MBP 16“ 24 vs 48GB RAM Non professionell User

[throAU]

I'd go with 48GB since you're planning on playing games, it's fairly effortless to hit 24GB+ with Discord and stuff open.

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9 percent memory pressure. that’s the headline figure there.

the machine is nowhere near breaking a sweat.

 

[Andrey84]

Thanks to all of you for your advice.

Looks like a tricky question even for the expert community

Maybe I should role a dice ?

It’s a gamble how long the machine will last and how ram requirements evolve…

I enjoy if things last for a long time but one never knows…

I've calculated the votes for you, and they are as follows:

• 48GB: 9
• 24GB: 7
• "Depends on your Safari tab management skills": 1

So, a slight majority towards upgrading to 48GB.

Have you made the decision yet? Please let us know once you do!

It's clear that 24GB will be enough for you for the next 5 years, but after that - noone really knows.

You have two good options here: the 24GB option with $400 saved and the 48GB option with enough memory for the next 10 years. You're right, you can just roll a dice 🎲

 

[getwellsoon]

Thanks a lot for the statistics

I am going back and forth between both options several times each day.
Budget wise I could afford the additional 480€ but I simply feel it is a a lot (it's almost half of an Apple Watch Ultra).
I will also go for the 1TB upgrade and Nanotecture display. Together with the RAM upgrade this will be around 3.8k€. I checked the quote of my old MBP from 2012 which was 1.8k€ with discount from the education store. Even if I add the SDD and the RAM upgrades on top of it, I am far from getting close to the price of the new M4 machine.

I really love to use things as long as possible and I would like to use the new machine for 8-10 years again. However, the fans of my current MBP already going wild on the light tasks for several years and the noise really bothers me... I just could not convince myself to upgrade earlier because the machine was still running everything it should.

If the M4 MBP will get louder after 6-7 years, I might already upgrade after this time period and maybe a RAM upgrade now would not be worth it... If the machine breaks earlier, money would also be wasted.
On the other hand, if the machine lasts and only the RAM will get the bottle neck, I know it will bother me a lot as well. If I go for the additional RAM now the machine might also have a higher resell value if I decide to upgrade earlier for whatever reason.

I checked the memory numbers in the activity screen again. With my normal workload while playing WoW, I have 13-14 GB used memory, 2-3 GB Cache and 6 GB swap. WoW takes about 2-3 GB alone and I am playing on lowest graphics settings. I also assume on the intel machine the RAM usage does not take into account the graphics memory which the unified memory also will need to take care about.

I need to come to a decision soon. Whatever option I will choose, I just hope the machine will last at least 7-8 years given the costs of more than 3k€.

Thanks a lot everyone and Merry Christmas!

 

[smirking]

It's also cheaper to just quit things that you're not using when you need free RAM.

That's basically the tradeoff these days. Most stuff runs just fine with how fast swap happens on a Silicon Mac. In the few cases in which swap severely degrades performance, you can just quit out of programs.

Being a developer, I do a lot of modestly resource intense stuff at the same time constantly. If swap was a death knell, I'd be totally unproductive as I spent my last 3 years on a 16GB M1 Pro machine and I'm now on a 24GB M4 Pro.

Runaway scripts aside, web pages are a perfect example of the kind of things that swap very gracefully. I spend all day developing those things. I don't just have tons of tabs open. I have four different browsers with tons of tabs open and sometimes also Windows 11 running additional browsers. 20-40 tabs is nothing.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Some time when you have WoW running along with a bunch of apps, try opening Activity Monitor and click memory. It will tell you how much is being used, and how much is being used as cache. Aside from video games, most apps don't use all that much more memory then way back when. I think the system uses 5GB doing nothing. Safari can add ~2 GB. Apps like keynote might use about a half GB. If you haven't run into memory problems with your 16 GB, then you should be fine with 24. IMHO, pretty much everybody should be sure to upgrade the base SSD from 0.5 tB to 1TB or more, but I don't think the RAM upgrade from 24 GB would help most people.

Read up on Apple's Unified Memory Architecture, AI, etc. It simply depends on whether one wants their Mac to perform optimally or sub-optimally during the 2025-2032 life cycle of any MBP new today.

Maybe suboptimal RAM is appropriate for a budget buyer going for the low end MBA and a short life cycle. But it does not make sense for a (pricey) MBP buyer looking for a long life cycle to forever hamstring the box with suboptimal RAM. Lesser RAM is like putting automobile tires on a full size pickup truck; you can do it, but it is a dumb move.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I've calculated the votes for you, and they are as follows:

• 48GB: 9
• 24GB: 7
• "Depends on your Safari tab management skills": 1

So, a slight majority towards upgrading to 48GB.

Have you made the decision yet? Please let us know once you do!

It's clear that 24GB will be enough for you for the next 5 years, but after that - noone really knows.

