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windows 7

I think you'll be far better off with Win7, but yes XP is still about 40%+ of wintel computer installs. That number IS a bit misleading though as MANY of those are out of the usa. Of course many haven't upgraded mostly from a price perspective.

Win7 has already far outpaced Vista (as was expected) and should overcome XP in the next 12-18 months.
 
I'm still stuck with 4GB on my 2008 machine - could probably put 6GB into it, but cannot be bothered. After upgrading to SSD I have found that quitting unused apps to free up some RAM to run something "heavy" is not as painful any more. The most resource hungry things I run are iPhoto (huge library) and FCP X. I find that when I use those particular apps, I want to give them my undivided attention, so things like Mail, Safari running in the background are just distractions. With an SSD the apps open so fast, I don't care to quit them when I don't immediately need them, since if I want to open them again, it will only take a second. Arguably, a RAM upgrade is still cheaper than an SSD, but SSD will give many more benefits.

With rMBP SSD is the only option, so I would agree with those here that say a RAM upgrade becomes a bit overrated.
 
If would want to return the 8gb model and wanted to order a 16gb one; in what timeframe is that allowed to do? or is that not possible at all?
 
You might have something wrong with your machine. i do more than that and barely use 5gb, and i have 16 on my late 2011 15. Get what you need. 90 percent of people dont NEED it.

nah its not the machine, i had a previous 2.6/8/512 running the same things and it was paging out excessively (several hundred mb's per second), obviously using more than the 8gb of physical ram in the machine.

You probably are basing your 5gb off a fresh purge and no safari data, etc. try using it for 5 hours without purging and i bet your ram usage is 10gb+
 
I think it really depends on what you are doing. Yes, it is difficult to use >8GB with today's programs running in the background 90% of the time. The time when it DOES become an issue is when you are doing something very memory intensive like editing a photo, scrolling through huge RAW files in Aperture/Photoshop, running a virtual machine at full gear. Tasks like these will tip the RAM useage over the edge and you will get pageouts and massive system slowdown. Most people don't run activity monitor at those times but that's what is causing the slowdown. My advice (as mentioned earlier in the thread) is if you WILL be either a) viewing/editing large RAW files in Aperture/Photoshop or b) want to run a virtual machine for more than just microsoft office or c) not sure, but have a likely chance of doing those two things, the extra RAM is worth it given that you can't update it later. If not, don't worry and be happy, 99% of the time you'll be fine. Personally I run my machine with 8GB and get pageouts ALL THE TIME and can't wait to upgrade my machine to 16GB (or more) when I upgrade next year.

...and yes, I do know what I'm doing given that I've been building my own computers for 20 years, and no, there isn't a memory leak in the programs I run.

Exactly. Great points!

How much memory to order in a new rMBP was an easy decision for me. My old MBP was maxed out with 8GB, but was always struggling for lack of memory. I'm a web developer and normally have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Aperture, Safari, Firefox and Parallels open when working on a project.

Parallels w/XP would run okay on the 2009 MBP but Win7 is very doggy and and memory hungry. I'd have to close lots and apps just to run P/Win7.

On the rMBP with my normal afore mentioned work apps freshly opened, memory usage is at over 12GB. If I take Parallels out of the mix and purge the unused memory, it's still at nearly 7GB.

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When the '09 MBP was new, 4GB worked fine. A few years later when the memory became a bottleneck, I was easily able to double it to 8GB. It ain't gonna be that easy to do the same thing with the rMBP. So when ordering a new Retina consider how long you plan on having it and what you might be using it for down the road.

:apple:
 
I use AutoCAD at work and that along can take 1.3GB of RAM as the day goes on, plus I have a myriad of engineering tools running on Windows through Parallels, although I'm hoping to program some of these Apps natively for Mac when I have time. 8GB would be my absolute minimum.

My wife's Air on the other hand has 4GB of RAM and that's plenty for her to surf the web, e-mail, watch videos, etc.
 
I imagine its more to do with cost as opposed to corporate laziness.. Why pay to relicense / replace all xp machines if they are doing the job fine still?

I don't know. At my place of work, we have a bunch of fairly modern computers (macs and PCs). The PCs are mostly high end lenovos (Core i5/i7 quad cores), but they're all running XP. Those machines would have come with Windows 7 licenses, so I guess they feel they need to run XP still for some reason.
 
Yet XP is still a popular OS in corporate environments.

I agree Windows XP is a very old system, which is not as capable as latest versions of Windows. But after all Mac handles a lot of things already, we just need Windows to run a few apps and I think speed is the first priority.

I imagine its more to do with cost as opposed to corporate laziness.. Why pay to relicense / replace all xp machines if they are doing the job fine still?

I have to use Windows XP machines at work all day and the reason we do so is because the software we run (an older electronic medical records system) only runs on windows XP. Thus, we will be on it as long as microsoft supports it. It's sad though because there are just so many issues with the backbone (for example, lots of the applications are webapps that HAVE to be run in ie7 ONLY to work - that's painful). However, I would never run windows XP at home anymore, I would run Windows 7 and virtualize XP if I need to within windows 7.
 
Just because you occasionally go over 8 GB's of RAM doesn't mean you need 16 GB of RAM.

However I still claim that the majority of users will go over 8 GB on at least a weekly basis. It's quite easy to reach the point where your RMBP will start purging inactive memory. I get it all the time with just a couple documents, Mail, and Safari open. You don't need many apps open.

