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phoenixz ,

Granted, I’m a developer and my dev ide already uses a good 10+GB, I have probably hundreds of tabs and windows open over 6 desktops… But I got 64GB, and I’m considering upgrading to 128, and these clowns think 8 is okay today? My development laptop of like 10 years ago has 8GB

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I’ve been okay with 16 for a while. I use ViM as my editor, and occasionally VSCode. I use a single desktop, but I generally have a half dozen or more tmux tabs for various parts of the project.

That said, I’ve been feeling a bit squeezed with 16GB. The main RAM consumers are:

  • Firefox - I frequently have 100 tabs open, so it takes a few GBs RAM
  • Docker - running most of our app (a dozen or so microservices) takes 3-4GB if I’m careful about turning stuff off that I don’t need, 5-6 if I’m not
  • Teams and Slack - especially during calls, these use a lot

So I think 16GB should be the minimum, and 24GB should be average. I’m going to be adding another 16GB to my personal development machine (hobbies and whatnot), and my work laptop can’t be upgraded (MacBook), but I’ll be upgrading to an M3 or M4 soonish and will request more RAM.

8GB is probably fine if you’re just running a browser and that’s it. If you’re doing anything else, 16GB should be the minimum.

affa ,

Not everyone is 🧩 like you.

jaschen ,

Most people are similar to him.

datelmd5sum ,

I have 16GB and I have to run shit I dev on local k8s. I have to close teams and my browser to get enough ram sometimes.

phoenixz ,

Buy more memory, if you have the financial means to do so. If not then I’m sorry you’re in that situation

Blackmist ,

8GB RAM is what my phone has.

Having that in a laptop shows what they think of people buying their kit. They think you’re only buying it so you can type easier on Facebook.

KillingTimeItself ,

TBF 8gb of ram on a phone is actually psychotic. You really shouldn’t be doing all that much on a phone lol.

IthronMorn ,

Then what should I be doing on my phone?

KillingTimeItself ,

nothing that requires 8GB of ram lol.

I’ve played the entirety of java minecraft on an old thinkpad with 4GB of ram. It didn’t crash (i dont use swap)

There literally shouldn’t be anything capable of using that much memory.

greedytacothief ,

Is this bait? Because like, you could be rendering, simulating, running virtual machines. Lots of stuff that aren’t web browsers also eat ram

RippleEffect ,

Web browsers also eat ram.

KillingTimeItself ,

90% of which can be paged in the background, it’s not like most people are chronically browsing the web on their phones.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

it’s not like most people are chronically browsing the web on their phones.

Yes, they do.

KillingTimeItself ,

and it’s also the worst place to do that. If you’re going to be chronically online like me, you should at least give it clear boundaries between something you carry on you at all times, and something that you regularly have access to, like my workstation for instance.

Unless you like being horribly depressed or something.

greedytacothief ,

I was trying to mention things that weren’t just web browsers. Since it seemed the comment was about programs that use more ram than they seemingly need to.

Edit: There’s like photogrammetry and stuff that happens on phones now!

RippleEffect ,

And games!

KillingTimeItself ,

games are probably a better argument honestly, but even at that point, it’s not a really good experience. Unless you buy a gaming phone, which i guess is an option. Regardless the mobile gaming market is actually vile.

KillingTimeItself ,

i suppose photo editing would be one? Maybe? I’m not sure how advanced photo editing would be on mobile, it’s not like you’re going to load up the entirety of GIMP or something.

As for photogrammetry, i’m not sure that would consume very much ram. It could, i honestly don’t think it would be that significant.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

There’s like photogrammetry and stuff that happens on phones now!

No, the photogrammetry apps all use cloud processing. The LIDAR ones don’t, but that’s only for Apple phones and the actual mesh quality is pretty bad.

KillingTimeItself ,

on a phone? Why the fuck would anyone be running virtual machines on a phone?

dustyData , (edited )

My man, have you been to selfhosted? People are using smart phones for all kinds of crazy stuff. They are basically mini ARM computers. Particularly the flagships, they can do many things like editing video, rendering digital drawings, after they end their use life they can host adguards, do torrent to NAS, host nextcloud. You name it.

pythonoob ,

Something like the Samsung Dex app that basically turns your phone into a mini computer with kbm and a monitor wouldn’t bee too bad tbh for most people. Take all your shit with you in your pocket and dock it at home or at work or whatever.

KillingTimeItself ,

yeah, i literally selfhost a server, running like 8 different services. I’m quite acclimated to it by now. Using a phone for this kind of thing is the wrong device. A chromebook is going to be a better alternative. You can probably get those cheaper anyway.

A big problem with phones is that they just aren’t really designed for that kind of thing, you leave a phone plugged in constantly and it’s going to spicy pillow itself. Let alone even trying to do that on something that isn’t an android. I cannot imagine the hell that self hosting on an android would be, let alone on an iphone.

