16gb MBP in 2021 isn’t enough for long-term

[aevan]

This is the point that most « hater » aren’t getting on this thread. It’s not normal to replace your laptop because you don’t have enough ram. Both the post above me and my use case are not « pro » usage. Truth is, the macbook pro m1 pro/max should have never ship with 16gb of ram period.

Erm, I don't need more than 16Gb RAM for what I do, but I wanted the Pro XDR screen, the great speakers and I love the CPU/GPU performance for my needs. 16 will certainly be enough for me for the next 4-5 years.

I'm a professional that uses my computer for work. There are many different pros with different pro needs. That's why you can customize these configurations.

Blanket statements like this have no basis in reality.

 

[MrGunny94]

That print screen I took were 3 days without a restart because I was coding a lot for a new pipeline. Here's a new one freshly restarted less than an hour ago.

Again, all connected to 2x Huawei Mateview, same tabs same things.

Basically a restart does help and gives me back 4GB. If I exit FB Messenger, What's App and Teams I DO NOT HAVE ANY ISSUE.

Regardless despite even days without restarting I never get a memory dump.

Well I guess if you were a good engineer, you would have known that going into it - so I'm guessing this is just to prove a point. In my case, I reviewed my usage on my 16 GB 2015 MBP and determined I didn't need more than 8. so, being a good engineer, I determined my usage requirements and bought appropriately. I am more than happy, never ran into a problem.

If you see my print screen if it weren't for Electron apps I'd have 5GB free to use a 2-4GB VM. However I work with Cloud and don't have to run anything locally.

Being a good engineer has nothing to do with this as we don't know how certain rogue apps will behave.

 

[arvinsim]

I do wonder why people whose workflow only needs 16GB or less even bother with the Pro models.

 

[MrGunny94]

I do wonder why people whose workflow only needs 16GB or less even bother with the Pro models.

Multiple reasons, ports, display, fans if they want compile and export. There's quite big differences and every user is different.

 

[collin_]

I'd like to open up this discussion.

Here's me, I'm a cloud engineer. This is my normal behavior during work I do Ansible pipelines with the Visual Code Studio and have tons of web apps open because I have to manage database and various servers across a cloud platform.

As you can see there's some crazy apps like What's App and MS Teams that take a lof of memory. I'm currently not using any VM because we have Citrix.

However as you can see 16GB is simply not enough, If I were to add a local VM to my workflow it would cripple my computer.. Just look at those 6,39GB compressed....

(Hooked up to 2x Huawei Mateview dual displays)

View attachment 1987259

Should I upgrade to 32GB? Probably not. I'll explain why I will most likely upgrade to the next model / every 2 years. Honestly If I were to get the 32GB model it would take me a whole month + 400€.. Plus I'm no longer in the return window, I could ask Amazon though.

Honestly I'm not expecting any slowdowns outside of Rosetta 2 apps.. I'm going to wait and see how it's going with these apps that will be eventually converted to Universal.

Thank you for the data. However, are you sure that adding a local VM would slow things down? The crazy thing about these machines is that even when you do make them compress a ton of RAM and use a ton of swap, they still don't noticeably slow down. Consequently, I think we should recalibrate "need more RAM" to when these machines actually start chugging rather than when it simply looks like they should be based on resource monitoring applications.

I think the deciding factor for me to go with 16 GB was this video where a RAM torture test was conducted with a 16 GB model vs a 32 GB model and the tester literally could not find a way to "break" the 16 GB model.

 

[darngooddesign]

Watch this first before jumping to conclusion.

This is a pretty compelling video.

So far my 16GB/1TB 10/16 16" MBP writes on average around 2TB per month so there are no durability/wear issues to worry about. I'm glad I didn't spend 400 on the extra RAM because the performance difference is minimal.

 

[0112862]

are your guys for real 🤣? A benchmark of lightroom/photoshop without any layer? An export isn't indicative of system performance in lightroom/photoshop. To quote a post from dpreview about this video.


"That is the point I made, they fill the ram first then start editing. But their editing is extremely simple and it’s not ‘heavy’ in the slightest. They’re just clicking through images to view.

There’s no layers, no 16bit, no hdr merge or panoramic merge, no auto blend layers, no filters or blur gallery stuff. Nothing that a photographer might actually use when EDITING a photo. Not to say there bad people 😂🤦‍♂️ Just they are editing anything."

 

[Danfango]

If you see my print screen if it weren't for Electron apps I'd have 5GB free to use a 2-4GB VM. However I work with Cloud and don't have to run anything locally.

Being a good engineer has nothing to do with this as we don't know how certain rogue apps will behave.

There's your problem...

Electron apps are a cancer on this planet and are completely irresponsible software development.

