It’s been more than three weeks since I fully transitioned to Mac from Windows, and the RAM situation is becoming a real concern. I’m starting to understand why people say Mac RAM is expensive—because you can’t just add more later.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
I’ve got a Mac Mini M4 Pro with 24GB of RAM. Activity Monitor is telling me I haven’t hit anything less than 16GB usage just doing day-to-day work. That’s before running any Docker containers.
Compare that to my PC setup where I had 128GB of DDR5 RAM. I could run Docker instances without thinking about it. I even had Hyper-V instances running that I’d literally forget about. RAM was never a concern.
Docker Makes Everything Worse
Docker is particularly bad on Mac when it comes to RAM usage. It just eats up so much memory that I’m being much more aggressive about stopping containers when I’m not actively using them.
On my PC, I would leave 4-5 containers running because why not? Now every container matters.
The Expensive Upgrade Reality
Here’s where it gets painful. To get more RAM, I’d need to buy a whole new machine. I’m looking at the 48GB Mac Studio, and that’s so expensive compared to just buying more DDR5 sticks for a PC.
I guess it was a good decision buying the 24GB version initially, but now I’m thinking if I need the 36GB or 48GB Studio. The upgrade path on Mac is just “buy a new computer.”
The LLM Problem
I can potentially run 30B local LLMs with 24GB of RAM, which is actually pretty decent. But here’s the catch—I need to quit everything else. VS Code, other apps, Docker containers—everything has to go.
I can’t run LLMs alongside my normal development workflow, which defeats the purpose of having local models for development work.
Looking Back at the Decision
The irony is that I initially bought this Mac thinking native Unix-like development would be better than WSL. Then I discovered WSL was actually really good and solved most of my Windows development issues.
So my main reason for switching to Mac was kind of defeated by WSL being much more compatible with the programming workflows I actually use.
What’s Next
I’m questioning whether I should upgrade to the 48GB Studio or just accept that Mac development means being more resource-conscious. The unified memory architecture might be great for some workloads, but for Docker-heavy development with local LLMs, it feels limiting.
Maybe I should have gone with the higher RAM configuration from the start. But hindsight is 20/20, and honestly, even 48GB would cost more than my entire PC RAM setup.
Still figuring out if this trade-off is worth it for the Mac ecosystem benefits.