I have a minimum of 64GB on my all my main developer machines (home, work, laptop), but I have a spare laptop with only 8GB of RAM for lightweight travel.
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
But why did you configure 3 machines with 64+ GB, if 8 GB RAM are "100% perfectly fine" for typical work tasks?
For me personally 16 or 32 GB are perfectly fine, 8 GB was too little (even without VMs) and I've never needed 64 or more. So it's curious to see you are pretty much exactly the opposite.
I have the base M2 air with 8gb ram, and it's really been perfect for working on. The only time things have become an issue is dual user accounts being logged in at the same time. Which is very preventable.
Half my organisation runs on 8GB Chromebooks. We were testing one of our app changes the other day and it performed better on the Chromebook than it did on my i7 machine with 32GB.
> 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.
This argument is self defeating in the context of the M4 announcement. "Average consumers" who don't need 16 GB of RAM don't need an M4 either. But people who do need an M4 chip probably also need 16 GB of RAM.
I think actually more people need 16 GB of RAM rather than a top M4 chip. Having only 8 GB can be a serious limitation in some memory heavy circumstances, while having (say) an M2 SoC rather than an M4 SoC probably doesn't break any workflow at all, it just makes it somewhat slower.
For me personally, it’s not an issue of being out of touch. I did, in fact, use a 2014 Macbook with an i5 CPU and 16 GB of RAM for nearly a decade and know how often I hit swap and/or OOM on it even without attempting multicore shenanigans which its processor couldn’t have managed anyway.
It’s rather an issue of selling deliberately underpowered hardware for no good reason other than to sell actually up-to-date versions for a difference in price that has no relation to the actual availability or price of the components. The sheer disconnect from any kind of reality offends me as a person whose job and alleged primary competency is to recognize reality then bend it to one’s will.
I don't think we ever were at a point in computing were you could buy a high-end (even entry level macbooks have high-end pricing) laptop with the same amount of ram as you could 10 years earlier.
Hmm, unexpected. I was quite sure my partner's 2015 mbp was sitting at 4gb, but you win this one! ;)
Edit: I confirmed that I was indeed wrong, but the payoff isn't great anyway because that just means that yes in fact they've kept the exact same ram floor for 10 years. Insane.
Fine just doesn't cut it for a premium machine you expect to last a few years at least. It's honestly just marketed so you want to spend extra and upgrade. Let's be real.
I bought a second-hand office-grade PC recently, about a year ago. It was about $10 to $15, had no disks (obviously) and just 2 GB of DDR3 RAM. Also, an integrated GPU with some low-grade Intel CPU (Pentium, if I’m not wrong). Even the generation isn’t current, it’s about a decade old, a bit more.
I put a spare 120 GB SSD, a cheap no-name brand that was just lying around for some testing purposes. Found the similar off-the-shelf DDR3 2 GB RAM stick. I thought the RAM was faulty, turned out it’s in a working condition, so I put it there.
I need the computer for basic so-called office work (a browser, some messengers, email client and a couple of other utilities). I thought I’d buy at least two 4GB RAM sticks after I test it, so you know, 8 GB is just the bare imaginable minimum! I have my 16 GBs everywhere since, idk, maybe 2012 or something.
And you know what?! It works very well with 4 GB of RAM and default Fedora (it’s 40 now, but I started with 38, iirc). It has the default Gnome (also, 46 now, started with 44, iirc). And it works very well!
It doesn’t allow me to open a gazillion of browser tabs, but my workflow is designed to avoid it, so I have like 5 to 10 open simultaneously.
Before throwing Fedora at the PC, I thought I would just install a minimal Arch Linux with swaywm and be good. But I decided I don’t want to bother, and I’ll just buy 8 GB later on, and be done with it.
And here I am, having full-blown Gnome and just 4 GB of RAM. I don’t restrict myself too much, the only time I notice it’s not my main PC is when I want to do some heavy web-browsing (e.g. shopping on some different heavy websites with many tabs opened). Then it slows down significantly, till I close the unnecessary tabs or apps. All the software is updated and current, so it’s not like it’s some ancient PC from 00’s.
Also, I have my iPad Pro 12,9 1st Gen with just 4 GB of RAM too, and I never feel it’s slow for me.
I understand that some tasks would require a lot of RAM, and it’s not for everyone. Having a lot of RAM everywhere, I’m quite used to not thinking of it at all for a significant part of my career (for over a decade now), so I may have something opened for weeks that I don’t have any need for.
So, it’s 2024, and I’m surprised to say that 4 GB of RAM is plenty when you’re focused on some tasks and don’t multitask heavily. Which never productive for me at least. I even noticed that I enjoy my low-memory PC even more, as it reminds me with its slowdowns that I’m entering the multitasking state.
I use swaywm on my Arch Linux laptop, and most of the time it’s less than 3–4 Gb (I have 16 Gb).
Despite the entire internet telling me it would be "unusable" and a disaster and a complete disaster, it's actually 100% perfectly fine. I can run IDEs, Slack, Discord, Chrome, and do dev work without a problem. I can't run a lot of VMs or compile giant projects with 10 threads, of course, but for typical work tasks it's just fine.
And for the average consumer, it would also be fine. I think it's obvious that a lot of people are out of touch with normal people's computer use cases. 8GB of RAM is fine for 95% of the population and the other 5% can buy something more expensive.