Why is everybody so obsessed with RAM?

[AJB1971]

I think there’s a disconnect between the average person on this forum and the average person. To illustrate that point, if you look at the recent poll on what RAM people were going to get for their M2 Airs only 13% had selected 8GB and over half had opted for 16GB. In reality, I would imagine that the majority of M2 Airs sold will have 8GB, otherwise, why wouldn’t Apple spec the higher-end standard model with 16GB?

The models that come with 8GB of RAM as standard are the lower-end models in the lineup. It probably says a lot about the capabilities of these machines that people are looking at them instead of something like the 14-inch Pro, which does come with 16GB of RAM as standard.

Ultimately, it comes down to user experience and I still think that the 8GB machines are more than capable enough for most people. The main issue for me is the price of the machines and the cost to upgrade the RAM if you do want extra.

 

[MajorFubar]

I think there’s a disconnect between the average person on this forum and the average person.

Realised that some weeks ago when someone said they start their day with 50 tabs open, finish it with 200, and they considered their use typical.
No.
A really, very, very big, No.
Like, Mount Rushmore big, No.

 

[wonderings]

Everyones work flow is going to be different. 8 gigs of ram might be enough for some, but will not be for everyone. Not sure about gave development, but games themselves do not need a lot of ram, it is more the hard drive, cpu and gpu that matter here. For my workflow using Adobe CC at the moment I am using about 12 gigs of RAM with Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. This varies of course based on what I am doing, but it certainly helps to have 32 gigs of ram opposed to 8 gigs of RAM. Also if you are going to be running virtual machines on your computer you relegate RAM to the VM when running. So when I have Windows 11 in Parallels going it is using 4 gigs of RAM right there. So now your 8 gigs is only 4 gigs without you running any applications. Lastly RAM is very cheap, at least on the PC side of things, so there is no reason why not to have at least 16 gigs of RAM. Apple of course charges you a fortune so I see why some stick with the base 8, and Apple does some great things hardware wise to make that 8 gigs of ram super efficient, but really they could be putting in 16 gigs as the base price for I am guessing the exact same price they are buying the 8 gigs of ram.

 

[jav6454]

16 tabs, all apps opened. Snappy but claustrophobic, which is why I use different browsers for different things.

That much Swap means you under estimated your memory needs.

 

[mi7chy]

Not sure about gave development, but games themselves do not need a lot of ram, it is more the hard drive, cpu and gpu that matter here.

One of the few native AS optimized games, Baldur's Gate 3, doesn't run well with only 8GB.

 

[Shirasaki]

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

Well, downgrading works and I have RAM problem when using chrome for work anyways so it’s about to get some upgrades, assuming my PC can support more than 16GB. I have well passed the time tinkering and troubleshooting random issues for no end just to use the latest and greatest.

 

[JahBoolean]

Yeah, they're right. Coders are just worse than they used to be.

The performance overhead not being an existential threat to your deployement means that time can be allocated to other tasks. That's no statement on competence, simply a shift in focus.

 

[xxray]

Probably because, with Apple Silicon, for 90% of users, the CPU/GPU is enough for their needs while the RAM will be the more limiting factor.

 

[Danfango]

Yeah, they're right. Coders are just worse than they used to be.

They are terrible. The whole field is a fashion show if I’m honest. I spent a number of years as an electronics engineer, bailed on that and worked my way up the path to senior position in soft eng. Now I sit on a stack of ruin driven by marketing, fads and fashion.

If we build aircraft like this Boeing would be selling them….

 

[julesme]

The wrong way to upgrade to a new Mac:

“Ten years ago, I used x, y, and z types of apps on 8GB of RAM with no problem. Those are the same types of apps I use today, so I should be OK with 8GB of RAM on my new 2022 machine.”

The right way to upgrade:

“Every 5 or 6 years, when I upgrade to a new Mac, I also double the RAM, because apps and OS’s tend to use more RAM over time. This way I allow for more overhead and also future proof my new machine, which will continue to be updated with new versions of apps for 5 or 6 years after I buy it.”

