I don’t get why Android phones have so much ram.

They often have more ram than my wife’s MacBook and the same or my as my desktop.

How much ram is needed if you’re not gaming or video editing?

In my case, it’s a very occasional picture or video recorded and then just social media apps and web. Do I need to get a phone with 12gb? Or is that just thrown in there for marketing?

  • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
    131·
    10 months ago

    Rule of thumb in 2024:

    • 8GB is a good place for a phone
    • 16GB is a okay place for a computer that doesn’t do anything heavy duty (basically just web browsing and word processing)
    • 32GB is the minimum for a computer doing anything heavy.

    I’m probably going to go up to 64GB on my desktop soon

    • M500@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I’m not doing anything particularly heavy on my desktop and I’m pushing 8-10gb while in zoom meetings?

      • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        10 months ago

        You don’t want to max out your ram with running applications, modern operating systems are designed to have several gigabytes of cached stuff in the memory next to your applications. You will be experiencing less than Ideal performance (and in some cases, quite abysmal performance) if your application usage is brushing up against your capacity.

        A good rule of thumb is when you’re running your heaviest task, you probably still want at least a quarter of your RAM “free” (free memory is not unused).

        If you’re specced at 16GB and the most you’re doing is zoom plus a couple of web pages, then you might be cool for the next couple of years, but I’d not recommend someone buy a new computer with that amount today as software inevitably gets heavier and a new computer shouldn’t only last a few years

    • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Bro, I bought my current MacBook Pro in 2014 with 16 GBs of RAM for “future proof” how is that 10 years later that is the “bare minimum” right now?

      I don’t do anything heavy but tend to let lots of apps run in the background and never close my tabs of Firefox and I never get to use that much RAM, even nowadays, sometimes I also add Parallels running Windows 10 lol.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
      01·
      10 months ago

      I agree with this rule of thumb, not because you can’t have a great user experience with less memory, but because memory is relatively cheap these days combined with the popularity of SSDs that have limited write cycles, making swap space even on fast media a much less attractive proposition.