Says the first owner of the machine. Macbooks, and Apple devices in general, have a strong reputation for high resale value. That high resale value is based on having them last quite a while. This falls apart in a few years as hardware requirements continue to balloon.

That was fine when Intel was sitting on their ass, raking in the cash, and nearly everything else (storage, especially external drives, RAM, and even batteries weren't too bad) is upgradeable. This is less great when you can no longer upgrade the component most likely to be the first bottleneck.

Apple pays people to be smarter than me about this, but I still think it's a stupid long-term play to damage one of your biggest selling points

I’ve definitely been memory limited on a 32GB MacBook Pro. Though it’s probably due to Docker, Slack, multiple IDEs, and dozens and dozens of browser tabs all open at the same time. Consider me part of the exception.

Agreed. I was XCode'ing on an 8gb M1 back during the lockdown, it was great.

It's nice to see more RAM and Apple was being very stingy about it, but the real-world is totally overblown.

Well yeah… like, that's why Electron apps are terrible, though, I bend over backward to avoid them.

Well... that doesn't really matter if you have to use Teams/Slack or whatever?

The problem is the insane markups, but my anecdata is the opposite of yours.

I'm also doing Rust dev, but I can't work with less than ~24GB.

On my headless rackmount dev box that I use for my remote development environment, the box sits around 17GB of memory in use + 8GB of cache. I've got an M3 with 36GB running a few Visual Studios Code (plus browser/Docker/Dropbox) with about 30GB used (8GB of that is cache).

16GB would not have been enough for me for my work at Deno. My current job involves both Rust and Python work and I'd quickly hit the limits of 16GB if I'm running my code while developing it, let alone running a browser or keeping my email client open.

My M1 MacBook is currently sitting at 46GB usage. It's not heavily under load

(WebStorm, Rider, Android Studio, Chrome, Discord & Slack), not currently running an Android Emulator, LLM or Docker

The OS will use more RAM if you give it more RAM. The fact that you are currently using 46GB on an (I assume) 64GB model doesn't necessarily mean that your workload would run badly on a 32GB or 16GB model.

It's more likely to mean exactly that, because the less RAM, the more disk swapping.

At some point it becomes impossible for the OS to keep everything it wants in RAM at the same time, and then you get an orgy of disk thrashing and a potential lock-up.

This is not theoretical. I've had it happen on both Macs and Windows machines, sometimes with just a single main app running.

At best you'll get obvious delays if you switch apps, as pages get dumped to disk while other pages are loaded.

Yes, you may get some swapping, but with a fast SSD that won't necessarily degrade performance too much.

Some RAM is used for file caching and other optional stuff, so not all of the additional usage will translate into swap if RAM is reduced.

MacOS also makes use of RAM compression, which increases the amount of memory pressure that can be sustained before swapping is necessary.

All in all, it's pretty complicated, and the only way to know if a workload will perform acceptably on a machine with less RAM is to try it.

I might get away with 48GB (don't know, I have 64 now on my work machine) but I had a lot of swap usage when I was running on 32GB. Some of us do need a lot of ram.

But are "us" imac users?

Well, iMacs used to be fairly common in music/video production. Given the move towards more casual use-cases by Apple, I would say there aren't many anymore, but if they were to put pro chips in there, I'm sure there would be more.

I have the feeling most music/video producers these days like the laptop format anyway (a music producer would typically want to have access to his projet in his home studio, live stages and pro studios) and the imac format is getting limited to traditional pro desk use.

With usb-c/thunderbolt, it is hard to be a pro user AND be interested in the iMac form factor when you can have a mobile device that you can easily dock to a large screen and have the conveniency and comfort of both a laptop and a desktop.

Outside of companies that wants fixed, kensington locked desktops for their employees, I don't see who would choose an imac over anything else.

Definitely constrained by my 16gb, it's only 2 years old. Rubymine takes 4gb on it's own, Chrome eats a lot... I'm usually hovering around 10gb of swap.

I do on my 24gb one running a custom typescript compiler, running backend + 2 frontends (a backoffice and an embedded one) + E2Es.