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Comment by agmcleod | Hacker News Reader

I'm a dev and I enjoy it. Though it kinda sucks when I can't connect to an external monitor at home, have yet to buy any dongles for that. I'm kinda curious who finds themselves needing more memory, and for what purpose. No doubt more can be helpful, but having 16 hasn't really ever felt slow to me. Even when running multiple virtual machines.

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You run multiple virtual machines simultaneously and 16GB of RAM doesn't feel slow to you? They must have seriously optimized the hardware to the point that the RAM goes farther. Running multiple VMs on my 2015 MBP with 16GB RAM is a nonstarter. How much memory are you devoting to each VM, and how much do you allocate for overhead on the host system?

I'm spoiled though - these days I spend most of my time on a machine with 128GB RAM and an i7-6900K :). I can barely recall what it's like for a machine to hang.

The SSD is crazy fast, and can make up for a lack of RAM in many circumstances. Swapping isn't as painful when your disk can read and write at 1.5-2 GB/sec.

Depends on what VMs and what other software you're running, no? You could comfortably fit a LAMP VM in what an Electron app like Slack uses...

As someone who has a similar desktop (128gb RAM w/ 12 core 3.3ghz Xeon Mac Pro) and the aforementioned late 2016 MBP w/ touchbar, I can definitively state you're being hyperbolic.

Last week I noticed I had Android Studio, Xcode 8.3b4, Xcode, IntelliJ, VMWare w/ Windows 7 Enterprise running Simplicity Studio and IAR Embedded Workbench, and Adobe Photoshop all at once. I was happily running along just fine without realizing I hadn't closed anything while switching tasks until Google Docs started consuming 6gb of RAM in a single browser tab.

Are you talking about a 2015 MBP or the 2016 with touchbar in the second paragraph? I honestly can't imagine all of that running on my 2015 MBP.

2016 w/ touchbar. I've done similarly heavy workloads on a 2015 MBP with same RAM and it was "ok", but certainly noticeable. I think the biggest contributing factor is likely SSD speed, but that's just a guess.

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