I would like to ask this following question to professionals and/or developer of DORICO:
I’m in the process of ordering a new MacBook Pro and I don’t know if I should order 16 or 32 GB RAM. Until now I had 16 GB and never had a problem, especially not with Dorico.
The Steinberg system requirements for Dorico say 8 GB minimum, recommended is 16 GB.
Since I will hopefully use my new device for a few years, I want to make sure that the 16 GB will still be enough in a few years (I don’t need strong performance for studio program since I don’t record anything, I’m not a gamer or Photoshop user).
Can you guarantee me regarding Dorico that 16 GB will be enough even in a few years?
I doubt that anyone can guarantee you anything about the future, given the pace of technology.
Many people have found that the new ARM Macs are more efficient with memory than equivalent processes on an comparable Intel Mac – so if you currently have 16Gb, and that’s fine for you, then 16Gb on an M2 Mac will work at least as well.
On the other hand, most Macs have come with either 8Gb or 16Gb as standard for a decade – so it might be said that ‘the future’ will need more.
Unless you’re using big multi-Gigabyte sample libraries, I’d suggest that 16Gb will be ‘adequate’ for Dorico, along with ‘the usual’ apps – Safari, Mail, Word/Pages, etc.
On the other hand, “no one ever regretted buying too much RAM”. The OS will try to use as much RAM as it can, in order to make things as fast as possible. More RAM is always better.
There’s a nice analogy of using a computer: that it’s like baking a pie in a kitchen. The cupboards are your disk storage; the RAM is your table space. To make the pie, you have to get all the ingredients out of the cupboards and put them on the table (and still have space to roll out the pastry, etc). If you don’t have enough space, you have to put things back in the cupboards.
In short, if you have the budget for 32Gb, I’d go with that. You might regret spending the money for a couple of months; but you’ll regret not having enough RAM for longer.
What type of music do you write or engrave? If you do any sort of large ensemble work, and want to use anything other than the included Halion sounds or NotePerformer, you’ll almost certainly want the extra RAM.
If I start from the “Film Orchestra” template, and load the BBCSO Core (a popular orchestral collection) playback template, then those sounds alone are using approx. 23 GB. Loading the VSL SYzd SE 1-4 template uses about 7 GB. If you only work with smaller ensembles and have no plans to use larger libraries, then it might not be much of an issue, but if you think you might be at all interested in doing any sort of large ensemble work like that in the next 5 years, by all means get as much RAM as you can.
Last time I tried to upgrade the memory in a Dell (Alienware) one had to by the RAM from Dell and the size stick was limited. I hope that has changed since.
I almost invariably upgrade the RAM in a PC during the lifecycle. This time, unusually, I actually did it twice - first from 16 to 32GB and then, because of the demands of NPPE, to 48Gb (meaning swapping out the original 16Gb).
As others have said, the crucial decision is whether decent playback with modern libraries is a requirement – if so then 32Gb is really the minimum for comfort (and for my PC at any rate actually cost very little). If unsure then the next question is if it’s easy to add more RAM later when it will probably be cheaper.
Your considerations are made more difficult because it’s a laptop, where RAM is more limited and expensive, but it does seem that life these days is increasingly pushing towards working in laptop mode. I’m glad I can still use a self-built PC.
When I build I mostly try to gain more years out of a build by getting a motherboard with double the maximum RAM than I can afford. My last build was 2018, I put in 32GB with a motherboard max of 64GB. It wasn’t long before I added the extra RAM, and it has served me well now for 5 years. I’m hoping to go a couple more with this rig. I’m sure I will double to 128GB max if I can support a new build at that time.