Read John Siracusa's Mavericks review of the compressed memory technology here. It works quite well with no performance hit at all.
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Is 4GB ram enough for the new 13" rMBP?
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Read John Siracusa's Mavericks review of the compressed memory technology here. It works quite well with no performance hit at all.
Here's one.
I run 16GB on my 2011 uMBP-15 because I rely on a Windows VM to run Bloomberg Pro.
My wife ran 4GB on her 2011 uMBP-13 until I upgraded her to 8GB because she was paging out a lot (and thus running more slowly due to lack of available RAM). She's not a power user.
My kids run 4GB on their 2009 iMac - and it's just barely workable. The last OS that was really usable with 4GB without eliciting significant pageouts was Snow Leopard. My kids aren't power users. When I use their machine for even light tasks it's painful.
I haven't had Mavericks installed long enough on the kids computer to observe the pageouts (just installed last night) but it does use about 800MB more free memory from bootup with no full apps running than Mountain Lion did - meaning that it seems to have less even headroom than 10.7 and 10.8.
While pageouts are less of a problem with an SSD, they're still indicative of RAM shortage, and while Mavericks may compress RAM to avoid pageouts, that's still indicative of RAM shortage.
IMO Apple shouldn't be shipping (or have shipped) ANY computers running full versions of OSX 10.7, 10.8, or 10.9 with 4GB configurations - it's just not enough RAM for most users under those OSes. Yes light users can get away with it, but performance suffers - and it's definitely NOT a future-proofing configuration if you plan to own your laptop for more than a year or two.
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He mainly wants to browes the web, watch movies and listen to music.
He will still be apple to do this in ten years from now even with 1gb of ram.
Hell! He can do it on an ipod
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Youtube Video editing and photoshop is fine with 4gb.
Win8 in parallels is a whole different story.
One of the only times i would suggest getting 8gb.
16gb is for professionell video editing on the go and cgi.
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Thank you for sharing this.
I take it all these systems run on hdd drives.
I find it hard to believe that a 2009 imac with 4gb ram has trouble managing light tasks. My 2012 mac mini runs on 4gb/500gb hdd. I use it with multiple apps open and medium video editing without noticing the slightest lag. It has got a bootup time of approx. 25sec. which is alright.
A mba with 4gb and pcie ssd will definitly last you longer than a couple of years.
I have to add that I was always a big proponent of more RAM since I first noticed the huge difference after updating my AMD486 from 4mb to 8mb in 1994. But after I've been using macs with pcie ssd i doubt that ram will play such a big role in the future.
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Well once you mentioned Win8 and parallels, you'll want the 8gb of ram. I don't understand the posters here claiming the SSD 'fixes' ram problems. Yes, SSDs page faster, but it's still noticeably slower than having enough RAM in the first place. I wouldn routinely noticed when my memory was maxed out on my 2012 MBA 4gb machine when running VMs. I wouldn't tolerate 'beach balls' on a brand new laptop in 2013. You're also going to be wearing our your SSD faster, especially if that puny 128gb SSD on the base model is filled up. (SSDs need at least >10% free space for wear leveling) The only reason why Apple cut down the base model's memory is PROFIT. They can brag that they lowered the price of the base rMBP by $200, when in reality it's just $100. If the choice of Haswell forces the OP to get 4gb over 8gb of ram in an equivalent Ivy Bridge machine, then he should get the Ivy Bridge version. Especially if battery life isn't a priority. The base Haswell CPU is actually slower in many tests over the base Ivy Bridge CPU. Yeah, you're getting wireless AC and PCIE SSD, but those only really come into play if you're moving TB of data like editing HD movies.
Great summation.
I'm going to get last years model. I'm in the exact same position as OP.
Did you ever have any problems with your 13" rMBP? How is the battery life?
We put hybrids into both uMPBs and that makes a big difference. The 2009 iMac is still running an HDD so the penalty for pageouts is stiff. And yes, for the kids it's fine - though just barely. It would be painful for my wife, and I literally couldn't use it for my VM needs - I tried and it was like working on a C64 with 5.25in floppy.
As I said, it has been our experience that 4GB is just barely cutting it on the modern versions of OS X. Certainly Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell processors, memory compression, and a PCIe SSD will significantly lessen the "pageout penalty" effects, but as you can't upgrade the memory on the new laptops, going with 4GB would be a very poor choice indeed for longevity and/or resale.
