn't as condescending as it sounds, I promise.

I'm just curious how many of you bought the 64gb ram option and what your purpose was. I see a lot of people mention VM's but I don't actually know what these are.

Have any of you picked this option for video editing, 3d design and rendering and other memory heavy audio/visual applications?
 
Not in a MBP but I ordered my 2018 Mac mini with 64GB.

VMs (virtual machines - ie running one or more extra operating systems in a virtualised environment. For a lot of people here that will mean a Windows VM to run Windows only apps on their Mac. I occasionally use it for that but mostly I’m running somewhere between one and a dozen headless Linux VMs for software development and to emulate client production environments for testing/debugging etc.) and a resource heavy IDE are the main drivers for this memory.
 
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Same story with having a couple of VMs running. Throw in a lot of tabs in Safari and Chrome, a few large Excel files, a few dev tools like Postman / VS Code and one can push past 32GB. The machine would run entirely fine on 32GB, but I don't want to buy something where I'm immediately bumping into the limit (I kept my last MBP for 7.5 years), hence I went for 64GB.

1580179122773.png
 
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klagermkii said:
Same story with having a couple of VMs running. Throw in a lot of tabs in Safari and Chrome, a few large Excel files, a few dev tools like Postman / VS Code and one can push past 32GB. The machine would run entirely fine on 32GB, but I don't want to buy something where I'm immediately bumping into the limit (I kept my last MBP for 7.5 years), hence I went for 64GB.

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The machine would run entirely fine on 16 GB too. The "Memory Used" section in the Activity Monitor is not telling anything valuable as memory is only released when memory pressure goes up. And even then there is almost never a noticeable difference in having 16, 32 or 64 GB (I have a maxed out MBP 16" and the same model with 16 GB/1TB for travels).
 
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Eliott69 said:
The machine would run entirely fine on 16 GB too. The "Memory Used" section in the Activity Monitor is not telling anything valuable as memory is only released when memory pressure goes up. And even then there is almost never a noticeable difference in having 16, 32 or 64 GB (I have a maxed out MBP 16" and the same model with 16 GB/1TB for travels).
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I don't know why there's so many anti-RAM people on this forum. It depends on what you mean by fine, sure it all launches, but then there's random stutters across apps, especially when I switch back to one that I haven't used for a bit.

And it's really easy to check, just ran it in 16GB mode with: sudo nvram boot-args="maxmem=16384"

1580188802765.png


Even though it isn't showing any kind of pressure I'm getting stutters. I don't want stutters, so I buy RAM.
 
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klagermkii said:
I don't know why there's so many anti-RAM people on this forum.
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Maybe because users have – in large quantity – different experience. I run on my 16 GB machine in parallel Photoshop / InDesign / XCode / PHPStorm / 1 VM with Windows 10 all day, plus Mail, Word, Excel, Safari. Never any stutters on the 16 GB and certainly not on my 64 GB. One thing I repeatedly read is that users give their VMs too much memory (like 8 GB for Windows 10 while 2 GB is recommended and enough). This slows down the whole machine.
 
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I got a colleague of mine a 64GB machine because he works extensively in Adobe tools... simultaneously. When you're designing a visual campaign, lots of those apps need to be open at once. And when the end result should include a video, RAM gets eaten quicker than a box of donuts.

i would also get myself a 64GB machine for testing with VMs. If you want to test the effect of the amount of RAM in certain applications, then having plenty of RAM to start with is an obvious requirement. I can't test a VM it’s 32GB if I only have 32GB physically installed :)

Two very different situations, both requiring oodles of RAM.
 
Eliott69 said:
while 2 GB is recommended and enough
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Have you used 2GB in windows :oops:

I have and its not pleasant.

As for the 16/32/64 memory situation. Last year it was people trying to justify 32 GB as an amount they absolutely needed, in 2020 people are doing the same at 64, yet not much as changed. I suspect most people don't need that much and it can be viewed as overkill for many.

Yet with that said, its their money and if they want 64, who am I to say they can't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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I certainly don't need it, but could afford it. I do a lot of Lightroom/Photoshop and AutoCad work and while 32GB in my 2018 was more than adequate, I know that file sizes aren't getting any smaller. Id rather have it and not need it then get slowed down because I wouldn't spend $400.
 
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64GB MacOS yes...

I would not buy 64GB ram on a Windows based PC knowing how poorly Windows manages memory. However on MacOS I would forsure because it'll use whatever you have, and so at least it's not going to waste. I have 32GB on my gaming PC which really doesn't get touched but at $150 for 32GB of 3600mhz Corsair... couldn't pass that up.
Next month I'll be picking up the 16" and I plan on getting it with 32GB, for the above mentioned reason being 1, and 2 it can't be upgraded later aswell I do run some Linux VM's.
 
