Upgrading RAM in Retina iMac.

[jordynicholls]

I know the Retina iMac has internally 8GB of RAM, I've decided I'm going to buy one for Christmas but I'm wondering is their any point in myself upgrading the RAM to 16GB or even 32GB will it make any difference to just every day performance and by that I mean probably just browsing the internet, few documents ect.

 

[GatorGhost]

I know the Retina iMac has internally 8GB of RAM, I've decided I'm going to buy one for Christmas but I'm wondering is their any point in myself upgrading the RAM to 16GB or even 32GB will it make any difference to just every day performance and by that I mean probably just browsing the internet, few documents ect.

I upgraded my 5k to 16gigs and it is way more than enough for common usage as you mentioned. Occasionally, I look at the memory usage in the "activity monitor" and I never see where my system has swapped to disk or have seen a high memory pressure level. In my opinion 32gigs is a waste of money for your usage issues.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I know the Retina iMac has internally 8GB of RAM, I've decided I'm going to buy one for Christmas but I'm wondering is their any point in myself upgrading the RAM to 16GB or even 32GB will it make any difference to just every day performance and by that I mean probably just browsing the internet, few documents ect.

No it'll make no difference whatsoever in the use case. But if your habits change in the future it's an easy upgrade to do yourself, there is easy access and 2 RAM slots left free.

 

[jerwin]

I've decided I'm going to buy one for Christmas but I'm wondering is their any point in myself upgrading the RAM to 16GB or even 32GB will it make any difference to just every day performance and by that I mean probably just browsing the internet, few documents ect.

I have 24 GB in my Mac.

I decided to open up my news bookmark folder, and my comics bookmark folder, and a couple of macrumors pages, all in tabs. So I have maybe 45 tabs in 4 windows. (Note that this is not usually how I browse the internet, but simply a test case scenario.)

The end result is Safari occupies 563 MB (it may be my largish reading list that's responsible), and my largest tab occupies 250 MB, and the simplest webpages considerably less. Final result: Memory Used 11.22 GB, cache 12.55 MB; memory pressure, nil.

You don't need 32 GB to browse the web. You don't need 24 GB, and in all probability, you won't benefit from 16 GB either. The only time Safari takes up more than 10-12 GB, including all its tab instances, is once in a blue moon when it leaks memory.

If you ever notice that your memory pressure is "yellow" in the activity monitor, by all means, upgrade. Otherwise, don't expect miracles.