Unnecessary RAMifications

People were crying about RAM on the 2016 MacBook Pros, and this was my take.

I’m a “professional” UX designer/iOS developer at a company you may have heard of. I have two laptops: one is my personal 13" Mid-2014 MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM, and the second is a 15" Mid-2015 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM that my employer gracefully provided for me to work on their stuff. On that last one, I’m currently running Chrome with 65 open tabs (really, I counted), most of which are instances of G Suite apps, plus Xcode, Sketch, iOS Simulator, Terminal, and Gitbox. My personal Mac looks similar, except I use Safari (sue me), plus Tweetbot and Sparrow, which I’ll give up once you pry it off my cold, dead hands.

Before being a “pro” though, I was a Design student and a hobbyist iOS developer (which I still am, shameless plug), rocking a 13" Mid-2011 MacBook Air with 4 GB of RAM. I ran most of the apps from above plus <strike>pirated copies of</strike> Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, After Effects, Keynote, and Final Cut Pro X on that thing, even simultaneously — it would have been a pretty normal day at school with Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and Keynote open while I refused to quit Xcode and my browser (which may or may not have been Chrome at the time).

All this to say: the last time I cared about the performance of my laptop, it had a spinning hard drive. Sure, rendering some After Effects animations on my old MacBook Air while it sat atop a leather couch might have been abusive, but these machines can take it. It’s what they’re built for. And anything your system’s built-in memory can’t handle will be handled by virtual memory, which uses your speedy SSD to make up for the difference. Sure, it’s not as fast as real RAM, so maybe you’ll need an extra second or two of patience. Careful, you might reach nirvana with all that enlightening time of calm. Hopefully one day technology will be able to keep up with the unstoppable hose of creativity that’s your brain. I’m sure there are countless amounts of productive and fulfilling ways you could be spending those two extra seconds that you’ll never get back. In the name of Apple, Intel, and 2016: we are so very sorry.

I’m not saying there aren’t workflows for which 16 GB of RAM is not enough. I’m sure there are. I’m just saying, this is getting blown way out of proportion. And the very loud complainers are bringing us, the “pro users” that don’t mind the current RAM options, along for the ride. But that’s not the complain train I wanna ride this time. The one I really want is the price train. But that’s neither here nor there.

There will be a MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM one day, and there will be a handful of people who will gladly pay the $3199 to get that luxury. And it is a bummer for them that Apple can’t make them fully happy today (or ever? do we measure our happiness by the performance of our workstations?), but they have a few options. They could focus on their desktops for power and keep a laptop for lighter-weight tasks. They could try to live with 16 GB and see if it’s really hell down there. You know, for science. Or, they could switch to Ubuntu.