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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little bit surprised at this outrage considering there are very few PC laptops that offer 32GB+ DDR4. XPS15 offers 32GB but its battery life is rather poor.

Thinkpad P50 offers 64gb with tested battery life of over 8 hours, but it clocks in at 5.8lbs.

I'm a pretty heavy duty user and I have 3 machines that each has 8GB. (PC, PC, Mac). What the hell are people doing on their 13.3 - 15inch laptop that requires 32GB?

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One example would be people that are doing software development, in particular with multiple virtual machines/containers, compilation, and heavy IDEs.

I work a lot with multiple (vagrant) virtualboxes and intellij idea running along with the browser and a bunch of other utilities. My 13" MacBook Pro at home with 8 GB RAM sometimes hits its limit but my 15" MacBook Pro at work with 16 GB RAM does just fine.

I have a mid-2012 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. Today I had open and used the following apps, with lot so windows open at once:

- MS Outlook, Word, Excel

- Safari, Chrome, Firefox

- Slack, Preview, Terminal

- Parallels - Windows 7 VM with 2GB RAM

- Photoshop

It worked great all day, with no beach balls. This is only a bit heavier than my usual usage.

So: I somewhat share the perplexity about why 32GB of RAM is needed by so many people. There are certainly some uses like compiling that I don't know much about, but I can't imagine that is huge segment of the potential audience.

FWIW: that would bring my Mac to a crawl and send my fans into overdrive.

If you want to play with infra VM, that's at least 4 GB each, slack loves memory, like, seriously, video conf + sharing your desktop needs memory. Now start playing with some data stores on top of that, and 16 GB feels cramp.

I absolutely don't for fancy graphic adapter, but I need all the memory I can get. I want 13 inch so I can use my laptop anywhere, including airplanes, cars, light railway etc...

I have 16GB of RAM in my MBP. As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used. I'm not running any VMs, nor am I running any Adobe Products. Chrome, Spotify, Slack, Visual Studio Code, HipChat, Keynote, Sketch... this is a typical, yet light application load for me.

Out of curiosity, what's Activity Monitor report each is taking?

Forgive my laziness, but it's a pain for me to answer due to all of the Google Chrome Helper processes that I'd have to sum to supply you with an accurate answer :-)

Understood :) Similarly, I'm amazed at how much CPU some Safari tabs can use. (How do these tabs keep proliferating?)

OS X seizes all available memory for the apps you have open, and aggressively manages it as you open more and more apps. Free memory in Activity Monitor is not a useful measure of how many apps your machine can run with sufficient performance.

>As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used

Yes, the OS will use as much memory as possible, this doesn't mean you are hitting memory limits or performance bottlenecks.

Except for when macOS tells me that it has run out of RAM and that I need to close some applications...

I think that only happens when your swap file takes up all available space on your drive

Perhaps, but that's not the case here. I have plenty of available disk space.

That used to happen to me weekly or so, but then I switched the majority of my browser workload from Chrome to Safari, and I haven't had that issue in the several months since.

I don't use a lot of tools that embed Chromium, though, so I'm not entirely sure just a browser switch would keep you from hitting memory pressure warnings.

MacOS tends to use all the ram it has available but that doesn't mean it needs it all. Much of it is used for caching and the like. It's a good thing, since if you're going to be powering the RAM you might as well use it all, even for marginal benefit. That means though that if you had 64GB of RAM on your next MBP, you'd be (hopefully) running at 53.4GB used.

- Chrome

- Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework)

- Slack (MacGap (WebKit))/(Electron (Chromium Embedded Framework))

- Visual Studio Code (Electron (Chromium Embedded Framework))

Notice a pattern? :)

Yes, the pattern is not lost on me :-)

I think you are very representative of the people complaining about the new MacBook Pros not having 32GB+ of RAM.

I am typing this on a 2013 MBP with 16 GB of ram. If I get a new machine today, I'd like to keep it until 2019 or so. The resource that I feel most pinched on with my Macbook is its ram.

The standard two slot SO-DIMM laptops can support 32 GB now thanks to 8Gbit DDR4. There was also 8Gbit DDR3 that is less common and more expensive, but is supported by Broadwell for example.

People are also upset that ram is no longer modular. You used to be able to buy a laptop and put ram in it, making the "few laptops ship with this configuration" argument irrelevant.

16GB of DDR4 is $99 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Technology-2400MHz-HX424S14I...

32GB DDR4 is $183 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Technology-2400MHz-HX424S14I...

A 32GB upgrade will come next year most likely, people who need 32GB can wait a year.

It probably will have to wait for Intel to support LPDDR4, which may be longer then a year.

It's not about what people need NOW. It's what people will need by the end of the lifespan of the laptop, since it can't be upgraded down the road.

So... how much RAM do you think you'll need in 2018 or 2020? ;)

I assume people who have a macbook pro that they dock and connect to a big display, and don't really own a desktop.

You can plow a field with a honda civic, but it's not really the "right" tool for the job. The same applies to insisting on a 64GB laptop as your main workstation.

If you spend all your time docked, why do you care about a 15" screen? I've got a 15" MBP precisely because I do a lot of work out of conference rooms, hotel rooms, etc. Traditional "road warrior" stuff. Battery life is a huge premium there.

I do a lot of work outside of an office too, but I don't care about the battery life advantages.

For my workloads, battery life is already terrible in a modern MBP, because all those great battery gains from the last 10 years are really about idle performance, not flattening the processor. My MBP is rarely quiet: Too often it has to do enough processing to sound like an airplane about to take off. If you actually tax it, it lasts about two hours before it runs out of juice.

I'd much rather have more power and less battery life than to just give up, buy a tablet with a keyboard, since then the computer is nothing more than a modernized VT100 terminal, and do all real computing in the cloud.

I see. I guess time will tell if apple made the right call to sacrifice ports and memory in exchange for thin and light.

I have a feeling that Apple's bigger screw up is the new pricing.

Cost of getting 15" laptop is now $2,400, which is colossally more expensive than before.

Some people just need bigger screen, and not high end specs.

For me the trade-offs don't bother me, aside from the RAM, but that's not a deal breaker. My preference sees to run contrary to the HN crowd, however. Having only USB-C is great; I can't wait to ditch Schrödinger's^WUSB-A soon enough. The butterfly key switch don't bother me, either. I bought a mechanical keyboard a few years ago, which I still use, but it doesn't feel that much better than the "free" bundled keyboards. Guess I'm just not picky. As for the price, yes I wouldn't mind if it were lower, but I do well enough that I can afford it (and I'm far from being a "10x" engineer, at least income wise). Besides, I hang on to them practically forever.

I have both a 15" 2011 MBP and a 2016 12" MB, and prior to acquiring the latter I'd also thought thin & light didn't matter to me. Yet I find myself using the latter more and more, for seemingly trivial reasons like being able to comfortably hold the MB, open or closed, with one hand, freeing my other hand to e.g. open or close doors. Having a free hand means I don't have to carry it with my carrying case--I could just grab & go--so I take it with me more often.

Of course, the MB is significantly slower, so I'm less productive in some cases even when I have it. The lower (logical) screen resolution is quite annoying, too. I occasionally run it in 1:1 mode until my eyes couldn't take it anymore. I'll probably get the new 15", but I'm hoping that the 13" is fast enough for me, because now I don't want to give up the portability.

Photoshop.

Are you really going to go with "Because 16GB oughta be enough for anybody"?

compilation. dont try to write android apps without 16 gb of ram, it will end up quickly.

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