I know I am beating a dead horse, but people who just surf the web and do light task will never see the benefit of 8gb ram. If you game or video edit, get it though.
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8GB vs 4GB on new Haswells?
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I know I am beating a dead horse, but people who just surf the web and do light task will never see the benefit of 8gb ram. If you game or video edit, get it though.
I have 4GB in my 2011 Air. I use iTunes, iPhoto, Safari, Chrome, Lightroom, Numbers, Pages, and watch 1080p movies connected to my 50" plasma. I have yet to feel the need for more RAM.
I never beachball even with "only" 4GB. My Macbook's uptime is 11 days right now, and I only have 99.5 MB page outs. I feel that the AVERAGE MBA user will be perfectly fine with 4GB. Apple wants the customers to have a good experience with their products and would not have 4GB on the $1300 model if it was inadequate.
I have 8GB in my desktop and it is overkill. Even gaming and photoshop could easily make do with 4GB. I know people are going to tell me I'm wrong, but I am only speaking from MY personal experience.
Maybe its because I'm in the habit of quitting programs when they're not in use instead of "clicking the red dot". I can't stand "apple-tabbing" and seeing a bunch of open apps I am not using. I also don't use VM's since I have Win7 on my desktop. Having said that, my MBA really is my "main" machine. I keep all my photos on it, music, etc. Desktop is rarely used, mainly web surfing on its bigger screen.
I never beachball even with "only" 4GB. My Macbook's uptime is 11 days right now, and I only have 99.5 MB page outs. I feel that the AVERAGE MBA user will be perfectly fine with 4GB. Apple wants the customers to have a good experience with their products and would not have 4GB on the $1300 model if it was inadequate.
I have 8GB in my desktop and it is overkill. Even gaming and photoshop could easily make do with 4GB. I know people are going to tell me I'm wrong, but I am only speaking from MY personal experience.
Maybe its because I'm in the habit of quitting programs when they're not in use instead of "clicking the red dot". I can't stand "apple-tabbing" and seeing a bunch of open apps I am not using. I also don't use VM's since I have Win7 on my desktop. Having said that, my MBA really is my "main" machine. I keep all my photos on it, music, etc. Desktop is rarely used, mainly web surfing on its bigger screen.
I use my 2010 MBA mainly to surf the web, no video editting or gaming. But I always have 30-40 tabs open in Chrome and I found 4GB RAM (yes I did upgrade the RAM already) NOT enough, i.e. it's getting lots of page-ins and outs.
So for my next MBA 2013, I'm getting 8GB RAM. 13" MBA is now US$100 cheaper, which means free upgrade of RAM! No brainer for me.
This is true. If you're going to mainly be doing stuff that an iPad can handle, and light weight content creation, 4GB will be fine. If you will be doing any windows virtualization and/or think you may get into a few games here and there, the extra 4GB and $100 is a worthwhile investment.
Apple wants customers to shell out money for their upgrade options while still being able to advertise "low" entry prices. They have a long history of skimping on RAM on their entry-level computers. They sold "new" Macs with only 2GB of (non-upgradeable) RAM until ...only a year ago.
The fact that overall experience is considerably mitigated by the Air's SSD performance doesn't mean that one wouldn't benefit from getting more RAM.
Having similar number of tabs open in Safari ("Safari" & "Safari web content" processes) currently use a combined 1.6GB of RAM on my machine.
I think I disagree, we are the only freaks here trying to get a millisecond there and a nanosecond here, Apple does not make money with us, they make money with the tons of average customers that walk into the store and get the base models, of course they will throw some BTO outrageous prices on upgrades for us freaks to spend countless hours in a forum checking how to get that ultimate speed paying the ultimate price.
Yeah Chrome is a RAM HOG. This is true on all OS's it's on.
The reason I wish I could have 16gb of ram is usually to fuel my obsession with keeping Chrome tabs open
The reason I wish I could have 16gb of ram is usually to fuel my obsession with keeping Chrome tabs open
Lol! I had to look up & count my tabs when you said that - 14! Before too long I'm going to have to stretch it across multiple monitors!