I could see a usecase for it as a network relay in the event that you need a hyper portable node or something. GLHF with the dongling if you need those.

Unfortunately, if you already have a server, it’s going to be better to just spin up a new task on that server, as the cost of running a new device is going to outweight the cost of just using an existing one that’s already running. Also, you can get stuff like a raspi or le potato for pretty cheap also. not very powerful, but probably more utility, especially given the IO.

dustyData ,

Yeah, god forbids anyone ever does anything suboptimal or worse…for fun 😱

KillingTimeItself , (edited )

i’m not saying that you can’t but like, you shouldn’t buy a phone with the prospect to turn it into a server. You should sell your old phone. Or use it until it dies. That’s probably going to be better in the long run honestly. You use a laptop? A desktop? An SBC even? All of those can be converted into a server with MUCH longer lifespans, and better software support.

Mobile hardware often has a support period of like 2-3 years, although that’s changed recently, the hardware expectancy is probably more like 5 years at most. Meanwhile, desktop hardware, and mobile hardware in particular can easily last like 10 years. Even longer if you’re ok with running legacy hardware.

My primary mobile laptops are 10 12 years old respectively. They’re perfectly fine for what i need. I would NOT want to be using a 10 year old phone for that.

If you aren’t the type of person buying or owning laptops, you almost certainly do not know what self hosting is.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

It sounds a lot more cost effective to get a used mini-pc than a flagship phone for any sort of server stuff.

KillingTimeItself ,

literally this, anything other than a phone is going to be more purpose suited. cheaper, and probably more versatile. You’re spending money on a really expensive screen that you are literally not going to be using. You might as well buy something with a shitty screen, or none at all.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

I got a ThinkCentre M700 with an i7-6700, 16gb of ram and a 256gb SSD for $70 total. It’s really hard to get a phone with anywhere near that value for money.

KillingTimeItself ,

exactly, even if we’re talking buying brand new modern desktop hardware. The sheer benefit you gain of having an sata port, and being able to stuff an 18TB exos drive on it, for example, will immediately pay itself off in terms of what cloud storage would cost, while also not being limited to your internet uplink speeds. You could easily run 10gig if you really wanted to. Although realistically, 2.5gb is going to be more apt.

greedytacothief ,

Does the JVM count?

KillingTimeItself ,

thats really funny, but no.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

you could be rendering, simulating, running virtual machines

On a phone? I guess you could, although 4gb is probably enough for any video game that any amount of people use.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

People use phone apps for photo and video editing these days. The common TikTok kid out there doesn’t use Adobe Premiere on a desktop workstation.

Phone apps often are desktop applications with a specialized GUI these days.

KillingTimeItself ,

i mean yeah, but even then those aren’t significant filters, and what makes you think that tiktok isn’t running a render farm somewhere in china to collect shit tons of data? They’re already collecting the data, might as well provide a rendering service to make the UI nicer, but i don’t use tiktok so don’t quote me on it.

Those are also all built into tiktok, and im pretty sure tiktok doesn’t require 8GB of ram to open.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

i mean yeah, but even then those aren’t significant filters, and what makes you think that tiktok isn’t running a render farm somewhere in china to collect shit tons of data?

Pretty sure my Adobe Premiere comparison made it clear I wasn’t talking about the TikTok app itself but 3rd party apps to later upload to online services like TikTok.

Just because you are completely inapt to think of use cases, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

KillingTimeItself ,

i mean yeah, you could, but then tiktok doesn’t have you on it’s app, and im pretty sure tiktok has a pretty comprehensive editing tool set, otherwise people wouldnt be making as much edited content on it.

even then, there are still a lot of people that do edit video intended for 9:16 consumption, and they do it on PC. Primarily because it’s just a better place to edit things.

IthronMorn ,

What about running a chrooted nix install and using a vnc to connect to it? While web browsing and playing a background video? Just because you don’t use your ram doesn’t mean others don’t. And no, I don’t use all my ram, but a little overhead is nice.

KillingTimeItself ,

on a phone? I mean i suppose you could do that, but VNC is not a very slick remote access tool for anything other than, well, remote access. The latency and speed over WIFI would be a significant problem, i suppose you could stream from your phone to your TV, but again, most TVs that exist today are smart TVs so literally a non issue.

my example here was using a computer rather than a phone, to show that even desktop computing tasks, don’t really use all that much ram.

IthronMorn ,

Well, then by that logic, since desktop computing tasks don’t really use all that ram: we shouldn’t need more than 8GB in a desktop ever. Yes, my example was a tad extreme, vnc-ing into your own VM on your phone, but my point was rather phones are becoming capable and replacing traditional computers more and more. A more realistic example is when I was using Samsung Dex the other day I had 80ish chrome tabs open, a video chat, and a terminal ssh’d into my computer fixing it. I liked the overhead of ram I had above me. Was I even close to 12GB? No. But it gave me room if I wanted another background program or had to spin something up quickly without disrupting my flow or lagging out/crashing.

