Whoa, that’s like 32GB of Windows RAM. Seems excessive to me tbh
My Linux machine has 64 GiB of RAM, which is like 128 GiB of Mac RAM. It’s still not enough
Serious question what are you using all that RAM for? I am having a hard time justifying upgrading one of my laptops to 32 GiB, nevermind 64 GiB.
For me in particular I’m a software developer who works on developer tools, so I have a lot of tests running in VMs so I can test on different operating systems. I just finished running a test suite that used up over 50 gigs of RAM for a dozen VMs.
Any memory that’s going unused by apps is going to be used by the OS for caching disk contents. That’s not as significant with SSD as with rotational drives, but it’s still providing a benefit, albeit one with diminishing returns as the size of the cache increases.
That being said, if this is a laptop and if you shut down or hibernate your laptop on a regular basis, then you’re going to be flushing the memory cache all the time, and it may buy you less.
IIRC, Apple’s default mode of operation on their laptops these days is to just have them sleep, not hibernate, so a Mac user would probably benefit from that cache.
If games, modding uses a lot. It can go to the point of needing more than 32gb, but rarely so.
Usually, you’d want 64gb or more for things like video editing, 3d modeling, running simulations, LLMs, or virtual machines.
Ironically, it’s the other way around, since Apple has to share their RAM between GPU and CPU, where other computers typically have them separately.
So in normal usage with 8 GB, you’re automatically down to 7, since at least 1GB would be taken by the graphics card. More if you’re doing anything reasonably graphics-heavy with it.
Does it?
Previous benchmarks have shown the 8 GB models seriously fell behind in performance.
Yeah I think the joke just flew over your head.
Apple keeps saying that their RAM is somehow magic and therefore better than Windows RAM, which is a comment that obviously makes no sense.
Yeah I think the joke just flew over your head.
I realize this should be a joke, but I am still unsure if it is.
I think they are able to share it with the GPU or something? It is maybe slightly better but it sure as fuck is not 2x better.
8 GB, even if it is “magic RAM,” is a joke amount and has been for a long time.
Yes. Freedom RAM equals approx. 1.6 metric RAMs. Unless your computer is on water, in which case it’s 1.857
The annoying thing is I have had people claim that 8GB and 16GB is fine on Apple and works better than on PC laptops. To the point one redditor point blank refused to believe I owned an Apple laptop. I literally had to take a photograph of said laptop and show it to them before they would believe me about the RAM capacity.
I own a 8GB MacBook Pro for work, it’s definitely better than a PC with 8GB of RAM, but not better or even close to a PC with 16GB. Just the amount of stutters/freezes while the swap file goes is insane
Maybe this is true if you use Windows. If you use Linux on your PC versus macOS on a MacBook you will probably find the PC performs comparably if not better.
Obviously it depends on the situation but sometimes it is worth talking to idiots not because you have any chance of changing their mind but just demonstrate to everyone else in the thread that they are in fact an idiot. Just in case somebody thinks they have a point.
Welcome to 2010
I’ve had to support their products on a professional level for over a decade.
Their enterprise stuff…can only be described as a quintessential example of an ill-conceived, horrendously executed fiasco, so utterly devoid of utility and coherence that it defies all logic and reasonable expectation. It stands as a paragon of dysfunction, a conflagration of conceptual failures so intense and egregious that it resembles a blazing inferno of pure, unadulterated refuse. It is, in every conceivable sense, a searing, molten heap of garbage—hot, steaming, and reeking with the unmistakable stench of profound ineptitude and sheer impracticality.
I always thought 8gb was a fine amount for daily use if you never did anything too heavy, are apps really that ram intense now?
Yes. Just as 4GB was barely enough a decade ago.
I usually find myself either capping out the 8GB of RAM on my laptop, or getting close to it if I have Firefox, Discord and a word processor open. Especially if I have Youtube or Spotify going.
I can get over 8 GB just running Discord, Steam, Shapes2
I am pretty sure most of that is just discord.
Imagine how much more room we’d have if everything wasn’t dragging a big trailer full of Chrome behind it.
Heavily depends on what you use, on a Linux server as a NAS I’m able to get away with 2gb, an orange pi zero 3 1gb but it essentially only ever ones one app at a time.
Im sure a hardcore rgb gamer could need 32gb pretty quick by leaving open twitch streams, discord, a couple games in the background, a couple chrome tabs open all on windows 11
Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.
I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop… So that’s literally the only thing they need to load, it’s just not good.
On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a “memory optimised” VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available… It caused problems.
Memory is continually getting more important.
When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we’re likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We’re just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s…
Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters
Imagine how far you can go on 8GB of RAM if every piece of software were still well optimized and free of bloat.
Recently I downloaded Chrome for some testing that I wanted to let separate from my Firefox browser. After a while I realized my computer was always getting hot every time I opened chrome. I took a look at the system monitor: chrome was using 30% of of my CPU power to play a single YouTube video in the background. What the fuck? I ended up switching the testing environment over the libreWolf and CPU load went down to only 10%.
Oooo a whole 16 gigs! It can run Firefox with more than four tabs open!
