Especially head scratching when you consider that a lot of folks still have 2012 Mac minis with 16GB of RAM.
I think 16GB is the bare minimum for a professional machine. Apple clears the bar here, but doesn't exceed it.
Maybe next year's machines? As a first product, I think it's good enough. And the performance gains elsewhere--if what Apple says is true--are actually pretty radically impressive.
This is really great point, and does highlight a key advantage of Apple Silicon going forward. This kind of thing will now be an option going forward on Apple's new computers, in a way it wasn't before.
Three browsers open is not a requirement for the vast majority of folks.
Every developer who makes frontend things for the web should have a minimum of three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, but maybe others as well) open any time they're testing or debugging their code. That's quite a lot of developers.
Nah, most of us go browser by browser I think. I think I've been going with two browsers open at most the last 5 years, and at my current employer I'm so reliant on browserstack that I don't even have anything other than chrome running.
I have 1500 tabs open in Firefox, plus CLion, PyCharm, a few Jupyter kernels eating 5-15G, a few apps running in background - it’s often nearing 32G on a 32G 7-year old Mac and sometimes goes into swap space. I personally won’t consider anything less than 128G as a main machine at this point (and it’s a pity that you can’t swap upgradable RAM on iMacs for 256G).
People used to tell me that Java development was resource consuming... But I somehow manage to build systems with 16GB. I didn't even go for 32G on my new laptop.
Stuff that’s easier to keep as open tabs (in a tree format via TreeStyleTab) and eventually close those trees when they are no longer needed, as opposed to bookmarking everything and eventually accumulating a bajillion of irrelevant bookmarks. E.g., I’m doing house renovation so I might have a good few hundred tabs open just on that topic which will eventually get closed.
On most browsers you can organize bookmarks in folders/tree structures. You could then delete folders/trees of bookmarks at a time, eliminating this "accumulating a bajillion of irrelevant bookmarks".
I know. Been there, done that. To each his own, I guess. An open tab is an open tab, if I close it, it's gone forever unless I bookmark it which I would very rarely do. A bookmark is an inverse, it's going to stay there forever unless you clean it up and manually delete it. In my experience, a few hundred more open tabs beats ten thousand dead bookmarks, and closing tabs is easier than cleaning up bookmarks.
I guess I mean more that if you're going to buy a brand new dev machine in 2020, you shouldn't buy anything with less than 16GB of RAM.
You can still be productive right this moment on 8GB of RAM (you're proving it!), but the march of time will inevitably start to make that amount feel less and less tolerable, if it isn't already.
Personally, when I buy a dev machine, I'm generally trying to look at the next few years of ownership. Will 8GB of RAM cut it in 2023? Doubtful. 16GB? Yeah, a little safer. But 32GB would make me feel better.
What kind of development? Firefox, Spotify, Slack, WhatsApp, any JetBrains IDE, an iOS Simulator, and an Android Simulator will have my 16GB MBP swapping like crazy.
This is super interesting. I personally wouldn’t consider a 8GB or 16GB laptop this year as my daily driver, but it’s true that the performance gain from extra RAM beyond 8GB is marginal, especially for average audiences and especially when their performances are measured only externally.
Like, you might get super frustrated, develop mental health issues, not that the corporate cares. Expenditure reduces, ROI might even slightly improve, why bother then?
you have to admit when you're in a busy day w/ looming deadlines and your machine starts chugging coz it can't handle the excel docs/dev work going on it feels like the worst thing ever.
the kinda company that can't afford to give you the latest stuff is more likely to have those kindsa days all the time too so it feels even worse. management even rides your ass coz you can't make it work...
part of "making it" as a software dev in a lot of countries is getting a machine per your specs not having a machine specced out to you by IT.
