this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 64 points 10 months ago (3 children)

8gb in a "pro" machine is rediculous. And the 8gb == 16gb thing was always rubbish.

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

My company is deploying new basic, mass-produced, small form-factor office PCs. No graphics-editing, no programming, integrated graphics card, just basically spreadsheets and web browsers. The standard is that each of them have 32gb of memory. 8 is ridiculous...

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 8 points 10 months ago

Computers are cheap, employee time is expensive. Giving your employees computers that limit or slow them down is a very poor investment. Maxing RAM, CPU and GPU even for relatively basic work can make some sense if you look at it that way (within reason, dont need to give everyone 4090's, but definitely go better than an etch-a-sketch :) ).

[–] vinceman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 10 months ago

When I built my first computer a decade ago, I put 16gb of ram in lol.

[–] astraeus@programming.dev 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And at this point the cost difference couldn’t possibly be so stark that they have to make it a great leap in price. I think they offer these 8GB models for non power-users. People doing spreadsheets and presentations all day, but honestly even then 8GB of memory just seems like they’re cheaping out.

[–] nous@programming.dev 6 points 10 months ago

I bet the 8 GB model ismore for lowering the advertised price then it being useable.

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Is it just me or is 16GB even on the low side for a pro user? I have 128 on my desktop and 80GB usage is normal for what I do (software dev; lots of local virtualization)

[–] vinceman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

All I do is game and stream, occasionally edit some photos and 32GB is the minimum for me now.

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah, this is pretty much what I thought. So I don’t understand why people are pretending that eight or 16 is going to cut it.

Maybe they are just happy purposefully limiting usage due to a constraint that they don’t realize is easy to raise.

I like to have 3 4k monitors and four desktops and 10 chrome tabs opened on each one along with SQL stuff and a half dozen vscode windows, and a full visual studio or 2, wsl2 running with a dozen docker containers, plus all of the collaboration programs like Telegram and Discord. And I don’t like to close any of that down when I go play flight simulator. So the extra couple hundos is nothing so that I can be sure to never run out of ram.

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The M3 is powerful enough that even 32GB can be a constraint for what you'd be able to run on it

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That entirely depends on if what you’re running requires lots of ram or is more cpu bound. I wouldn’t conflate the two as directly related.

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago

That's true, but unless you're 100% sure that you'll only ever run a workload that fits those specs, I think you'd rather like having the extra memory.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 10 months ago

Answer probably depends on the nature of your usage?

I have a 16gb m1 air, and it is okay for development, but i dont have any VMs (except docker i guess, and also android VMs). I have run out of RAM once, with multiple pycharm/clion/browser windows open. Its not great, but its livable. I run out of screen realestate first usually. I use it for personal projects to kill time on trains, so not super heavy stuff.

But otherwise yeah, more is better. I have 64 gb in my desktop and 96gb in my work PC, and occasionally i can hit the limits there.