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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.

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Tons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.

My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)

> My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory

What are you doing that needs that much memory?

I have a 128GB M3 Max from my employer. Due to some IT oversight, I was able to use it for a few months without the corporate "security" crapware. Didn't even ever noticed this machine had a fan before the "security theatre" corporate rootkits were installed.

Meh. I do plenty of development on my 32GB work macbook pro and 8GB M2 air and never notice a difference.

While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.

Pretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.

(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)

For mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.

VMs or huge builds can burn through that fast. Say 3 simultaneous Android emulators, or building Android itself

Some people use computers to compute things. More memory is always useful.

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