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shakow

It is definitely an adequate base spec. What would the random MacBook user fill 16GB of RAM with?

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I have Firefox, Slack, MS Team, MS Word, MS Excel, and Onenote opened. The world's most boring office worker use case.

I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed.

Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)".

HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc.

I'm game to use any other "more realistic" specification or monitor as I know that with memory paging and virtualization things are wonky.

I don't think this indicates I MUST have 12 or 16 or 32GB - I have a 4GB media PC that works just fine. But I do believe it's an indicator average user can use 16GB, if it's available. Or in other words, if I buy a $1000USD laptop, I don't think 16GB is going to waste away unused with zero benefit ever :-\

Again, perfectly willing to be educated :).

> Slack

You're lucky any of those other applications opened at all!

Yes, largely because two of those are (bad) Electron apps that eat way more memory than they have any right to.

What is the person buying a laptop supposed to do about that?

Oh, I don't disagree even remotely! We can have a nice thread about optimized apps and 4k demos :)

But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.

Those apps will use memory as they are given it, for the most part.

For a $1,000 laptop? I disagree. It’s fine for a $500 one but Apple doesn’t sell those.

That $500 difference goes towards a higher quality product with good support, not necessarily just system specs.

I think what they're saying is that they'd expect a $500 price increase to update specs as well.

There are tons of $1000 PC laptops with worse build and 8GB

On my MBP with Catalina just browsing will get me over 8 gigs. Reaching 16 is another thing, that i did not manage even with Docker and mutiple IDEs in a typical day.

I personally wouldn't buy something without 32GB these days. But I would tell family/friends to get at least 16GB. With 32GB, I rarely have to think about RAM. But I'm probably 85%+ utilization all the time. I'll admit that I'm a "power user", but my wife has a fairly new laptop with 8GB and it fills up FAST, even when doing nothing serious. It's at 81% right now with just Firefox, Word, and Evernote.

If I were going for a desktop it'd be at least 64GB.

More than one electron app?

We are not looking at a typical Mac user here, are we?

Slack, Whatsapp, Discord, and Skype, pick any two and I don't think it's unusual.

Never measured whatsapp but it's really pretty performant. Is it heavy?

Slack and discord, on the other hand, are real drags.

> Never measured whatsapp but it's really pretty performant

are we really talking about the same whatsapp ? it takes a good 4 seconds to load here. I don't remember ever waiting for MSN Messenger to load, on potato-powered computers.

I think that's because it's trying to connect to your phone since that's where the messages etc are stored.

Electron is cancer .. but Skype is native (for now, at least on Linux. Although I'm sure they'll switch to the Teams codebase and Skype native will disappear forever too)

Is that recent? It definitely used to be Electron https://www.codepicky.com/hacking-electron-restyle-skype/

Skype 7 was native; Skype 8 is Electron. So is Teams.

Electron is recent. What are good and widely used cross platform application frameworks other than electron?

Qt?

I'm not saying your wrong, but this is such a catch-22.

When people complain about Electron apps, the response is always "modern computers have so much memory anyway, it's fine!"

But then when a manufacturer introduces a computer with slightly less memory (but still a perfectly reasonable amount) the big question is whether it can run all those Electron apps!

Is there a way to break the cycle? This isn't good!

I'm not sure 16 GB is enough.

Chrome?

I don’t do any tab-hoarding in Chrome (that’s the job of Safari on my machine), but I’m pretty sure that it will suspend tabs long before you run out of RAM. 8 GB is still plenty for web browsing.

I started surfing the net in the 90s with 8MB. :D

BRB gonna fire up Netscape on my brand new MacBook Air

Netscape?! That's for the kids, we used NCSA Mosaic and liked it. I suspect lynx is still around in some form.

Lynx is definitely still around. Useful for a quick "can I actually get to this site" sanity checks on servers.

Lynx is bloatware. Just use telnet.

Unless it’s HTTPS-only, which is most sites these days....

(I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing; it just makes Telnet more annoying)

Yeah, but I need both browser + IntelliJ. I run out of 8 GB pretty damn quickly.

Definitely not the random user, but the moment you start running docker containers, you are screwed.

Chrome, Slack, Docker. Pick 1 (and only 1)!

Another chrome tab!

That will do it.

Better yet, pick 0 and 8GB is fine.

At least for Slack there's would be the iOS version available.

Electron apps.

Chrome, Slack, Zoom, Docker, k8s, VS Code, etc.

Your definition of random user seems a little off.

The median Macbook user is not a developer. A web browser and videocalling are the only two from that list you'd expect the median user to be doing with a Macbook.

Also Office. Lots of open Word documents.

My "typical Mac user" in this case, is my wife. Her 8GB MBP is holding up very well.

Google Docs and Slides browser tabs can take a decent amount of resources too.

Does macOS handle memory in a way where it just lets RAM fill up to some point before actively doing something about it? Because on my 16gig Macbook 8 gigs are gone just with browsing & spotify.

They're not really "gone", they've just been put to use because there's no point in leaving RAM empty. You can do much more than run a browser and Spotify with 8GB of RAM.

Thanks, memory stats sure look different than with linux. Switched a short while back & was surprised, but that would explain it.

Yes. If you run vm_stat in the Terminal, you can see how few pages of RAM are actually left free at any given time. Modern operating systems aggressively cache files in RAM to improve performance.

The green/yellow/red graph in the Memory tab of Activity Manager is the best way of seeing if you need more RAM at a glance. In my experience, macOS won't do any swapping in the green. In the yellow, the system is still pretty usable but there's some swapping going on. When it turns red, your SSD will be getting thrashed pretty hard.

Thanks for the hint!

It's a good question -- do most people still use desktop office suites these days? I don't know the answer. I use the Google Docs suite for both work and for personal stuff, and I personally haven't seen the need to pay for Office in awhile.

1. The market those as "Pro"

2. Their entire presentation focuses on editing large image files, editing 4k video, machine learning, and graphics-intensive games (games were mentioned more than anything else)

So, given how these are marketed, they are extremely low on RAM and storage.

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