I basically came here to say this, too. It's following the usual troll thread pattern on MR where the OP asks a question then refuses to believe and/or attacks everyone who provides an answer.
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Why is everybody so obsessed with RAM?
- Thread starter iHorseHead
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That argument can be applied to any amount.
For those saying 16GB of RAM is enough, try opening 5 different virtual machines. Or try editing 8k video. Or try editing 5+ streams of 4K footage.
I am not bashing on people needing more RAM. I have 7 computers in my workflow. Some of them have 64GB of RAM (even the new Mac Studio I bought). Some of them have just 8 GB of RAM and they function just fine with the work they do.
Agreed. I think it got fixed, but at one point Chrome was using swap with 5 tabs open on my 64 GB RAM Windows 10 system. I looked it up at the time (can't find the article as its been a few years) but essentially it is impossible to 100% prevent swap.
And people need to get with the times on SSD life. It has been tested and documented, even filling up the entire drive constantly takes a VERY long time to kill it off, some GBs for swap here and there is a drop in the bucket with life expectancy.
Bro for real?
That ships with an RTX A3000, which is $1100, and it has a UHD (4k display)
Keep the eyes open on the differences. Not apples to apples here. That's an extremely niche use case device
Not only that but this is a one off example in a sea of MANY that are easily available for 16gb ram at less than 1000
This web developer is offended 😅. I don't hate Safari. Actually, I wouldn't say I like IE and Firefox because they don't handle WebKit well. Also, I have gotten pretty decent at optimizing images and some Javascript.
Chrome from my experience regularly takes up too much memory and for unknown reasons.
RAM is an obsession on these forums. There are people who say 32Gb is a bare minimum…. For surfing.
They also don’t understand how memory management works. If 8Gb is working fine for your workflow - you don’t need more, and won’t need it for years to come. Don’t listen to people, they don’t know what they are talking about.
For the ones that say 64Gb is enough, try rendering a Pixar movie and see what happens….
Yep! We all need to be better at recommending RAM. A few years ago (when I got my 2019 i9 iMac) I asked a similar question and was just advised "get as much as you can afford". Well, I could afford to get 128GB of RAM. It was a waste of money! There are "what you can afford" and "wasting money" going on here. If you just use Microsoft Word for your resume, and you have $5,000 just handed to you, would you "get as much as you can afford"? Or would you just get a cheapo $500 system and save the rest?
That’s probably because memory unused by apps is used for caching by Windows, and it uses more the more memory you have. The portion used for caching is reduced if needed when apps request more memory.
Do you think you rely heavily on third party apps if all you do is basic 1080p video editing? I do not.
I think people like to just leave dozens of stuff open and be lazy. My mom does video editing, photoshop, illustrator, social media work and more on her 8GB M1 iMac.
Premiere Pro/After Effects are in my workflow so yes, I do rely heavily on third party apps.
My wife does professional writing. Word, endnote, SPSS, R, multiple pages of tabs. I got her the 16gb air and it still grinds when she’s really pushing it. That’s not a huge workload for a machine, but her ram goes to yellow and red pretty regularly. Imagine if I had listened to the OP and gotten the base model.
I suppose what I wrote can be interpreted the way you do, but I didn't mean what you earn your income from, rather that your computer uses a lot of different RAM intensive apps at the same time. That was what I meant, anyway.
And on the Windows side with Vista! I immediately have 12GB of RAM used on my Windows 11 machine which has 64GB of RAM. Doesn't mean Windows 11 cannot run on 8GB of RAM.
Like everything on the computer there is no straightforward answer. If it works for you then great.
For me personally I always like to have more RAM then less, even if I don't fully utilize it all the time. To me this is more efficient for the computer, sure maybe on today's systems the burden of using swap or compressed memory isn't as impact as it use to be, but at least it's a peace of mind and if I crank things up their could be less issues or noticeable weird lag. Never mind over time software demands can increase or use case's can. I've been working this way with Mac systems along time and so far it works well.
For me personally I always like to have more RAM then less, even if I don't fully utilize it all the time. To me this is more efficient for the computer, sure maybe on today's systems the burden of using swap or compressed memory isn't as impact as it use to be, but at least it's a peace of mind and if I crank things up their could be less issues or noticeable weird lag. Never mind over time software demands can increase or use case's can. I've been working this way with Mac systems along time and so far it works well.
Perfect example of why "number of browser tabs I can open" is not a good benchmark.
This isn't 1990s anymore where we have basic websites.
"it's running 5 advertising modules, 2 trackers, 2 mobile viewports, 8 social widgets, a payment provider, 2 audio/video tools, embedded multiple times on the page, and who knows how many wordpress plugins adding miscellaneous client-side data."
This isn't 1990s anymore where we have basic websites.
"it's running 5 advertising modules, 2 trackers, 2 mobile viewports, 8 social widgets, a payment provider, 2 audio/video tools, embedded multiple times on the page, and who knows how many wordpress plugins adding miscellaneous client-side data."
So we can say its fine for Dell to do it but not Apple? That comes with 8GB of RAM! The entire argument here is "nothing over $1,000 should come with 8GB of RAM". Well there you have one ALMOST $3,000!
Guess what Apple systems have too? Better GPU, SSD, RAM performance, screen, keyboard, trackpad and more than comparable $1,000 Windows laptops.
So if you say "8GB of RAM is fine since it comes with X or Y". Then same applies to Apple systems.
Running out of RAM sucks hard and upgrading RAM after the fact can be more expensive than just buying it upfront. I have 128gb in my workstation and 64gb in my macbook pro. Never have to think about RAM. I go in to work and use one of the ****** computers with insufficient RAM and the difference is brutal.
Both of my machines have many cores. This allows me to concurrently run many processes. However all of my processes need a lot of memory (data science, large data sets). So without the RAM the cores are useless.
If you are just running notepad and one tab in chrome on yoru machine then you don't need the RAM. But many of us do need it.
Both of my machines have many cores. This allows me to concurrently run many processes. However all of my processes need a lot of memory (data science, large data sets). So without the RAM the cores are useless.
If you are just running notepad and one tab in chrome on yoru machine then you don't need the RAM. But many of us do need it.
People aren’t obsessed with RAM. RAM is one of the most important things you can have more of in a computer. The more RAM you have, the more things you can do at once. When you run low or out, annoying things happen. And unlike most Windows computers where you can upgrade the RAM later, you’re stuck with what you’ve got.
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Don't be silly. That laptop has four memory slots. 8GB is the minimum configuration people buy so they can self upgrade memory without paying Dell memory pricing.
Especially when the tabs are a millimeter thin. That would drive me nuts.
This has got to be it. Honestly I can see genuine uses where you could even need 128GB+ but I think most people are just lazy and expect their computer to just power on through when they're too bone idle to shut down apps and tabs that they can't possibly need to be still open.
Here's Facebook eating 1.8 GB in Safari, which is more RAM efficient than Chrome. And MacRumors using almost 900MB.
You're right to a large extent, but there was a poster who said his computer with 8GB of RAM was struggling to play a video, which is either
1 - a complete load of lobbox
2 - something on his computer is broken
3 - he's one of these people with literally EVERYTHING open and his computer is at the point of having a nervous breakdown.
That's who I was directly responding to (I should have quoted him for clarity).