Maximum RAM supported by MacOS Sierra?

Did they bump up the maximum memory (RAM) limit for MacOS Sierra? Last I knew it was capped at 128GB. In Lion the limit was 96GB and in Mavericks it was raised to 128GB. I'm wondering if the limit was raised again in Yosemite, El Capitan, or Sierra.

Mac Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12.1)

Posted on Oct 31, 2016 9:03 PM

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22 replies

Feb 24, 2017 11:23 AM in response to John Galt

There is a hard-limit, OS X before was 96GB of PHYSICAL MEMORY. However, as nbritton mentions, there are macs capable of registering more than 96GB.


I have this same question too.


What is the actual maximum that Mac OS Sierra allows? (Physical memory here folks, if you say unlimited you don't know what you're talking about or understand the question properly.)

Jun 25, 2017 9:26 PM in response to Kurt Lang

How did you calculate your final figure? Four RAM sticks of 256 Gigabytes of RAM on each stick will give you one Terabyte of RAM. Hence, 256 Terabytes of RAM would need 4 x 256 of the same RAM sticks, thus 1024 sticks, ie just two dozen more than a thousand sticks each of 256 GB of RAM. If you had rows of ten sticks by ten sticks, then the array would need to be ten levels high. A sizeable box, but hardly a whole grocery store.

Oct 31, 2016 10:15 PM in response to nbritton

nbritton wrote:


Did they bump up the maximum memory (RAM) limit for MacOS Sierra? Last I knew it was capped at 128GB. In Lion the limit was 96GB and in Mavericks it was raised to 128GB. I'm wondering if the limit was raised again in Yosemite, El Capitan, or Sierra.


Such low limits have never existed. OS X has always had a maximum addressable memory limit of about 18 EB (approximately 18,000,000,000 GB).

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Maximum RAM supported by MacOS Sierra?

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