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Comment by dean177 | Hacker News Reader

8GB is absolutely fine for most people, but it is an expensive upgrade.

In my experience with family members who have 8G laptops, they are not fine. Even my mother who just uses a web browser, mail.app and occasinally Photos is not fine with 8G. Her MacBook Pro regularly ground to a halt. I replaced it with a used model that was almost exactly the same except that it has 16G and now she is fine.

Beg to differ - I slam my MacBook Air (2015 i5 w/8GB ram) pretty hard, and I don't run into a lot of problems. I usually have a nice mix of office, iphoto, itunes, acorn, chrome with a dozen or so tabs, jupyter + pandas running doing some data -engineering. It's a pretty good workhorse - I don't run into many issues with the exception that occasionally I'll hit a web page that spins up the CPU hard enough that the fans start making noise (at which point I just close the offending web page) - but that's a CPU (or maybe web page) problem, not Memory issue.

It was mostly an issue with memory use in Safari. Might be due to the kind of web sites she visits, with tons of video and animated adverts. Restarting Safari always fixed the issue. Anyway, I got tired of her complaining and got her the 16G machine and she's been fine since.

By the way, I had been fine with an 8G machine and I do dev work so I was surprised that it was an issue for her.

My 2011 Air has 4gb and it's too little. 8 would be fine in it. But I wouldn't buy an 8gb machine today.

Swapping's also not as big a deal on SSD machines, as it used to be.

I have a laptop with 8gb of RAM and have never had any problems browsing the internet or even playing intensive games.

Games aren't going to strain your RAM

I don't in any way believe you, sorry.

There's absolutely no way anyone with that workload is hitting RAM limits.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnuNs_Nu46Q

I get by with 8GB in my 2015 MPB, but only because I use aggressive ad blocking to keep browser memory usage somewhat in check. I still have 3.5GB of swap in use and 1.25GB of RAM compressed. I suppose for a light user who doesn't keep as many browser tabs open, 8GB may be sufficient even without an ad blocker, but it's close.

16GB is definitely more than "marginal". There's nothing wrong with a mid-range laptop shipping with 16GB of DRAM.

Plenty of websites will happily leak gigs of memory if left open. Browsers now try to aggressively lower resources given to background tabs but stupid still happens.

If his mother frequents just one or two misbehaving sites, a few GB of memory can easily vanish. Not to mention CPU and even GPU utilization can shoot up...

With browsers eating half a gig just to launch these days, I agree 8 GB is borderline. I often hit the limit even just doing web browsing, e-mailing and a mix of other apps here and there, nothing fancy.

"Hitting the limit" doesn't mean performance is impacted.

Operating systems and programs allocate RAM somewhat intelligently. They won't necessarily clear out information from RAM if there's no reason to do so.

In Chrome, you have to have around 25 tabs open to hit swap, but performance only becomes a problem at many more than that. The obvious answer is to close some tabs - there's no way you can even read the titles of 25 tabs anyway.

If people like my parents need a new computer, I absolutely wouldn't bother recommending the 16GB memory system to them. Absolute total overkill. Storage and CPU are better upgrades to make first.

We see a difference that made us change our minimum specification to 16GB for any machine we buy. We do the same for Win 10 these days. The biggest problem are the browsers and the fun educational companies software that does evil, required things.

We learned our lesson from the MacBook Airs that we bought with 4GB.

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