16GB or 32GB for multitasking? Not for video productions...

[theotherphil]

I currently have 32Gb RAM and 99.9% of my everyday usage leaves SWAP untouched. I currently have a Windows 11 Pro VM open (8.5Gb) and a bunch of Safari Tabs with YouTube eating >2Gb. Still green on memory pressure.

Whilst I could probably get away with 16Gb, it's nice not to have to worry about it and just have a fast, responsive system 24/7.

 

[dmccloud]

You're right! But I feel uncomfortable with the extra 500$CAD just for a luxury memory boost.

If your workflow will benefit from 32GB over 16GB, then it's not really a luxury.

 

[boomspot]

We geeks can be a pretty neurotic bunch. 9 times out of 10 you’d probably not even recognize a performance hit when the memory pressure meter is in the yellow. I’ve learned to stop looking at the memory stats and have zero issues with my 16Gb mini and 16” MPB. That said, I’ll probably go 32Gb on my next Mac for extra assurance. 😜

 

[bobcomer]

We geeks can be a pretty neurotic bunch. 9 times out of 10 you’d probably not even recognize a performance hit when the memory pressure meter is in the yellow. I’ve learned to stop looking at the memory stats and have zero issues with my 16Gb mini and 16” MPB. That said, I’ll probably go 32Gb on my next Mac for extra assurance. 😜

I never look at the RAM stats unless I already feel there's a problem. And why shouldn't we configure our machines well enough to know we wont have a problem?

I just looked at the RAM stats on my iMac, 36G used, 7.5G cached files out of 128G. Barely even green, but I know I may run a whole LAN's worth of VM's at the same time and I know I'll need that 128G to do it. And I did add the 128G after I purchased it, no way I could add that much RAM with their prices. $300 versus $1200 or more...

 

[dandeco]

I use an M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, but since I rarely make videos with a higher definition than 1080, I don't really have many problems. Of course, when working on a big video project I do cut down the number of applications I have open at once...

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

I seem to hover around 24-26 GB RAM usage, so 16 GB wasn’t good enough for me. Yet 24 GB wasn’t a build option until M2, so I upgraded to 32 GB RAM. Don’t regret it.

 

[leman]

This is what my idle MacBook Pro M1 Pro 16BG 1TB stats look like. I would say that 16 GB isn’t enough even if you only leave a lot of tabs open plus WhatsApp on desktop. Just opened my MacBook for the screenshot. No working on it being done yet.

And now check how much of that RAM is actually required to run the software (as opposed to purgeable/caches etc.) and you’d see that 8GB would be more than enough.

 

[Johnny London]

And now check how much of that RAM is actually required to run the software (as opposed to purgeable/caches etc.) and you’d see that 8GB would be more than enough.

Does this mean that the more RAM the machine has, the more of it apps use even if idle? That would be interesting. Still, as seen on my screenshot, open and pinned tabs like facebook, many other content rich websites seem to use hundreds of MB by default…

 

[iPadified]

People should learn to kill apps (and tabs) they don't presently use in a work flow or stop complaining about the price of RAM.

 

[unrigestered]

People should learn to kill apps (and tabs) they don't presently use in a work flow or stop complaining about the price of RAM.

don't underestimate the wear and tear all those saved links would do to our SSD if people were using favorites instead of keeping all those tabs open for 10+ years 😜

 

[leman]

Does this mean that the more RAM the machine has, the more of it apps use even if idle? That would be interesting. Still, as seen on my screenshot, open and pinned tabs like facebook, many other content rich websites seem to use hundreds of MB by default…

See my post above where I explain purgeable memory. The activity monitor can be hard to read as it includes shared memory and transient (purgeable) memory.

MacOS has a command called vm_stat that will show you the current memory usage in detail.

People should learn to kill apps (and tabs) they don't presently use in a work flow or stop complaining about the price of RAM.

Completely unnecessary as the system will take care of these things automatically. No need to hamper one’s productivity with pointless rituals.