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

Because 8GB goes quickly for all but the lowest denomination of users.

That's why Apple still starts at 8GB. It's enough for the lowest needs of users. But for a vast majority, 8GB quickly becomes a low ceiling.

 

[ignatius345]

I've been using MacBook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM for awhile and I haven't had any issues yet.

It entirely depends on workflow. Even if you're doing one fairly demanding task, 8 GB of RAM can actually be decent because the Mac is very good about memory management. Where I know I start running into issues is switching between tasks and demanding apps. If I have Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all open, plus a set of tabs in my browser, plus email, plus maybe my Photos app and a few other things -- it's all OK if I'm using one or two of those actively. But if I start expecting to just rapidly switch from thing to thing, there start to be lags as the system starts paging (putting inactive stuff on hold on the SSD to free up active RAM). It settles down again once I stay in one app, but the switching can throw things. That's where more RAM would help: more active things can stay in RAM without being paged off to the SSD.

It's true in my experience that the M1s handle 8GB of RAM way better than an Intel machine, but it can still absolutely be a bottleneck depending on how you work.

 

[nastysailboat]

some people are incapable of admitting when they’re wrong.

I’m kinda surprised to see you running chrome with everything else that’s running and being good on 8gb

 

[jav6454]

Because 8GB goes quickly for all but the lowest denomination of users.

That's why Apple still starts at 8GB. It's enough for the lowest needs of users. But for a vast majority, 8GB quickly becomes a low ceiling.

Agreed, specially with several users who like to have 10+ tabs @ ~330MB per Tab. That will go quick...

 

[Bob_DM]

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 of 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.

A few years (or maybe more something like 15 years) ago I followed a Webdesign course in our school.
We started with pure html to make sites and if using dreamweaver we should check and clean up resulting code to ensure a fast user experience.
Today webdesign teachers are not supposed to ask students to have any idea what html/css is and let them use Wordpress or something similar.
Getting old I know …

 

[JahBoolean]

Wordpress or something similar.

Getting old I know …

 

[Danfango]

A few years (or maybe more something like 15 years) ago I followed a Webdesign course in our school.
We started with pure html to make sites and if using dreamweaver we should check and clean up resulting code to ensure a fast user experience.
Today webdesign teachers are not supposed to ask students to have any idea what html/css is and let them use Wordpress or something similar.
Getting old I know …

Not sure that’s totally true. Our new hire front end guys were taught CSS and HTML last year from courses designed in 2005 🤣. They just Google everything like the rest of us.

I’ve been writing it since Mosaic days on SunOs machines in vi and I don’t understand React. Now that’s old 🤣

 

[TightLines]

I’ve been writing it since Mosaic days on SunOs machines in vi and I don’t understand React. Now that’s old 🤣

Everyone should have the prerequisite of learning and using BBEdit for website design, and then go into learning the WYSIWYG stuff… that will teach you the difference real quick.

 

[Bob_DM]

Not sure that’s totally true. Our new hire front end guys were taught CSS and HTML last year from courses designed in 2005 🤣. They just Google everything like the rest of us.

I’ve been writing it since Mosaic days on SunOs machines in vi and I don’t understand React. Now that’s old 🤣

I speak about higher secondary school, the level you need to go to university or high school in Belgium. Have no idea what’s corresponding level in US.
It’s the level you normally get at 18 year old.

 

[Danfango]

I speak about higher secondary school, the level you need to go to university or high school in Belgium. Have no idea what’s corresponding level in US.
It’s the level you normally get at 18 year old.

I'm in the UK. The people in question came from university.

Saying that my oldest two kids learned python and HTML at secondary school at age 15-16 so there is some hope...

 

[Bob_DM]

Back to topic, I think Apple today should provide 16/512GB for base models at current prices. Maybe offering a 8/256 as BTO for less?

