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Comment by culturestate | Hacker News Reader

You can max it out with 16GB of RAM for an additional $200. I'm not sure I can see myself putting more than that into a laptop during its useful life.

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Yes I know but that wasn't the point. The point is that if I now buy the laptop with let's say 8GB because I think I don't need more than that because all I do is code. After 6 months I get assigned to doing work with BIG databases that easily eat 10GB memory. Now I'm stuck with 8GB because it's soldered and even Apple can't upgrade it.

When you buy a PC, you should always get as much memory, disk, and CPU as you can afford. That was sound advice 20 years ago and it still fits today.

Has that really been considered 'sound advice' all this time? Getting the best CPU/GPU I could understand, but up until now PC's have been so easily upgradable, that I've never heard someone recommend maxing out the Hard Drive and RAM during the ordering process (unless it was to your average consumer). I've always heard (and likewise, advised my 'power-user' friends) to just buy systems with the baseline HD and RAM options, because those components really tend to be a lot cheaper via third parties...

> I've always heard (and likewise, advised my 'power-user' friends) to just buy systems with the baseline HD and RAM options, because those components really tend to be a lot cheaper via third parties...

Not to mention if you hit your HD limit after a year the bigger drives are going to be drastically cheaper.

I disagree. Sometimes I can afford the best CPU, but it's twice as much as a CPU that's 90% as powerful. It doesn't make sense to buy it, even if I can afford it. I can wait a year or 2 and upgrade and still save money over buying the best.

The same goes for memory, hard drive, and other parts of the computer.

Upgrading the RAM on a new Macbook Pro is a user-serviceable operation. It consists of four steps:

1) Back up data, wipe drive

2) Sell MBP on eBay

3) Buy new MBP with desired amount of RAM

4) Restore data

Now stop it. You're buying a Mac because you don't like to waste time dicking around with your computer, remember?

You're buying a Mac because you don't like to waste time dicking around with your computer, remember?

And I do like to waste time dealing with backups and Craigslist scammers? I'm buying a Mac because I want a Unix workstation with a solid UI. Lots of MacBook Pro owners are not terrified of screwdrivers.

> And I do like to waste time dealing with backups

Ha. Best of luck, friend.

No, I'm buying a Mac because I need a UNIX-based operating system that can run the Adobe Creative Suite.

My fiancee, who is practically hardware illiterate, just installed brand new RAM and a new SSD into her 4-year-old MacBook. If she had originally purchased it with those upgrades, it would have been $500+ extra at the time of purchase. This week, it cost $150 for the parts on Amazon.

User-serviceable operations that don't require completely replacing the computer are important, and will surely affect many people's buying decisions. You don't get to say that everybody who wants a Mac will never want to waste time dicking around with their computer.

"stuck"? Buy another brand of laptop.

Yes

Also, the SSD makes you need less memory, since reading from it is so fast

So 16Gb will go a long way really.

Exactly, and although similar statements have been made in the past, I think 16GB shall be sufficient for at least 5 years out.

I have a current MBP with both 8GB and 16GB of memory. I found that with 8GB, performance is excellent. With 16GB, I normally have about 6-7GB free - Mac OS X normally uses the rest for a filesystem cache but it doesn't really affect performance that much in my experience. 16GB is going to be enough for quite a while...

Not to mention, the glaring problem people like to ignore when discussing this is the motherboard in the MBP is only going to support so much memory anyway (would not be surprised if it could only support 16gb), so talking about not being able to upgrade it to 32/64/whatever is common then is kind of moot.

Sure, but I think the issue is that if you ever want 16GB, you have to buy it now at Apple's price: $200 for an extra 8GB.

I'm not sure why we keep saying things like this.

"X MB/TB of resource Y will be plenty for a while" is almost always something we laugh about 2 years later.

I have the late 2011 MBP with 16gb of RAM and I maxed out RAM usage earlier today just with Postbox, Steam, a backgrounded 2Gb VM, a large file copy in forklift and chrome. While that's a rare occurence now, I imagine that over time it will become more common.

I don't think you understand how RAM works. Hint: there is lots of caching goes on.

I don't think you understand how my laptop use case works. Hint: I run a lot of VMs and emulators, do a lot of debugging and have a lot of tabs open.

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