Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gqhf | Hacker News Reader

That's good for you and I'm glad you're happy but for some of us, considering the work with are doing, sometimes even 32GB is not really enough. Different people, different needs.

View on HN

That's fine, but people like these are mostly outliers in the dev community, they exist on Linux, Windows and even macOS and they definitely KNOW perfectly well what their requirements are and why.

The post I was replying to said something very different and much weirder.

What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.

If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB.

The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.

I’m just asking what would be a use case where you would actually need this

I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.

Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.

Perhaps you're correct that I don't need it in the sense that I only very occasionally find myself with a dataset or something that doesn't fit in memory, and could just run a high memory cloud instance for a bit to process it.

Even still, my experience of desktop Linux under memory pressure has been frustrating, even with fast SSDs, and overspeccing the memory is an inexpensive guarantee that my system will never start thrashing during an important screenshare demo or something, so it's an obvious choice if I'm shopping for a new computer.

When I built this computer last year the cost difference between 16 and 32GB was like $40...easy to justify a 2-3% premium on the overall cost of the machine to never have to give a second thought to conserving memory. That said, Apple charges $400 for the same upgrade (in their machines that support 32GB), so the calculus there is a bit different.

Desktop Linux tends to be a bit of a memory hog compared to MacOS. I think a lot of Linux users would be surprised how usable even the 8GB macs are for most tasks.

My work desktop is 32GB and it falls over any time I try to create really big R data sets for others. I have to use a cloud machine with 64GB, and I run that out of memory most of the time when trying to optimize the production pipeline. They refuse to give me anything larger, so that's my upper limit. If anyone knows how to create giant .rds files without storing everything in memory first, I'd love to hear it.

Virtual Machines.

Or a web browser with a lot of tabs.

I never close Chrome tabs.

That's fine, it's not like it keeps them all open, i've had a couple hundred tabs open in Firefox while researching a project using tree style tab to organize them. Modern browsers cache pages to disk after a certain high water mark. People actually seem to think all those tabs stay in memory.

It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual suspects with Slack, Skype (yes), Finder, etc.

Honestly, I could probably do with 16GB right now, but I'm planning on keeping this machine for at least 5 years; it was worth the few hundred bucks extra to future-proof it.

Browsers will quickly eat up all of your available RAM if you open enough tabs. The thing is, if you had less RAM, they'd be keeping fewer tabs alive in RAM. So you can't really infer from "I'm using X amount of RAM now" to "I need at least X amount of RAM". If you upgraded to 64GB you'd probably end up 'using' a lot more than 28GB for the exact same workflow.

Simply open a blank page, quit the browser and restart it. Now, only load the two or three page/sites you really need. Simple as that to bring mem use under 500MB, with Firefox at least. Repeat this once a day.

I personally close my browser at night and load it in the morning.

Oh yeah, definitely! I was just RAM-constrained on my previous machine (8GB) when running Docker workloads, so I made sure to future-proof this one.

re. the "usual suspects", I got an M1 air late last year, and I've decided to keep it completely separate from my work laptop, so all it has installed is basically firefox, a couple of code editors, and whatever came with it. It absolutely screams compared to my other laptop, but I wonder how much of that is the M1 processor, and how much of it is because I don't have all this garbage running all the time.

Apple brands one of these machines as a "Pro" system and previously offered 32Gb in that model's option range.

The person isn't the one that's failing to understand the market position of the two items, Apple is the one that failed to brand it appropriately. It should have been a Macbook Air & Macbook, not a Macbook Pro.

Although realistically at this point "Pro" has lost nearly all meaning in Apple's lineup. It's like an R badge on a car. Used to mean something specific, now just means a generically higher premium option.

> Apple brands one of these machines as a "Pro" system and previously offered 32Gb in that model's option range.

They still do. The Intel, 4-port, 13” MacBook Pro is still available, and can be configured with 32GB of RAM. I don’t think it would be a sensible purchase at this point though.

That 2-port Pro has no reason to exist IMO. Even on Intel it used a chip with a TDP closer to the Air than the 4-port models; now on ARM they’re using the exact same part. Yeah it has a fan but most workloads will never turn the thing on.

>> What do you need 32GB for?

Massive projects. Or a couple VM's.

The first laptop I saw running a VM was a Dell Precision M50 (?), it was 2" thick and almost 10lbs. It had something ridiculous (at the the time) like 1 or 1.5GB of RAM.

A sales guy was demoing a product to us, and it spun up a Windows 2000 VM for IIS and another for SQL server, it probably took 10 minutes to get started but he could then demo the app through the browser. Sounds silly but it worked.

"But can't you just run it on a server somewhere"

Yes. That'd be cheaper and faster. But at this high end of the market, it might make more sense for some people.

I work on a medium-to-large sized project that has a Go backend and a React/TypeScript frontend. Having our full development environment running (a handful of Go processes, Webpack, PostgreSQL, Redis, an indexing server, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting) and trying to edit code in both simultaneously (so having LSP servers running for both Go and TypeScript) is usually enough to cause my 16 GB laptop to swap heavily. It's not a pleasant experience: think multi-second UI lockups, music skipping, that kind of thing.

So, realistically, at this point I need a 32 GB machine to effectively do my job. Minority? Sure. But I think there are enough people in my boat that it's a legitimate market to have an option for.

Not the OP, but I fill 32GB pretty decently when I run my work’s customer facing web stack, database server, ancillary services, and a couple search engine instances. Prior to moving to locally hosted containers my main memory gripe was Electron. I much prefer having all of my development localized though. It’s a lot closer to the good parts of when I wrote “shrink wrapped” desktop software.

Run and compile very big C++/.net applications and big scenes in Unreal Engine and Houdini.

edit: I love how I got downvoted because my work can't fit into a toy Mac M1

Running a Filecoin full node. Mind you, not mining, just verifying.

https://docs.filecoin.io/get-started/lotus/installation/#min...

Somehow if you have that kind of memory it tends to fill up.

Too many electron apps? :P

Boy isn't that the truth. I actively avoid them but sometimes you just can't like with signal-desktop. I actually have to keep it running because I don't want to reach for my phone every 10 minutes. Something as simple as that interface doesn't need electron but oh well. Maybe a lite version with just text and contacts would be acceptable. I don't need stickers, gifs and emojis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com