2011 Macbook Air with 2gb ram ok for $400?

[joshlalonde]

The 2012 13" MacBook Pro is one such example. Nearly 3-year old hardware at 2015 prices, and runs like a bag of poop due to 4GB RAM & 5400rpm drive. You're right, it is still an Apple computer. That doesn't really mean much. Neither does the year it was purchased.

I fear what may happen on this thread is an argument about how 2GB RAM is or isn't suitable. All I can say is in my experience of doing tech support in this field for 3-4 years for a large number of Macs, RAM has been a huge issue since OS X Lion. Lion was terrible for paging and iMacs/MacBooks with anything less than 4GB RAM were crippled the moment you did any sort of task. Naturally, that's more due to Lion's shoddy RAM usage than an argument against 2GB RAM. Mavericks and Yosemite are, thankfully, much better with RAM.

What I will also need to say is that RAM works differently on OS X than it does with Windows. On Windows, whenever you open an application, it'll page to the hard-drive (virtual memory) and to the RAM simultaneously. On OS X, because it's a UNIX system, it'll write everything to the RAM, and will continue to do so until it runs out of RAM. Once it's ran out of RAM, it'll page to the hard-drive. It won't do that before.

That's why you get a massive benefit from 4GB-8GB RAM upgrade on OS X, but you don't see that much of a difference if you were to do the same upgrade on Windows.

I don't mean to be rude but people suggesting to buy a Mac with 2GB RAM is really, really poor advice.

Sigh. You're the one arguing about RAM and we're trying to tell you that it's simply not true.

He wants to know if it's okay to buy a $400 Macbook, but his concern is that it only has 2GB of RAM.
We're trying to tell you and him both that yes, that's perfectly okay.

You're confusing yourself. This isn't about a 2014 MBA off the shelves with Yosemite installed. This is about an old macbook he wants to buy.

Should he buy it? I say, if you can't afford a new computer, then yes. That's a good price for an older laptop that has an SSD. It's less than the price of an iPad, even.

Also, this doesn't seem like it does too bad, does it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moeMtB-Se8Q

----------

The 2012 13" MacBook Pro is one such example. Nearly 3-year old hardware at 2015 prices, and runs like a bag of poop due to 4GB RAM & 5400rpm drive. You're right, it is still an Apple computer. That doesn't really mean much. Neither does the year it was purchased.

I fear what may happen on this thread is an argument about how 2GB RAM is or isn't suitable. All I can say is in my experience of doing tech support in this field for 3-4 years for a large number of Macs, RAM has been a huge issue since OS X Lion. Lion was terrible for paging and iMacs/MacBooks with anything less than 4GB RAM were crippled the moment you did any sort of task. Naturally, that's more due to Lion's shoddy RAM usage than an argument against 2GB RAM. Mavericks and Yosemite are, thankfully, much better with RAM.

What I will also need to say is that RAM works differently on OS X than it does with Windows. On Windows, whenever you open an application, it'll page to the hard-drive (virtual memory) and to the RAM simultaneously. On OS X, because it's a UNIX system, it'll write everything to the RAM, and will continue to do so until it runs out of RAM. Once it's ran out of RAM, it'll page to the hard-drive. It won't do that before.

That's why you get a massive benefit from 4GB-8GB RAM upgrade on OS X, but you don't see that much of a difference if you were to do the same upgrade on Windows.

I don't mean to be rude but people suggesting to buy a Mac with 2GB RAM is really, really poor advice.

Also, I call bullocks. It runs like "poop" because it has a HDD. Don't kid yourself.