i5 with 4Gb or 8Gb of Ram

[CirrusPilot]

On an i5 MBP, is it worth the extra $100 to get 8Gb?

I don't do anything intense with the computer (just normal grad school work). No photoshop, no video editing, no music production.

 

[GGJstudios]

On an i5 MBP, is it worth the extra $100 to get 8Gb?

I don't do anything intense with the computer (just normal grad school work). No photoshop, no video editing, no music production.

4GB would likely suffice for your needs. At any rate, unless you're getting the retina MBP (in which you can't upgrade RAM after purchase), don't buy added RAM from Apple, as they overcharge for it.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

 

[T5BRICK]

On an i5 MBP, is it worth the extra $100 to get 8Gb?

I don't do anything intense with the computer (just normal grad school work). No photoshop, no video editing, no music production.

You'll be fine with 4GB.

Since your asking in the MBP forum youre not looking at buying a MBA, and you also mentioned 4GB as an option, I know you're not buying a rMBP, you can always upgrade the current cMBP models later.