27.4 GB !? DAT Page outs! IF i remember correctly from my Computer Architecture class, this is by far the biggest slowdown your computer can have. Page outs to disk are extremely expensive! If you were getting this, You definitely needed more RAM, however your Page in/ out ratio wasn't bad.
I say 8GB to make it future proof, and even if you sell it after a year, that $100 invested in Ram will retain at least $90 IMO.
1 year may be fine but I guess sin 3-4years nobody will want a non-upgradeable 4gb laptop.
Too bad you can't properly benchmark the difference between 4GB/8GB. In theory it makes sense that more is better though, it should lead to less swapping out to disk, which in turn will give a more responsive system.
This is noticed when going back to a memory hungry program that has been swapped out to disk. This will be noticed by some lag when the application waits for the swapped out data to be put back into memory. Not as annoying now that we have fast SSD, but not as smooth as it could be.
Don't think that your system won't be swapping out just because you only run Safari, or even if you have upgraded to 8GB. Inactive memory will at some point be swapped out, even if you have lots of available memory. I believe the logic behind this is that in the past, unused/inactive RAM would be better used as filesystem I/O cache. With fast SSD and plenty of RAM you should be able to disable swapping completely, and that should make your 8GB system shine:
http://superuser.com/questions/460658/why-os-x-use-swap-when-there-is-lots-of-inactive-memory
If you are the type of user that aren't sensitive to a few lags/jerks when multitasking between apps, then maybe 4GB is ok for you. But considering the points that have been made in this thread, like future-proofing and the low $100 price tag, it shouldn't be a difficult choice. Personally I went for the 8GB and not for the i7, even if I have the money for both. Turning off swap should be more noticeable for day to day use than the few % of increased CPU power.
This is noticed when going back to a memory hungry program that has been swapped out to disk. This will be noticed by some lag when the application waits for the swapped out data to be put back into memory. Not as annoying now that we have fast SSD, but not as smooth as it could be.
Don't think that your system won't be swapping out just because you only run Safari, or even if you have upgraded to 8GB. Inactive memory will at some point be swapped out, even if you have lots of available memory. I believe the logic behind this is that in the past, unused/inactive RAM would be better used as filesystem I/O cache. With fast SSD and plenty of RAM you should be able to disable swapping completely, and that should make your 8GB system shine:
http://superuser.com/questions/460658/why-os-x-use-swap-when-there-is-lots-of-inactive-memory
If you are the type of user that aren't sensitive to a few lags/jerks when multitasking between apps, then maybe 4GB is ok for you. But considering the points that have been made in this thread, like future-proofing and the low $100 price tag, it shouldn't be a difficult choice. Personally I went for the 8GB and not for the i7, even if I have the money for both. Turning off swap should be more noticeable for day to day use than the few % of increased CPU power.
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Well... I got 4GB (installed myself) RAM on the early 2008 White Macbook I'm typing on right now, and back then that was 'overkill', but I wouldn't have lasted this long without it.
Do you think 8GB of RAM is going to be a ridiculous amount in 4 or even 5.5 years from now? As the Air doesn't have user replaceable RAM, if you're planning on using Air for 3 years or longer, just cough up the $100 to future proof yourself.
Do you think 8GB of RAM is going to be a ridiculous amount in 4 or even 5.5 years from now? As the Air doesn't have user replaceable RAM, if you're planning on using Air for 3 years or longer, just cough up the $100 to future proof yourself.
This. A few years from now when you're installing OSX 11, do you really think you'll be saying "Sure glad I saved that $100 and got 4GB memory..."
I dunno about you guys, but there's no way I'd want to use a computer from 3-4 years ago that only has whatever the minimum was at the time.
That is not going to be me, the guy that get my computer next year will be saying that, I'll be on my new redesigned 56 hour battery life magicalutionary Macbook air
That is not going to be me, the guy that get my computer next year will be saying that, I'll be on my new redesigned 56 hour battery life magicalutionary Macbook air
Haha, fair enough. I'd still rather not have the bare minimum at any given time when it comes to RAM. 4GB is about the bare minimum right now, I'd say.
I know, I'm joking, I think the best config (for my own purposes) is going to be i5/8gb/256ssd