PSA: you probably don’t need 32 or 64Gb RAM unless you know you need it.

[aevan]

BTW, there is rule of thumb, which gives balanced memory/cores scenario: 4-8GB per core. on general average workload, this means you have enough data for cores to digest, and enough cores to digest data balanced average case.
It used to be 4 for quite some time, now, with eventual speed-up of cores it is moving towards 8.
Again, this is _average_. Of course you can have case me where 64 cores will have enough to do with 2 MB of data, and cases where one core is enough for processing 64GB. But on average, it is quite good rule of thumb.

So you’re basically saying you need from 40 to 80Gb RAM with these new MacBooks? I honestly don’t think this rule is good, unless you’re running VMs and are allocating separate resources.

Here’s a rule of thumb: open all of the apps you use in your workflow, see if your current computer is slow more than you expect it to be, in regards to your CPU and GPU (eliminate the CPU and GPU as bottlenecks first). If it is, in that case you might need more RAM. Get the new computer with that in mind. Or just buy the most you can comfortably afford - if you feel like it. That’s it.

 

[patrick.a]

Air doesn’t come with a Mini LED display and numerous other improvements. And 16Gb is fine for a lot of people who need the cpu performance gains, too.

Sure. But we are talking about performance here. And I would argue that those people won‘t notice a difference as single core speed is exactly the same.
You can buy a MBP for all the other improvements, that‘s why Apple sells the basic configurations. But I think this group would be way better off waiting for the updated Air (or whatever it will be called) next year!

 

[arche3]

@IllIllIll​

Extra for you :



I know what you can expect from only 16 gb ram .

@antst

That's the point. And you should have the 200 - 400 Bucks also, when you buy such an expensive notebook. Some users like IllIllIll obviously haven't enough money for this. It's really sad. I bought the 16 gb model only, because i trusted the Apple users on forums (had no experience with mac os before) and the 32 gb was initially not available in Germany.

Why did u post a potatoe picture? Lol. Using a prepaid trakphone from 1998.

 

[ASX]

This photo was for the user IllIllIll who didn't believe i own(ed) (i sent it back because of the annoying screen) this mbp 2021 m1 max.

The smartphone which i used for the photo is the Apple Iphone 13 Pro in auto mode. So all in the favour of Apple fans .

 

[antst]

And when you say “16gb is enough for browsing”, try to remember how much memory was enough for browsing in 2016 I bet a lot of people would go with 8gb. Are those machines potent in 2021?

Sorry, but this is spreading FUD. No, I don’t expect the memory requirements to grow in the next two years, especially in a world where 90% of browsing is done on 4-6Gb RAM phones. Metaverse has little to do with it, it’s still more an idea than anything else and making your purchase decisions based on such speculation is not a good advice. Because what if suddenly AR and VR becomes a thing for browsing - better get that M1 Max just in case!

You will be able to comfortably browse and use your apps with 16Gb RAM in 5 years, if you can do it today. And if you’re not - it might not be because of RAM anyway.

What I am saying, 5 years ago, 8gb was pretty ok for you, yes? Can you live comfortably with 8gb now?
Of course? If you change laptop every year, then it doesn’t matter. Otherwise, it will become a limit very quickly. 2-3 years and 16gb will not cut it.
For last 15 years, the main reason I change laptops is a memory. RAM first and, to less extent, SSD.

 

[antst]

So you’re basically saying you need from 40 to 80Gb RAM with these new MacBooks? I honestly don’t think this rule is good, unless you’re running VMs and are allocating separate resources.

Here’s a rule of thumb: open all of the apps you use in your workflow, see if your current computer is slow more than you expect it to be, in regards to your CPU and GPU (eliminate the CPU and GPU as bottlenecks first). If it is, in that case you might need more RAM. Get the new computer with that in mind. Or just buy the most you can comfortably afford - if you feel like it. That’s it.

Not 40-80, but 32-64. Low power cores is out of picture with this.
And yep, this rule served well me and not only me for last 2 decades in very different conditions.

 

[antst]

So you’re basically saying you need from 40 to 80Gb RAM with these new MacBooks? I honestly don’t think this rule is good, unless you’re running VMs and are allocating separate resources.

Here’s a rule of thumb: open all of the apps you use in your workflow, see if your current computer is slow more than you expect it to be, in regards to your CPU and GPU (eliminate the CPU and GPU as bottlenecks first). If it is, in that case you might need more RAM. Get the new computer with that in mind. Or just buy the most you can comfortably afford - if you feel like it. That’s it.

