Multitasking on just 4gb of RAM?

[mangotears]

I posted a short clip of my base 2011 MBA multitasking on 4gb of RAM.
Maybe it'll help new macbook buyers decide if they need the upgrade to 8 or 16gb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6oaUJPZKNc

These are apps I regularly run on my base model 2011 MBA. It's rare that I have all of them open at simultaneously, and its unrealistic for anyone to cycle through them back-to-back.

I think XNU has gotten very smart about the way it handles memory management, and the increasingly fast ssd's make a lot of the paging activity transparent to the end-user. I tend to agree with the OP here. Most potential buyers, and even mac owners overestimate the amount of RAM they need, and get overly anxious when their activity monitor shows that it's "using" all the RAM (like it should be doing)

 

[ducatiti]

Great video. Thanks for sharing. The music makes me feel guilty of getting 8gb of ram

 

[yliu]

Wow. I see the laptop is running Mavericks, how well would mountain lion handle it?

 

[mangotears]

Wow. I see the laptop is running Mavericks, how well would mountain lion handle it?

Mountain lion was no slouch either. The only times I feel like I need more memory is when I'm running virtual machines/simulators and/or moderately heavy video compositing. But even in those situations, CPU becomes much more of a problem than memory anyways.

 

[Mr Mystery]

Wrong thread

 

[MacChinoNyc]

I posted a short clip of my base 2011 MBA

You say base but on your video it shows a 1.7 processor?
Nice vid btw

edit: nevermind I missed the 2011 part