KillingTimeItself ,

Well, then by that logic, since desktop computing tasks don’t really use all that ram: we shouldn’t need more than 8GB in a desktop ever.

if this is the logic we’re using, then we shouldn’t have phones at all. Since clearly they do nothing more than a computer. Or we shouldn’t have desktops/laptops at all. Because clearly they do nothing more than a phone.

I understand that phones are more capable, my point is that they have no reason to be more capable. 99% of what you do on a phone is going to be the same whether you spend 200 dollars on it, or 2000.

Khanzarate ,

Obviously using it as a thin client for this MacBook, duh.

Blackmist ,

Yeah, but if you have plenty of RAM on Android, there’s a chance those apps you left in the background will still be running when you go back to them, rather than doing the usual Android thing of just restarting them.

KillingTimeItself ,

yeah i get that, but i often only have like 2 apps open on my android phone (maybe three). And even if you didn’t have enough ram there’s no reason android can’t cache old apps to page file or something. Then you don’t need to restart them, just load it from page. Given how fast modern phone storage is likely to be, this should be pretty negligible.

macrocephalic ,

My phone was manufactured in 2022, cost under USD250, and has 8gb of ram. New phones generally come with 12gb or more.

Ghostalmedia , (edited )
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

I bought one of the early M1s and bought into a lot of the early reviewers that claimed 8 was enough on the ARM architecture. Honestly, for most folks, it’s probably fine. For me, it’s not.

My wife and I use the M1 has a multi-account family machine. And we’re both experience design directors, so we both have RAM hog design apps open under our accounts. The poor little Mac just can’t handle all that abuse with 8 gigs.

Our old ass Intel Mac with 16gig of RAM had no problems keeping a ton of crap open.

The battery life and low heat are absolutely amazing on the M1. That stuff was a monumental upgrade. But we absolutely can’t be lazy and just leave crap open unless it’s actually needed.

The fact that Apple is selling “Pro” machine with 8 gigs is a joke. 8 would be fine for my folks who fart around on Facebook all day, but it’s not enough for a lot of heavy multimedia work.

BreakDecks ,

8 megs of RAM? I didn’t know they brought back the Macintosh II.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

lol. Fixed. My brain is broken.

rushaction , (edited )

I dunno if you noticed or if that was the joke. But you said “8 megs” three times in your comment when I think you meant to say “8 gigs”. 1 gigabyte ~ 1024 megabytes. Just wanted to let you know in case it wasn’t a joke about how 8 wasn’t enough. That’s all, thank you!

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

lol. Apparently my brain is broken.

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

Actually, 1 gigabyte (10^9^ B) is 1000 megabytes (10^6^ B), while one gibibyte (2^30^ B) corresponds to 1024 mebibytes (2^20^ B). I know that in some circles, 1 GB is treated as 1 GiB, so I don’t blame you. This system of quantities is standardised internationally in order to conform with the SI (mega must mean a million times and not 2^20^ times), but many don’t conform to it, such as Microsoft as far as I know.

rushaction ,

Thank you for the correction and details.

Car ,

I found for most CS-ish tasks 8GB is okay. I also bought an early M1 and haven’t had too many problems outside of running VMs, which I expected. I purchased one of the stocked configurations at an Apple store, so there were slim pickings with 16GB of memory that weren’t like double the price of the machine.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, my guess is 2x accounts is the cause of 90% of my performance issues. One person’s Adobe crap is fine, but two us too much for 8gigs without the occasional beach ball.

seth ,

Is Adobe still the standard? When I realized browsers and 3rd party apps render PDFs much quicker than Reader, I started looking for other alternatives to Adobe. I was familiar with the flow of PaintShop Pro and GIMP, so now the very little I did in Photoshop I do in GIMP/Inkscape/a couple other freebie tools. When they acquired Macromedia and killed Flash, I was out of their ecosystem, so my poor knowledge of their products is almost 2 decades old. What are their can’t-live-without products nowadays?

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Depends what you’re doing, but for branding and print media, Adobe still dominates most shops. If you’re doing UX, then you’re probably in Figma these days.

seth ,

Ooh, Figma looks interesting, thanks!

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, Figma is the new standard for UX design. Adobe was trying to buy them for the last couple years because most people no longer use Adobe tools for UX work.

reverendsteveii ,

Tim Apple be like “We’ve tried charging more money. Have we tried charging more money and delivering less stuff in exchange?”

goatman360 ,

Yes, they do constantly. Yet, people still keep buying. I hate that I have to use Apple for my job because of the software and interface is exclusive.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Yup, same. I really don’t like macOS, but that’s what we’ve standardized on. I’m a Linux guy and use Linux at home for everything.

reverendsteveii ,

I really like my macbook for dev work, and I think that now that macos is essentially a linux distro it’s quite nice, but it’s not that much better than the free distros and it’s getting worse while they get better. Right now the only thing keeping me on a mac at work is that they gave it to me and the only thing keeping me on a mac at home is that it’s already paid for.

