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Holy cow, that's true. New 2020 Mini with a 16GB RAM, seriously?
by aldanor 6y ago
Holy cow, that's true. New 2020 Mini with a 16GB RAM, seriously?
- whynotminot 6y agoEspecially head scratching when you consider that a lot of folks still have 2012 Mac minis with 16GB of RAM. I think 16GB is the bare minimum for a professional machine. Apple clears the bar here, but doesn't exceed it. Maybe next year's machines? As a first product, I think it's good enough. And the performance gains elsewhere--if what Apple says is true--are actually pretty radically impressive.
- saagarjha 6y agoIt's possible to do development on 8 GB, you just can't use Electron apps.
- whynotminot 6y agoTo be fair, most of us doing dev on our machines probably have a Slack client or Mattermost app floating in the background. ...And we might even be doing dev in something like VS Code in the first place. We all like to dunk on Electron, but it's kind of become part of the furniture at this point, for better our worse.
- saagarjha 6y agoYou can avoid Electron if you try hard enough. I use Slack through a native client, for example; before that I was using browser tabs.
- whynotminot 6y agoI'm not stupid dude, I know there are ways to avoid it. Sometimes they're not worth it. Electron's existence itself is proof of "sometimes it's not worth it."
- mixmastamyk 6y agoTry hard enough, haha. I don't have a single Electron app, and yet have never purposely avoided them either.
- johncalvinyoung 6y agoWhich native client? Slack for desktop is Electron.
- saagarjha 6y agohttps://shrugs.app/ https://shrugs.app/
- thekyle 6y agoMaybe we could use the iPad version of Slack for better efficiency.
- whynotminot 6y agoThis is really great point, and does highlight a key advantage of Apple Silicon going forward. This kind of thing will now be an option going forward on Apple's new computers, in a way it wasn't before.
- saagarjha 6y agoYeah, until Slack throws a fit and decides that desktop users don't deserve to use it.
- jmnicolas 6y agoI'm learning Flutter on my Windows 10 desktop. I have Android studio and the emulator open, and Firefox, Chromium and Brave opened. Total 14G of ram. My combined browser ram use is about 3G. The flutter project is barely 20 lines of code. The PC was started up about 2h ago. I'd feel much better with 32G on a dev machine (to be fair, my .net projects require much less ram than this).
- mixmastamyk 6y agoThree browsers open is not a requirement for the vast majority of folks. There are probably a number of useless Windows services that could be shut down as well.
- onion2k 6y agoThree browsers open is not a requirement for the vast majority of folks. Every developer who makes frontend things for the web should have a minimum of three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, but maybe others as well) open any time they're testing or debugging their code. That's quite a lot of developers.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoAnd 16GB is fine for that. That's not what is taking the majority of the grandparents ram.
- cupofjoakim 6y agoNah, most of us go browser by browser I think. I think I've been going with two browsers open at most the last 5 years, and at my current employer I'm so reliant on browserstack that I don't even have anything other than chrome running.
- aldanor 6y agoI have 1500 tabs open in Firefox, plus CLion, PyCharm, a few Jupyter kernels eating 5-15G, a few apps running in background - it’s often nearing 32G on a 32G 7-year old Mac and sometimes goes into swap space. I personally won’t consider anything less than 128G as a main machine at this point (and it’s a pity that you can’t swap upgradable RAM on iMacs for 256G).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JAlexoid 6y agoAtom, Chrome and Firefox on a 2017 8GB 13" MBP - no issues in using it for development. I upgraded it only because my keyboard died.
- whynotminot 6y agoI guess I mean more that if you're going to buy a brand new dev machine in 2020, you shouldn't buy anything with less than 16GB of RAM. You can still be productive right this moment on 8GB of RAM (you're proving it!), but the march of time will inevitably start to make that amount feel less and less tolerable, if it isn't already. Personally, when I buy a dev machine, I'm generally trying to look at the next few years of ownership. Will 8GB of RAM cut it in 2023? Doubtful. 16GB? Yeah, a little safer. But 32GB would make me feel better.
- 00deadbeef 6y agoWhat kind of development? Firefox, Spotify, Slack, WhatsApp, any JetBrains IDE, an iOS Simulator, and an Android Simulator will have my 16GB MBP swapping like crazy.
- Existenceblinks 6y agoI run a few Electron apps daily within 4GB RAM, it's (fine - 1); =~ almost fine lol.
- qz2 6y agoThey’re not advertising any 16Gb models on their web site. It’s all 8Gb. Which you’re not going to be able to upgrade. I’m out
- numpad0 6y agoThis is super interesting. I personally wouldn’t consider a 8GB or 16GB laptop this year as my daily driver, but it’s true that the performance gain from extra RAM beyond 8GB is marginal, especially for average audiences and especially when their performances are measured only externally. Like, you might get super frustrated, develop mental health issues, not that the corporate cares. Expenditure reduces, ROI might even slightly improve, why bother then?
- saagarjha 6y ago> you might get super frustrated, develop mental health issues Uh, what? Is your comment literally "because I don't have enough RAM in my computer my mental health will decline"?
- numpad0 6y agoYes, literally? I’m talking about 4GB DDR4 non-SSD Office machines still in production that are borderline crime against humanity.
- saagarjha 6y agoBut you were just talking about 8 GB machines with fast SSDs…
- kkarakk 6y agoyou have to admit when you're in a busy day w/ looming deadlines and your machine starts chugging coz it can't handle the excel docs/dev work going on it feels like the worst thing ever. the kinda company that can't afford to give you the latest stuff is more likely to have those kindsa days all the time too so it feels even worse. management even rides your ass coz you can't make it work... part of "making it" as a software dev in a lot of countries is getting a machine per your specs not having a machine specced out to you by IT.
- acchow 6y agoMy 100 Chrome tabs easily consume 8GB