8GB vs 16GB RAM?

[Floris]

I've been using the iMac 2017 model with 4k video editing on just 8gb ram, and it's been doing just fine. Gaming and whatever that requires 8 but recommends more is doing ok as well. When it does create swap, the really fast SSD inside it helps.

But if you can afford it: 16, once i have the money and things are in stock, i certainly am adding 2x16gb to this system.

But my point of posting is that with an SSD and 8gb ram, I have been able to do 99% of what i plan to use this thing for without getting ram/performance issues.

 

[Adamantoise]

Bingo. I guess most people saying there is no need for more RAM do not need to use their machines to solve number crunching problems where the memory gets eaten up just because of the sheer size of the data you are dealing with.

In those contexts, the quantity of RAM can be a hard limitation on which problems you can tackle and which ones you can't. Some will argue these are fairly niche usage cases, I'll reply that these days it's not so rare at all, for a professional engineer or scientist (or even just a student in these fields), to need/want to deal with large datasets on a personal computer.

Back on topic: 8GB is still totally enough for a moderate use, but in a few years it won't be hard to hit the limit. if I were buying now I would not hesitate to get 16, especially on a MBP. As someone else said, you'll never regret having too much RAM, you'll easily regret not having enough.

Your CPU is a bit slow --> Wait a bit longer
Your drive is too small --> Plug in an external drive
You don't have enough RAM --> You don't have enough RAM

You're projecting your use case on OP. Has OP mentioned he will be doing data analysis on this machine? No. Has he mentioned he will be using programs like R, Matlab, Python etc? No.

So wth is everyone talking about? Dude is playing league of legends, and editing pictures. 8GB is just fine.

 

[ZapNZs]

Most people have a fairly constant use case when it comes to computer (i.e. what they do with their machines doesn't change that much over time), your use case doesn't just get more demanding overnight. I believed that rubbish once upon a time; but not anymore.

Respectfully, I disagree with this completely. A different major path, going back to graduate school or vocational training, changing careers, or just changing work positions can radically alter the way one uses a computer. The integration of low AI into everyday tasks could also radically alter what constitutes "capable enough for mainstream usage."

Now does that mean someone should buy for the 'what if' scenario? Or is it more economical to buy for current needs and then upgrade to a new system should different future needs arise? I have my own opinions, but there seems to be so much personal preference that I do not think there is necessarily a right answer (although, in the case of RAM and primary storage, Apple has forced us to confront this question with their portable devices because of the design choices that Apple made with the MacBook Pro.)

 

[Sterkenburg]

You're projecting your use case on OP. Has OP mentioned he will be doing data analysis on this machine? No. Has he mentioned he will be using programs like R, Matlab, Python etc? No.

So wth is everyone talking about? Dude is playing league of legends, and editing pictures. 8GB is just fine.

I was just replying to another post, and I agreed that for OP's current usage 8GB will be enough. However, I respectfully disagree with people suggesting that upgrading to 16GB would not be worth it. I agree that one's RAM usage does not increase overnight, sure, but in 2-3 years? Very possible.

It's not unlikely for a user to one day decide to pick up a new job or hobby that requires working with a slightly more capable hardware. I'm obviously not suggesting that someone needing, say, a base model MBA should pick up a desktop workstation with 64GB "just in case", that would be absurd. But I believe it's a good idea to allow for a certain amount of leeway when purchasing a premium-level machine, especially when you can't change your mind later and the price of the upgrade is, all in all, very reasonable.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Reading the replies here I'm thinking people are doing some really serious data crunching on their machines. I really don't presume to know what people do or don't do, or much about RAM usage in general (other than that for me personally, 8 gigs is enough), but I find this a very interesting read: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355

I am the same but then again I close things when I'm not using them, this seems to be foreign concept to many people.

Of course there are use cases where 16gb is a must but nothing in the OP suggests this is the case here.

 

[raqball]

Of course there are use cases where 16gb is a must but nothing in the OP suggests this is the case here.

I agree.. Lets recap what the OP said:

I'm currently a college student and I plan on getting the 2017 nTB MacBook Pro this summer. I am choosing between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Here are my general uses: web browsing, video streaming, occasional light picture or video editing, light gaming such as League of Legends, and I do plan on installing windows to play some Windows only games as well.