KillingTimeItself ,

you wanna expand on why you think it’s basically a linux distro? Last i heard macos was more closely based on BSD than it was linux, and this was ages ago. Unless they rewrote it without my knowledge it really shouldn’t be anything like either one of the two.

reverendsteveii ,

because I can pop a terminal into zsh and beyond that I don’t really know the taxonomy

KillingTimeItself ,

you can do that with WSL though.

All modern terminals are actually terminal emulators, unless you’re sitting in TTY. It’s pretty trivial to implement a proper UNIX/linux like CLI environment.

reverendsteveii ,

okay

KillingTimeItself ,

and for completion sake here, technically windows implements a “terminal” through CMD, it’s not linux/unix like at all, but it is still a CLI interface, so.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

Lol, audio jacks come to mind. As well as a physical button. And shipping devices without cords or chargers.

kamen ,

Yeah, sure. Even if what they say about the OS resource usage is true, it’s only a fraction of the total usage. A lot of the multiplatform software will use the same resources regardless of the OS. Many apps eat RAM for breakfast, doesn’t matter if it’s content creation or software development. Heck, even smartphones these days have have this much or more RAM.

I won’t argue, I just won’t buy an Apple product in the near future or probably ever at all.

KillingTimeItself ,

buys [insert price] laptop, top of the line, flagship, custom silicon, built ground up to be purpose specific.

Opens final cut pro: crashes

ok…

Retrograde ,
@Retrograde@lemmy.world avatar

Especially paired with Apple’s 128gb integrated, non replaceable hard drives. Whoops you installed all of Microsoft office? Looks like you have no room to save any documents :(

KillingTimeItself ,

ah yes, we can’t forget the proprietary non controller based nvme drives that use m.2 but arent actually nvme drives, they’re just flash.

jaschen ,

No way. It isn’t NVME?!?!

KillingTimeItself ,

it’s NVME in the sense that it’s non volatile flash, probably even higher quality than most existing NVME ssds out there today.

The thing is that it literally just the flash. On a card with an m.2 pin out, that fits into an m.2 slot, it doesn’t have a storage controller or any standardized method of communication, that already exists. It’s literally a proprietary non standard standard form factor SSD.

The controller is integrated onto the silicon chip die itself, there is no storage controller on the storage itself.

jaschen ,

Yet another reason to never go back to Apple

KillingTimeItself ,

apple, we innovate where no one else does, because for some reason, we like doing that.

jaschen ,

Apple, we innovate where “everyone” else has already done.

Fixed it for you.

KillingTimeItself ,

Apple, we innovate things, sometimes, for reasons.

GlobalMind ,

Same. And I bet you the price will also go up with less ram.

chemicalwonka ,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

of course they will, it is for profit

mechoman444 ,

I mean. It makes sense. The vast majority of people buying apple computers are loyalists or people that simply need an Internet/word processor.

And if you want to develop in apple then you have to spend a massive premium for their higher end hardware.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

Their CPUs are actually really good now, when the apps are actually optimized for them. Especially in single core, they are very competitive with top Intel or AMD chips while being way more power efficient.

ex: in Geekbench 5.1 single core the M2 max gets 1967 points (85%) compared to 2311 points from the 7950X3D and 2369 from the 14900k. The M2 max (12 cores (8 p + 4 e), 12 threads) can draw a maximum of 36 watts while the 7950X3D (16 cores, 32 threads) can draw around 250 watts, and the 14900k (16 cores (8 p + 16 e), 32 threads) can draw around 350 watts.

Apple’s GPUs are definitely lacking though, in terms of performance.

mechoman444 ,

Ya. Their CPUs are really good. Got to give credit where credit is due.

horse ,

There is exactly one reason why they do this: So they can charge you $200 to upgrade it to 16GB and in doing so make the listed price of the device look $200 cheaper than it actually is. Or sometimes $400 if it’s a model where the base model comes with a 256GB SSD (the upgrade to 512GB, the minimum I’d ever recommend, is also $200).

The prices Apple charges for storage and RAM are plain offensive. And I say that as someone who enjoys using their stuff.

Jesus_666 ,

That’s why I dropped them when my mid-2013 MBP got a bit long in the tooth. Mac OS X, I mean OS X, I mean macOS is a nice enough OS but it’s not worth the extortionate prices for hardware that’s locked down even by ultralight laptop standards. Not even the impressive energy efficiency can save the value proposition for me.

Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.

ebc ,

Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.

Typing this from a M2 Max Macbook Pro with 32GB, and honestly, this thing puts the “Pro” back in the MBP. It’s insanely powerful, I rarely have to wait for it to compile code, transcode video, or run AI stuff. It also does all of that while sipping battery, it’s not even breaking a sweat. Yes, it’s pretty thin, but it’s by no means underpowered. Apple really is onto something with their M* lineup.

