I can definitely see myself using this machine. 16GB is enough for me as I don’t use electron. 8 core Ryzen is decent too.
My main development machine is a simple Ryzen 3 with 8GB RAM, and I run two electron apps (VS Code and Slack) at all times.
A comment in a separate thread here mentioned virtualization. That and gaming would be two legitimate use cases, but for plain-jane development, "8gb ought to be enough for anybody" (har har)
not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.
example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.
Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.
This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb
I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
When running Linux, you do not incur the VM overhead for containers (Docker) that you do on Mac or Windows. This allows for isolated production like environments, without carving out multi GB chunks of RAM. Additionally, if you are targeting Linux for production, you often don't even need to containerize, unless you need to run three different versions of node/python/ruby or something else that is just library conflicts all over the place.
> I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
My 2012 daily driver was a well spec'd HP, and it had 8GB of RAM. It did not support more - I tried and had to take the RAM back because the machine would only address 8GB. A look at Macbook specs in 2012: 4GB or 8GB models. I think the 16GB becoming the norm was a few years later.
I want 64 GB but I will say for my current needs, 32 GB is the sweet spot. My normal daily use is around 20GB. And it is a MacBook Pro. One day I’ll probably go back to a laptop running Linux. It is the fastest for code compilation in my experience.
But it's not just memory, I find running code on MacOS generates a lot more heat causing the CPU to spike and harder to run in the first place.
By default a Java app will set its max heap size to 25% of RAM (Java 11 and above). While it may not use all of that, it’s likely to. So, by default, running two Java apps on Java 11 on 8GB of RAM has the likely potential of eating 4GB RAM. Then there’s the OS needs, browser needs, etc.
Clearly 8GB isn’t enough for such a developer. I’ve had this discussion countless times with people over the past two decades. It always ends the same — with people from both sides of the discussion shaking their heads.
The only claim that I feel anyone can make, given enough experience, is that RAM needs vary. So making a claim that N amount of RAM is enough for many or most will always be patently wrong in my view.
Running multiple OS' is always demanding. They could fix it by just using Linux for the dev environment in the first place since all their tools are always electron or Java based.
Perhaps it's a windows thing?