logoalt Hacker News

nessus42 • last Wednesday at 9:46 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.

OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)

Replies

JohnBooty • yesterday at 1:41 AM

    OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. 
    (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
32GB is starting to feel like a minimum for a common workflow: Dockerized development + git worktree + Claude Code or equivalent for working on multiple branches at once.

Definitely brings our engineers' 24GB MBPs to their knees primarily b/c of the RAM chewed up by those multiple Docker instances.

Will 32GB also start looking paltry soon? It's hard to say. I want to say the realistic upper limit is 3-4 simultaneous worktrees for a given developer (at this point the developer becomes the bottleneck again?) but it's a wild guess that may be hilariously low.

➕ show 1 reply
zf00002 • yesterday at 1:08 AM

I have M2 Air with 8 and don't have problem either. Even runs WoW ok.

bandrami • yesterday at 5:50 AM

I've got an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and it runs Ableton and Serato so well I don't actually need a Pro anymore, so Mac may have shot themselves in the foot there.

benjiro3000 • last Wednesday at 11:20 PM

[dead]