💻 How much ram is my MacBook Pro using?

Lately, I have been thinking about how much ram am I actually using. In over two years, not once I have felt that this computer was slow and not meeting my needs. Therefore, I was wondering, perhaps; I got a machine that is way too powerful for my needs and perhaps is overkill. Therefore, the relevant question is what RAM and STORAGE is more suitable for my needs. From the storage perspective, it's pretty straight forward. I am using over 400gb so 1TB seems more than sufficient. Evaluating how much ram is necessary isn't as easy. 

Before we dive into that, relevantly, the following are specs of my MacBook (acquired in November 2021):

I was upgrading from a 13 inch 2016 MacBook Pro which had 16gb ram and 512gb storage. Therefore, getting twice the amount of ram and storage made sense.

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Thankfully, to assist me with my research, iStat Menus came to my rescue. The app is running on my MacBook all day every day, so it made sense to finally refer to the iStat part of the app for my use case.

I have always found colours visually easier to understand than analysing raw statistics.

Purple is showing Compressed Memory: Memory that is compressed to make more space available to other processes. Memory is compressed to limit swapping to disk.

Red is showing Active Memory: This is memory that is actively being used.

Blue is showing Wired Memory: This is memory that applications or the system needs immediate access to, so it can’t be cached to disk. It will vary depending on what applications you’re using.

The above terminology is from the iStat Menu website.

Based on my reading of the above (and I am no expert), it seems, the Red (active memory) and Blue (wired memory) usage is most relevant for my needs. The Red and Blue usage accounts for 40% to 50% of the total memory usage, meaning I am using 12GB to 14GB out of my 32GB of storage. This makes me think 16GB RAM would be sufficient for my use case. Clearly, I certainly need no more than what I already have. With no kind of supporting evidence, I am pretty sure, the macOS will manage its RAM usage well so, 16GB may have been more than sufficient. 

This finding seems correct because my 2016 MacBook was 16GB and not once I felt my RAM was limiting. I upgraded in 2021 because the battery life was terrible and I really wanted Apple silicon. 

I reckon, based on what I do for my day job, the iPad Pro may just be sufficient for my needs. Hell, maybe I will try working from my iPad Pro connected to my Apple Studio Display for a couple days and see how that goes. The point I am attempting to make is that I do not use my mac for any CPU/GPU intensive tasks.

As I am coming to the end of this post, I forgot why I was doing this... Curiosity; I suppose.