I genuinely can't wait until people seeing energy and software efficiency as a business concern worth considering again.

Back 15 years ago I wrote a windows desktop application which used C# and winforms. This worked fine. Along comes fad developers and it was rebuilt with Electron and about three different JS frameworks. So it turned out to be a complete failure because you have 50 people connecting to the same Citrix box running 50 copies of that app, that the thing hits a wall. The memory footprint was around 750MB per user.

I built out a new solution using a Golang process backed with SQLite that services the whole damn app like it was the 90s again without the heavy JS framework to the existing local browser. 7MB of RAM and 30-70MB for the browser tab.

---

Also on topic for this, Lightroom is a fine example of an absolute steaming turd of a desktop application when it comes to RAM gobbling. It quickly becomes unusable on my 16GB MBP 14" when you're editing RAWs. Not because it has to be because it'll quite happily edit 3-4 files to completion without hitting 50% memory pressure but because it's poorly implemented when it comes to memory management.

Resources are not free. Developers and programming language frameworks and runtimes are irresponsible. Fix that, problem goes away.

 

[0112862]

.

 

[MrGunny94]

There's your problem...

Electron apps are a cancer on this planet and are completely irresponsible software development.

I genuinely can't wait until people seeing energy and software efficiency as a business concern worth considering again.

Back 15 years ago I wrote a windows desktop application which used C# and winforms. This worked fine. Along comes fad developers and it was rebuilt with Electron and about three different JS frameworks. So it turned out to be a complete failure because you have 50 people connecting to the same Citrix box running 50 copies of that app, that the thing hits a wall. The memory footprint was around 750MB per user.

I built out a new solution using a Golang process backed with SQLite that services the whole damn app like it was the 90s again without the heavy JS framework to the existing local browser. 7MB of RAM and 30-70MB for the browser tab.

---

Also on topic for this, Lightroom is a fine example of an absolute steaming turd of a desktop application when it comes to RAM gobbling. It quickly becomes unusable on my 16GB MBP 14" when you're editing RAWs. Not because it has to be because it'll quite happily edit 3-4 files to completion without hitting 50% memory pressure but because it's poorly implemented when it comes to memory management.

Resources are not free. Developers and programming language frameworks and runtimes are irresponsible. Fix that, problem goes away.

Yeah Electron is terrible. Sadly I need the full native Teams app otherwise I would have never used anything based in Electron its absolute trash.

 

[MrGunny94]

Thank you for the data. However, are you sure that adding a local VM would slow things down? The crazy thing about these machines is that even when you do make them compress a ton of RAM and use a ton of swap, they still don't noticeably slow down. Consequently, I think we should recalibrate "need more RAM" to when these machines actually start chugging rather than when it simply looks like they should be based on resource monitoring applications.

I think the deciding factor for me to go with 16 GB was this video where a RAM torture test was conducted with a 16 GB model vs a 32 GB model and the tester literally could not find a way to "break" the 16 GB model.

It doesn’t slow things but causes a lot of swap, in general it’s fine No ‘slow down’ per say.

 

[darngooddesign]

Im not sure if it's simply Electron causing problems because I don't recall Twitch using a lot of resources.

 

[alien3dx]

There's your problem...

Electron apps are a cancer on this planet and are completely irresponsible software development.

I genuinely can't wait until people seeing energy and software efficiency as a business concern worth considering again.

Back 15 years ago I wrote a windows desktop application which used C# and winforms. This worked fine. Along comes fad developers and it was rebuilt with Electron and about three different JS frameworks. So it turned out to be a complete failure because you have 50 people connecting to the same Citrix box running 50 copies of that app, that the thing hits a wall. The memory footprint was around 750MB per user.

I built out a new solution using a Golang process backed with SQLite that services the whole damn app like it was the 90s again without the heavy JS framework to the existing local browser. 7MB of RAM and 30-70MB for the browser tab.

---

Also on topic for this, Lightroom is a fine example of an absolute steaming turd of a desktop application when it comes to RAM gobbling. It quickly becomes unusable on my 16GB MBP 14" when you're editing RAWs. Not because it has to be because it'll quite happily edit 3-4 files to completion without hitting 50% memory pressure but because it's poorly implemented when it comes to memory management.

Resources are not free. Developers and programming language frameworks and runtimes are irresponsible. Fix that, problem goes away.

as developer , people these day thinking ram is cheap and if not used ram is wasted of ram. Old age developer and new age developer think diff. These era developer just copy paste "stack over flow " developer and never need to think memory management since most think garbage collection cater them all.

the trend of js and java, clean clean code ,automated test .. What the h*** . What important the atomic data and memory management aka stability.

 

[smirking]

However as you can see 16GB is simply not enough, If I were to add a local VM to my workflow it would cripple my computer.. Just look at those 6,39GB compressed....

