Why is everybody so obsessed with RAM?

[Kuckuckstein]

It entirely depends on what you want to do and how well the software you use is written.

Many would have sufficient memory with 8GB. However, when I started my wife’s new iMac M1 with 16GB of RAM, it soon utilized more than 8 GB even though I had only touched Safari, and tested a bit YouTube.

This shows that the more memory you have the more the system will use / keep for quicker actions.

Personally, assume developer and engineer I would always go for more because development with many project instances open, plus mock-up tools, or returning to big data crunching scenarios such as fluid simulations or audio processing would be too slow without enough memory. The data to handle will be large and if you do not have enough memory, it will have to be split in chunks and processed in smaller parts one at a time, which means back and forth between RAM and disc.

But you are right, for most “normal” users - such as myself with the 2018 MacBook Air - more often processor will be the stop gap.

 

[iHorseHead]

Ok, maybe those message don't mean much. What about being unable to do a law exam? It would be disappointing to realise your £1.5k devise is incapable of doing such basic task.

You do know your examples are the worst here? How couldn't he take a law exam? It doesn't make any sense.
My soon to be girlfriend (she doesn't know it yet but she will be) is studying the law and she manager to take all of her exams on her crappy PC with 2GB of ram.
What kind of law exam is this? MBA M1 can even run GTA V in a virtual machine.

 

[iHorseHead]

It entirely depends on what you want to do and how well the software you use is written.

Many would have sufficient memory with 8GB. However, when I started my wife’s new iMac M1 with 16GB of RAM, it soon utilized more than 8 GB even though I had only touched Safari, and tested a bit YouTube.

This shows that the more memory you have the more the system will use / keep for quicker actions.

Personally, assume developer and engineer I would always go for more because development with many project instances open, plus mock-up tools, or returning to big data crunching scenarios such as fluid simulations or audio processing would be too slow without enough memory. The data to handle will be large and if you do not have enough memory, it will have to be split in chunks and processed in smaller parts one at a time, which means back and forth between RAM and disc.

But you are right, for most “normal” users - such as myself with the 2018 MacBook Air - more often processor will be the stop gap.

That doesn't mean anything. Look at the prior posts. The person has no apps opened and it used 8GB already while on desktop. You really think regular MBA with 8GB will use 8GB while on desktop? I feel like we're back on Lion again with that topic.

 

[Kuckuckstein]

Instead of expecting people to add more and more memory to their machines, developers should optimize their apps/websites more.

There is definitely a lot of laziness going on. Too many developers love to just pull one library after the other in, then only using a fraction of their features. That leaves it to the build process to kick unused things out.

But some dev and runtime environments don’t work that way - they just load the full library, and if you refer a lot or structure your libraries to load everything at once, your users are in bad luck.

Also, when you look at websites and their headers the shear amount of JavaScript and CSS bundle references I see.

Unfortunately, short development time (quickly glue together) is too often more important than lean runtime.

 

[BellSystem]

That's not a practical example.

What else do you want?????? Here is my current laptop running on 16GB and 13.97GB is used RIGHT NOW. Imagine if that was 8GB. pRaCtIcLe eXaMpLe

 

[iHorseHead]

Also, when you look at websites and their headers the shear amount of JavaScript and CSS bundle references I see.

I literally don't care about website developers. They don't care about optimisation. I used to do websites back in 2013-2016 and I had so much fun optimising everything for IE and Safari too. Now they just hate Safari and Apple and when you try to say that Safari is great and you use it everyday they'll murder you.

 

[iHorseHead]

View attachment 2020393
What else do you want?????? Here is my current laptop running on 16GB and 13.97GB is used RIGHT NOW. Imagine if that was 8GB. pRaCtIcLe eXaMpLe

Yet if I used the same apps I would have no problems as you can see from my examples as well. With such examples we're back at Lion again.

 

[BellSystem]

Yet if I used the same apps I would have no problems as you can see from my examples as well. With such examples we're back at Lion again.

Its not the apps its how each of us are using them.

 

[M1956]

You do know your examples are the worst here? How couldn't he take a law exam? It doesn't make any sense.
My soon to be girlfriend (she doesn't know it yet but she will be) is studying the law and she manager to take all of her exams on her crappy PC with 2GB of ram.
What kind of law exam is this? MBA M1 can even run GTA V in a virtual machine.

Not saying every law exam requires 16gb, but even such seemingly trivial thing can became an issue. Here the thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/confusing-ram-question.2330958/

 

[BellSystem]

Yet if I used the same apps I would have no problems as you can see from my examples as well. With such examples we're back at Lion again.

When I do the same workflows on an 8GB machine its noticeable. That is a fact from the source....me....the user with the same workflows.

 

[Shirasaki]

Shirasaki Mac uses swap memory too.​

Yes I know. Once saw 23GB of swap memory on my MacBook Pro and someone else’s Microsoft powepoint using 223GB of swap memory smh and locks his system up.

 

[iHorseHead]

Not saying every law exam requires 16gb, but even such seemingly trivial thing can became an issue. Here the thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/confusing-ram-question.2330958/

But there was a memory leak? I had the same issues with Big Sur and stopped having such issues after upgrading to 12.4.

 

[iHorseHead]

Yes I know. Once saw 23GB of swap memory on my MacBook Pro and someone else’s Microsoft powepoint using 223GB of swap memory smh and locks his system up.

What do you do in Powerpoint? 😱

 

[Shirasaki]

What do you do in Powerpoint? 😱

I said someone else. It’s in a forum post that I forgot where, but that window shows 223GB memory being used by PowerPoint, on M1 Pro with 16 GB of memory iirc.

