I'm not too familiar with the internals of OSX, but I would be very surprised if that ram is actually really used. More than likely, it's just caching of things

I'm not too familiar with the internals of OSX, but I would be very surprised if that ram is actually really used. More than likely, it's just caching of things already on the harddrive. If you have a old fashioned mechanical drive it makes a lot of sense, but with modern SSDs, I doubt you'll feel it much. Unless you're a true poweruser, no one really needs more than 8gb by todays standards. I have 32gb because I maintain and develop 4 different codebases each with their own setup in different VMs. If I didn't do that, I could manage with 8gb just fine.