8 GB of ram, myth?

[cycledance]

The upvote feature you are constantly refering to is meaningless and also anonymous.
You don't know who is upvoting what.

----------

I constantly hear Eduard Khyl in my head while reading his posts

----------

I have over 4000 posts (PRSI and private forums not counting) to keep track of my modification history you would have to be cyber stalking me. Also modifying posts is a feature of this forum and I am not sure what it has to do with the topic on hand.

----------

What? ... Where? ... 2nd macs? ... wtf? ....

you have modified this post alone 4 times. i see it because your posts spam my notifications several times.
i have also read this post before and you kept expanding it. as you do with your other posts.

you are a highly motivated bully as anyone can see how much you are enjoying this as your hobby.

 

[Meister]

you have modified this post alone 4 times. i see it because your posts spam my notifications several times.
i have also read this post before and you kept expanding it. as you do with your other posts.

That is how the quote/notification system on this forum works. I also get several notifications when someone has several quotes in their post. It's an automatic feature that has been discussed in the feedback subforum.

There is also a ignore feature that you can use, so you don't have to read post by posters you find unpleasant.

This is all off topic and belongs in the site and forum feedback subforum.

 

[2984839]

please stop telling others what i think. you can't look inside my head. you are highly motivated to steer people away from getting 8gb ram. this is a sport for u. it's always the same 3-4 people. you seek out ram threads and upvote each other within minutes. arguing the whole day. refining your posts several times. (most replies from meister are modified around 4 times). you have now resorted to compare prices of 2nd hand macs, last year models, discounted macs to built to order configurations. so you can justify the lie that it's more than 100 difference in most countries. ridiculous.

Meister has repeatedly told people whose uses require 8 GB to buy 8 GB. It is frustrating to see people who will never see a shred of benefit of 8 GB of RAM told they must buy it by people who don't know what they're talking about.

Part of it is that some people genuinely need 8 GB or more for their uses and assume everyone else's uses are similar.

Others don't know how much RAM is necessary and always recommend upgrading, since traditionally laptops have always come without an adequate amount of RAM and upgrading offered a performance boost. This is no longer the case though, since we've hit a plateau. 4 GB has met the average user's needs with room to spare for 5 years. When PowerBooks were being shipped from Apple with 256 MB, it made a lot of sense for even the most casual user to get about 1 GB or more. This is not true anymore.


Finally, some people have a devotion to spending loads of money buying the best and fastest machine they can, even though they will never see a difference. There's nothing wrong with that, but a few of them delude themselves into thinking that all that performance is necessary, probably to justify spending extra on it. They're typically the ones who think that a 2 year old laptop is old, outdated and too slow to be useful. They often tell people to buy more RAM than necessary because they don't buy based on necessity; they buy based on what they want, then try to justify it. I have no problem with folks buying what they want just because they want it, but it's inaccurate to tell others they need it or that blazing fast machines are slow just because something new is 20.04% faster on the magic unicorn benchmark or something.

 

[ZBoater]

So am I evil for wanting 16GB of RAM?

 

[Meister]

So am I evil for wanting 16GB of RAM?

No. You are evil without wanting those precious 16g of random access memory.

 

[ZBoater]

No. You are evil without wanting those precious 16g of random access memory.

 

[Meister]

 

[AFEPPL]

traditionally laptops have always come without an adequate amount of RAM and upgrading offered a performance boost. This is no longer the case though, since we've hit a plateau. 4 GB has met the average user's needs with room to spare for 5 years.

I normally stay clear of these comments... But..

Pls provide details of this extensive research you have undertaken to formulate this revelation. Can you also explain the plateau you believe "we've" all hit.

Looking forward to seeing the data.

 

[motrek]

...
you are highly motivated to steer people away from getting 8gb ram. ...

What possible reason would he/we have to steer people away from 8GB (if they need it)?

----------

I normally stay clear of these comments... But..

Pls provide details of this extensive research you have undertaken to formulate this revelation. Can you also explain the plateau you believe "we've" all hit.

Looking forward to seeing the data.

No extensive research required and the data is super easy to find.

Just look at the minimum OS X system requirements since it was originally released.

It increased rapidly and exponentially from ~2003 to 2011, and it has been the same (2GB) since 2011.

That's the textbook definition of a plateau.

 

[2984839]

I normally stay clear of these comments... But..

Pls provide details of this extensive research you have undertaken to formulate this revelation. Can you also explain the plateau you believe "we've" all hit.

Looking forward to seeing the data.

Here are the minimum RAM requirements for Windows and OS X going back to Windows 95 and OS X 10.0. I used minimum requirements because they are more objective than recommendations, which vary based on use. There was a period where each release of Windows required more RAM and each OS X release required more until they stopped at 2 GB. Some of the early OS X versions probably required more than the 128 MB minimum in reality, but I'm going by the listed numbers.

