10.11 El Capitan is better than yosemite under every aspect!
I think the only faster os was snow leopard
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Who here chose 8gb or 4gb of ram? if so, do you max it out?
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10.11 El Capitan is better than yosemite under every aspect!
I think the only faster os was snow leopard
i only use Safari - anteprima - chrome - canary - (usually 20-25 tasks in total )
i ve never used professional video editing programs or 3d modelling programs, but i m almost sure they re out of reach for the weak dual core ulv i7 of the macbook air. (and also for the quad core cpus of most notebooks)
There are dual xeon starting with (min) 12 core/24 thread desktop pcs for these heavy loads, and most notebooks are just a bad choice to run these heavy tasks (in my opinion) .
ps.: i m not a pro user, i only assumed this, could be wrong
My 2013 MBA has 8GB and the decision was based mainly on the need to run VMs. Without that I think 4GB would be enough.
I didn't say that no one uses their computer that way, but lots of people don't. I shut down my computer anytime I don't expect to use it for more than a few hours. I never thought of this as being "housekeeping". It's just something that I do, like turning off lights when I leave the room, or turning off the tv when I'm not watching it. I did this even before SSDs made it so that computers boot up in a matter of seconds.
When web browsing, I seldom have more than 5 or 6 tabs open.
I have 4GB. I don't really need a computer. I do 97 % of my computing on mobile devices like my iPads and iPhone. I only bought the air after my Windows laptop died as I wasn't ready to fully embrace the post PC world just yet. I use it about once a week but that is mostly to justify to £750 I spent on it otherwise I'd use it much less. My Windows laptop had 4GB of ram and when I first got that I used ot for more (collage work, video ripping). It never broke a sweat with 4GB. So this time I decided to go with 4GB again and I've not ran into any problems. All I do on there is web browse and manage my iTunes library and it's been fine with that.
Very useful read. I'll be going over from Windows to Mac later this year or early the next. I was thinking of maxing out on everything but after reading this I don't think I'll need to. Memory yes, RAM no.
Very useful thread.
Very useful thread.
I'm on a 2009 Air 4GB and I have Safari(17 tabs) + Mail + Xcode open. Memory pressure is well into yellow. With a newer model Air I suspect I could be in the red since they use more VRAM. My next MacBook is going to have at least 8GB!
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Makes sense but is 17 tabs considered normal safari usage? I can see 3-4 tabs maybe but 17? Everyone's use case is different and I get that but this seems rather excessive. Just saying.
In my limited experience with Windows, it appears to consume RAM less readily, so perhaps it's giving a misleading impression.
Excessive would be like saying I eat 17 slices of bacon in the morning for breakfast... but I don't see why 17 tabs is excessive. On a normal work session I will have between 5 - 10 tabs open at a time, but if I'm taking a break and looking around my favourite sites I can easily add a few more tabs and they soon add up.
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Thanks for the replies and suggestions for the 2GB ram machine. El Capitan public runs great now on my 2010 MBA. Weird thing was that with the beta I didn't have a good experience, fans were on all the time.
You're assuming I cram all the tabs into 1 Safari window. Anyway, it's not the number of tabs that is a limiting factor, it's what's in them. Sites with heavy use of advertising, graphics and video are going to use a lot more memory than pages from Wikipedia for example.
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Some of us use "open in a new tab" as a quick/poor substitute for a reading list. When I'm reading something on a site and find a link that seems interesting I open it to check it out later, ad infinitum, therefore sometimes I end with 20-40 tabs on my "pending to read" list, and I close them one by one as I finish reading them. It's not that I need them all at once, but they are open at the same time until I go to them
And exactly like bacon, you can never have enough...
Same with me.Some of us use "open in a new tab" as a quick/poor substitute for a reading list. When I'm reading something on a site and find a link that seems interesting I open it to check it out later, ad infinitum, therefore sometimes I end with 20-40 tabs on my "pending to read" list, and I close them one by one as I finish reading them. It's not that I need them all at once, but they are open at the same time until I go to them
And exactly like bacon, you can never have enough...
Actually this what I do-- the Reading List thing is for stuff that I want synced with my iPad-- which may well include "interesting articles for the day". But scanning the headlines of the frontpage of the new york times means that eight or nine articles go straight into tabs. Having a window wide enough that the tab bar is still readable helps.
4.34 gb devoted to Safari and rising.
When you have lots of memory, these things become second nature. When you don't, I suppose the natural inclination is to wonder "doesn't that slow down your machine?"
I got the 4 GB and have not had regrets. I had 8 GB on my old Macbook Pro and always maxed it out. The 4 GB I currently have is always maxed out. From what I can tell, this is kind of just the way Mac OS works.
But to say that it is maxed out does not mean that it is slowed down. I do programming on my MBA and have had no problem. At almost every moment that I am on my MBA I have 9 programs open: iTunes, Calendar, OmniFocus, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Sente, Devonthink, Outlook, and Chrome. I often also have two-three large (200+ MB PDFs) open along with all of these programs.
Now, none of these are particularly resource heavy such as movie editing or image editing... But I must say, I am more than amazed that I can have all of these open with ZERO slow down.
Do I wish I had bought 8 GB? Yes... But I am only completely satisfied when I max out my technology. However, I bought a "low-end" MBA and the only upgrade was to 256 GB HD. And this has not affected my experience a single bit, except I personally like to have maxed out technology.
To be 100% honest, I can only recommend getting 8 GB if you do movie/image editing or you want maxed out technology. Though I will say, I feel that I could have benefited from a better CPU whenever I code number-crunching programs.
But to say that it is maxed out does not mean that it is slowed down. I do programming on my MBA and have had no problem. At almost every moment that I am on my MBA I have 9 programs open: iTunes, Calendar, OmniFocus, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Sente, Devonthink, Outlook, and Chrome. I often also have two-three large (200+ MB PDFs) open along with all of these programs.
Now, none of these are particularly resource heavy such as movie editing or image editing... But I must say, I am more than amazed that I can have all of these open with ZERO slow down.
Do I wish I had bought 8 GB? Yes... But I am only completely satisfied when I max out my technology. However, I bought a "low-end" MBA and the only upgrade was to 256 GB HD. And this has not affected my experience a single bit, except I personally like to have maxed out technology.
To be 100% honest, I can only recommend getting 8 GB if you do movie/image editing or you want maxed out technology. Though I will say, I feel that I could have benefited from a better CPU whenever I code number-crunching programs.
I'm in the 8Gb camp, for sure. Set it and forget it. I hate having to micro manage things, I just want to use my machine and not have to even think about it.
To me, the price difference of an extra bit of RAM (when dropping $x on a machine anyway) is neither here nor there. If your margins are really that tight, then perhaps you should be looking at buying a secondhand Mac anyway.
To me, the price difference of an extra bit of RAM (when dropping $x on a machine anyway) is neither here nor there. If your margins are really that tight, then perhaps you should be looking at buying a secondhand Mac anyway.