32GB of RAM is becoming the standard
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
> 16GB RAM is also a practical capacity for general tasks such as web browsing, office work
16GB RAM to read and write text and see images... I think it just says it all.
More could be said about the bloatware, telemetry, surveillance, and adtech built into Windows.
Hard to imagine that 1GB was "a big deal" in my lifetime.
Only when the resources are limited do we see optimization being done seriously.
Sure I don't need 32gb to do all that, but who knows what fun things will come from having that extra budget?
An example I have is a food orders website, which takes 4 seconds and 10MB to load, where all I want to do is go unsubscribe for the weekly order (where I need to unsubscribe every week because it's opt-out, I guess it's better for them). This page is crap because it can, not because it brings some value it couldn't without using all that compute power.
Then as a software engineer, many colleagues literally say "memory is cheap" very often, which kind of hints towards the fact that they don't care about optimizing for memory :-).
I honestly cannot really think of something I do now that is really useful for me and that I was not already able to do 10 years ago (hint: I don't use a copilot to code).
For 90% of browsing like searching and reading articles or watching video or using email, all of those worked on the almost same functionality 10 years ago with a fraction of the memory.
First it was audio, then video, and RAW camera images are almost there with the prosumer digital cameras. And those are compressed files. Software that decompresses the whole thing into arrays of regular samples will need much more RAM...
They say this is happing due to abstraction and saving development costs but I'm not so sure anymore. Windows 11 infamously has large swathes of boilerplate copied around apps that many of their engineers don't even know what it does.
At this point we're far into abstracting abstractions and those abstractions bear their own complexity that may or may not be more complex than what we began with at a fraction of the resource cost...
And most of this stuff isn't even doing anything that special or demanding, which is the sad part.
They get paid to be productive from the point of view of the company paying them. And by slapping layers of stuff together until it barely works, apparently they make profit for their company.
They are not paid to write optimized (or "good" or "useful for society") code.
Which is sad, no question asked. But it makes perfect sense given the system we live in.
Which I believe is not taken into account in the performance evaluations. How could you blame an employee for consequences that will happen in 2 years, when the employee has already been promoted for their good short-term results?
These conversations usually usually end up at "my 8gb ram machine actually swaps constantly, but it's fine because otherwise I'd have to face the cognitive dissonance of justifying this purchase, so I'd rather repeat the apple marketing line they came up with to BS around their poor silicon yields"
(It does look like my machine is using some swap space, but I don't notice any lag, so I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.)
Maybe it’s the speed of the SSD that prevents me noticing it, but it sure feels fast and I don’t have a ton of memory
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#:~:text=The%20SoC%20a....
The latency of LPDDR is higher than desktop RAM, so it relies on the cache to get around that, and the cache is about the same as most x86 CPUs. So there isn't much benefit in the real world.
edit: ha I guess people didn't see the /s in the above
And that’s a blatant lie from Apple, if anything, the GPU shares memory with the CPU therefore Apple Silicon needs MORE memory, not less.
Somehow an efficiency has been made.
Think different (tm). Snark aside you're right, Macs are much better at memory management than Linux, swap handling in particular. But that's a very low bar.
> the usage patterns on those devices is significantly different.
You're right, Mac users tend to run more multimedia productivity tools that benefit greatly from more RAM!
> You can get higher memory Apple kit if you need it…
You can pay the $800 premium yes, just make sure to plan what your future usage will be for the next 10 years because you can't buy it after the fact.
Last point I’ll make on this topic, you are going to see more CPUs move to have RAM on die because of the physical limitations on latency. Modern storage speeds are also making this a moot point as RAM may become just another caching layer for ultra fast solid state storage.
The article is objectively correct, RAM is cheap these days, some apps waste ram, some apps just realize that there no reason not to stretch their legs a bit to offer a better experience. Chrome often gets the short end of the stick, but Chrome does objectively well with RAM considering how inefficient modern web development is. They’re doing the best they can in the modern web dev landscape.
There will always be some application that comes along and can use the hardware that you didn't imagine. I remember a friend saying that the 48k in his Apple ][ was enough ram for any program... as long as you didn't go filling it up with graphics and that kind of nonsense.
It's amazing how small code is compared to the data it operates upon.
You need all that RAM to virtualize operating systems, because running native code is dangerous.
The observant may wonder why running native code is dangerous. Why doesn't the operating system defend itself?
The hard drive? What machine is sold with a hard drive as swap in 2024?
The surprising thing is that you can buy a desktop computer (but no monitor) for less than a day of minimum wage in California.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Restored-Dell-Optiplex-790-Deskto...
What I find more surprising is that there is any margins in selling those sort of computers. Enough to actually reliably profit.
I get these types of machines (actually somewhat newer i5/i7 11th gen+) from an Amazon returns auction house for $5-$20/ea and they invariably have mismatched ram in them and HDDs with 50-70K hours on them already. They also typically won't boot because of a faulty ram stick 9r failed HDD.
That being said, I also have 4 kids and those machines have served well as 'starter' systems. They get to upgrade the PSU, HDD-->SSD, GPU and max out the ram on a shoestring budget.
Between a local MicroCtr and /r/homelabsales ... They get to build out performant systems for $300-$600 total. I also consider this to be a much greater investment than just throwing a console at them.
Profits or not for them; we found some profit in their waste stream.
Hahahhahahhahhukaufkauf! (Excuse me while I clear my throat) Uh… my 7Mhz 512KB Amiga generally had a better UX.
True, although... on topic, 1MB became very needed by 1990-ish.