You have two good options here: the 24GB option with $400 saved and the 48GB option with enough memory for the next 10 years. You're right, you can just roll a dice 🎲

We disagree with what you call "clear." All that is clear is that a 2025 buyer can choose to force a new high end MBP to run sub-optimally until 2030, and the Mac OS will make it work, albeit constrained. What is "enough for you" just depends on whether or not a 2025 buyer wants to spend $2k on a MBP and save $400 by choosing less RAM at the cost of sub-optimal operation.

Note also that adding up the comments has nothing to do with what the buyer's best choice will be. Note that circa 2026-2027 (if not today, as in my workflow), anything to do with images will be paging to disk with 24 GB RAM. Some folks think that swap operation is OK because Mac OS makes it work. Others (me) think a computer should be ideally configured when feasible.

 

[raythompsontn]

anything to do with images will be paging to disk with 24 GB RAM

I opened mail, preview, Lightroom (imported 500 photos), Photoshop (6 images), excel, word, OneNote, PowerPoint, pages, numbers, FileZilla, keynote, Topaz AI, Topaz Denoiser, notes, photos, contacts, WhatsApp, TurboTax on my machine. I was only using 17Gig of memory. Memory pressure was low green.

I have been using systems for 55 years, worked with systems that swapped for much of that time. Swapping was an issue with spinning rust, even some of the early solid state systems. With the speed of SSDs swapping is no longer an issue. The only time swap is going to be used is when switching apps. When using apps, such as Photoshop, everything will be loaded into memory. Apps while running generally do not swap. It is no big deal if the OS swaps the app to disk when the app does not have current focus.

When using normal productivity apps (word, excel, mail, PowerPoint, etc.) no one will notice that swapping is taking place. Even using Photoshop with massive images, (3’x6’, 300 DPI, with 32 layers) there were no, performance problems. If swapping was used it was most certainly not noticeable. Performance did not suffer.

I have imported 4,700 images into Lightroom without getting out of low green for memory pressure. The import took several minutes (with preview building) and the CPU was at 95% the entire time. Exporting those same images, changing the format, also did not affect memory pressure.

What is "enough for you" just depends on whether or not a 2025 buyer wants to spend $2k on a MBP and save $400 by choosing less RAM at the cost of sub-optimal operation.

What I did was more than most people would be doing. This is with 24Gig of memory. I would say that is far from “sub-optimal”. And it worked just fine.

Lesser RAM is like putting automobile tires on a full size pickup truck

There is also the possibility of putting “Z” rated tires on a Corolla. Buying more than what is needed is a waste of money that can be better spent elsewhere.

24Gig will serve the majority of the users. Those that need more know who they are and will configure as much as possible. Buying 48Gig when 24Gig will remain unused the overwhelming majority of the time is a waste of money.

A person’s workload is not going to increase 25% every 8 years. What works today will work 8 years from now. This can be proven by the number of people still running 8 year old Macs.

 

[Andrey84]

We disagree with what you call "clear." All that is clear is that a 2025 buyer can choose to force a new high end MBP to run sub-optimally until 2030, and the Mac OS will make it work, albeit constrained. What is "enough for you" just depends on whether or not a 2025 buyer wants to spend $2k on a MBP and save $400 by choosing less RAM at the cost of sub-optimal operation.

Note also that adding up the comments has nothing to do with what the buyer's best choice will be. Note that circa 2026-2027 (if not today, as in my workflow), anything to do with images will be paging to disk with 24 GB RAM. Some folks think that swap operation is OK because Mac OS makes it work. Others (me) think a computer should be ideally configured when feasible.

Hello,

Just wanted to say that the way you phrased and formatted your comment, specifically this: 'We disagree', '"clear"', 'adding up the comments has nothing to do', comes across as hostile. It has certainly increased my blood pressure and stressed me out. This tone is inappropriate, especially on Christmas & Boxing Day.

I was merely expressing my opinion and I didn't say it's the only and correct opinion.

Also, I'm not sure who "we" are in your post. I'm firmly in the 48GB camp and my post №6 confirms that. So it's misdirected as well.

 

[Ziperix]

I'd go with 48GB since you're planning on playing games, it's fairly effortless to hit 24GB+ with Discord and stuff open.

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It's insane to me how clueless average apple user is about their pc. Your memory pressure is at 9%, you are barely using any RAM. 24GB is just allocated, there is no reason for there to be any free unallocated RAM. It's easy to see how Apple is profitable when their users are so clueless.

For op: you will probably not even come close to using 24GB with your usage.

 

[ondioline]

It's insane to me how clueless average apple user is about their pc. Your memory pressure is at 9%, you are barely using any RAM. 24GB is just allocated, there is no reason for there to be any free unallocated RAM. It's easy to see how Apple is profitable when their users are so clueless.

lol my dude, it was a screenshot at a particular point in time. I like that you think it's impossible to utilize the 48GB of memory though, I think you're projecting about the clueless part just a little bit.

 

[getwellsoon]

Always when I think I have come to a decision, I find new posts here with real strong opinions in the other direction and I get confused again

@Ziperix Do you think I will be fine with 24GB today or also in 5-7 years?