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4GB vs 8GB RAM

F

ForFour

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 5, 2015
1
0
Hi guys,
yes i know this has been asked and answered over and over again and i am really sorry for asking again but it's a little different than most of the cases I I've read through.
I want to buy an MBA and found the base model at 850 euro at a local store(link if someone is interested) in Germany and the 8 GB at the usual apple store price of 1100 euro.
I'll be doing just some school work(word, power point), light coding for IT class (in java), and day to day things like web browsing, listening to music watch some videos nothing too fancy especially no video editing or music creation. Might try out some photo editing but it' rather unlikely.
So do you think it's worth to shell out the 250 euro for the extra 4 GB of ram?
Again sorry for asking this again but i haven' found anything similar to my situation.
 
OS X takes less space than Windows, although Windows still works fine with 4GB too.

People just see that there are a lot of 8GB laptops on the market, so they think half as much isn't enough. It has nothing to do with what the laptop is used for, just what's available to buy.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
For your uses, 4GB is enough.

8GB upgrade isn't a rip off but the upgrade cost could be a bit cheaper but hey, it's Apple. It depends on how people use their MacBooks, in my case, 4GB isn't enough, I run couple of VMs, I edit photos occasionally and I have quite few software running at the same time.
 
Idarzoid said:
For your uses, 4GB is enough.

8GB upgrade isn't a rip off but the upgrade cost could be a bit cheaper but hey, it's Apple. It depends on how people use their MacBooks, in my case, 4GB isn't enough, I run couple of VMs, I edit photos occasionally and I have quite few software running at the same time.
Click to expand...
250€ ~ 300$ for 4gb is a rip-off
For VMs more ram is always recommended for obvious reasons.
 
Meister said:
250€ ~ 300$ for 4gb is a rip-off
For VMs more ram is always recommended for obvious reasons.
Click to expand...


I suppose it's easier to justify spending £68/80 on 8GB upgrade if you know you're going to take advantage of the extra RAM, but 250 euros? Damn, where in EU the price is that bad? No way I can justify it like that.
 
Idarzoid said:
I suppose it's easier to justify spending £68/80 on 8GB upgrade if you know you're going to take advantage of the extra RAM, but 250 euros? Damn, where in EU the price is that bad? No way I can justify it like that.
Click to expand...

A base mba is 850€. The same model with 8gb ram is 1100€. That's 30% extra.
4gb for everyone here :)
 
Meister said:
250€ ~ 300$ for 4gb is a rip-off
For VMs more ram is always recommended for obvious reasons.
Click to expand...

Considering I paid about $130 for my 16GB (2 x 204 pin 8GB SO-DIMM) for my 2011 MBP, then I'd have to agree. $300 for an extra 4GB seems ridiculous.

Before I started running VMs I could get by with 4GB on Mavericks and the memory pressure in Activity Monitor was almost always green.
 
RAM is much less important when using SSD. Those SSD drives are amazingly fast compared to 5400rpm drives, so paging out is less apparent.
 
Personally running a 4GB Air (late 2010) and still enthusiastic about it. On the other hand I equipped my father's new Air with 8 GB just three days ago. Does he need them? Probably not. Just wanted to be on the safe side for the next couple of OS X releases.
 
For £68 extra, 8GB was a no brainer for me.

OS X and web browsers love RAM and I want my Macs to last as long as possible. 4GB might be fine now but Chrome/Safari get greedier every year.
 
On a device with 4GB DRAM I have to be more conscious with what software I install and run. That burden is much less with 8GB and the peace of mind that it's more future proof considering it's not upgradable.
 
Aika said:
For £68 extra, 8GB was a no brainer for me.

OS X and web browsers love RAM and I want my Macs to last as long as possible. 4GB might be fine now but Chrome/Safari get greedier every year.
Click to expand...

I think you mean web sites get greedier. I doubt Chrome or Safari uses significantly more memory to display the same web content between versions.

----------
mi7chy said:
On a device with 4GB DRAM I have to be more conscious with what software I install and run. That burden is much less with 8GB and the peace of mind that it's more future proof considering it's not upgradable.
Click to expand...

What you have installed has nothing to do with what you run.
 
motrek said:
What you have installed has nothing to do with what you run.
Click to expand...

You have to install it before you can run it and if you're not going to run it due to limited DRAM then there's no point in wasting precious SSD storage.
 
4gb should be enough, but 8gb will make you feeling secure I am using MBA 2012 with 8gb anyway.
 
Okay, now you're doing Java programming so you should definitely get 8GB RAM. Maybe 32GB, because it'll never be enough.

/s
(Actually, kinda not really because Java is horrible)

Why only Java programming, by the way? Java programmers get paid the least of all programmers. Learn COBOL or something (as much as I despise it). At least learn C++, C#.net, Swift (if you want to do apple development), HTML5/JS/CSS3, PHP, SQL and anything else you can.
It might sound like a daunting task, but once you learn one language, you'll know them all. Just syntax differences, mostly.

I suggest you do:
1. C++
2. html5/js/css3 with stress on javascript
3. PHP
4. SQL
5. COBOL
In that order.

C# is basically Java anyways so you'll be fine on that front.

EDIT:
Just read the part about IT class.
pfffffft why java. >.>
 
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