I find it easy to sneak up on 16gb of memory when running basic apps (editor, bunch of browser tabs, zoom, spotify) plus a complete environment for a mid sized web app (multiple services, dbs, message queue, caches, js bundler, workers etc), especially if I’m running tests and have mobile device VMs up. Pretty cheap insurance over the life of a machine to get 32gb of RAM and never have to think about it.

Right, but that’s what swap is for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need more than 16GB.

Perhaps you're correct that I don't need it in the sense that I only very occasionally find myself with a dataset or something that doesn't fit in memory, and could just run a high memory cloud instance for a bit to process it.

Even still, my experience of desktop Linux under memory pressure has been frustrating, even with fast SSDs, and overspeccing the memory is an inexpensive guarantee that my system will never start thrashing during an important screenshare demo or something, so it's an obvious choice if I'm shopping for a new computer.

When I built this computer last year the cost difference between 16 and 32GB was like $40...easy to justify a 2-3% premium on the overall cost of the machine to never have to give a second thought to conserving memory. That said, Apple charges $400 for the same upgrade (in their machines that support 32GB), so the calculus there is a bit different.

Desktop Linux tends to be a bit of a memory hog compared to MacOS. I think a lot of Linux users would be surprised how usable even the 8GB macs are for most tasks.

My work desktop is 32GB and it falls over any time I try to create really big R data sets for others. I have to use a cloud machine with 64GB, and I run that out of memory most of the time when trying to optimize the production pipeline. They refuse to give me anything larger, so that's my upper limit. If anyone knows how to create giant .rds files without storing everything in memory first, I'd love to hear it.

Virtual Machines.

Or a web browser with a lot of tabs.

I never close Chrome tabs.

That's fine, it's not like it keeps them all open, i've had a couple hundred tabs open in Firefox while researching a project using tree style tab to organize them. Modern browsers cache pages to disk after a certain high water mark. People actually seem to think all those tabs stay in memory.

It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual suspects with Slack, Skype (yes), Finder, etc.

Honestly, I could probably do with 16GB right now, but I'm planning on keeping this machine for at least 5 years; it was worth the few hundred bucks extra to future-proof it.

Browsers will quickly eat up all of your available RAM if you open enough tabs. The thing is, if you had less RAM, they'd be keeping fewer tabs alive in RAM. So you can't really infer from "I'm using X amount of RAM now" to "I need at least X amount of RAM". If you upgraded to 64GB you'd probably end up 'using' a lot more than 28GB for the exact same workflow.

Simply open a blank page, quit the browser and restart it. Now, only load the two or three page/sites you really need. Simple as that to bring mem use under 500MB, with Firefox at least. Repeat this once a day.

I personally close my browser at night and load it in the morning.

Oh yeah, definitely! I was just RAM-constrained on my previous machine (8GB) when running Docker workloads, so I made sure to future-proof this one.

re. the "usual suspects", I got an M1 air late last year, and I've decided to keep it completely separate from my work laptop, so all it has installed is basically firefox, a couple of code editors, and whatever came with it. It absolutely screams compared to my other laptop, but I wonder how much of that is the M1 processor, and how much of it is because I don't have all this garbage running all the time.