> Do they fastidiously quit applications even though they'll probably use the app again within a few days?
s/days/minutes/
It's an old habit of mine that stems from spending most of my pre-adult life with old equipment, and using others' equipment with <1gb ram running Norton antivirus.... I'm so glad those days are over, but I haven't completely recovered. That being said, I do occasionally just leave everything running for as long as I can stand to. My system can never tell the difference.
As for using less than 64gb of ram... Ha! I have never had more than 8gb of ram! I have never needed more than 8gb of ram! 8gb is a lot of memory! 64gb? Are you kidding me? I've considered several times over the past few years getting another 8gb (for 16gb total), and ended up realizing I would never use it.
Don't browsers generally use more RAM when more is available? I only have 12 GB on my laptop and I've never really noticed anything. It's not like I'm using all 50 tabs and 20 applications at once, and the split second that it takes to reload the app state/data into RAM if it got bumped doesn't bother me.
I would phrase it this way. No matter how much RAM you have, the gosh darn internet browser will easily gobble it all up.
I see this question often, and I totally don't get it. I do use 64GB for work, and in light of this news that no new Mac Pro will arrive any time soon, I'm considering bumping that to 128GB[1]. But I don't do high-frequency corporate hegemony work, or video editing, or any of that — I'm just a programmer.
Moreover, you could delete IDEA and Xcode and my 5 browsers and 7 text editors and my 30 terminal windows and git client and all the other work-related stuff open right now, and I'd still easily use 64GB just fucking around.
I wonder: how is it that people don't use 64GB of RAM? Do they reboot their machines every week? Do they fastidiously quit applications even though they'll probably use the app again within a few days? Are they just all like, "modern memory-swapping technology is so awesome compared to 1990s System 7 'Virtual Memory' that I love to watch it work, even though things run an order of magnitude slower in many critical sections"?
I really don't get it. Terabytes of RAM? Yeah, that might be hard to make use of today. But 64GB is definitely not too much, not for me and probably not for you, or even for your mom.
I don't have 64GB in my laptop, but only because I can't and have to settle for 16GB (unless I switch to a different OS, which is on balance a worse tradeoff currently, and yeah yeah I'm rooting for Linux but come on, one can only maintain hope for a couple decades and that mark is fast approaching...)
Cheap RAM is one of the things that keeps hope alive in this increasingly degenerate era.
[1]: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/13...