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Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough (www.xda-developers.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (13 children)

Software and AI development would be hard with 8gb of RAM on Linux. Having you seen the memes on AI adding to global climate change? Not even Linux can fix the issues with ChatGPT...

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (12 children)

I don't think anyone anywhere is claiming 8GB RAM is enough for software and AI development. Pretty sure we're talking about consumer-grade hardware here. And low-end at that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My main development machine has 8 GB, for what it's worth. And most of the software in use nowadays was developped when 8GB was a lot of RAM

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

This. My Mac has 16GB but I use half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux (server) software.

I don't need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB. Also I don't need to give the Linux VM less memory, all my production servers have way less than that. But I don't need to - because 8GB for the host is more than enough.

Obviously it depends what software you're running, but editing text, compiling code, and browsing the web... it doesn't use that much. And the AI code completion system I use needs terabytes of RAM. Hard to believe Apple's one that runs locally will be anywhere near as good.

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