But yeah, selling “Pro” laptops with 8GB in 2024 is very stupid.

Veraxus ,

My basic web dev Docker suite uses about 13GB just on its own, which - assuming you were on 16GB (double Apple’s minimum) - wouldn’t leave much for things like browser tabs, which also eat memory for breakfast.

A fast swap is not an argument to short-change on RAM, especially since SSDs have a shorter lifespan than RAM modules. 16GB remains the absolute bare minimum for modern computing, and Apple is making weak, ridiculous excuses to pocket just a few extra bucks per MacBook.

filister OP , (edited )

Have you seen the difference between the 8 and 16Gb Macbooks, it is ridiculously expensive.

localhost443 ,

Nah its about £13 retail.

Oh wait, you mean from apple… Its £200 from them.

filister OP ,

Yes, my bad, I wanted to say the difference in price between the 8 and 16Gb model, I know that RAM became dirt cheap nowadays and there aren’t any excuses for Apple to continue offering 8Gb model, as this is exactly a planned obsolescence.

localhost443 ,

Yeah I was just pointing out the insanity of their pricing, using sarcasm. Its the main way we communicate over here.

The price difference between the first 2 models where 8gb ram is the only change, is £200. Post 2025 I’m going to need some solution to replace my windows install which solely runs CAD/CAM software. If it wasn’t for this scumbaggery I’d buy a Mac to replace win10, but at present apple are such a shower of cunts I think I may have to put up with win11.

What a fucking choice…

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

You know there’s a third way…

localhost443 ,

I already run Linux for everything else. Its not an option for my CAD work unfortunately

PlexSheep ,

What do you bist that takes that much memory?

olympicyes ,

PS5 has 16GB and it’s a toy.

hector ,

Wow! 13GB! I did some heavy stuff on my computer with like a shit ton of Docker servers running together + deployment and I never reached 13GB!

Without disclosing private company information lol what are you doing ;)

ben_dover ,

not OP, but I have to run fronted and backend of a project in docker simultaneously (multiple postgres and redis dbs, queues, search index, etc., plus two webservers), plus a few browser tabs and two VSCode instances open, regularly pushes my machine over 15gb ram usage

pretty much like this

seth ,

That was a fun song, t4t.

Veraxus ,

That is basically my use-case. You add a DB service (or two), DNS, reverse proxy, Redis, Memcached, etc… maybe some containers for additional proprietary backend services like APIs, and then the application themselves that need those things to run… it adds up FAST. The advantage is that you can have multiple projects all running simultaneously and you can add/remove/swap them pretty easily.

RAM is cheap. There is no excuse for shipping a 8GB computer… even if it’s mostly going to be used for family photos and internet.

Veraxus ,

Running a suite of services in containers (DBs, DNS, reverse proxy, memcached, redis, elasticsearch, shared services, etc) plus a number of discreet applications that use all those things. My day-to-day usage hovers around 20GB with spikes to 32 (my max allocation) when I run parallelized test suites.

Dockers memory usage really adds up fast.

accideath ,

Playing devils advocate here: As someone who deals with stuff like that, you also wouldn’t buy the base model mac. The average computer user can get by with 8GB just fine and it’s not like you can’t configure Macs with more than that.

That of course doesn’t justify the abhorrent price of the upgrades…

Specal ,

And here I am, putting 16gb in every machine I work on because it’s so damn cheap there’s no reason not to future proof

accideath ,

I mean, same. The difference in price for 8GB and 16GB is negligible, especially if you want dual channel on desktops

exanime ,

For apple, that difference is $200… not negligible I’d say

accideath ,

Oh yea, absolutely. I meant that in regards to the price of memory itself, be it as modules for your desktop PC or the chips itself for soldered solutions. Apple’s markup is bonkers

Specal ,

That’s because apple is a greedy grabby company who wants all your money. The easiest solution is to stop buying their products

Specal ,

My girlfriends mum wanted to know why her laptop was slow… It was because HP thought that 4gb of ram is acceptable in 2022 (when the laptop was sold). Granted ram wasn’t as cheap then as it is now… Still I paid £30 for a brand new 8gb DDR4 sodimm, there’s not reason hp couldn’t do that. It’s annoying the corners these company cut.

accideath ,

My experience is, that 4GB is just about useable for a bit of web browsing and similar stuff. Even on windows 11. I have an old Surface Pro 4 laying around that, in a pinch, works perfectly fine with 11. Of course, it’s not fast. But it’s totally useable.

Specal ,

Her laptop just wasn’t having it, windows 11, windows was using 3.7gb ram took about 30 seconds for task manager to open. As soon as I upgraded the ram is was usable.

I checked for any surprising background services or anti virus software and there was nothing really

accideath ,

That sounds more like issues Windows would have running on an HDD (or maybe eMMC) instead of an SSD… Bit that wouldn’t explain why it got better, when you upgraded the RAM…

Specal ,

It’s not worth trying to understand windows ram usage, it will drive any same person insane. The laptop uses intel optane as it’s main drive, which is slower than an SSD but much much lower latency so should actually be perfect for the job of being swap. But it shit the bed.