When a college student who does light tasks is told he/she needs 16GB of RAM, its a serious head scratcher.. I guess if 16GB of RAM is needed for light office type work. video streaming and web browsing then the rest of us need 32GB or 64GB in an ultrabook!

 

[leman]

But DATA is exploding. And new features are coming. Optimisation has a hard floor with regards to the reduction that is possible (i.e., you can't optimise down to zero - and a lot of the legacy garbage has already been cut out now).

Is data really exploding though? Sure, over the last few years we experienced boom of HiDPI content, which obviously meant quadratic increase in storage needs. But at the same time we also seen increase in vector graphics use and other kind of procedurally generated data. What else is there? Wide-gamut color? That you can still pack into 32bits for the foreseeable time. Not to mention that new codecs are actually more efficient than old ones.

P.S. Look through WWDC videos of this year. Apple mention on multiple occasions how they work to make their OS and tools more efficient.

P.P.S. Much of this RAM explosion comes from very lazy programming btw. And also of some very worrying trends in some development scenes, mostly web front-end stuff. I do not understand why a basic web app setup needs that much garbage. When I was modifying a ruby on rails app I was horrified to see that my basic rvm+tools installation took multiple GB on disk! Then add all this Docker stuff and suddenly your average web-dev needs a supercomputer to make a hello world web template!

Maybe. But with the explosion of using data in all subjects in school, students need to be able to handle large sets of data. My daughter uses 1.2 TB datasets in her biology research. A decade ago 1 GB would have been considered very large. Welcome to the world of AI and Machine Learning.

I regularly work with multi-TB datasets. So what? Having more RAM here won't necessarily speed things up. In the end, its all about how the algorithm works. A naive algorithm that requires all the data be loaded in RAM will starve you out very quickly. But the fact is that if you work with large data, you CAN'T have it all in RAM to begin with. It doesn't matter whether you have 8, 16 or 128GB RAM — a 1TB dataset simply won't fit. Which means that you need to stream in parts of the data and process them accordingly — and depending on the particular task and the algorithm you might not need that much RAM after all. The question is not about how much data you have. The question is about how much data you need to be close to the CPU at any given time.

This all is far from trivial. Bandwidth of modern DDR4 RAM is in the ballpark of 30GB/s. If you are working on a trivial task where your CPU can process data faster than that, yes, you need a lot of RAM. But in most scenarios, you'd process the data slower. Which means that processing one buffer of data while another buffer is getting streamed in from the disk is just as fast in practice. Also, more RAM means diminishing returns. Take a current consumer mobile high-end quad-core CPU with 8MB cache. The more RAM you have the more likely you'd get cache conflicts, sending your performance down the drain. If you want to have 32GB or more RAM, you really should start looking into quad-channel memory controllers and large caches.

In a few years, most people still won't need 16 GB to avoid the pageouts, but the argument isn't that we will need 16 GB. The argument is that we will need more than 8 GB. Even today, if you have two users on a computer, 8 GB is limiting because the second user with minimal apps loaded will still use up about 2 GB RAM. With only a single user, I currently use about 4-6 RAM usually with moderate usage but sometimes it's a little bit more. Do you really think in 5 years, having another 2 GB RAM will be enough to avoid page outs?

Why do you talk about avoiding page outs like its such a terrible thing? If I am switching to a different user, I WANT the data of the user in the background to be paged out, so that I can get more for that active RAM for my needs. The only relevant thing about page outs is that you don't want them on the data you actively use. Everything else SHOULD be paged out. To out it differently, if you never have any page outs, then you simply have way to much RAM

 

[lambertjohn]

Hello all,

I'm currently a college student and I plan on getting the 2017 nTB MacBook Pro this summer. I am choosing between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Here are my general uses: web browsing, video streaming, occasional light picture or video editing, light gaming such as League of Legends, and I do plan on installing windows to play some Windows only games as well.
Any input would be appreciated. Thank you!

All this future-proofing talk is nonsense. Apple's operating systems are designed to work just fine with 4,8, and 16gb of RAM. I'm typing this reply on a 2010 MacBook Pro 15 with 8GB of RAM running Sierra. And I've got zero issues. Runs fast, fluid, and multitasks with ease. A seven-year-old MacBook Pro! Think about it, would Apple sell a line of MacBooks, MacBook Pros and Airs that all start out with 8GB of RAM if the things were going to run slow as snails. I don't think so. Just buy what works for your budget, 8 or 16, and enjoy your new computer. It will run fine either way.

