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Ask HN: Do you use your personal computer for programming?

3 points by check1234123 ↗ HN
I'm thinking of getting Macbook Air base as a personal laptop, but I'm not sure about 8GB RAM. My company is planning to buy us Macbook Pro 16, so it would be a little bit dumb to get the same model for personal usage. How limiting will be 8GB RAM for personal usage and learning new technologies?

12 comments

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DamonHD
I do have 16GB in my MBA(s), but unless you are running huge DBs or editing big videos, or have hundreds of browser tabs open, or like running huge (Java) virtual machines, etc, then you may never notice the difference between 8GB and 16GB.
check1234123
I am a Java developer (unfortunately :)) but I don't think I will be running anything extremely demanding on my personal laptop. I might rent a VPS and ssh into it for a heavy stuff. Not sure about how much it would cost.
DamonHD
I like Java, and I squeeze various Java servers and cron jobs etc into 1GB RPis, so there is hope at 8GB!
micahdeath
I now default my PCs with 16GB but strive for 32GB upgrades ASAP. Browsers consume massive amounts of mem (I keep tabs open in multiple browsers)

Visual Studio, VSCode, Teams and the like use tons of RAM also. I miss native apps. (VS does odd things now that it's 64bit - not sure why it eats RAM)

I do anything on my PCs, so it gets used more than my work PCs.

check1234123
I would love to get 32/64GB version of MBP but Apple's markup for RAM is insane.

> Visual Studio, VSCode, Teams and the like use tons of RAM also. I miss native apps.

Yes, I hate Electron as well but I guess we'll just have to suck it up.

raxxorraxor
I do, but depending on setup 8GB should be enough for coding. It probably is a question on how long that is enough as operating systems and IDEs tend to get more resource hungry. I don't like Macbooks for programming but I am fairly sure you can get an air with 16GB too.
check1234123
The most attractive thing about Air for me is pricing. There's a huge price gap between base and 16GB models in my country. I would buy myself a MBP 14/16, but I'm afraid it will be collecting dust when/if I will get my work laptop.
codevark
On my work desktop I do Delphi coding. On my work laptop, I mess around with lazarus/FPC. On my home webserver, I use PHP. On one or more of my home desktops (PC, Amiga) I mess with REBOL/RED, ARexx and CanDo. On one of my home desktops I do UE stuff. Random other stuff sprinkled here and there.

"Useful RAM" depends on what you are trying to do. My UE machine has 64GB. Most of my other machines have between 6 and 16GB. My A500 has 3.5MB, my A3000 has 82MB :) Windows and Mac seem to need more RAM ha :/

mark_l_watson
I bought a personal MacBook Pro M1, and last year there was a 1 month wait list. I ended up buying not from Apple but from my local independent Mac store: they only had 8G models in stock. Anyway, I do Common Lisp, deep learning, and Swift dev on it with no problems. I would rather have 16G, but 8G is working for me.
check1234123
Thank you for answering. I just feel like getting 16GB version doesn't sound as appealing in terms of price. Another question: does your MBP swaps a lot? I've heard that SSD wears off much more quickly on M1 so that is also another concerning point.
mark_l_watson
I don't notice much swapping when running 'top'.
night-rider
I don’t need anything fancy for development, unless I’m building resource intensive apps. Most of the time I do front end stuff and you can reliably run a browser and a text editor in tandem with 2GB RAM and a Celeron/ Atom chip.