I'm often noticing a ton of swapping going on, causing serious system-wide lag, when I have a few dozen Chrome tabs and two VM's running in addition to a few other standard programs which use a lot of memory (Slack).

It's not hard to rub up against 16GB in a standard developer workflow.

Glad to know it's not just me that sees performance and memory issues with Slack...

> a few dozen Chrome tabs

There's your problem.

I agree. Chrome is a big bloat on Windows and OS X/macOS. I find Safari to be quite lean (memory and energy consumption) on OS X/macOS. I miss that Firefox is not keeping up since it's the most flexible browser for my use.

No not really, while Chrome certainly isn't perfect it's usually using less than 10% of my memory. I don't think the objections would go away if it supported 17GB, or even 18GB.

There are legitimate reasons to need that much RAM. What I don't see people doing though, is asking if they are using the correct tool (laptop) for the job (video editing, data processing, compiling, etc).

If your workflow is Mac-oriented, buying a trashcan Mac Pro right now is really expensive for pretty outdated hardware. MBPs are pretty much the only game in town.

If you're doing video editing with FCPX and/or Motion, those dual GPUs in the MacPro help a lot!

Sure, but the hardware's anemic for the price. The MBP is pretty much at the reasonable spot on the price/performance curve.

(I use an MBP as the brain of a multi-camera video studio; I totally get why one would buy a Pro. But I'd pull 100% off of Macs before buying one.)

There is also desktops and servers, both of which may be much better for rendering, running VMs, etc.

There is no serious Mac desktop except for the stunningly overpriced Mac Pro.

There is no serious Mac server, period.

If your in the apple ecosystem then you aren't worried about over priced products.

This is...objectively wrong? The "Apple Tax" hasn't, up until the current generation and maybe (depending on your metrics) the prior one, been a serious thing for a decade. They've consistently released price-competitive systems that come with what's probably the best multi-purpose desktop OS on the planet.

Don't do the middlebrow thing. It never works.

Yes, here is my system right now.

http://imgur.com/a/Zj2wK

Running multiple VMs

Shit... Just one will start to put strain on the system.

If I'm developing an iOS/Android frontend in osx with Xamarin Studio and an asp.net backend with Visual Studio, then 16gb just won't do.

Not sure about Xamarin studio, but for Xcode, AppCode, PHPStorm anr Virtualbox 16GB still does do.

Workload expands to use all available resources. 640kb etc etc etc...

Multi-threaded builds of C++ codebases that make gratuitous use of template meta programming.

You should offload the build to a compile cluster. Especially if there are multiple developers doing this it will be worth setting it up.

How does one do this for XCode builds? Especially with the sad state of the Mac Mini.