Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sdsd 101 days ago
I've been using 8 GB on my M3 for years as a security engineer, doing pretty heavy development. I usually have like 15 Brave tabs open, several terminals, a game (PokeMMO) and a small DeepSeek model, lots of Claude Code instances running, Obsidian, and LadyBird, among other small things. I honestly have no idea what people do with all that RAM.
2 comments
eertami 101 days ago
To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.

Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

link
kwanbix 101 days ago
15 tabs? I manage multiple projects, one per window, and have about 15 to 30 tabs per window. So maybe 300 tabs.
link
sdsd 101 days ago
Oh yeah well I run 500 VMs of Windows Vista each with an instance of DeepSeek botting Neopets stocks for me. I make more neopoints in a day than you'll make in USD in a year.

/s but I suppose I've developed a work flow that adapts to the RAM I've always had. I've seen people with zillions of tabs and I do wonder if it's really that much more productive than the occasional HTTP request to reopen one. I find leaving things open as a form of bookmarking clouds my mental space too much.

I do intend to have beastly RAM on my new desktop so who knows, maybe I'll be like you in a year.

link