> 16GB RAM is also a practical capacity for general tasks such as web browsing, office work
16GB RAM to read and write text and see images... I think it just says it all.
More could be said about the bloatware, telemetry, surveillance, and adtech built into Windows.
Hard to imagine that 1GB was "a big deal" in my lifetime.
First it was audio, then video, and RAW camera images are almost there with the prosumer digital cameras. And those are compressed files. Software that decompresses the whole thing into arrays of regular samples will need much more RAM...
They say this is happing due to abstraction and saving development costs but I'm not so sure anymore. Windows 11 infamously has large swathes of boilerplate copied around apps that many of their engineers don't even know what it does.
At this point we're far into abstracting abstractions and those abstractions bear their own complexity that may or may not be more complex than what we began with at a fraction of the resource cost...
And most of this stuff isn't even doing anything that special or demanding, which is the sad part.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#:~:text=The%20SoC%20a....
edit: ha I guess people didn't see the /s in the above
And that’s a blatant lie from Apple, if anything, the GPU shares memory with the CPU therefore Apple Silicon needs MORE memory, not less.
Think different (tm). Snark aside you're right, Macs are much better at memory management than Linux, swap handling in particular. But that's a very low bar.
> the usage patterns on those devices is significantly different.
You're right, Mac users tend to run more multimedia productivity tools that benefit greatly from more RAM!
> You can get higher memory Apple kit if you need it…
You can pay the $800 premium yes, just make sure to plan what your future usage will be for the next 10 years because you can't buy it after the fact.
The article is objectively correct, RAM is cheap these days, some apps waste ram, some apps just realize that there no reason not to stretch their legs a bit to offer a better experience. Chrome often gets the short end of the stick, but Chrome does objectively well with RAM considering how inefficient modern web development is. They’re doing the best they can in the modern web dev landscape.
There will always be some application that comes along and can use the hardware that you didn't imagine. I remember a friend saying that the 48k in his Apple ][ was enough ram for any program... as long as you didn't go filling it up with graphics and that kind of nonsense.
It's amazing how small code is compared to the data it operates upon.
You need all that RAM to virtualize operating systems, because running native code is dangerous.
The observant may wonder why running native code is dangerous. Why doesn't the operating system defend itself?
The hard drive? What machine is sold with a hard drive as swap in 2024?
The surprising thing is that you can buy a desktop computer (but no monitor) for less than a day of minimum wage in California.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Restored-Dell-Optiplex-790-Deskto...
What I find more surprising is that there is any margins in selling those sort of computers. Enough to actually reliably profit.
Hahahhahahhahhukaufkauf! (Excuse me while I clear my throat) Uh… my 7Mhz 512KB Amiga generally had a better UX.
True, although... on topic, 1MB became very needed by 1990-ish.
