32GB of RAM is becoming the standard (2024)

More RAM is becoming the standard because software developed with more RAM is less efficient. And developers tend to have powerful computers "because it's their job", which encourages them to write inefficient code.

> 16GB RAM is also a practical capacity for general tasks such as web browsing, office work

16GB RAM to read and write text and see images... I think it just says it all.

>16GB RAM to read and write text and see images... I think it just says it all.

More could be said about the bloatware, telemetry, surveillance, and adtech built into Windows.

Hard to imagine that 1GB was "a big deal" in my lifetime.

Because it has been the same problem for decades: the more RAM developers have the more RAM their code uses. There is nothing special for 32GB, it was always the case.

Only when the resources are limited do we see optimization being done seriously.

while slop probably plays a part, there is a lot going on that is now possible that wasn't previously. Many of the things we take for granted wouldn't be possible without the extra memory. Do I need 16gb to read text and view images? no. I don't even need 1gb, but I do need that extra ram if I'd like to listen to music while I write text that is actively spell checked, while searching my open document against ones i've already written to look for reusable content while leaving my spreadsheets open, browsing with multiple tabs open, while handling some beefy data file a colleague has sent through, all of which sounds like a reasonable workday for many. Multitab browsing alone isn't some massive stroke of genius that no one had thought of prior, while clever it was also not present earlier because of technical limitations.

Sure I don't need 32gb to do all that, but who knows what fun things will come from having that extra budget?

I would like to completely agree with that, but when my laptop consistently starts venting like crazy whenever I open a particular webpage, I have to blame the webpage.

An example I have is a food orders website, which takes 4 seconds and 10MB to load, where all I want to do is go unsubscribe for the weekly order (where I need to unsubscribe every week because it's opt-out, I guess it's better for them). This page is crap because it can, not because it brings some value it couldn't without using all that compute power.

Then as a software engineer, many colleagues literally say "memory is cheap" very often, which kind of hints towards the fact that they don't care about optimizing for memory :-).

I honestly cannot really think of something I do now that is really useful for me and that I was not already able to do 10 years ago (hint: I don't use a copilot to code).

Obviously, large data files will need large memory, but aside from that, music and spellcheck take little memory, and web browsing takes so much

For 90% of browsing like searching and reading articles or watching video or using email, all of those worked on the almost same functionality 10 years ago with a fraction of the memory.

I saw it as a bit of a milestone when people started regularly talking about individual media files that were larger than the whole 80 MB hard drive that held my first Slackware Linux install with X Windows, emacs, and C development tools.

First it was audio, then video, and RAW camera images are almost there with the prosumer digital cameras. And those are compressed files. Software that decompresses the whole thing into arrays of regular samples will need much more RAM...

Windows 98 ran on 16 MB as a pretty enthusiast configuration and it let you browse the web. I recall Outlook was about as capable as now too for most uses (mail, calendar etc).

They say this is happing due to abstraction and saving development costs but I'm not so sure anymore. Windows 11 infamously has large swathes of boilerplate copied around apps that many of their engineers don't even know what it does.

At this point we're far into abstracting abstractions and those abstractions bear their own complexity that may or may not be more complex than what we began with at a fraction of the resource cost...

I'm starting to think that no one in our industry have any actual pride in their work. Just slapping layers and layers of stuff together until it barely works and then shipping it... And somehow they should be paid lot of money for this...

And most of this stuff isn't even doing anything that special or demanding, which is the sad part.

> And somehow they should be paid lot of money for this...

They get paid to be productive from the point of view of the company paying them. And by slapping layers of stuff together until it barely works, apparently they make profit for their company.

They are not paid to write optimized (or "good" or "useful for society") code.

Which is sad, no question asked. But it makes perfect sense given the system we live in.

> accumulating tech debt like that will likely slow them down

Which I believe is not taken into account in the performance evaluations. How could you blame an employee for consequences that will happen in 2 years, when the employee has already been promoted for their good short-term results?

I can never quite figure out what the use case is - as I sit here with 2 brave tabs open, my 10.13 mac is using up 13.58gb of ram.

These conversations usually usually end up at "my 8gb ram machine actually swaps constantly, but it's fine because otherwise I'd have to face the cognitive dissonance of justifying this purchase, so I'd rather repeat the apple marketing line they came up with to BS around their poor silicon yields"

That's so high I suspect measurement error. How did you come up with that number?

(It does look like my machine is using some swap space, but I don't notice any lag, so I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.)

Perhaps?

Maybe it’s the speed of the SSD that prevents me noticing it, but it sure feels fast and I don’t have a ton of memory

5200 mt/s is 83 GB/s assuming dual channel, which isn't much compared to 100 GB/s for base M2, and 800 GB/s for M2 ultra[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#:~:text=The%20SoC%20a....

The higher end M2s just run more chips in parallel. The bandwidth is there to support the GPU.

