16GB required on 15" rMBP?

[BizJet78]

Hi,

I am a Mac virgin with a 5yr old Dell XPS which has pretty much been upgraded as much as possible in an attempt to keep it current.

I am now contemplating a switch to Apple with either the 13" or more likely 15" rMBP.

As a Mac novice, how much benefit am I going to get for the 16GB memory upgrade over the 8GB?

I generally put my laptop through light internet useage, various media consumption and some specialised software which I will need to run on OSX wtih VMWare or similar. I would like to occasionally blast through some Diablo 3 (my old M1210 with Intel 945GM struggles with Diablo 2 so this will certainly be a step up).

I don't really get much into photo editing and have never really played with video editing (it would be a painful process on the Dell). So am I going to see any benefit from paying extra for more memory - perhaps to help future-proof somewhat.

Many thanks!!

Phil.

 

[NewishMacGuy]

Whatever you get, you're going to love it when compered to your old Dell box.

Given your planned usage (including light video editing), 8GB will be fine unless you want to run Windows in a VM as well (in which case I would get 16GB).

While the rMBP-13 will run games better than your old Dell, it doesn't have a discrete GPU so it's not going to be a good gaming platform. While many would argue that no Mac can make a decent gaming platform, the rMBP-15 (or cMBP-15) will do just fine.

 

[4kusnik]

Hi,
As a Mac novice, how much benefit am I going to get for the 16GB memory upgrade over the 8GB?

Well taking into the account your current tasks I suppose 8GB should be enough. However, as you probably know, RAM is not upgradable in MBPR therefore just for any case I would spend an extra $200 just for potential future growth of RAM utilization. I think $200 doesn't worth a painful headache in the future caused by the shortage of RAM.