AngryCommieKender ,

I just slap in 32GB on every computer I build because the MoBos can take 128GB and anything less feels cheap and silly.

PraiseTheSoup ,

The average computer user can get by with 8GB just fine

Hard disagree. The average computer user is idling at 5gb already because the average computer user is stupid.

accideath ,

Still leaves 3gb for the web browser and the average user isn’t using anything else anyways. And even on chrome that’s quite a few pages.

captainlezbian ,

No they can’t. I ran 8gb of ram for years and it turns out that that’s why my computer sucked

accideath ,

Maybe you’re not an average user then. Most people just browse the web and maybe manage some photos or fill out a document once in a while. You could do that on 4GB if you wanted to, let alone 8.

Specal ,

I wouldn’t say 4gb is usable for the average consumer. Using the assumption they’re using windows 11 that’ll eat 3.7 ish GB of ram just idling.

accideath ,

You forget there though, that a lot of the RAM, that Windows (and most modern operating systems) uses, while idling, is a cache of programs you’re likely to open and that gets cleared, if you open something else. That has been a thing since Vista and was btw one of the reasons why Vista was criticized for high memory useage. Windows 11 is very useable with 4GB of RAM, if you’re not planning to do something bigger than browsing the web or editing a word document.

Specal ,

I’m not forgetting that, but it won’t just clear that ram it will want to put it into swap, and depending on your storage speed that can slow tasks down. Making it quite stuttery.

accideath ,

I mean, a (good) SSD is worth quite a lot, even on very old systems. I have an old 2008 MacBook laying around. It’s certainly not fast but with an SSD it’s totally useable, even on current macOS versions.

Specal ,

Oh for sure, I remember buying my first SSD and booting windows in under 10 seconds and being like whaaaat.

I am starting to think maybe I am a ram hog.

uis ,

How? I have 108 tabs open and still use 2.67GB of RAM.

Specal ,

Tabs of what? Chromes ram usage is more of a meme than an actual ram issue, windows will only allow an application to use so much ram depending on ram availability

uis ,

108 tabs in chromium. Mentioned RAM usage is total RAM usage including all system and kernel, but excluding page cache. Forgot to mention libreoffice in background.

dullbananas ,
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca avatar

My basic web dev Docker suite uses about 13GB just on its own

Skill issue

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

average webdev

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU ,

The people need to know how you use 13GB of ram worth of containers for web dev.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Docker is awesome for a lot of things. But it’s not particularly good for RAM.

rasakaf679 ,

Why tf can’t they sell mac with upgradable parts?? They are “so” into renewable and recycling stuff and saving planet and stuff. Then they should start selling shits with upgradable parts. Even cpu’s if possible. Now apple fan boys argue with that. And don’t bullshit me with soc should be near cpu for faster optimisation they can redesign the mobo.

accideath ,

There are legitimate advantages of the RAM being soldered right next to the SoC. However, if anyone could figure out how to create a proprietary RAM module, that slots in right next to the SoC (or even just an SoC module including RAM) that can be swapped out and that doesn‘t have any meaningful performance impact, it would be Apple. Just that it never could be Apple…

natebluehooves ,

The problem is the electrical resistance of the socket. Most of the performance on apple silicon is achieved through extremely high bandwidth, low latency memory. Unfortunately that necessitates a socketless design at the moment, and you can see that happening on the snapdragon X too.

accideath ,

Yea, not just snapdragon and apple. Even intel and amd processors usually get paired with higher bandwidth soldered ram on many mobile offerings.

And on GPUs soldered VRAM has been a thing for a loooong time, with HBM memory being the prime example for what RAM close to the chip can do. AMD‘s Vega cards were highly sought after during the mining craze, even though they weren’t that fast in general computing, simply because their memory bandwidth was so beyond any other consumer cards…

flop_leash_973 ,

Because that gives the user as much or more control over the device as Apple themselves have. One of the fairly consistent things about Apple over the years has been a desire to maintain tight control for themselves over the products they make.

anon_8675309 ,

Because then they can’t gaslight people into thinking their 8GB is magical.

phoenixz ,

There is what they say they are in favor of, and there is what they really are in favor of.

They are in favor of apple getting all the monies, the end

Caiman86 ,

They certainly used to. My wife’s 2012 MacBook Pro has upgraded RAM and SSD parts I’ve put in over the years and still runs fine, though it isn’t used much anymore and OS upgrades stopped a while ago.

Their current environmental marketing is pure greenwashing bullshit and their stances on upgradability and repairability are terrible.