The latency of LPDDR is higher than desktop RAM, so it relies on the cache to get around that, and the cache is about the same as most x86 CPUs. So there isn't much benefit in the real world.

apple silicone doesn't need any memory tho

edit: ha I guess people didn't see the /s in the above

Silicon, silicone is fake boob plastic.

And that’s a blatant lie from Apple, if anything, the GPU shares memory with the CPU therefore Apple Silicon needs MORE memory, not less.

And yet the machines are more performant with less memory than their Intel equivalents were (comparing Mac to Mac).

Somehow an efficiency has been made.

> They handle memory management quite differently

Think different (tm). Snark aside you're right, Macs are much better at memory management than Linux, swap handling in particular. But that's a very low bar.

> the usage patterns on those devices is significantly different.

You're right, Mac users tend to run more multimedia productivity tools that benefit greatly from more RAM!

> You can get higher memory Apple kit if you need it…

You can pay the $800 premium yes, just make sure to plan what your future usage will be for the next 10 years because you can't buy it after the fact.

Most of the people buying an $800 MacBook Air or lower memory variant of an Apple device are not worried about RAM and don’t use it in such a way that it matters. Yes, if you’re a professional using a macOS device you can pay the $400 premium for the highest memory variant. You either have the money to pay it, or the product justifies the amount. They are charging what their customers are willing to pay, it’s also somewhat inflated because the cost of maintaining those less popular SKUs.

Last point I’ll make on this topic, you are going to see more CPUs move to have RAM on die because of the physical limitations on latency. Modern storage speeds are also making this a moot point as RAM may become just another caching layer for ultra fast solid state storage.

Somehow this thread has attracted a large number of the “Apple sucks, look how much they charge for X” crowd. It’s ok to fanboy about your favorite hardware and software, but it’s also ok to have differing opinions. I use Windows, macOS, and Linux. I use macOS because I enjoy the casual experience significantly more, I prefer it for browsing and productivity and 8Gb of ram is plenty for that use case. I use Windows for software development and gaming, I have 128GB of ram in that system because it’s nice for games and running Hyper-V without compromising. I use Linux for self hosting, proxmox, docker, and more and that system is a retired R720 with 192GB of ram.

The article is objectively correct, RAM is cheap these days, some apps waste ram, some apps just realize that there no reason not to stretch their legs a bit to offer a better experience. Chrome often gets the short end of the stick, but Chrome does objectively well with RAM considering how inefficient modern web development is. They’re doing the best they can in the modern web dev landscape.

Why wouldn't you spend as much on RAM as you would on your CPU? It seems kind of silly to skimp on RAM or SSD space these days.

There will always be some application that comes along and can use the hardware that you didn't imagine. I remember a friend saying that the 48k in his Apple ][ was enough ram for any program... as long as you didn't go filling it up with graphics and that kind of nonsense.

It's amazing how small code is compared to the data it operates upon.

You need all that RAM to virtualize operating systems, because running native code is dangerous.

The observant may wonder why running native code is dangerous. Why doesn't the operating system defend itself?

>computers with little RAM have to swap this data to the hard drive

The hard drive? What machine is sold with a hard drive as swap in 2024?

Go to Walmart.com, desktop computer category, sort by low price. Many have HDDs. My parents do the analog version of this for appliances, and if I gave them the task of buying a desktop computer, they would probably buy one like this with a HDD.

The surprising thing is that you can buy a desktop computer (but no monitor) for less than a day of minimum wage in California.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Restored-Dell-Optiplex-790-Deskto...

It is not that surprising when the computer is actually over decade old... i5-2400 released in Q1 2011.

What I find more surprising is that there is any margins in selling those sort of computers. Enough to actually reliably profit.

It's because they're off-lease trash that they hobble back together with used HDDs and used RAM. They target low-income; budget conscious/frugal; elderly and those otherwise ignorant of the scam. Backed by a 30-day return policy!

I get these types of machines (actually somewhat newer i5/i7 11th gen+) from an Amazon returns auction house for $5-$20/ea and they invariably have mismatched ram in them and HDDs with 50-70K hours on them already. They also typically won't boot because of a faulty ram stick 9r failed HDD.

That being said, I also have 4 kids and those machines have served well as 'starter' systems. They get to upgrade the PSU, HDD-->SSD, GPU and max out the ram on a shoestring budget.

Between a local MicroCtr and /r/homelabsales ... They get to build out performant systems for $300-$600 total. I also consider this to be a much greater investment than just throwing a console at them.

Profits or not for them; we found some profit in their waste stream.

“Modern operating systems such as Windows 11 or macOS use additional RAM very efficiently”

Hahahhahahhahhukaufkauf! (Excuse me while I clear my throat) Uh… my 7Mhz 512KB Amiga generally had a better UX.

>my 7Mhz 512KB Amiga generally had a better UX

True, although... on topic, 1MB became very needed by 1990-ish.