so I i need a machine asap. i have nothing right now. i was suprised to learn no apple stores have the 4gb model. rather than wait 1 week+ should i just buy instore tommrow? my uses will includes itunes, mail, safari , 1080p + 720p mkv's in vlc, external 27" monitor, occansial unraring of 5gb files, data transfer, basic final cut express editing. No heavy media work. So am I ok with 2gb?
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real world 2gb ram?
- Thread starter The Final Cut
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better wait a week and spend another $100 for a 4GB than regret it. it's just a week man!
for your relief, i purchased the 11" air with 4gb, it says shipping in 4 weeks, but after i made the purchase, it says delivers by 2-december.
how ****in long is that!
for your relief, i purchased the 11" air with 4gb, it says shipping in 4 weeks, but after i made the purchase, it says delivers by 2-december.
how ****in long is that!
I would really hold out for the 4 gig.I had a mb with 2 gigs and it would beachball a ton when I had quite a few tabs open in chrome. I recently upgraded to more ram and it is a much more fluid experience.
the mba will probably be better than your mb experience, because it has a flash storage which writes and reads disk much much faster than your conventional hard drive, so will be lot less beach ball on the MBA. but still, i agree with you, i would hold out.
I will post up a Youtube vid tomorrow, 13"/2gig/256ss, I have yet to beachball it and have tried to crash the damn thing for a few hours today with no luck.
It showed 27mb FREE in Activity monitor, I had iPhoto pushing some photo's up to Mobile me, iTunes streaming the Apple event, Safari up with 12 tabs and DL, then playing 1080p trailer for Transformers 2, then just for the hell of it opened iCal, iMovie, iChat and Mail. I don't normally have this many things going at once and after at least 30 mins of messing around and taking some video with my iPhone I gave up, it clearly is enough ram for what I need. Activity monitor showed many, many times less than 30mb of FREE ram, but the system never beach balled, never became slow or unresponsive when going thru some photo's in iPhoto and remained responsive in safari even with two video's streaming while iTunes kept streaming the Apple event video.
This similar test on my 2010 mini would bring it to it's knees, beach ball for days, if it's the SSD storage then it's very impressive that OSX is probably able to use a swap file and make the system stay very useable even when loaded down.
It showed 27mb FREE in Activity monitor, I had iPhoto pushing some photo's up to Mobile me, iTunes streaming the Apple event, Safari up with 12 tabs and DL, then playing 1080p trailer for Transformers 2, then just for the hell of it opened iCal, iMovie, iChat and Mail. I don't normally have this many things going at once and after at least 30 mins of messing around and taking some video with my iPhone I gave up, it clearly is enough ram for what I need. Activity monitor showed many, many times less than 30mb of FREE ram, but the system never beach balled, never became slow or unresponsive when going thru some photo's in iPhoto and remained responsive in safari even with two video's streaming while iTunes kept streaming the Apple event video.
This similar test on my 2010 mini would bring it to it's knees, beach ball for days, if it's the SSD storage then it's very impressive that OSX is probably able to use a swap file and make the system stay very useable even when loaded down.
For your average usage, 2GB is plenty. I used that for over a year, and the only time I ever even saw a slowdown (and a very minor one at that) was when I was maxing basically all of the system resources (internet, itunes, probably mail, and a very large software update which used most of it). As fast as the flash is, it would be far less noticeable, and hardly bothersome.
Use Parallels and it may suck up alot of ram. Otherwise 2 gb is not that bad.
The magical speed of the macbook air is primarily the SSD. Stick a high-quality SSD in your "regular" notebook and it would scream as well.
But it's that $999 for an SSD hard drive and the media attention + slick form factor is what is getting people's attention.
The magical speed of the macbook air is primarily the SSD. Stick a high-quality SSD in your "regular" notebook and it would scream as well.
But it's that $999 for an SSD hard drive and the media attention + slick form factor is what is getting people's attention.
Is best to upgrade it if you can afford!!! (I reckon the price is acceptable)
Think about this, after 1 or 2 years old, when you want to sell your Air, at least 4GB RAM won't be too old, and 4GB RAMs are most ppl who looking for. It's worth the money
Not just for selling, for you personal is better too.
Think about this, after 1 or 2 years old, when you want to sell your Air, at least 4GB RAM won't be too old, and 4GB RAMs are most ppl who looking for. It's worth the money
Not just for selling, for you personal is better too.
I take it you can't just buy the 2gb model now and then swap in 4gb of ram manually later on if you need it? I just assumed you can't manually upgrade the ram in the new mb airs?