AdrianTheFrog ,
@AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world avatar

It’s basically just greenwashing. They pretend to be into renewables and recycling only when it doesn’t disincentivize people from buying the newest product. Ex: iPhone trade in for recycling - Yes, they do recover some raw material but you can only do it if you’re buying a new iPhone with that credit, and its probably also an attempt to keep cheap used iPhones off of the market.

AlecSadler ,

I’ll admit I don’t use Macs, so maybe they are more efficient than the Linux and windows machines I work off…

…but I typically use machines with 64GB and recently upgraded my personal machine to 128GB. I still swap about 50GB to my SSD from time to time.

And I’m not doing heavy graphic design or movie editing stuff.

I cannot fathom for the life of me how 8GB would ever be feasible.

thedeadwalking4242 ,

How the fuck are you using that much ram of you aren’t doing “heavy duty” stuff???

AlecSadler ,

I just said I’m not doing graphic design or movie editing. I typically have 10 different browser profiles open to separate data / bookmarks, maybe 8 email accounts in tabs and Outlook (if not on Linux), 4-8 VS code windows, a mix of jetbrains rider or visual studio instances, a smattering mix of postman/SQL server/azure data studio/thunder client, among other things like PDFs and documents. And then multiple docker containers and other local running servers.

The swap usually comes in when I’m parsing a data file or something.

QuaternionsRock ,

I do not want to see what your desktop looks like lol

AlecSadler ,

Hahaha, it stressed me out so I hide all the icons and changed the background to just black.

el_bhm ,

Excuse me, can I get some more pepper for this troll dish?

jadedwench ,

I do a lot on my M1 air and I haven’t even considered I would have RAM issues with 16GB. Windows, I would be getting 64GB to not be miserable. I don’t run as much as you all the time, but having a container or two going, far too many browser tabs, PDFs, 3-4 intellij projects, discord, teams, and probably other things I am forgetting about is the norm. I even have AutoCAD open sometimes.

The biggest difference is Mx is arm based, which goes a long way into getting better performance and battery life. I really need to look up again how Apple manages memory, swap, and performance in general. I just checked Activity Monitor and even with most of the memory showing as used, I don’t even notice. If my laptop were to die tomorrow due to my clumsy fumbling, I am getting another Mac. My only wish is getting Vulkan support. That would be amazing. Not going to hold my breath on that though.

Now, 8GB is a crime and it is not something I would recommend for any laptop/desktop, no matter what it is running. Not saying it wouldn’t work ok on a Mac for someone who only uses it for web browsing, but it is utterly ridiculous that 8GB is even an option these days. This is a dumb hill for Apple to die on and 16 should be the absolute minimum.

I have a debloated W11 VM on my proxmox server that I have used only once and is only there for some unknown emergency. With a little fiddling, I got it to idle under 4GB. I don’t plan to run servers on my laptop and invested enough on a little server rack to give me things like file servers, VMs, more permanent containers, and somehow got talked into making a gaming VM that I use at LAN parties. The 3U case for the main server travels very well.

Personally, I would try and get some of your server stuff off your machine. You can even take a look at some docker swarm or similar k8 concepts to reduce your container load. RPis are another good choice for some lower load server operations. I have a little RPi swarm that is powered by PoE+, though I plan on trying k8 on them soon to get some experience. RPis are also small enough that you could throw one in your bag if you needed something portable and are fairly inexpensive. Just a thought and may not be possible with your server applications.

AlecSadler ,

Hmm, getting server stuff off sounds fun! I have a couple laptops sitting around so it might be fun to even just use those to offload some processes.

I’d love to get my own little server rack or something, not the best timing financially, but that’d be awesome.

I’ll have to look into the RPi thing. Thanks for the ideas!

ik5pvx ,

For me, it’s huddle (the conf call thing of slack), zoom, and a few Google sheets. Very easy to get to OOM killer

emptiestplace ,

With 64GiB or more of RAM?

ik5pvx ,

That VM has 16.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

I get the sense that a lot of people here don’t use MacOS.

I have a few ARM and Intel Macs in 8 and 16gig configs, and I do a lot of heavy multimedia work. My 8 gig M1 only really gets into trouble when my partner and I both have an account with files open in bloated creative software. One pro user, and it’s usually fine. 2 active accounts with shitty creative software running, and you get a few beach balls.

AlecSadler ,

Interesting to know for sure! I guess I can’t speak to what they’re doing for optimizations first hand, but at the same time…my 128GB cost me like $300 on sale so, I dunno, a wash? Haha.

I’ve tried to become a Mac convert a few times, mostly peer pressure, but I just haven’t been able to do it successfully yet.

Ghostalmedia ,
@Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, if I’m building a PC, I’ll throw in as much RAM as I can get.

That said, with 16gigs I’m usually not thinking about RAM at all. I’d probably only want to go higher than that if I was living in Adobe Lightroom 24/7.

olympicyes ,

There are a ton of benchmark videos on YouTube. I saw one recently for the new MacBook Air comparing the 8/16/24 GB models. They found that 8GB was significantly slower than 16GB for tasks like exporting video, but there was no difference between 16 and 24 gb.

summerof69 ,

I get the sense that a lot of people here don’t use MacOS.

