I've considered adding SDXC 512GB card to the SDXC slot to expand storage, less thing to lug around than an external Thunderbolt drive.
20 years ago, when we were collectively trying to squeeze more and more out of personal computers at a fairly decent clip, it made some sense. At this point, though, things have tapered off outside of a few special cases like large-scale data crunching and serious gaming, neither of which was ever really a primary use case for Macs in the first place.
What's left for reasons why you might need ever more RAM are things that feel kind of silly. On my personal computer, the big RAM suckers in recent memory have been ad-heavy news websites and (bafflingly) the Slack desktop app. In both cases, I'm pretty sure the reason why they get away with sucking more and more RAM is that we're rolling over and buying more RAM instead of putting some more pressure on software developers about being wasteful.
I rather wish Grace Hopper were still around to give a memory consumption version of her "nanoseconds" lecture.
I think developers are still chasing the ‘write once run anywhere’ Holy Grail. This time it’s JavaScript.
The other 2-3GB (I'm not even kidding) seemed to be a result of keeping a copy every single attachment and Giphy image that anyone posts in memory, indefinitely. Like with any good memory leak, the solution was to bounce the application.
I use vscode quite a bit, and it doesn't eat RAM in a way that seems reminiscent of what people like to blame on Electron apps. Perhaps what we like to lay at the feet of Electron is more appropriately blamed on there being a lot of JavaScript developers who haven't been sufficiently educated in how to manage memory.
Part of this is due to increasing DRAM densities, and used to be a good thing with Macs - frequently the device's practical maximum RAM would be twice what Apple listed as possible, since the DRAM density doubles between the time the machine is released and you actually need to upgrade the machine. However, with the RAM now soldered, we can't benefit from the increasing densities right as we start needing more RAM.
When I upgraded, I bought a Skylake laptop with 16GB of socketed RAM and the option with the CPU to increase that to 64GB down the line. 32GB SO-DIMMs only became possible this year.
I've read that Apple's limits of 16GB were usually down to power draw, that adding more RAM would require more power, thus bigger batteries to keep up the marketing battery life, and it was easier to just limit the RAM to '16GB is enough'.
That all said, I cannot deny that modern applications are RAM guzzlers and developers seem to revel in the glut of available memory. Still, there are situations where you need all that RAM (e.g. multi-k video production... perhaps that's where the 'Pro' in MacBook Pro came from?!), and you just can't get around that requirement.
At least RAM is likely to be good as long as the rest of the system.
I know people use it to store VM images and run them off the flash disk.
Just don’t insert them into a non-Mac, you’ll have a fun time pulling them out.
Just a couple dollars from Asia from your favourite online auction house.