I chose the 16GB upgrade because I found 8GB kind of low on my current machine. I wish I could have upped it to 32GB but that would have been insanely expensive. Do they even make single ram chips that large for laptops? Although I suppose the old "slots" terminology is gone with Apple attaching everything directly to the motherboard. I guess the only limiting factor is the Ivy Bridge chipset. Not sure but I believe Sandy Bridge maxed out at 16GB. This is my typical load:
- Photoshop CS6 with 30-50 docs open
- Illustrator CS6 with 5-10 docs open
- InDesign CS6 with 1-3 docs open
- Acrobat Pro with 3-5 docs open
- Firefox with 100-150 tabs open
- Chrome with 10-20 tabs open
- Safari with 10-20 tabs open
- Coda 2 with 20-30 tabs open
- Twitter with 3 user account tabs / Trillian with Google Talk
- Mail, iMessages, App Store, etc
- Finder with 5-10 open windows + Forklift FTP
- Lots of background processes / widgets / tweaks like Magic Prefs, Dropbox, Moom, Dropzone, Cloud App, smcFanControl, Growl, VPN clients, etc
- Rdio, Pandora or iTunes playing in the background
- Sometimes I whip together animations in After Effects CS6, a quick 3D model in Lightwave or edit a fast video in Premiere Pro CS6, but not too often. The speedy new 512GB SSD on my new machine should help with the scratch disk though.
- Sometimes I also run Microsoft Office apps—especially if a client put all their copy in a word file, or if I'm computing costs or other figures in Excel.
Haha, and before someone tells me I don't run all this—I do. I have degrees in graphic design, photography, and marketing. I'm always overloaded with so much stuff! Furthermore I code all my sites by hand and test them in different browsers. I also have a Dell Inspiron sitting next to me running Internet Explorer so I can test in there, and sometimes I'm even running Adobe Shadow so I can test sites on my iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. I hope to cut out the Inspiron though—perhaps with this extra ram I can put together a small virtual machine running Win 7 in it's own space. That would be nice! The reason I have so many docs open in Photoshop is I usually make my website mockups in there and then pull it apart to get all the different pieces. I'm always tweaking effects on different parts, like shadows, gradients, strokes, etc and resaving for web and uploading. Then there are some parts or logos I'm tweaking in Illustrator. InDesign I sometimes have to tweak PDF files or come up with documentation and then I check them over and optimize them in Acrobat Pro. Not to mention I often do my own photography for a client, so I'm editing RAW files from my 7D in the mix. I use 8 desktop spaces to keep things organized. CS6 apps generally get their own space (except Acrobat Pro—usually in the Finder space). Then I have Coda 2 in a space, several Finder windows in another space, my "social" space that has Twitter, Trillian, Mail and iMessages, Firefox in it's own space, and then Chrome and Safari share a space for testing.
So no, for me 16 gigs is not overkill! LOL.
P.S. The 500MB/s SSD in this beast is almost like ram itself, haha! Ok I know that's a stretch, but still. Caching to that thing is going to be great. So even when the 16GB gets full it can offload to a large, speedy SSD.
