Because 16GB is suddenly low?

Until now most laptops sold everywhere, including high end models, where 16GB and below. 32/64 is a tiny niche (and special built to order option in most cases), even for video and music editing people.

Sure, 32GB would be nice, but let's pretend this is some huge issue for but a small minority that runs several VMs simultaneously or such.

Not to mention the M1 machines released thus far (Air, Mini, 13" Pro, and 24" iMac) are the lower end of the line - the kind of machines that people wouldn't tend to update to 32 even when it was an option under Intel (which itself, is not that long ago).

I realized that too much RAM leads to issues like this proliferating: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-jupyter/issues/4442

Oh, the app happens to use 5 instead of 1 background processes and nobody notices (using 50+ MB of RAM each, it's not nothing) and the bug just languishes.. :)

It adds up, and needs to be fixed.

I find that the browsers eat all my memory. Have to exit them for data crunching.

I have hundreds of tabs in Firefox. Total memory usage is 4GB at worst.

Could it be that not all tabs are loaded into memory at all times? I use Firefox with Sidebery and a boatload of tabs, most of which aren't loaded at all.

Justify it how you like but I consider 16GB too low for my use.

32GB is minimum in 2021, with all my hardware having 64GB

I have a 32gb overclocked hackintosh and my 8gb M1 Air blows it away in nearly everything.

I’m not sure exactly what the difference is but in terms of UX, x86 ram needs do not translate to Apple Silicon 1:1

They do, you just notice it less. MacOS is notorious for having one of the most asinine memory management schemes in the history of software, and so causing a memory issue can be a bit of a finnecky task (but certainly not impossible). As a matter of fact, most times you don't even need to fill swap before MacOS runs out of memory: you just need to fool the OS into thinking the memory pressure is high enough to warrant GC.

>As a matter of fact, most times you don't even need to fill swap before MacOS runs out of memory: you just need to fool the OS into thinking the memory pressure is high enough to warrant GC.

I do DAWs (with tons of VSTs and sample libraries), VMs (vagrant, docker) and NLEs (up to 4K), but usually not at the same time, and I've never run out of memory in macOS ever in ~20 years. 16GB is the largest amount of RAM I ever had in them.

How often does this mythical "macOS runs out of memory" thing happen?

>MacOS is notorious for having one of the most asinine memory management schemes in the history of software

Citation needed.

I’m not saying a byte isn’t a byte. I’m saying that if I don’t notice it, then I don’t need as much. I routinely swap 6-8gb and I can’t imagine this thing being faster. Most interactions are near instantaneous.

So my ram needs are lower precisely because I don’t notice it.

That's good for you. But you aren't a market.

So the question is what share of the market this is true for? When it comes to laptops, I'd say not that larger (relatively, in absolute numbers it might have doubled, e.g. from 1% to 2%) than what it was in 2019 or 2020.

The iPad Pro has 4GB with almost the same CPU and is absolutely snappy editing 4K videos, instantly switching in and out of apps etc. It’s a matter of software architecture and not raw space available.

Editing 4K videos doesn't strike me as particularly RAM intensive if you optimize the common behaviors (seeking, etc) properly in software and have a fast SSD.

Between filters, caching, CPU assets, and of course, on M1, GPU memory sharing, and so on, you'd be surprised.