 

[Danfango]

Everyone should have the prerequisite of learning and using BBEdit for website design, and then go into learning the WYSIWYG stuff… that will teach you the difference real quick.

I don't know any web developers that use the WYSIWYG stuff at all. Even going back to Dreamweaver days they only used it as a code editor.

Although there is nothing wrong with the Wordpress and prebuilt content management type applications if you want to deliver content and not worry about the rest of it or divide the workload. I've built a couple myself.

But there is nothing worse than inheriting someone else's pile of Wordpress. That stuff is cancer.

 

[Danfango]

Back to topic, I think Apple today should provide 16/512GB for base models at current prices. Maybe offering a 8/256 as BTO for less?

No they shouldn't.

My daughter has the bottom end M1 MacBook Air. She uses it for browsing, mail, reminders, calendar, GoodNotes, watching videos, Apple music, spreadsheets etc. Oh and Playing Sims. It is a perfectly adequate machine for her and never goes near any sign of memory pressure. Her disk is about 50% full.

In fact I'll go as far to say that even I can quite happily exist on that machine as it was mine until I got the base model 14" MacBook Pro. The only thing that even dented it slightly was Adobe Lightroom. I was doing some quite heavy editing in Pixelmator with no problems too. Bear in mind I run a small business off this thing doing consultancy.

I only bought the 14" MBP because it was shiny and I wanted it so I can go ooh and ahh and nod approvingly at it. I don't need it at all.

When I buy a Mac I'm buying into the ecosystem not just the lump of computer and I expect to pay a bit more for it. It's not free to run a massive stack of cloud applications and deliver several years of OS updates and desktop apps. So I expect the bottom end model to be more expensive than comparable PCs etc so I don't even make the comparison. But that needs to fit in a chunk of money that people understand (under <$1000 / £1000) and Apple need to make a good profit so they can make huge investments in development (like M1 processors, their own 5G chipset etc).

 

[TightLines]

No they shouldn't….

…. When I buy a Mac I'm buying into the ecosystem not just the lump of computer and I expect to pay a bit more for it. It's not free to run a massive stack of cloud applications and deliver several years of OS updates and desktop apps. So I expect the bottom end model to be more expensive than comparable PCs etc so I don't even make the comparison. But that needs to fit in a chunk of money that people understand (under <$1000 / £1000) and Apple need to make a good profit so they can make huge investments in development (like M1 processors, their own 5G chipset etc).

It’s one thing to “make a good profit” and entirely another with what Apple does. Which is to gouge their customers, all the while at the same time, designing and manufacturing things so those customers have no other choice but to go through them to upgrade the product. This wouldn’t even be a topic for discussion had Apple just designed things so the customer could upgrade their purchases independently of Apple and their predatory prices. Just as they have (reluctantly) for years.

They have shown (unintentionally I think) they can design things in such a way that the upgradeable components can be removed and changed, like with the SSD’s in the new Mac studio… but in doing so also provided a picture if their clear intent to prevent customers from doing it by locking things down and not allowing a replacement part to function.

Apple doesn’t need the “excessive profits” - they are likely the wealthiest cash on hand company in the world. It just goes to show how the bad parts within the Apple company operate… as noted before, i expect Apple will sooner rather than later be motivated to change its ways…but it shouldn’t have to come down to that…

 

[banfiz]

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Maybe this is why people saying 8GB of RAM is not enough. A google chrome tab could easy eat away 2GB for certain websites. Adobe uses 4GB sometimes even for seemingly small photos. My MacBook Pro at one point saw 23GB of swaps being used. And the machine isn’t running any “heavy” workload that YouTuber claims at all.

Apple’s dirty trick allows Mac users to not feel memory crunch as much, but 8GB of shared memory will come and bite the user dare They run anything more than a few safari window alongside background programs.

Adobe and Microsoft SW are known memory hogs.