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Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

Why is it annoying? I'm genuinely curious: what are you doing that takes that much RAM?

I routinely run: - a virtual box instance set to 8GB ram to run docker containers that comprise our backend services - a VMWare Fusion instance configured with 4GB ram running Windows to run our client apps - an IntelliJ instance that easily hits 2GB ram usage - a smattering of standalone JVMs and other miscellaneous dev things, plus the regular mac os stuff, browsers, skype, slack, mail, etc etc

I can do that easily on my 24GB imac. If that starts to get cramped, I can upgrade it up to 64GB. But I would be SOL on a 16GB macbook pro

You need a machine designed for professional use not a consumer machine. If you look outside the Apple garden, you can have pretty much whatever you want, even 64GB of RAM.

For most people it's running a lot of virtual machines, or compiling large projects.

VM's, development environments, editing photos/video. There are people who do actual work on computers, and yet Apple seems to not acknowledge the ones filling their App Store.

I'm having a hard time seeing photo editing requiring 16GB of ram. For video editing it seems to me most use cases aren't going to have more than a few GB worth of frames at a time required in memory, but I can see the potential for 16GB being a bottleneck in certain applications.

For "actual [computational] work", use a different computer suited for the purpose, not toys marketed to graphics professionals and hipsters.

As I read your comment, I have something like 7 JVM's running (mostly in Docker containers) on an 8GB MBA that's not remotely close to hitting swap. You talk about people that 'do actual work on computers'. I get this, but where I start to wonder is that even 8GB represents a _lot_ of capacity for useful work.

(Some of this probably comes from the fact I cut my teeth on machines with 64K RAM... but once machines got past half a gig, the availability of RAM seems to have outpaced the need, at least for me.)

Compiling WebKit takes more than 8 GiB RAM, and even with modern SSDs, you don't really want to swap out. And I'd like to do other things in the mean time (e.g., run 2-3 VMs with 4+ GiB RAM each – no, I can't move Windows 7 in a docker container, yes, I need to test on it).

Moving things in the cloud isn't an option, thanks to internet being too slow and unreliable, and I don't want to be tied to a desktop.

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