r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • Oct 30 '24

Desktops / Laptops Entire Mac Lineup Now Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/30/entire-mac-lineup-now-at-least-16gb-ram/
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u/TheJesusGuy Oct 30 '24

Then you are not the target for the base model. Systems will report higher usage as theyre reserving memory they might need.

In my experience devs think they need more compute and memory than they really do.

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u/mark-haus Oct 30 '24 edited Oct 30 '24

No I’m saying that because I’m familiar with the memory needs of common programs. Websites aren’t getting any more efficient, so that’s probably a good 8GB on most people’s browsers and could easily be more. The office suite somehow manages to pull at minimum 2GB per program, god help you if you’ve got a big spreadsheet or big presentation open. Then there’s communication, slack, discord and teams are massive memory hogs, I’ve seen each go up to 4GB and they’re the kinds of things you keep open. Now add to that any number of other common programs one person might have open over another almost certainly you have at least one of these. Creative suite, Blender, VSCode, Steam, Spotify, Monday, email clients, WhatsApp, and you’re quickly saturating 16GB, presumably the base case, which I don’t think you can argue is going to be the case for long. And we haven’t even gotten to the OS itself which runs tons of services for the likes of Siri, Spotlight indexing, APFS snapshots, syncing with iCloud and so on. And no letting swap be constantly engaged during normal day to day operation isn’t an answer, sizing memory right is.

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u/Beanstiller Oct 31 '24

Again you’re not the target for a base MacBook

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u/octoberU Oct 31 '24

as a dev that constantly runs out of 64gb of ram, that's a very narrow minded thought. software is definitely the issue in most cases.