There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple’s claim that 8GB of unified memory was enough for base-model Apple silicon Macs, you won’t be able to use it. There’s a memory requirement for Predictive Code Completion in Xcode 16, and it’s the closest thing we’ll get from Apple to an admission that 8GB of memory isn’t really enough for a new Mac in 2024.

  • _number8_@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    imagine showing this post to someone in 1995

    shit has gotten too bloated these days. i mean even in my head 8GB still sounds like ‘a lot’ of RAM and 16GB feels extravagant

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      I still can’t fully accept that 1GB is not normal, 2GB is not very good, and 4GB is not all you ever gonna need.

      If only it got bloated for some good reasons.

      • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
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        5 months ago

        I remember when I got my first computer with 1GB of RAM, where my previous computer had 64MB, later upgraded to 192MB. And there were only like 3 or 4 years in between them.

        It was like: holy shit, now I can put all the things in RAM. I will never run out.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        The moment you use a file that is bigger than 1GB, that computer will explode.

        Some of us do more than just browse Lemmy.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          Wow. Have you ever considered how people were working with files bigger than total RAM they had in the normal days of computing?

          So in your opinion if you have 2GB+ of a log file, editing it you should have 2GB RAM occupied?

          I just have no words, the ignorance.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      I chalk it up to lazy rushed development. Good code is art.

    • Bjornir@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      I have a VPS that uses 1GB of RAM, it has 6-7 apps running in docker containers which isn’t the most ram efficient method of running apps.

      A light OS really helps, plus the most used app that uses a lot of RAM actually reduce their consumption if needed, but use more when memory is free, the web browser. On one computer I have chrome running with some hundreds of MB used, instead of the usual GBs because RAM is running out.

      So it appears that memory is full,but you can actually have a bit more memory available that is “hidden”

      • derpgon@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        Same here. When idle, the apps basically consume nothing. If they are just a webserver that calls to some PHP script, it basically takes no RAM at all when idle, and some RAM when actually used.

        Websites and phone apps are such an unoptimized pieces if garbage that they are the sole reason for high RAM requirements. Also lots of background bloatware.

      • Specal@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This is resource reservation, it happens at an OS level. If chrome is using what appears to be alot of ram, it will be freed up once either the OS or another application requires it.

        It just exists so that an application knows that if it needs that resource it can use X amount for now.

    • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Absolutely.

      Bad, rushed software that wires together 200 different giant libraries just to use a fraction of them and then run it in a sandboxed container with three daemons it needs for some reason doesn’t mean “8 Gb isn’t enough”, it means write tighter, better software.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You just have to watch your favorite tablet get slower year after year to understand that a lot of this is artificial. They could make applications that don’t need those resources but would never do so.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      We measure success by how many GB’s we have consumed when the only keys depressed from power on to desktop is our password. This shit right here is the real issue.

    • jas0n@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Guy from '95: “I bet it’s lightning fast though…”

      No dude. It peaks pretty soon. In my time, Microsoft is touting a chat program that starts in under 10 seconds. And they’re genuinely proud of it.

    • qqq@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      I once went for lower CAS timing 2x 128MB ram sticks (256 MB) instead of 2x 256s with slower speeds because I thought 512MB was insane overkill. Realized how wrong I was when trying to play Star Wars galaxies mmorpg when a lot of people were on the screen it started swapping to disk. Look up the specs for an IBM Aptiva, first computer my parents bought, and you’ll understand how 512MB can seem like a lot.

      Now my current computer has 64 GB (most gaming computers go for 32GB) at the time I built it. My workstation at work has 128GB which really isn’t even enough for some workloads we have that use a lot of in-memory cache… And large servers can have multiple TB of RAM. My mind has been blown multiple times.