I wish that was true.

emptiestplace ,

Do you understand kernel memory management fundamentals? I’m asking because what you wrote here strongly suggests otherwise - so, unless you’re able to show me I’m wrong, I’m going to stick with my conclusion that this is all incorrect and likely complete bullshit.

AlecSadler ,

You do you.

tsonfeir ,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

You seem particular in a way that is breathtakingly unfun.

Specal ,

It’s worth mentioning that windows will use as much ram as possible just because it can and leave available with what it considers “reasonable”

uis ,

Then WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

AlecSadler ,

Code code code

uis ,

I don’t think even Eclipse can burn so much memory

lolcatnip ,

Dude, that’s how much RAM I used to have on a super high-end dev box at work with 56 cores. It was very helpful for compiling Chrome. WTF are you doing with a personal machine that needs that much RAM?

AlecSadler ,

I mean it’s my personal machine but I am a software engineer consultant/contractor so I use it for work, too.

lolcatnip ,

Ok fair enough. It’s just surprising to see someone say that. The standard-issue dev machine where I work is a laptop with 32 GB.

MacNCheezus ,
@MacNCheezus@lemmy.today avatar

I have a five year old MBP here with 16 gigs of RAM and it runs the latest version of macOS. I can run multiple web browsers with dozens of open tabs, VS Code, an LLM, and a video editing app on it, all simultaneously, without breaking a sweat.

IDK what Apple’s secret sauce is but their shit just works better than everyone else’s, that’s a fact.

BilboBargains ,

As engineers, we should never insert proprietary interfaces into our designs. We shouldn’t obfuscate the design.

The motivation for these toxic practices comes from the business side because it’s profitable. These people won’t share the profits with you because they are psychopaths. Ultimately we are making more waste when electronics cannot be upgraded, maintained and repaired. It’s bad for people and it’s bad for the environment.

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

So much stuff in both the hardware and software world really annoys me and makes me think our future is shit the more I think about it.

Things could be so much better. Pretty much everything could be open and standardised, yet it isn’t.

Software can be made in a way that isn’t user-hostile, but that’s not the way of things. Hardware could be repairable and open, without OEMs having to navigate a minefield of IP and patents, much of which shouldn’t have been granted in the first place, or users having no ability to repair or upgrade their devices.

It’s all so tiresome.

rottingleaf ,

I think Napoleon said something similar to “the army is commanded by me and the sergeants”?

Well, not true anymore today. All this connectivity and processing power, however seemingly inefficiently they are used, allow to centralize the world more than it could ever be. No need to consider what sergeants think.

(Which also means no Napoleons, cause much more average, grey, unskilled and generally unpleasant and uninteresting people are there now.)

It’s about power and it happened in the last 15 years.

I think it’s a political tendency, very intentional for those making decisions, not a “market failure” and other smartassery. It comes down to elites making laws. I feel they are more similar to Goering than to Hitler all over the world today.

This post may seem nuts, but our daily lives significantly depend on things more complex and centralized in supply chains and expertise than nukes and spaceships.

We don’t need desktop computers which can’t be fully made in, say, Italy, or at least in a few European countries taken together. Yes, this would mean kinda going back to late 90s at best in terms of computing power per PC, but we waste so much of it on useless things that our devices do less now than then.

We trade a lot of unseen security for comfort.

anhydrous ,

My X220 and T520 each have 16GB. The designed max was actually “only” 8GB, but it turns out 16 GB actually works. I replaced the RAM modules myself without asking Lenovo for permission. Those models came out in 2011.

jaschen ,

My HP Omen 17" was designed for a maximum of 32GB ram. I’m currently running 64GB on it.

Duamerthrax ,

This was also true for Apple computers before they started soldering the ram in place. I remember going way over spec in my old G4 tower. Hell, I doubt the system would crash if you found larger ram chips and soldered them in.

Klause ,

I doubt the system would crash if you found larger ram chips and soldered them in.

You can’t even swap components with official ones from other upgraded models. Everything is tied down with verification codes and shit nowadays. So I doubt you could solder in new ram and get it to work.

Valmond ,

Yeah lol my thinkcentre with a 6gen intel had only 8GB (I paid under 100€ for it) so I went shopping to double that on a second hand site, but the price for 4, 8 or the 16GB ddr4 ram stick (sodimm, there seems to be a flood of used ones) I bought was about the same, like 30€ shipping included, so now I got 24GB.

egeres ,
@egeres@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t believe I’m reading this in 2024

mightyfoolish ,

I get upgrades help the bottom line but considering that 8GB of RAM chokes the silicon they are allegedly so proud of… seems like a slap in the face to their own engineers (and the customer as well but that is not my point).

Raz ,

Like the upper management and C-suite give a fuck about any of their employees.

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