I don't want to use VMs every day, but I often have to for my work. I suspect it's the same for a lot people here.
In several jobs in recent years I've also had to develop on very resource heavy Java applications which absolutely cripple my MacBook Pro 16GB when running a browser with several tabs open, Spotify, an IDE (sometimes two), Teams, Slack, and occasionally a VM for testing.
Granted this isn't a typical workload, but I'm frustrated enough that I have been waiting all year for this new lineup of 13" MacBook Pros (although I was hoping for a 14" model honestly) so I could finally upgrade to 32GBs.
I also assumed that 16GB would have been minimum amount of RAM Apple would ship in a professional laptop released at the end of 2020, yet they seem to believe there are some professional users who can get by with just 8GB just fine which confuses me even more than the 16GB limit.
It's also worth noting that the upgrade to 16GB is $200. That's $200 for 8GB of RAM! I know this isn't out of the ordinary for Apple, but that's just an outrageous price for what should be included in the base model anyway.
So yeah, I'm pretty disappointed. I was almost certain I would be buying a new MacBook Pro yesterday, but as it stands I really have no reason to upgrade from my 2016 model.
>In several jobs in recent years I've also had to develop on very resource heavy Java applications which absolutely cripple my MacBook Pro 16GB when running a browser with several tabs ope
On the flip side, I've got 16 gb and when I've checked I don't think I've ever been using half of that. There's definitely scenarios where it could happen, but for general programming on non gigantic problems 16gb is plenty.
RAM is also less important these days with fast SSDs. With a spinning disk having to read a file was a performance killer. But SSDs have very high throughput and having to use the page file isn't as big of a deal as it once was.
For me longevity is the main factor in not getting 16GB. I’m using a 15” 2015 MBP with 16GB for web dev work and I have no problems, but I tend to keep my resource usage low: emacs or vim, Safari usually with very few tabs, Slack, and sometimes Music. I’m getting the 16” MBP in a few weeks, with 32GB ram.
In several jobs in recent years I've also had to develop on very resource heavy Java applications which absolutely cripple my MacBook Pro 16GB when running a browser with several tabs open, Spotify, an IDE (sometimes two), Teams, Slack, and occasionally a VM for testing.
Granted this isn't a typical workload, but I'm frustrated enough that I have been waiting all year for this new lineup of 13" MacBook Pros (although I was hoping for a 14" model honestly) so I could finally upgrade to 32GBs.
I also assumed that 16GB would have been minimum amount of RAM Apple would ship in a professional laptop released at the end of 2020, yet they seem to believe there are some professional users who can get by with just 8GB just fine which confuses me even more than the 16GB limit.
It's also worth noting that the upgrade to 16GB is $200. That's $200 for 8GB of RAM! I know this isn't out of the ordinary for Apple, but that's just an outrageous price for what should be included in the base model anyway.
So yeah, I'm pretty disappointed. I was almost certain I would be buying a new MacBook Pro yesterday, but as it stands I really have no reason to upgrade from my 2016 model.