 

[raqball]

All this future-proofing talk is nonsense. Just buy what works for your budget, 8 or 16, and enjoy your new computer. It will run fine either way.

Agree! I think some are projecting their own personal use case onto the OP instead of reading what was written.. I also think some are justifying their decision to 'future proof' their machine and are injecting that into the mix..

These new machines are disposable so the question is will the need for additional 'future proofing' out live the life of the machine? I don't think it will..

There are plenty of professionals doing much more intense activities than the OP describes who get by fine with 8GB and will continue to get by fine. The suggestions that the OP needs 16GB of RAM for student and light home type usage is odd..

 

[Fishrrman]

My opinon only, and it goes against the grain of most posting here, but you really don't need 16gb now, and I believe that 8gb will probalby serve you well over the expected life of the new MacBook Pro (say, 5-7 years?)…

 

[EugW]

P.P.S. Much of this RAM explosion comes from very lazy programming btw. And also of some very worrying trends in some development scenes, mostly web front-end stuff. I do not understand why a basic web app setup needs that much garbage. When I was modifying a ruby on rails app I was horrified to see that my basic rvm+tools installation took multiple GB on disk! Then add all this Docker stuff and suddenly your average web-dev needs a supercomputer to make a hello world web template!

I've never quite understood why people who argue we don't need so much RAM bring up this argument. If anything, this statement strongly supports the argument that RAM needs are increasing. I'm not sure that was your intent, but nonetheless you bring this up and you're on the "less is more" side of the argument.

Yes, there is a lot of bloated software out there, but it's not as if end users really can do anything about it, except buy more RAM to compensate. Except with Apple, buying more RAM means buying a new machine.

Why do you talk about avoiding page outs like its such a terrible thing? If I am switching to a different user, I WANT the data of the user in the background to be paged out, so that I can get more for that active RAM for my needs. The only relevant thing about page outs is that you don't want them on the data you actively use. Everything else SHOULD be paged out. To out it differently, if you never have any page outs, then you simply have way to much RAM

Sacrilege! Seriously though, you can flip it around and just say you want page outs because you don't have enough RAM.

 

[raqball]

Typical 'future proof' and off topic responses that are irrelevant to the OP's stated usage....

Is goes like this..

A new poster says:

>>> I want to get my grandmother a computer so she can surf the web and read her email.

Responses:

>>> She needs an i7, 1TB of SSD and 16GB of RAM. That way she is future proofed..

When people say otherwise the thread is derailed!

OP I hope you can shift through all this and find your answer..

 

[jerryk]

Is data really exploding though?
I regularly work with multi-TB datasets. So what? Having more RAM here won't necessarily speed things up. In the end, its all about how the algorithm works. A naive algorithm that requires all the data be loaded in RAM will starve you out very quickly. But the fact is that if you work with large data, you CAN'T have it all in RAM to begin with. It doesn't matter whether you have 8, 16 or 128GB RAM — a 1TB dataset simply won't fit. Which means that you need to stream in parts of the data and process them accordingly — and depending on the particular task and the algorithm you might not need that much RAM after all. The question is not about how much data you have. The question is about how much data you need to be close to the CPU at any given time.

This all is far from trivial. Bandwidth of modern DDR4 RAM is in the ballpark of 30GB/s. If you are working on a trivial task where your CPU can process data faster than that, yes, you need a lot of RAM. But in most scenarios, you'd process the data slower. Which means that processing one buffer of data while another buffer is getting streamed in from the disk is just as fast in practice. Also, more RAM means diminishing returns. Take a current consumer mobile high-end quad-core CPU with 8MB cache. The more RAM you have the more likely you'd get cache conflicts, sending your performance down the drain. If you want to have 32GB or more RAM, you really should start looking into quad-channel memory controllers and large caches.

