5 ms·

I'm pretty ambivalent about the RAM thing. The CPUs they're using don't support more than 16GB of RAM, anyway, and I'd guess that nobody who both cares and has

I'm pretty ambivalent about the RAM thing. The CPUs they're using don't support more than 16GB of RAM, anyway, and I'd guess that nobody who both cares and has the tech knowledge to be likely to upgrade RAM is going to be buying the 8GB model in the first place. For me, the deeper problem there is, why should I be feeling anguish about being able to upgrade them memory in a (non desktop replacement) latpop in the first place? 20 years ago, when we were collectively trying to squeeze more and more out of personal computers at a fairly decent clip, it made some sense. At this point, though, things have tapered off outside of a few special cases like large-scale data crunching and serious gaming, neither of which was ever really a primary use case for Macs in the first place. What's left for reasons why you might need ever more RAM are things that feel kind of silly. On my personal computer, the big RAM suckers in recent memory have been ad-heavy news websites and (bafflingly) the Slack desktop app. In both cases, I'm pretty sure the reason why they get away with sucking more and more RAM is that we're rolling over and buying more RAM instead of putting some more pressure on software developers about being wasteful. I rather wish Grace Hopper were still around to give a memory consumption version of her "nanoseconds" lecture.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
Well Slack is an electronjs app. I think developers are still chasing the ‘write once run anywhere’ Holy Grail. This time it’s JavaScript.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Running in Electron accounts for a few tens of megabytes, tops. I'm not convinced it's really all that much worse than the runtime environments for popular interpreted and managed languages. The other 2-3GB (I'm not even kidding) seemed to be a result of keeping a copy every single attachment and Giphy image that anyone posts in memory, indefinitely. Like with any good memory leak, the solution was to bounce the application. I use vscode quite a bit, and it doesn't eat RAM in a way that seems reminiscent of what people like to blame on Electron apps. Perhaps what we like to lay at the feet of Electron is more appropriately blamed on there being a lot of JavaScript developers who haven't been sufficiently educated in how to manage memory.
gargravarr 8y ago
Not always the case - my 2014 MBP Retina has an i7-4870HQ CPU. According to Intel's ARK, the CPU supports 32GB RAM. However, the maximum you could spec until this year was 16GB on any model. Even worse, I got my hands on a 2012 MacBook Air with an i7-3667U CPU. The maximum those models ever went to was 8GB. This i7 also supports 32GB. Finally, the latest range-topper 15" MBP has an i9-8950HK chip that supports 64GB, double the amount Apple will solder permanently to the board for you. Part of this is due to increasing DRAM densities, and used to be a good thing with Macs - frequently the device's practical maximum RAM would be twice what Apple listed as possible, since the DRAM density doubles between the time the machine is released and you actually need to upgrade the machine. However, with the RAM now soldered, we can't benefit from the increasing densities right as we start needing more RAM. When I upgraded, I bought a Skylake laptop with 16GB of socketed RAM and the option with the CPU to increase that to 64GB down the line. 32GB SO-DIMMs only became possible this year. I've read that Apple's limits of 16GB were usually down to power draw, that adding more RAM would require more power, thus bigger batteries to keep up the marketing battery life, and it was easier to just limit the RAM to '16GB is enough'. That all said, I cannot deny that modern applications are RAM guzzlers and developers seem to revel in the glut of available memory. Still, there are situations where you need all that RAM (e.g. multi-k video production... perhaps that's where the 'Pro' in MacBook Pro came from?!), and you just can't get around that requirement.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

2muchcoffeeman 8y ago

Well Slack is an electronjs app. I think developers are still chasing the ‘write once run anywhere’ Holy Grail. This time it’s JavaScript.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Running in Electron accounts for a few tens of megabytes, tops. I'm not convinced it's really all that much worse than the runtime environments for popular interpreted and managed languages. The other 2-3GB (I'm not even kidding) seemed to be a result of keeping a copy every single attachment and Giphy image that anyone posts in memory, indefinitely. Like with any good memory leak, the solution was to bounce the application. I use vscode quite a bit, and it doesn't eat RAM in a way that seems reminiscent of what people like to blame on Electron apps. Perhaps what we like to lay at the feet of Electron is more appropriately blamed on there being a lot of JavaScript developers who haven't been sufficiently educated in how to manage memory.

gargravarr 8y ago

Not always the case - my 2014 MBP Retina has an i7-4870HQ CPU. According to Intel's ARK, the CPU supports 32GB RAM. However, the maximum you could spec until this year was 16GB on any model. Even worse, I got my hands on a 2012 MacBook Air with an i7-3667U CPU. The maximum those models ever went to was 8GB. This i7 also supports 32GB. Finally, the latest range-topper 15" MBP has an i9-8950HK chip that supports 64GB, double the amount Apple will solder permanently to the board for you. Part of this is due to increasing DRAM densities, and used to be a good thing with Macs - frequently the device's practical maximum RAM would be twice what Apple listed as possible, since the DRAM density doubles between the time the machine is released and you actually need to upgrade the machine. However, with the RAM now soldered, we can't benefit from the increasing densities right as we start needing more RAM. When I upgraded, I bought a Skylake laptop with 16GB of socketed RAM and the option with the CPU to increase that to 64GB down the line. 32GB SO-DIMMs only became possible this year. I've read that Apple's limits of 16GB were usually down to power draw, that adding more RAM would require more power, thus bigger batteries to keep up the marketing battery life, and it was easier to just limit the RAM to '16GB is enough'. That all said, I cannot deny that modern applications are RAM guzzlers and developers seem to revel in the glut of available memory. Still, there are situations where you need all that RAM (e.g. multi-k video production... perhaps that's where the 'Pro' in MacBook Pro came from?!), and you just can't get around that requirement.