And about “slow more than you expect”…if you get a car which has problem with always on break, you never know that you can expect it to go faster ))) it’s meaningless.
What you can see, that if for now you can go mostly without compression, then 4-5 years down the road you might have more or less useable laptop
Refusing that memory use grows constantly is refusing reality
We could browse internet with 256MB back in time, comfortably
Today we are talking that 16gb is enough it is 64 times more, and it took about 22-25 years or so, since 256MB was enough. And now suddenly it will go flat?

 

[arche3]

This photo was for the user IllIllIll who didn't believe i own(ed) (i sent it back because of the annoying screen) this mbp 2021 m1 max.

The smartphone which i used for the photo is the Apple Iphone 13 Pro in auto mode. So all in the favour of Apple fans .

What did you google a pic of the box and insert a cutout with your user name? The picture is like 90x90 pixels. Lol.

 

[antst]

All in all, memory use something like doubles every 3 years approximately.
All the same stuff you use now, will eat twice more memory in 3 years

I remember when I was using MATLAB with something like 16MB of RAM.
Now, if I want to exactly the same, I afraid I need to have at least 4GB )))
You could write simple A4 text document in ms word with 4MB on the pc. Now to do exactly the same, how much you need?
And, the fun part, resulting document will be exactly the same )))

 

[aevan]

All in all, memory use something like doubles every 3 years approximately.
All the same stuff you use now, will eat twice more memory in 3 years

Where do you find all these rules?

This is just not true.

 

[aevan]

And when you say “16gb is enough for browsing”, try to remember how much memory was enough for browsing in 2016 I bet a lot of people would go with 8gb. Are those machines potent in 2021?

What I am saying, 5 years ago, 8gb was pretty ok for you, yes? Can you live comfortably with 8gb now?

Probably. Most people still can. And I’ve heard the exact same comments in 2016.

 

[hans1972]

And when you say “16gb is enough for browsing”, try to remember how much memory was enough for browsing in 2016 I bet a lot of people would go with 8gb. Are those machines potent in 2021?

What I am saying, 5 years ago, 8gb was pretty ok for you, yes? Can you live comfortably with 8gb now?
Of course? If you change laptop every year, then it doesn’t matter. Otherwise, it will become a limit very quickly. 2-3 years and 16gb will not cut it.
For last 15 years, the main reason I change laptops is a memory. RAM first and, to less extent, SSD.

There are no problems surfing and using a Mac with 8Gb of RAM.

21.5" iMac (around 2010/11): Used for browsing and writing documents in a word processor, light use of Photos app. Used by my girlfriend's mother.

13" MacBook Pro Retina (2012): Used for browsing, light editing in Photos, listening to Music and writing documents in a word processor. Used by my girlfriend's father

12" MacBook (2015): Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook), Teams, browsing in Safari, VMware Fusion to run one VM with Windows, MS Remote Desktop, Photos, Music. It's my spare laptop.

27" iMac 5K (2014): Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook), Teams, browsing in Safari, VMware Fusion to run one VM with Windows, MS Remote Desktop,Music. Do photo editing in Photos and Pixelmator. Editing 4k video with iMovie. It's my main desktop machine.

13" MacBook Air (2018): Office, Teams, browsing in Safari (esp. Youtube). Used for school work. Used by my girlfriends 17-year old daughter.

All of these have 8Gb of memory and their performance is mostly the same as when they was bought. The exception being Excel which is faster today.

 

[hans1972]

All in all, memory use something like doubles every 3 years approximately.
All the same stuff you use now, will eat twice more memory in 3 years

No it doesn't. Sometimes you hit a plateau in which it takes a long time to move away from, or there are new uses cases.

8Gb is that kind of plateau for a lot of users just doing browsing, simple office applications, video communication and also light editing of photos and movies.

 

[antst]

Where do you find all these rules?

This is just not true.

If it is not true, why don't you have 1GB, which was more than enough for literally anything on desktop/laptop something like 20 years ago, maybe even less?
When did it stop?

 

[aevan]

If it is not true, why don't you have 1GB, which was more than enough for literally anything on desktop/laptop something like 20 years ago, maybe even less?
When did it stop?

It slowed down considerably in the past decade and a lot of things changed. But hey, believe what you will - I just feel sorry for people who got base models and now think they will run out of memory in a few years (they won’t), but other than that - you go and calculate your RAM needs however you like. If you think in 3 years you will need 32 and 64 in six, there’s nothing I can say that will change your mind.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

If it is not true, why don't you have 1GB, which was more than enough for literally anything on desktop/laptop something like 20 years ago, maybe even less?
When did it stop?