Future proofing is a major reason (I just ordered over the weekend). I don't need 64GB today. I do need more an 16GB today, because I often start stacking up swap. If I am running Parallels (with, say, Skyrim) then I can really bog things down. If I am opening a really big image, it can bog things down.

I figure over the next three years, it's likely I will cross the "Need more than 32GB" threshold too. So I buy the RAM now.
 
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I got the 64 GB machine.

I’m a software engineer that regularly works on very large, stateful software that needs a lot of memory. On my previous laptop (15 inch MBP with 32 GB RAM), I was already close to hitting 32 GB of real memory consumption when I was running the entire Kubernetes cluster on my local machine. I forgot what the price difference was, but I remember it being pretty cheap to go from 32 GB to 64 GB on the 16 inch MBP. I haven’t actually checked yet, but if I haven’t already breached 32 GB, I’m close.

The added memory and threads (i9, heck yea) lets me be lazy and wasteful, too, which saves me time. I can just leave several virtual machines at the ready at all times and not even feel it. I can also write really crappy, naive code just to try something, even if it consumes way too much memory and CPU time, because for the most part, brute forcing is fast enough for trying an experiment.

My MacBook Pro generates an income for me. So yea, the price, while a factor, wasn’t much of an issue. May as well max it out so I can minimize the chance of the hardware getting in the way of doing my job.
 
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If you need it you know it so buy it. Most of the people here who talk about buying such large ram configs tend to explain it pretty well; they have good reasons for the upgrade. For the rest of us, it's likely a case of massive overkill.

However, these days I wouldn't buy any MBP with less than 16. I think we're there now where that should be the ground floor. Apple still sells a lot of base configs (heck, all but the 16, right?) with 8 gigs, but if I were getting one of those other machines I'd go ahead and make sure to get one with 16. 32 though is for power users. 64 is for people who work their MBP so hard it is often on the verge of melting.
 
Eliott69 said:
Maybe because users have – in large quantity – different experience. I run on my 16 GB machine in parallel Photoshop / InDesign / XCode / PHPStorm / 1 VM with Windows 10 all day, plus Mail, Word, Excel, Safari. Never any stutters on the 16 GB and certainly not on my 64 GB. One thing I repeatedly read is that users give their VMs too much memory (like 8 GB for Windows 10 while 2 GB is recommended and enough). This slows down the whole machine.
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I've 10 years of VMware & virtualization experience and there's no way on earth Windows 10 is happy with just 2GB. Even running the leanest of Windows 10 images, it will still chug with 2GB.

In most of my environments my W10 VM's get 8GB & 2 vCPU's.
 
Dominus Mortem said:
32 though is for power users. 64 is for people who work their MBP so hard it is often on the verge of melting.
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My RAM use is separate from my CPU use. It's not because I want to have several VMs running with 8GB or more each, that those VMs necessarily will be doing a lot. I'm looking at simulating a server network before spending on the hardware. But the servers will work request-based, so when I'm checking my mail in between testing sessions, the servers are idle. No smoke here :)
 
gplusplus said:
I got the 64 GB machine.

I’m a software engineer that regularly works on very large, stateful software that needs a lot of memory. On my previous laptop (15 inch MBP with 32 GB RAM), I was already close to hitting 32 GB of real memory consumption when I was running the entire Kubernetes cluster on my local machine. I forgot what the price difference was, but I remember it being pretty cheap to go from 32 GB to 64 GB on the 16 inch MBP. I haven’t actually checked yet, but if I haven’t already breached 32 GB, I’m close.

The added memory and threads (i9, heck yea) lets me be lazy and wasteful, too, which saves me time. I can just leave several virtual machines at the ready at all times and not even feel it. I can also write really crappy, naive code just to try something, even if it consumes way too much memory and CPU time, because for the most part, brute forcing is fast enough for trying an experiment.

My MacBook Pro generates an income for me. So yea, the price, while a factor, wasn’t much of an issue. May as well max it out so I can minimize the chance of the hardware getting in the way of doing my job.
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Out of interest , are you running Minikube or a multi node K8s cluster (ie, with Vagrant) on your machine ? And with running multiple VMs at same time how does the machine cope in terms of fan noise and thermals?

I have the same use case and really want to go for the i9 and 64GB, but held back with all the talk about loud fan noise on this spec - although not intending to use a 4K external monitor in my case which seems to cause much of the complaints about fans, my main concern is having to shutdown VMs to stop the machine sounding like a jet engine.. which clearly won’t be ideal when you pay for all those extra cores and RAM.
 
Customer demos and lab testing on VMs. It is more convenient and less worries about not having Internet connection back to ESXi while on the road. Easy to just spin-up another instance in Fusion. I am running two 4k via eGPU and have no noticeable fan noise from MBP. For larger labs, I am using a 20-core 144GB old DELL server under my desk.
 
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