 

[Think77]

My M1 Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM mostly does fine with that spec. Working in Logic Pro, Photoshop, Word, Powerpoint, Google Chrome, Safari all open at the same time with no real trouble/delay switching between them. The Apple Silicon way of integrating everything is truly a game changer. What holds the system back is mostly the CPU and GPU. So, I will be upgrading to the M2 Pro Mac mini with 16 GB of RAM. That gives it more headroom for using Parallels for instance, which is where 8 GB meets its limitations. Then again, 32 GB would probably be even more future proof, but 16 GB should still be really, really great 😊

 

[iPadified]

Completely unnecessary as the system will take care of these things automatically. No need to hamper one’s productivity with pointless rituals.

You mean having as few apps and tabs open as possible has not impact on RAM usage?

 

[Bodhitree]

Completely unnecessary as the system will take care of these things automatically. No need to hamper one’s productivity with pointless rituals.

I’m generally a fan of running a lean window set. I recycle tabs, and have a few tabs open for big websites that I refer to often, but I’ve heard that some people use tabs like bookmarks, keeping hundreds of open tabs. For me thats unnecessarily clogging the machine.

In part its down to macOS automatically reloading apps and tabs on startup. It creates a very lazy attitude. Back in the day when a machine would just open with an empty desktop, it created a kind of mindset where you’d run just 2-3 applications because you’d actually be needing them together.

But these days people keep all kinds of stuff open together, and it all just opens up again when the machine is restarted, and people never re-examine whether they actually need all these things.

 

[leman]

You mean having as few apps and tabs open as possible has not impact on RAM usage?

Of course it does. I just don’t understand why anyone would care about RAM usage. Things like performance or UI responsiveness sound much more important to me. And you can have hundreds of tabs open without negatively impacting either because hidden tabs don’t actively use resources. No matter how scary the Activity Monitor readout it.

Quite frankly, this obsession with current RAM usage is like computer hypochondria. It’s like running to the doctor any time your heart registers even the slightest rate increase.

 

[leman]

I’m generally a fan of running a lean window set. I recycle tabs, and have a few tabs open for big websites that I refer to often, but I’ve heard that some people use tabs like bookmarks, keeping hundreds of open tabs. For me thats unnecessarily clogging the machine.

In part its down to macOS automatically reloading apps and tabs on startup. It creates a very lazy attitude. Back in the day when a machine would just open with an empty desktop, it created a kind of mindset where you’d run just 2-3 applications because you’d actually be needing them together.

But these days people keep all kinds of stuff open together, and it all just opens up again when the machine is restarted, and people never re-examine whether they actually need all these things.

Everyone has their own mental attitude towards these things and organizes stuff differently. It helps you to run your machine like that - that’s great! Myself, I have hundreds of windows and tabs open at any time and that’s the organization model that works for me.

Regarding “clogging the machine” - it’s a computer, not a sanitary unit 😁

 

[iPadified]

Of course it does. I just don’t understand why anyone would care about RAM usage. Things like performance or UI responsiveness sound much more important to me. And you can have hundreds of tabs open without negatively impacting either because hidden tabs don’t actively use resources. No matter how scary the Activity Monitor readout it.

Quite frankly, this obsession with current RAM usage is like computer hypochondria. It’s like running to the doctor any time your heart registers even the slightest rate increase.

That I can agree with. Too much obsession about RAM usage. If the computer feels slow, remove, unused apps and tabs from RAM and see if it better. I think it is hysterical to future proof with more RAM. It is not that apps gets much bigger and if your work is data heavy (videos, simulations, databases) you know that from the start and buy accordingly.

Perhaps I am just minimalistic in terms of the desktop cluttering as well as the what I have in the RAM. Wish my hard drive was just as tidy!

 

[wyrdness]

In almost all cases, the answer to "Do I need [more expensive thing] or will [cheaper thing] do?" is "If you don't already know then [cheaper thing] will meet your needs".

