As an aside, I'm surprised that the author's suggesting that 16GB is a sweet spot for a configuration – I'm not sure that's true today (I don't think it is for quite a few workloads on top of heavy webengine apps), but I doubt it'll be true in five years.
This is coming from an M1 MBP user with 32GB who, even with aggressive paging in and out of an uber-fast disk, manages to fill about ~20GB on a regular basis.
And then seeing people say >I don't understand it either, a 16 GB DDR5 stick costs like $50
50 bucks is a lot of money to a whole lot of people. Yes, actual computations and compilation etc take a lot of memory, but there is so much memory wasted through js bloat, it's just sad. But if you take a little effort and optimize your system, then 16GB is still more than enough and "just works"
Got a refurbished X200 with 8 GB RAM and a CPU that has only 2 cores. Can develop software using it just fine. Can even watch YouTube videos in acceptable quality just fine. Can do all things ordinary people do just fine, all applications I need opened at the same time just fine. It all depends on ones software choices. If MacOS cannot cope with less than 16GB RAM, then that is a defect in itself.
It's not just the price, there are tons of new computers out there being sold with <=16 GB of RAM soldered onto the motherboard. It's not like one can just pop it out and put a new stick in.
Yup, $50 is definitely a lot when the whole computer was $150! Whatever it came with from the person I got the machine from on Craigslist, that's what it's generally staying with until I have to replace something - especially as I try to acquire multiples of my machines so I can continue to use them for a very long time. An entire functioning machine is more important to me than a RAM upgrade. (That said, it's really nice to be able to pop in new RAM if I happen to have some on hand, so having RAM slots is pretty important regardless!)
I'm hoping I haven't become an out of touch tech bro, but I believe if you're able to flash libreboot on your software development machine you're able to afford $50.
_should_ you have to spend more money to support bloated software? No of course not, especially since many users of such software _aren't_ tech bros, but as someone in tech, shelling out a little more money seems like a much more pragmatic solution vs having your computer be slow and/or waiting for the industry to change.
"unused memory is wasted memory" is a meme, technically true from a narrow point of view, but leading to bloat and encouraging bad practices. A little bit of care could shave off orders of magnitude of memory use, as well as performance, which could ultimately allow for cheaper computers, sustainable use of legacy hardware and keeping performance reserve for actual use. In reality, I the idea of increased efficiency by using more memory ultimately leads to software requiring that memory that used to be optional, and software not playing nice with other programs that also need space. Of course even with the idea to have everything ready in memory, software is not generally snappy these days, neither in starting up and loading even from fast SSDs and during trivial UI tasks. Performance and efficiency is also generally not something that programmers regularly seem to consider the way real Mechanical-, Civil-, or Electrical Engineers would when designing systems.
I accept trade-offs concerning development effort and time-to-market, however the phrase "Unused memory is wasted memory" does not seem appropriate for a developer who's proud if their work.
I think a lot of this comes down to semantics confusion for most people. Intuitively one would assume "unused" memory would be the inverse of "used" memory, with not everyone thinking what even counts as "used" or "unused" in the first place. In reality on macOS/Windows/Linux "used" memory is counted as a specific type of usage (e.g. processes/system/hardware), cached things are counted as cached, and there are multiple ways to refer to which "unused" portion you mean (e.g. free vs available) as well as anywhere between a half to several dozen ultra specific terms to break things up further with which probably don't matter in context.
Once you clear the semantics hurdle it's surprising how much people are in agreement that "used" should be optimised, "cached" should fill as much else as possible, and often having large amounts of "free" is generally a waste. The only remaining debate tends to center on how much cache really matters with a fast disk and what percentile of workload burst should you worry about how much "free" you have left after.
Is that generally how unused memory is used, and will this kind of "cache" be released if another application truly needs it to load actually vital things?
Using memory doesn't have to be about badly written software though, there's many legitimate use cases for actually using your memory to make your experience better.
My comment has not suggested that there were no legitimate cases for using more memory.
It's too easy, and happening too often on HN these days, to reply with a low-effort contrarian statement without engaging with the central point of the argument.
Anyone considering a T480 is not at all interested in performance at this point in time. Modern chips are going to be substantially more capable and use less power.
As I pointed out in another comment, RAM is soldered on most non-desktop computers these days. It's not easy to expand later. The hardware companies are well aware of that, pushing overpriced RAM upgrades at the time of purchase and it's not like you can just walk into a store and say "I'd like this laptop but with last year's GPU model and 2x the RAM for the same price."
> As I pointed out in another comment, RAM is soldered on most non-desktop computers these days.
It's still very easy to choose computers with modular RAM, even in portable formfactors. The classic SODIMM module format seems to have run its course and is not compatible with modern low-power memory but we now have the CAMM module which at least Dell and Lenovo are shipping and major memory vendors like Crucial offer replacement/upgrade parts for.
Obviously if you prefer your computers fruit-flavored you're SOL, but that's not news to anyone either. Their memory packaging in the M-series machines has its own advantages that may be worth the tradeoff depending on your application, but for a normal user it's more of a limitation than a feature.
Don't know what it's like today, but more ram always means more power usage, so maybe makes sense for people who work on battery frequently...
Otoh, my main rig is also on 16gb today and I never run into issues. But then again I don't run electron apps and don't do webdev or microservice stuff with 30 VMs.
32 is great for editing and such, but I do assume that one would be using linux, and in that case, I can consistenly open over 100 tabs in firefox and do programming and have electron apps open on the side on KDE plasma with no issues, no out of memory errors. Things do get squeezy and noticeably slow at those extremely heavy workloads; for heavy tasks of course get 32 but if 16 can do you that far its fine.
I even won a hackathon with 16gb of ram on an X230, if I can do that and be productive even at home its enough. macOS is just very RAM heavy, theres always at least 50 weirdly names background processes active.
This is coming from an M1 MBP user with 32GB who, even with aggressive paging in and out of an uber-fast disk, manages to fill about ~20GB on a regular basis.