Depends what you do with data. If you just processing records to sum them or do trend analysis, maybe. But if you are using data in unsupervised learning looking for insights into a problem that clusters of data will reveal than you need to hold large segments of the data in memory. Sure you cannot hold all of it in memory at once, but you need to have access to large subsets to form conclusions. And this sort of data usage is at the heart of much leading academic and industrial use of data.

I do agree that bandwidth is an issue, as is processing power. People doing this sort of work regularly use multiple GPUs to perform many calculations in parallel or in a streams of parallel operations. Thanks Nvidia for giving us CUDA.

 

[OneMike]

The deciding factor for me would be if you want to dual boot windows or in vmware, parallels, etc.. or directory boot into it through bootcamp. If you want to access through bootcamp, then 8GB if fine. If you plan on dual booting, I'd go for 16GB.

More ram is always better, but it comes down to your use.

I don't buy the having 16GB will make it more future proof with Mac Laptops. If you're also upgrading the hard drive, then you have a better argument. Other than that, in a few years (now) 256GB will be a small amount of storage as well.

 

[jerwin]

Hello all,

I'm currently a college student and I plan on getting the 2017 nTB MacBook Pro this summer. I am choosing between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Here are my general uses: web browsing, video streaming, occasional light picture or video editing, light gaming such as League of Legends, and I do plan on installing windows to play some Windows only games as well.
Any input would be appreciated. Thank you!

Did you have a major in mind?

 

[Chupa Chupa]

8GB is doable but 16GB is more comfortable. 16GB is hardly overkill and I'd make the argument 8GB on a "premium" and "pro" computer is just a way for Apple to keep the MSRP on the 13" down, but it knows 16GB should be the stock RAM. It is on the 15" MBP. Once you buy you are done, unlike, say, the 27" iMac where you can easily upgrade RAM after purchase and for much less than Apple's offering too. So I wouldn't think twice about it. I also wouldn't buy any machine with only 8GB of non-upgradable RAM. 16GB is my standard these days.

 

[jerryk]

8GB is doable but 16GB is more comfortable. 16GB is hardly overkill and I'd make the argument 8GB on a "premium" and "pro" computer is just a way for Apple to keep the MSRP on the 13" down, but it knows 16GB should be the stock RAM. It is on the 15" MBP. Once you buy you are done, unlike, say, the 27" iMac where you can easily upgrade RAM after purchase and for much less than Apple's offering too. So I wouldn't think twice about it. I also wouldn't buy any machine with only 8GB of non-upgradable RAM. 16GB is my standard these days.

Lack of upgradability is the biggest issue. If you could swap in a new memory and m.2 modules I think everyone would be happier.

 

[Rhinoevans]

I have a 2012, the last one with upgrade ability for Ram and HD. Yess I have an SSD and 16G. Why? so inexpensive to upgrade. As a test to this post I open up Safari to see this post, the Activity monitor to check ram usage and I launched Parallels to run Windows 10.
PHY memory 16 GB
Mem used 12.4 GB
Cashed files 2.65 GB

Memory pressure seems high but is still green.

I guess with 8G it would just have more cashed files.

One day this 2012 will cease to work and I will have to buy a new one, and although I will hate to pay the Apple price for add RAM/SSD i would always find the cash for extra Ram

 

[raqball]

I have a 2012, the last one with upgrade ability for Ram and HD. Yess I have an SSD and 16G. Why? so inexpensive to upgrade. As a test to this post I open up Safari to see this post, the Activity monitor to check ram usage and I launched Parallels to run Windows 10.
PHY memory 16 GB
Mem used 12.4 GB
Cashed files 2.65 GB

Memory pressure seems high but is still green.

I guess with 8G it would just have more cashed files.

One day this 2012 will cease to work and I will have to buy a new one, and although I will hate to pay the Apple price for add RAM/SSD i would always find the cash for extra Ram

Has MacOS gotten that bad at memory usage and management?

I just ran a test on my Win 10 Pro machine with 8GB of RAM.

-- 40 Edge tabs open (I never have that many open just did so for this test)
-- Exporting a 3 minute 1080P GoPro video
-- Excel open
-- MS Word open

I have 2.1 GB of memory free as it trucks along with the open tabs, programs and exporting the video...

Edit to add: Video export complete and RAM released. Now at 3.8 free with 40 tabs open and excel and word still running...

Edit 2: All tabs, word and excel closed... All RAM released and now at 6.1 GB free...