Did you try your workflow for a day? Give it a shot. You might be surprised. I ran a crazy workload off only 8GB for a couple of weeks last summer when I took a 13" M1 MBP for a punishing test drive and it handled my work as a full-stack / back-end dev running a virtual servers, IDE, Parallels, and tons of other apps all at the same. I was in the red the entire time I had that machine, but the times in which I had performance issues it was due to a bug.

I really didn't think 8GB could possibly work. I did it just because I wanted to see what would happen. I was so impressed I almost kept that M1 that I only intended to test drive while my daily driver was getting a battery replacement.

 

[smirking]

It doesn’t slow things but causes a lot of swap, in general it’s fine No ‘slow down’ per say.

If you're not noticing a slowdown, then don't bother interpreting the memory pressure. You can run in the red 100% of the time and still not notice any real world effects. Not having "free memory" isn't the same as not being able to access enough memory to function.

 

[arvinsim]

Electron apps are a cancer on this planet and are completely irresponsible software development.

Of course, because building native apps is cheap /s

Also on topic for this, Lightroom is a fine example of an absolute steaming turd of a desktop application when it comes to RAM gobbling.

That's because Lightroom is an Electron app and not a native app...oh wait!

 

[fel10]

I do wonder why people whose workflow only needs 16GB or less even bother with the Pro models.

For me is mainly for the display and I plan on keeping this computer for the next 5 years.

 

[flapflapflap]

I went to Apple store yesterday to see the 14/16” MacbookPro and do some testing. With a few basic apps open, 2 safari tabs it was using 10.5gb/16gb. Restarted the Mac and repeated the sam ram usage after 10-15 minutes.

If you keep your mac only a few years it’s ok but if you are planning to keep your mac for 5 years you should absolutely upgrade to 32gb.

I agree. This is part of why I buy a new MBP every 3 years.

 

[alien3dx]

I agree. This is part of why I buy a new MBP every 3 years.

if work like me 3 year is a must ! cannot afford to take risk.

 

[ChildOfTheWW]

My 16" M1 Pro with 16 GB RAM never has more than around 13,8GB in use (doesnt matter how many things i have opened), however swap happens and memory pressure is orange. Is that normal behavour?
Had M1 Air with 8GB RAM before, and somehow i feel i am in memory pressure almost as fast with 16GB RAM (same usage). Yes, the OS is slightly snappier (no split second lag when opening Launchpad for example), but thats not really important for me. Would he happier to avoid Swapping.

 

[Sanpete]

I agree. This is part of why I buy a new MBP every 3 years.

While I'm sure Apple and its stockholders appreciate this practice, the reason you quote isn't a good one to do that.

My 16" M1 Pro with 16 GB RAM never has more than around 13,8GB in use (doesnt matter how many things i have opened), however swap happens and memory pressure is orange. Is that normal behavour?
Had M1 Air with 8GB RAM before, and somehow i feel i am in memory pressure almost as fast with 16GB RAM (same usage). Yes, the OS is slightly snappier (no split second lag when opening Launchpad for example), but thats not really important for me. Would he happier to avoid Swapping.

View attachment 1988830

What version of the OS are you running? If you look at Activity Monitor > Memory, you can see what's using the memory up.

 

[flapflapflap]

While I'm sure Apple and its stockholders appreciate this practice, the reason you quote isn't a good one to do that.


What version of the OS are you running? If you look at Activity Monitor > Memory, you can see what's using the memory up.

I do the same for cars. I need new every 3 years. Apple shareholders should be grateful that people like me exist.

 

[doboy]

I do wonder why people whose workflow only needs 16GB or less even bother with the Pro models.

just keep on wondering, haha

 

[wilberforce]

My 16" M1 Pro with 16 GB RAM never has more than around 13,8GB in use (doesnt matter how many things i have opened), however swap happens and memory pressure is orange. Is that normal behavour?
Had M1 Air with 8GB RAM before, and somehow i feel i am in memory pressure almost as fast with 16GB RAM (same usage). Yes, the OS is slightly snappier (no split second lag when opening Launchpad for example), but thats not really important for me. Would he happier to avoid Swapping.

View attachment 1988830

The reason you are showing yellow memory pressure is because you have a large amount of compressed memory. You have little swap (less than half a GB). This is negligible. I sometimes have up to 20GB of swap, for comparison.
Compressed memory is not a bad thing, it is very fast. But the fact that it needed to compress some of the memory at some point indicates that there is (or was) pressure on the memory.

 

[lambertjohn]

32gb? Whatever. For years, I had an 8gb MacBook Air. Never had one single problem running anything. Now I have a 16gb M1 MBP. Still haven't had a single problem running anything. I'm just saying.