This is coming from an M1 MBP user with 32GB who, even with aggressive paging in and out of an uber-fast disk, manages to fill about ~20GB on a regular basis.
And then seeing people say >I don't understand it either, a 16 GB DDR5 stick costs like $50
50 bucks is a lot of money to a whole lot of people. Yes, actual computations and compilation etc take a lot of memory, but there is so much memory wasted through js bloat, it's just sad. But if you take a little effort and optimize your system, then 16GB is still more than enough and "just works"
_should_ you have to spend more money to support bloated software? No of course not, especially since many users of such software _aren't_ tech bros, but as someone in tech, shelling out a little more money seems like a much more pragmatic solution vs having your computer be slow and/or waiting for the industry to change.
Unused memory is wasted memory, so makes sense to always have a lot in memory. Doesn't mean that you'd have a worse experience with 16GB.
I accept trade-offs concerning development effort and time-to-market, however the phrase "Unused memory is wasted memory" does not seem appropriate for a developer who's proud if their work.
Little friday rant, sorry :-)
Once you clear the semantics hurdle it's surprising how much people are in agreement that "used" should be optimised, "cached" should fill as much else as possible, and often having large amounts of "free" is generally a waste. The only remaining debate tends to center on how much cache really matters with a fast disk and what percentile of workload burst should you worry about how much "free" you have left after.
It's too easy, and happening too often on HN these days, to reply with a low-effort contrarian statement without engaging with the central point of the argument.
Not having enough RAM slows you work to a halt, I would always go a tier down in CPU or GPU to have enough RAM
And it's also easy to expand later
Otoh, my main rig is also on 16gb today and I never run into issues. But then again I don't run electron apps and don't do webdev or microservice stuff with 30 VMs.
As I pointed out in another comment, RAM is soldered on most non-desktop computers these days. It's not easy to expand later. The hardware companies are well aware of that, pushing overpriced RAM upgrades at the time of purchase and it's not like you can just walk into a store and say "I'd like this laptop but with last year's GPU model and 2x the RAM for the same price."
It's still very easy to choose computers with modular RAM, even in portable formfactors. The classic SODIMM module format seems to have run its course and is not compatible with modern low-power memory but we now have the CAMM module which at least Dell and Lenovo are shipping and major memory vendors like Crucial offer replacement/upgrade parts for.
Obviously if you prefer your computers fruit-flavored you're SOL, but that's not news to anyone either. Their memory packaging in the M-series machines has its own advantages that may be worth the tradeoff depending on your application, but for a normal user it's more of a limitation than a feature.
32 is great for editing and such, but I do assume that one would be using linux, and in that case, I can consistenly open over 100 tabs in firefox and do programming and have electron apps open on the side on KDE plasma with no issues, no out of memory errors. Things do get squeezy and noticeably slow at those extremely heavy workloads; for heavy tasks of course get 32 but if 16 can do you that far its fine.
I even won a hackathon with 16gb of ram on an X230, if I can do that and be productive even at home its enough. macOS is just very RAM heavy, theres always at least 50 weirdly names background processes active.