No doubt there are use cases for 16GB of RAM but students (like the OP), home users and office types are generally not in the 16GB club..

 

[EugW]

Has MacOS gotten that bad at memory usage and management?

I just ran a test on my Win 10 Pro machine with 8GB of RAM.

-- 40 Edge tabs open
-- Exporting a 3 minute 1080P GoPro video
-- Excel open
- MS Word open

I have 2.1 GB of memory free as it trucks along with the open tabs and exporting the video...

No doubt there are use cases for 16GB of RAM but students (like the OP), home users and office types are generally not in the 16GB club..

That doesn't really necessarily reflect the OP's usage, and it definitely does not reflect the usage of the person to which you responded.

As some of us have already mentioned, if you run a VM, that will eat up RAM very quickly. The poster to which you responded had a VM running. Furthermore, the OP said he wants to run Windows. If he's running it only under Boot Camp just for games then that's fine, but if he ever wants to run it under a VM, then that really eats up memory quickly.

For people who want to run Windows on their Macs, there are a lot of good reasons to do so within a VM, although games aren't one of them.

 

[jerwin]

I guess with 8G it would just have more cashed files.

It would have fewer cached files.

If a file is cached in Ram, it can be accessed more quickly, though the difference between a SSD and memory is considerably narrower than with a spinning hard drive. Theoretically, more cached files equals a faster machine.

 

[raqball]

For people who want to run Windows on their Macs, there are a lot of good reasons to do so within a VM, although games aren't one of them.

So then why not respond to the OP's usage instead of going off on a RAM tangent?

I agree with most of what you've said in a general sense but absolutely none of it applies to the OP or his / her stated usage of the machine...

If you want to start a new thread on why 16GB is a good option for VM then I'll agree... The OP never mentioned VM, he/she said they wanted to play Windows games....

It might be helpful to the OP if people would respond based on the stated usage and not what might be, could be or may be...

 

[EugW]

So then why not respond to the OP's usage instead of going off on a RAM tangent?

I agree with most of what you've said in a general sense but absolutely none of it applies to the OP or his / her stated usage of the machine...

If you want to start a new thread on why 16GB is a good option for VM then I'll agree... The OP never mentioned VM, he/she said they wanted to play Windows games....

It might be helpful to the OP if people would respond based the stated usage and not what might be, could be or may be...

Err... I said VM in the first post I made in this thread, cuz he said he's going to be running Windows.

Windows could be Boot Camp alone, or Boot Camp and VM.

 

[raqball]

Err... I said VM right in the first post I made in this thread, cuz he said he's going to be running Windows.

Windows could be Boot Camp alone, or Boot Camp and VM.

Except the OP never said anything about VM. The statement was to play Windows games.. Most would use dual boot for that and not VM...

If the OP chimes in with additional information then I might change my answer.. As his/her stated usage stands now, 8GB would be plenty..

 

[leman]

I've never quite understood why people who argue we don't need so much RAM bring up this argument. If anything, this statement strongly supports the argument that RAM needs are increasing. I'm not sure that was your intent, but nonetheless you bring this up and you're on the "less is more" side of the argument.

Yes, there is a lot of bloated software out there, but it's not as if end users really can do anything about it, except buy more RAM to compensate. Except with Apple, buying more RAM means buying a new machine.

The argument is that "RAM is cheap so let's not care about programming quality" is not really a sustainable way to go. I am of course not saying that one should go back to 64KB days or practice some sort of "spec asceticism". In my opinion, however, at least some of the situation is because of bad quality software and that this is changing. Apple for one is really trying to improve the situation here with Swift and their frameworks that prevent the devs of making stupid mistakes.

Sacrilege! Seriously though, you can flip it around and just say you want page outs because you don't have enough RAM.

I don't think you can do it. Page outs are an important mechanism of OS memory management and they can be very useful even if you have tons of RAM to burn. My core point here is that attempting to prevent any page out is an overkill. MacOS has a much more useful indicator here: memory pressure.
[doublepost=1499195159][/doublepost]

Has MacOS gotten that bad at memory usage and management?

I just ran a test on my Win 10 Pro machine with 8GB of RAM.

Windows reports memory usage differently And it also uses memory differently. Can't really compare.