If I was the OP and I was paying for it myself, I'd go for 16GB. You have to push a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac really hard to start to run into issues. My personal 16GB M1 runs amazingly well and never has memory issues.

Having said that, my new 32GB M2 Pro is arriving in a few days time. But this is a work machine, my employer is paying for it and I know that I really do need 32GB for my work, especially as I'll need to run Linux in Parallels.

 

[orionquest]

So web browsing and playing music in the background is "Heavy Multitasking" ok gotcha.

To address the actual issue 16 gigs for this would be a somewhat sweet spot. This will provide enough room to avoid swap, and space for video to work in, and possibly good enough for long term software resource increases.
That is if these are the tasks being used.

 

[xraydoc]

To be honest, I have no issues with multiple Safari tabs, Microsoft Word open, Mail open, Calendar open, Messages open, Preview open with several documents, and a 6GB Windows VM in Parallels, all in 16GB of RAM. Sure, if I look at Activity Monitor when all of that is going, the memory pressure will get in to the yellow, but everything remains responsive. When the Parallels isn't running, the memory pressure remains in the green.

Last time I saw a "memory low" error was on an early version of Monterey.

 

[orionquest]

I'm pretty sure the OP has left the thread, and so they should with this foolishness.

Anyhow they didn't seem interested in a real example of video production, which is a demanding multitasking. Here's another example for them.

I recently ran into an out of memory error on my 32 gig intel machine. The only time it ever happened in my years of Mac use. Was running a dataset with a model in python. I thought it was taking too long or something hung up. So I started the model again in another browser. Effectively the model was running twice now. Then poof! Got the error, and apps suddenly started quitting to reduce memory consumption. Restarted everything and tried the model again, but this time with activity monitor open. Python memory usage grew to about 90 gigs. Quite surprising, no wonder it crapped out. I was more patient this time and it eventually completed without issue.

IF you are not doing stuff like this, ya probably don't need 32 gigs.
As always it's your money, but don't go looking for support on flimsy justification.

 

[Electrojake]

I'm pretty sure the OP has left the thread, and so they should with this foolishness.
As always it's your money, but don't go looking for support on flimsy justification.

No argument from me orionquest, but the OP's original question got us well over 100 posts deep thus far.🍺
Second item. . .
Special thanks goes to forum member @leman for repeatedly trying to inject reason & common sense into the thread. While it seems to have had little effect on the group here (or the OP), I for one enjoyed reading your posts.👍

 

[Johnny London]

See my post above where I explain purgeable memory. The activity monitor can be hard to read as it includes shared memory and transient (purgeable) memory.

MacOS has a command called vm_stat that will show you the current memory usage in detail.



Completely unnecessary as the system will take care of these things automatically. No need to hamper one’s productivity with pointless rituals.

Cool, thanks for the command line, I’ll try to figure it out.

 

[dmccloud]

Of course it does. I just don’t understand why anyone would care about RAM usage. Things like performance or UI responsiveness sound much more important to me. And you can have hundreds of tabs open without negatively impacting either because hidden tabs don’t actively use resources. No matter how scary the Activity Monitor readout it.

Quite frankly, this obsession with current RAM usage is like computer hypochondria. It’s like running to the doctor any time your heart registers even the slightest rate increase.

Even on an M1 13" MBP with 8GB of RAM, I was able to open 187 tabs in Firefox simultaneously before seeing any slowdowns or beach balls. That's easily 10x the number of tabs I'd run on average (currently only have five open), so even that 8GB machine had more then enough RAM for usual usage. I only ran into issues when editing 4K videos on that machine. Now I just occasionally check memory pressure in Activity Monitor, and even then only when I'm curious as to just how hard the machine is being pushed.

 

[AdamBuker]

Go for a 1 Terabyte. You won't regret it.

1 TB is the bare minimum that you need, otherwise you will feel a giant snail dragging you by your ankles anytime you try to be productive. Note that I am not speaking metaphorically, this will actually happen. I know this because both Max Tech and Luke Miani made videos about it.