As you can see, the RAM requirements for both operating systems have tapered off and have remained at 2 GB for a number of years now.

Windows 95: 4 MB
Windows 98: 16 MB
Windows ME: 32 MB
Windows XP: 64 MB
Windows Vista: 512 MB
Windows 7: 2 GB <---2009
Windows 8: 2 GB
Windows 10: 2 GB

OS X 10.0: 128 MB
OS X 10.1: 128 MB
OS X 10.2: 128 MB
OS X 10.3: 128 MB
OS X 10.4: 256 MB
OS X 10.5: 512 MB
OS X 10.6: 1 GB
OS X 10.7: 2 GB <---2011
OS X 10.8: 2 GB
OS X 10.9: 2 GB
OS X 10.10: 2 GB

 

[unplugme71]

4GB is fine for today and maybe next year. But after that who knows. So unless you want to buy a new mac in a year or two, upgrade to 8GB.

Who knows what you will be doing the next year. Maybe you'll want to do more. The memory upgrade is cheaper than a new machine.

Things to think about..

 

[AFEPPL]

Here are the minimum RAM requirements for Windows and OS X going back to Windows 95 and OS X 10.0. I used minimum requirements because they are more objective than recommendations, which vary based on use. There was a period where each release of Windows required more RAM and each OS X release required more until they stopped at 2 GB. Some of the early OS X versions probably required more than the 128 MB minimum in reality, but I'm going by the listed numbers.

As you can see, the RAM requirements for both operating systems have tapered off and have remained at 2 GB for a number of years now.

Windows 95: 4 MB
Windows 98: 16 MB
Windows ME: 32 MB
Windows XP: 64 MB
Windows Vista: 512 MB
Windows 7: 2 GB <---2009
Windows 8: 2 GB
Windows 10: 2 GB

OS X 10.0: 128 MB
OS X 10.1: 128 MB
OS X 10.2: 128 MB
OS X 10.3: 128 MB
OS X 10.4: 256 MB
OS X 10.5: 512 MB
OS X 10.6: 1 GB
OS X 10.7: 2 GB <---2011
OS X 10.8: 2 GB
OS X 10.9: 2 GB
OS X 10.10: 2 GB

So you have no data just an opinion that's it's not needed and would you say we are at the start or the end of the plateau based on historic requirements by release? Those numbers are just the OS min requirements, I assume people run application over the OS?

Photoshop 8GB recommended CS6 was 2GB. Ilife 09 was 512GB, vs 4GB recommended for iMovie 2013. Garage band 4GB recommended - I could go on, do you included the offload off common memory to dedicated memory for graphics in that theory of memory growth/requirement as part of the calculation?

The point with Mac that's not applicable to other vendors is the crazy lock in. You buy it now when new, or you can't upgrade later."If" needed. The uplift in most cases is small - why limit or even worry about it. Shame on apple for doing this in the first place. 8GB min is where I'd be. (IMO)

 

[ZBoater]

This is all crazy talk. No one is EVERY going to need more than 640K of RAM.

Oh, wait...

 

[xylitol]

4GB is fine for today and maybe next year. But after that who knows. So unless you want to buy a new mac in a year or two, upgrade to 8GB.

Who knows what you will be doing the next year. Maybe you'll want to do more. The memory upgrade is cheaper than a new machine.

Things to think about..

I'm pretty certain that my new computer will feel a bit antiquated in year or two anyway, not because of 4GB but because of Skylake.

 

[ZBoater]

I'm pretty certain that my new computer will feel a bit antiquated in year or two anyway, not because of 4GB but because of Skylake.

Yeah, and Cannonlake is going to make Skylake feel positively outdated...

 

[xylitol]

Yeah, and Cannonlake is going to make Skylake feel positively outdated...

But, miraculously, upgrading to 8GB of RAM now would prevent all this.

 

[motrek]

So you have no data just an opinion that's it's not needed and would you say we are at the start or the end of the plateau based on historic requirements by release? Those numbers are just the OS min requirements, I assume people run application over the OS? ...

When Apple says the minimum memory requirement for OS X is some number of gigabytes, they obviously mean that's the amount required to run some average applications and get acceptable performance.

Otherwise, how would that specification have any useful value to any consumer?

Nobody has ever argued that 4GB is enough RAM to run whatever software you want and open whatever files you want. Just because you can find some software that requires from than 4GB RAM doesn't prove that everybody should go get 8GB or more.

 

[newellj]

The point with Mac that's not applicable to other vendors is the crazy lock in. You buy it now when new, or you can't upgrade later."If" needed. The uplift in most cases is small - why limit or even worry about it. Shame on apple for doing this in the first place. 8GB min is where I'd be. (IMO)

But the "crazy lock in" IS applicable with other vendors. A lot of Windows ultrabooks have the RAM soldered in today.

 

[Weaselboy]

[Mod Note]

Seems like the OP has the information needed. Thread closed.