If I don't do anything taxing...

Don't bother OS X handles ram brilliantly by using as much as it can to keep your Mac running as fast as possible clearing ram will just slow it down, unused ram is wasted ram.

 

Yes. But you can also put it on your menu bar. It then gives you a %age of memory use. And when you click on it you can see total memory being used(right now its 6.14 gb for me and I'm running Activity Monitor, Safari, and iMovie only), amount of junk files and cpu usage and network usage. You can manually optimize for memory and removal of junk files. I got it from the Apple Store for free.

--- Post Merged, Mar 1, 2017 ---

I have not found that to be the case. The problem is that after the application closes, the RAM is still tied up. My old copy of iMovie use to tie up gads of RAM and then when I closed it down it was still tied up. Dr Cleaner will remove that. I agree that unless you are running out of RAM, or Virtual pulls are becoming excessive, you should not optimize in the middle of an application. I still have a bit of problem with that in my 12 gb iMac, but not yet in my 16gb MBP.

 

It isn't actually tied up (wired) though. It's flagged as inactive memory by the system, which means that the system knows it's not being used, but it decides to not free it up anyway, since you might want to open the app again soon, and having all the data already in RAM will make that faster. Now granted, there is a small performance deficit when the system first has to free up inactive memory to reallocate it to something else, but in general that performance drop is outweighed by the speedup you get from when the caching system does what it's supposed to, and accurately predicts your future data usage.

 

Yes, you are right. You know much more than I do. I am basing only on my experience

I can compare my Thinkpad T410s (14") with 8 GB RAM (upgraded from 4GB). This is BTO laptop has decent specs: i5 CPU and 128GB SSD (Win7 Pro x64), WWAN - cost me +2000 EUR. When this Thinkpad was less than one year old it was replaced by MacBook Air 11" with 4GB + 128GB (Lion) which was way faster to work with similar tasks (bought it for 850 EUR brand new). This MacBook Air was the first one I bought (initially only for couch surfing!).

After experiencing MacOSX I never ever looked back. Only this Thinkpad is sitting there on the shelf (not used for last +4 years). I charge it from time to time and trust me it is now completely unusable (fresh copy of Win7 x64!). It is now dead slowwwww. My MacBook Air which I passed to one of family members is still going strong... This is why I think Windows is crap. I love Thinkpad and admire their keyboard and sturdiness. Mac is a better package - no matter what price.

You draw your own conclusions from my story.

In my opinion final experience for user is always superposition of hardware + software (it is not just hardware specs!). From my observations PC nowadays could only compete with Mac by stuffing more CPU and/or RAM, hoping that user will hook up - especially "specs collectors".

 

I fundamentally agree with you, and find this particularly evident when comparing Final Cut Pro to Premiere on similar hardware (both Windows v Mac and both on Mac). Apple's Final Cut Pro X, can render 4k video on the bloody MacBook, at a comparable speed to Premiere on a high-end iMac with a 4GHz i7. Or at least roughly similar time frames. Now if that doesn't say it all, I don't know what does.

That said however, I actually have a lot of respect for the way Microsoft coded Windows too. In the areas I find important, and evidently the areas you find important, macOS is supreme, but Windows does have its advantages. Some very major in fact. For instance the graphics API for 3D rendering. Now for ages, Apple has been stuck with OpenGL 4.1 and recently Metal too, whilst Windows has OpenGL 4.5, Vulkan, DirectX11, and DirectX 12, every single one of them beating both Metal and OpenGL 4.1 on Mac in terms of performance. Now granted, Metal can probably run faster than DX11 and OpenGL 4.5, but with the optimisation through the entire stack, from GPU vendor to game developer, the Windows side of things beats the Mac on performance in this aspect. Windows also supports SpeedShift for new Intel CPUs which Apple still hasn't implemented, even though it could improve both responsiveness and battery life. I could go on, but the point is that both operating systems have pros and cons, and whilst I'd say macOS is the definitive winner any day of the week, if all you care about with your PC is video games... Well, Windows wins hands down. Or if you need to run an Active Directory server, albeit again, if Macs had more customisable hardware, I think they'd make for better servers too, purely on the basis of the Unix shell. Though Linux gets the best of both worlds on that

Anyhow, I've started just rambling now.

 

Could start a business hosting servers with Mac Minis and do pretty well.

Oh wait, someone already is:

https://www.macstadium.com/

 

Well, did say they were good, though for general purpose I don't think you'll dispute the benefit of an open server platform and Linux. Allows more in terms of redundancy and servicing.