Ask HN: Is 16GB enough for Software Engineering (M1 13“ MacBook Pro)?

I am on MBP mid 2014 15". It has 16GB of DDR3 memory. With just Slack, IntelliJ(not even doing anything), and Chromium browser I'm sitting at ~10GB. There is no way I would ever buy a laptop on which I intend to work with, with less than 32GB.

https://imgur.com/a/iKSVDGk

Yes. It's just not ideal. It depends a lot on what you want to do. Plenty of developers work on remote boxes either by remote desktop or SSH. That is not very memory intensive.

On the other hand, if you want to make iPhone apps, you'd probably want more, as Xcode for e.g. is a resource hog.

Yes - if you don't want to use VMs every day. Still it depends how long you want to use it, for 5 years it could be a bit tight.

The Thinkpad X1 Carbon line is also capped at 16gb Ram. I can't understand why manufacturers do this. How hard is it to offer the upgrade to 32 gb?

I'm using a 16gb MacBook Pro, developing in a mix of Scala, JavaScript, and Python projects in Intellij, with a handful of Docker containers running in the background. For the most part it is reasonable.

I have gotten OOMs when working on the Scala project though, which to me is one more reason not to use Scala.

Build a kickass workstation for far less money: https://www.theserverstore.com/

𝟼̶𝟺̶𝟶̶𝙺̶ 16GB should be enough for anybody!

Yes, I know the above quote was not actually stated by Gates or was misinterpreted, but the reason that it became so infamous is pretty much the same case as this. It's the short sightedness of the thing. (or in this case, perhaps a marketing trick as they now have a great "now supports up to 32 or 64GB" tagline for their 2021 model that will drive another must-upgrade rush)

It's pretty ridiculous to release a "latest and greatest" generation of any computer in 2020 with a hard 16GB limit. Sure, it's most likely enough for general usage and diehard Apple fans will buy that thing in droves and then spend countless hours debating it and justifying the buy, but as already stated by other commenters, there are many reasons to need more RAM and I suspect it will be a deal breaker for a lot of potential buyers, especially developers and designers. There are many things that benefit of more ram, large or complex ide's, virtual machines, game development, sound design, video editing, 3d rendering, and just plain old multitasking.

So, in my opinion, no, it's not reasonable for Software Engineering work unless you upgrade machines very frequently, and even then, I wouldn't really go for it, not only because of the RAM issue, but also the novelty of the entire system.

Depends very, very much on what kind of software you are building and what kind of local test/debug rig you need.

16GB is fine in my opinion. I have that amount with Microsoft Edge, VS Code, Microsoft Teams, and 20 Docker containers and it fits (Windows and WSL2).

However I need to be careful, For example I started using Tabnine recently and the memory usage per instance of vscode is way too high and I need to think about closing unused instances of vscode.

I'm considering to test Github Codespaces so I get a fast environment in the cloud. But the ram amount is only 8GB max and since it probably runs on Azure the IOs performances will likely be awful. But it may be great and then 16GB on a laptop to run many instances of Electron is a lot more than enough.

But if I were to buy a new laptop tomorrow, I would like to get at least 32GB and a touchscreen. So no MacBook pro for me.

I thought the 13" MacBook Pro only had an 8 GB option

It depends on your needs. For me, I want to be able to run multiple production-like environments, IDEs, profilers, browsers, Electron-based applications, etc. My old workstation had 16GiB, and it was a bit limiting. I had to sometimes close or shutdown programs to free up memory. My new workstation has 32GiB of memory, and so far that is enough.

Just get a Thinkpad and pimp it out with 32 gigs.

I'm thinking of getting the 8gb air version. But I am also the type of person that closes the docker desktop when I am not using it.

Depends on what you work with.. We develop some heavy server apps, only launching it takes over 8 gigs of memory, so combined with all other stuff that has to run, 16 is barely cutting it.

Leaving aside the arguments about whether you need more than 16GB, I'd seriously think about 'buyers regret' if you buy one now and Apple releases Apple Silicon Macs with more memory next year.

Also consider carefully whether the software you work on is fully compatible with Arm (e.g using x86 VMs).

If you can hold on for now I would do that and make a decision when you have more information.

Regardless of whether 16GB is enough or not, I'm always wary of the first release of any Apple hardware or operating system and would rather wait for a hardware revision or point release.

You build your Linux workstation at home to have static ip/domain and you ssh from your Apple product. VSCode have excellent support for this type of workflow.

For me 16Gb would not be enough. But it depends on type of work and your worflows (editor/tooling) you use.

Well I needed 32gb ram for a webpack watch for ~1mb minified code plus basic windows usage so I’d guess no.

This is the same question I’m pondering. I bough 2020 32gb MBP in October and it came last week and of course now the same one chip is available except 16 GB I will look at my memory usage today it looks like just with several chrome windows open dropbox zoom windows applications that’s about it 19 GB to 22 so I’m thinking as much as I’d like to get this 16 GB just isn’t enough. Apple is willing to let me in return the MacBook Pro and I could buy the new one but the memory I believe will be an issue.

If you can wait, wait for the later ones.

Funny That everybody is just talking about RAM and not the fact that the M1 has double the number of cores than the intel i7 also with higher performance. That makes the decision even more complicated