Out of curiosity, how many people are actually constrained by 16GB of RAM? What applications are you using it for that 16GB vs 32GB is actually a deal breaker for you?
Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processing?
If you have a microservices architecture or are using Kubernetes then you will easily need more than 16GB. I have 128GB on my desktop purely so that I can have my full platform running in the background whilst also doing development.
Also if you're doing data engineering e.g. Spark then you will likely want more than 16GB.
Adobe Premiere Pro barely works on 32GB, let alone 16GB. Perhaps not "normal people", but it is a Pro device. And bear in mind, due to the UMA, that 16GB is shared between GPU and CPU.
I have 74GB on my system (10GB of which is GPU) so I can run my dev env (Kubernetes, PGSQL, Visual Studio), data science, machine learning and do 6K video editing. But then, there's also zero chance that I would consider doing this on a laptop.
> Adobe Premiere Pro barely works on 32GB, let alone 16GB
Which is why I use Final Cut Pro. It was a little sluggish from time to time on my Air with 8GB of RAM, now on my mid-2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM it never stutters or slows down. Editing 1080p.
People running electron apps are likely constrained. Maybe with the ability to run iOS/iPadOS versions we can ditch things like the desktop version of Slack.
On my 2015 MBP with 16gb I currently have 20-ish tabs in Chrome, Scrivener, GitKraken, Capture One, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Books and Xcode open. The only things that's really bogged down is Capture One.
Now that the processors are different, there will be cases where we will need to run multiple VMs to use Linux or to use Windows etc. Then having more RAM will be very helpful.
I'm not in the market for Apple stuff but if I were, developing locally: SQL server drinks all the memory you throw at it and then some. Occasionally spinning up a VM.
I bookmarked this thread and keep coming back to it to see if any situations would apply to me. I’ve been fine with 16gb on Ubuntu with a Dell XPS 13 for VS Code/Python/PostgreSQL for what most people call CRUD work. Android development has been a little painful with both Android Studio and device emulation slowing things down but still workable. Otherwise I’ve had no problem with web app style work on large projects. Honestly I’d prefer 32gb for those things (and to “future proof”) but I need a Mac dev environment for early 2021 and will probably go with the MacBook Pro 16gb unless the reviews or benchmarks on things I actually do look poor.
I often use more than 16 GB of RAM. Generally, I have 3-4 Windows 10 VMs running which each take at least 4GB to be stable. So if I have 4 running that is all the RAM already.
I was running a Windows VM on my laptop earlier this year (before some of the telework issues got worked out). While, yes, you need at least 4GB/VM, by the time I had two running the issue wasn't RAM. Laptop CPUs just can't keep up with that workload IME. Not unless you get, maybe, the latest 16" MBP (if restricting ourselves to Apple's hardware).
What are you doing that needs them all actually running simultaneously? Disk-backed VM pause/resume is extremely fast when your SSD's sequential read/write performance is measured in GBps.
I have a hard time imagining a workflow that actually uses multiple systems all at once, so to me what you're saying sounds like "Well of course my RAM gets filled if I fill it on purpose."
Haha. I will admit that it is sometimes just for convenience, but when testing networking code, or writing things to interoperate with large system I do really need 3-4 VMs running.
it's not, is that 16gb of ram is actually enough for 99% of people. I see many more downsides on the lack of upgradeability after buying it and on the cost of the ssd and ram factory upgrades than on the lack of availability of a 32gb ram version, which will probably follow up when they make the new revision of the soc for the 16 inch laptop and to replace the higher tier 13 inch intel models, that they are still selling with 32gb if you really need that amount of memory.
Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processing?