Well, I'm typing this from a mid 2010 polycarbonate MacBook with 4GB of RAM. It's my wife's Mac and she refuses to upgrade, but I have to say it's still surprisingly capable today. It struggles with 4K youtube videos and it screams like a jet engine, but for what she uses it for (iWork, email, online shopping) it's... quite workable. I would say that 8GB is more than enough for the average user, it has been for years and it will be for years to come.

 

[antst]

I am more sorry for those who will in 4 years suffer from slow machines. And of course it magically slowed down right now as my MBP 2015@16GB about 2018/2019 became quite memory limited without changing workload and use pattern. And by 2020 became literally unusable. and while m1@16GB with much faster swapping helped to cover the gap till M1 max somehow, but still used to give me OOM kill suggestion every second day.
Just magical memory deflation this particular sample(s) was subject to )))

memory use grows, inevitable. And will keep growing, till somebody will manage to enforce majority of developers to stick to machines with 4GB ram permanently
and ban nodeJS with package driven development

 

[hmorneau]

It's true that RAM usage went down actually. For example, a lot of virtualization was replaced by containers (docker) and you don't need to allocate the RAM like before.

Rule of thumb, are you working on a file bigger than the memory size? If so, it slows down quite a bit. If not, you are good to go. That's why a lot of Youtubers show basically no difference in performance between the 16GB and the 64GB, multitasking is not a reason to get more RAM, the swap is fast enough for those use cases.

If you work on a large file, then the RAM becomes important, you can check this video:

This file is 56GB and it's basically 6 times faster with 64GB of ram vs 32GB.

 

[ASX]

Before you get more hyped about this m1 macbook pro 2021 watch this:

The cpus are quiet old. Alder Lake and Zen 3 3d vcache and Zen 4 will be much faster .
I have really to laugh. Why did i jump on this hype train? Very foolish . The M1 Pro/Max is mostly pretty slow. Nothing special. I saw this on cinebench r23 where the m1 pro is a snug compared with a racing car (pc). But it's only a stupid benchmark right ?

 

[antst]

Clearly, my personal requirement for memory size is higher comparing to average user, but I don’t suggest everyone needs 64gb. but I clearly can in see how year by year the same amount of money is becoming “less“. And I have zero doubts that comfort, one has with 16gb, most likely, will be available only with 32gb 4 years down the road. Unless chip shortage and other issue will add extra delay for 1-2 years.

for couple of decades one of principals of development in industry is “don’t care about memory use, it’s getting cheaper and average memory size in computers grows” and “we better get it faster to the market and by the time we hit shelves, users will just have more memory to cover it”

 

[antst]

It's true that RAM usage went down actually. For example, a lot of virtualization was replaced by containers (docker) and you don't need to allocate the RAM like before.

Rule of thumb, are you working on a file bigger than the memory size? If so, it slows down quite a bit. If not, you are good to go. That's why a lot of Youtubers show basically no difference in performance between the 16GB and the 64GB, multitasking is not a reason to get more RAM, the swap is fast enough for those use cases.

If you work on a large file, then the RAM becomes important, you can check this video:

This file is 56GB and it's basically 6 times faster with 64GB of ram vs 32GB.

To be precise, docker on Mac means virtualization

 

[hmorneau]

True... I always run them on Linux... my bad, so everyone, get the 64GB, not that 16GB rubbish

 

[ASX]

Isn't MacOs a linux copy?

 

[antst]

Clearly, my personal requirement for memory size is higher comparing to average user, but I don’t suggest everyone needs 64gb. but I clearly can in see how year by year the same amount of money is becoming “less“. And I have zero doubts that comfort, one has with 16gb, most likely, will be available only with 32gb 4 years down the road. Unless chip shortage and other issue will add extra delay for 1-2 years.

for couple of decades one of principals of development in industry is “don’t care about memory use, it’s getting cheaper and average memory size in computers grows” and “we better get it faster to the market and by the time we hit shelves, users will just have more memory to cover it”

The worst part of the story is that memory price isn’t going down as fast as it used to. Even more, something like 3-4 years ago prices even went up considerably.
But it didn’t affect things as much as one could think. As there are “generations” of developers who don’t care about memory and optimization in general. You can’t change them over single day.

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

16gb should be good enough for normal usage and occasional above normal usage, for at least 4+ years IMHO.

32gb is basically the sweet spot. More than what most need but definitely future proof. Especially good if you plan to have Parallels running the majority of the time.

64gb will still be overkill for 95% of users even 7 years from now. I have 64gb on my desktop PC and only hit near 100% of usage in special cases such as a robust video edit or compiling code(which I'm still an ametuer). Other than those rare instances pretty much always have more than enough to spare.

I did pre order the 16' 64gb MBP Max, only cause I can afford it. But hurting your wallet for 64gb makes no sense at the moment.