.

And if you had 64GB or 200GB of RAM you would still see pageouts. That's a normal function of the operating system. Check the activity monitor and it will tell you how much free memory there is.

If you run out of memory you'll know it without checking because everything will grind to a halt.
 
And if you had 64GB or 200GB of RAM you would still see pageouts. That's a normal function of the operating system. Check the activity monitor and it will tell you how much free memory there is.

If you run out of memory you'll know it without checking because everything will grind to a halt.

Ummm... no. You may see a few MB at most of pageouts if you have enough RAM but nothing significant or noticeable.
 
If would want to return the 8gb model and wanted to order a 16gb one; in what timeframe is that allowed to do? or is that not possible at all?

So I found out that it is within 14 calendar days in the netherlands, so bad luck for me (almost a month now). Let's see how long i can 'survive' with 8gb. So far, so good. (it's probably a mental state as well with me, doubting afterwards)
 
I use Outlook for work email, mail.app for personal. Don't like to mix business with pleasure.

I tried combining my work email together with my personal email into one inbox. Resulted in a cluster*** trying to find any email. Keeping them separate makes finding things much easier.
 
Ummm... no. You may see a few MB at most of pageouts if you have enough RAM but nothing significant or noticeable.

Dude, if you see any page outs then there are page outs. You can say no and yes in the same comment.
 
Dude, if you see any page outs then there are page outs. You can say no and yes in the same comment.

There is a difference between paging out 1MB of data vs 100MB of data (a small program vs editing a large photo) based on the delay that it takes to cache the data to the hard drive. That's why 1MB of data is hardly noticeable whereas 100mb is.
 
4G has been good enough for me with my mid-2009 MBP. I am doing development work with C/C++ (and tiny bit of Object-C). With the new rMBP, 8G will be good for me for another 3 or 4 years.

8G or 16G, really depends on how you use the machine.
 
Hello there.
I have a late 2011 MBP with 16 GBs of RAM, and it is good for few reasons:
- I can use VMs comfortably
- I can make ram disk for system cache files, to make SSD life easy
- I can edit huge photos, videos and HDRs in PS|Aperture and FCPX

So I am pretty satisfied about installing 2x8GB in my MBP :)
Thanks.
 
There is a difference between paging out 1MB of data vs 100MB of data (a small program vs editing a large photo) based on the delay that it takes to cache the data to the hard drive. That's why 1MB of data is hardly noticeable whereas 100mb is.

Why is the operating system paging out at all if there is free active memory?

Seems Mac OS can still page out even with free memory. Anyone claiming they are not getting page outs it BS'ing
 
At my company, the newer developer laptops (non-apple) are being configured with 32Gb of RAM.

If you do development, run sort of any VM, run memory hungry applications like photo or video or audio processing, load up the boat on RAM.

I run a cupcake baking business and I load up all my laptops with 64gb of RAM.

If you do cupcake baking or any kind of cooking you need 64gb of RAM.

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Why is the operating system paging out at all if there is free active memory?

Seems Mac OS can still page out even with free memory. Anyone claiming they are not getting page outs it BS'ing

Don't necessarily worry about page outs, worry about swap usage more.
 
That makes no sense at all. You either have a defective model or you are suffering from observational bias. There is no way that the 8GB is slower unless you are using more than 8GB of RAM. Please stop spreading misinformation.

They are both DDR3 1600MHz memory with what I am assuming the same timings.


It makes no sense at all, but zipzap seems to be right.. Got my 16/2.6/512 yesterday and the ui is butter smooth when swiping to the dashboard using integrated video, whereas my 8/2.6/512 had extreme screen tearing on the same ui animation when also using integrated.

Can't explain it as both have 512mb of video ram for the hd4000 graphics, and the tearing would happen on the 8g model when there was plenty of ram still available.

It's definitely not in my head, the screen tearing was the only ui issue that bothered me with the 8/2.6/512 unit. Maybe my old machine had a weak integrated graphics chip? Not sure, also both machines had/have the ml gm running (returned the 8g model to the store last night, would have liked to keep it longer for some side by side comparisons but it was already 2 weeks past the 14 day window so decided not to push it further)
 
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Can anyone suggest a good place to buy ram? I'm looking for pc3-8500 ddr3 1066 mhz type ram for an old MacBook Pro late 2008 model and don't want to spend too much on it. Thanks!
 
That makes no sense at all. You either have a defective model or you are suffering from observational bias. There is no way that the 8GB is slower unless you are using more than 8GB of RAM. Please stop spreading misinformation.

They are both DDR3 1600MHz memory with what I am assuming the same timings.

Well depending on how differently the 8GB vs 16GB systems are configured, there could be a couple things going on...

The 8GB might be physically using fewer RAM chips, and therefore perhaps running in single channel? I kinda doubt that though

Apple might simply be using higher quality chips for the 16GB systems.

I guess maybe we should do a few memory benchmarks... I've got a 2.6/16/512... If anyone has a preferred test, I'm willing to run it
 
Just upgraded to Mountain Lion and there is a serious memory leak in the new Safari causing it to use tons of memory. Just putting it out there in case it might sway some people toward the 16GB upgrade.
 
Just upgraded to Mountain Lion and there is a serious memory leak in the new Safari causing it to use tons of memory. Just putting it out there in case it might sway some people toward the 16GB upgrade.

This is a fine example of the intelligence powering the RAM whores argument.
 
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