 

[iHorseHead]

I said someone else. It’s in a forum post that I forgot where, but that window shows 223GB memory being used by PowerPoint, on M1 Pro with 16 GB of memory iirc.

That is actually very impressive. I can't imagine having such PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint has never worked for me, but the last time I used it was back in 2011, so um… It was a disaste, but Microsoft Office 2011 was quite bad.

 

[Shirasaki]

I worked at Adobe 20 years ago. Everyone knew that Adobe refused to optimize its apps, and that Photoshop and Premiere could run on much slower systems if they would just trash the old code. It was never worthwhile to the company, they preferred to add new features. So? Yes, coders should optimize their code for lower-end machines. They often don’t.

I can really feel this. My PC has only 16 GB of ram and latest photoshop keeps crashing when opening any image that is more than 1 MB in size or doing anything with it. I am forced to downgrade to the oldest version Adobe offer to control RAM usage. It’s brutal that I have to forego maybe security and stability update just to make sure the software will run properly. Mac version doesn’t fare better either. This is just one of many reasons I hate keeping updating the software, especially those big ones.

 

[Ethosik]

People need to stop using websites as a benchmark. This is like saying I do video editing how much memory is good? Well am I doing just 1080p or 4K? Single streams or multiple? How long are the videos?

I made a website 5 years ago that had a bug in JavaScript that caused high CPU and memory.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I was wondering about one thing and actually I've been wondering about for awhile: On reddit and on other sites I see people constantly whining about 8GB of RAM and them blaming everybody else for getting the 8GB MBA, because some YouTubers said it's good.

Because it’s another one of those things that drive engagement. Any content anyone produces that will get a lot of people engaging with their content (whether positively or negatively) is good for the content producer. So, even if the producer doesn’t really care about the issue at hand, they’ve GOT to say something about it to maintain the relevance of their social media accounts.

 

[fisherking]

I can really feel this. My PC has only 16 GB of ram and latest photoshop keeps crashing when opening any image that is more than 1 MB in size or doing anything with it. I am forced to downgrade to the oldest version Adobe offer to control RAM usage. It’s brutal that I have to forego maybe security and stability update just to make sure the software will run properly. Mac version doesn’t fare better either. This is just one of many reasons I hate keeping updating the software, especially those big ones.

the problems you're describing don't seem related to ram; might be worth trying to sort out what the problem actually is.

 

[MacHiavelli]

I have a 2015 15" MBP with 16GB of RAM and a 2017 13" MBP with 8GB of RAM.

Without question, both machines have been pretty awful to use for varying reasons. Loathe both of them.

But the 16GB machine can cope with more guff than the 8GB machine, though that’s only ever a handful of tabs in Safari, Mail open, and perhaps a couple of other apps like Pages and WhatsApp running.

Next machine will be a MBA with 8GB of RAM, just because I can’t bear the thought of wasting too much money on more Apple products. I’m slowly getting out of the ecosystem and the next Mac will be the last I will buy (unless it blows me away).

 

[Ethosik]

Speed and type of memory also matter. Is an 16GB DDR2 RAM just as good as 16GB Unified memory? This is like saying my Pentium 4 which was 3Ghz is the same as a current 3Ghz processor today(with the extra cores disabled).

 

[tubuliferous]

Can you send me the url of a chrome tab that will eat away 2GB?

2GB for a tab does sound like a lot, but (for example) I wrote a web app for scientific visualization that absolutely devours RAM. I believe the trend towards more popular and more complex web apps (and web apps that are wrapped for desktop use like Discord and Slack) will contribute to increasing demand for RAM. Web apps and their desktop counterparts will get more efficient with future developments, but there will probably still be major RAM pressure from that direction, maybe even outpacing RAM pressure from other types of software.

As always, RAM demands are different for different individuals depending on software usage habits, but the point is that the wide and increasing popularity of web apps (and web apps disguised as desktop apps) will likely greatly increase the average consumer RAM demand.

 

[TripleYoThreat]

It seems like OP made this thread just to thrash on everyone who wants 16gb ram...

 

[Ethosik]

Get as much RAM as you can if you rely heavily on third party apps, I'd say. Otherwise, it's not necessary.

We also need to be careful with this suggestion. I took this advise when I got my 2019 i9 iMac and put in 128 GB of RAM. All I do is basic 1080p video editing and it was NOT better than my 2010 Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM.

 

[Ethosik]

Are you just going to counter everyone that says 16 is valid at 1000 bucks? Because that's a valid point regardless of whether who needs how much. Apple is just doing it to get away with it, but, everyone's right. 1000 bucks for 8gb ram is a joke. HELL, the iPhone 13 Pro has 6gb RAM, and my Android phone at half the price has 8gb RAM.
Even though I see that 8 is enough for the average user, almost every laptop 900 and up has 16gb or some other niche feature it's bringing. Browsing Newegg, there's plenty of laptops for 500 with DDR4 16GB RAM.

Say I wanted to ensure 2k res, here is one at 900 offering 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD, and a UHD display.

The point is valid, maybe that's the answer to the OP of the thread. That hey, everyone's talking about it not even necessarily cause they all need it, but cause Apple is starting to short change people / their product and it is up to us to speak up about it like we are, to incite the change

I was recently looking at a Dell that is over $2,000 and it has 8GB of RAM. https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/sho...d/precision-17-7760-laptop/xctop776017us_vpps

If we want to talk about the entire industry, we can have a conversation. But if you want to just target Apple here its a different story.