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Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

All I want is a 16" laptop with an M1 and 32GB of RAM. And the extra RAM is just so I can comfortably allocate RAM to VMs.

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This but 64GB. Docker, Chrome and IDEs alone regularly consume up to 50GB memory on my Intel MBP.

Plus, why the stupid monitor limitation? A "Pro" MacBook needs to be able to have 2-3 monitors with no compromises.

Is that just cache data though? Programs and the OS disk cache will just eat all the RAM you have because there's no point letting it sit empty.

What is your memory pressure like? Your RAM will get filled with file system and other caches, even if no programs are actually using the memory.

Cache is not the problem, my IDE uses ~10GB (IntelliJ with very large projects), Chrome can use 20-30GB depending on tabs open. Then you've got Docker which is 5GB on a good day, 10GB on a bad day.

I'm currently using 40GB and I rebooted on Monday.

Sounds like you have memory leaks.

How much of your problem is Docker? If you're running more than, say, 6 containers locally, you'd really benefit from spinning up a Linux VM (Parallels Desktop Pro is nice) and putting your Docker containers there. Note Parallels supports port forwarding, and VSCode supports opening projects through ssh.

As it is, if you're running Docker Desktop for Mac, you're spinning up an entirely separate (internal) VM with macOS filesystem syncing for each Docker container you run.

AFAIK it is not possible to run Docker outside of a Linux VM on the mac.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but (s)he’s saying running docker inside a single Linux VM is more efficient than running the Docker beta (multiple VMs). You seem to be saying that Docker runs inside a Linux VM either way which no one is disputing…

By the time "M2" is released, you'd want 128GB.

And maybe more two ports?

YES please. I'm generally quite happy with my 13 inch MBP. But I do wish it had two more USB-C ports. Would make things less complicated. I don't really even want a bigger MBP (I have a 16 inch as well, if I need screen real estate, but I really like the portability of the 13). Just the same laptop with four ports would be 80% of ideal. The last 20% would be more RAM.

And support for two external displays

I'm running three right now, please.

four

> All I want is a 16" laptop with an M1 and 32GB of RAM. And the extra RAM is just so I can comfortably allocate RAM to VMs.

All I want is a 14" laptop with an M1 and 32GB of RAM. And the extra RAM is just so I can comfortably allocate RAM to Safari tabs.

The article says M1 can only support up to 16GB of RAM. The M2 would be able to support 64GB.

And the ability to run x86 docker images without software emulation.

you read my mind.

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