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Regarding battery life, here's some results that I've tracked with my normal usage (mainly web browsing using Chrome, office apps, light video playing). My screen brightness was set to 12 "dots" and keyboard to 2 "dots".
2012 rMBP 13" MD212LL/A (Mountain Lion): 5:50
2013 MBA 13" MD760LL/A (Mountain Lion): 9:30
2013 MBA 13" MD760LL/A (Mavericks): 8:40
2013 rMBP 13 ME864LL/A (Mavericks): 6:30
2012 rMBP 13" MD212LL/A (Mountain Lion): 5:50
2013 MBA 13" MD760LL/A (Mountain Lion): 9:30
2013 MBA 13" MD760LL/A (Mavericks): 8:40
2013 rMBP 13 ME864LL/A (Mavericks): 6:30
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Oh, and by way of example I just did a fresh restart and opened up my browser (Firefox) with 2 tabs and no flash - free memory 12.75GB, meaning that the OS, one browser window and an (admittedly largish) assortment of menu apps are consuming 3.25GB RAM. That would be awfully tight on 4GB system - and that's not doing anything but running a bunch of relatively light menu apps and writing this post.
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Programs will take advantage of the free memory if its available. Just because you consume 3.25GB with 8GB total doesn't mean the same programs will use 3.25GB with 4GB total.
Base model. I updated my post to add the model numbers.
Even for my MacBook Air, Mavericks has not shown to help with battery life so far. But then again, I am browsing with Chrome and not Safari so I bet I take a 1/2 hour hit compared to Safari users.
interesting.
Seeing as you have both last year's version and the newest model, would you advise getting last year's model at all instead? I heard it had some problems, too.
I don't have last year's anymore, but had kept the record of my battery life. I am currently considering the late 2012 vs this new 2013 per this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1660004/
Most are voting for the newer version despite less RAM. From memory, they seem really about the same. But I do not know how Mavericks runs on the 2012 and what the battery life reports are on it with that OS.
SSDs do help, but you are putting way too much stock in SSDs. SSDs will not be replacing usage, RAM will always play a big role. RAM is hundreds of times faster then SSDs.
Having an SSD has nothing to do with how quickly you max out your RAM, it can improve performance once it's maxed out.
2GB of RAM for big Photoshop files is not I'm not enough. Let's do the math, I have Mavericks with:
Photoshop with a 80MB PSD open and Photoshop is using 740MB of RAM by itself. Add 420MB more to get to a 500MB PSD and your at 1.16GB.
The kernel is using 600MB.
If you have a iGPU let's say at minimum that would be another 100MB used.
I have safari with just six tabs open and it's using 750MB.
Finder is using 116MB (it has one window open).
Of course there is more to the OS than just the kernel and there will be other small things here and there, these are just the standouts.
Add it all up and you get ~2.7GB.
There's no major multitasking going on here, I added up far from all of the RAM being used. Your RAM usage estimations are off by quite a lot. Yes, some extra can go on the HD or SSD, but both are so much slower then RAM. Who wants to buy a new computer with no room for growth in the future and no way to upgrade.
I didnt do any math. I dont really pay any attention to how the memory is occupide.
The OS does this for me. I am not a computer scientist.
I know from experience that 2gb ram will let u do anything in photoshop.
At least with a mba that is.
My wife has been getting a little over 7 hours or so on her rMBP running Mavericks, with ML she was getting about 6 hours. So a net gain of a hour. Her usual uses are surfing on facebook/instagram/pinterest. However, chrome negates all Mavericks advantages. If she's running chrome she gets only about 5 hours on both 10.8 and 10.9. One more thing, BOTH Haswell and Ivy Bridge rMBP 13's lag on Mavericks when running any other resolution other than 'Best For Retina'. Confirmed at Apple store. At least Mavericks made both the 2012 rMBP 13/15 scroll much better than ML when running the standard rMBP res.
thanks for the info. Can't wait to get one
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wow. that battery life is insane
Hmmm... We all know how ACCURATE that number is... You have to use your laptop and physically time it. No reviewer worth his salt expects that number unless your laptop is sitting there idle with the brightness turned down to the first click. Apple loves to brag about battery life. If they expected the majority of their users to pull 14 hours of battery life they would be bragging about 14 hours on the rMBP, not 9 hours.
Hi,
I know that Photoshop and InDesign + Bridge aren't the most RAM intensive, but combined they can eat RAM like candy. Nevertheless it's Flash (in Safari) that's the worst - and the platforms my company used were based on Flash and Java mostly, thus being a pain in the a My business 2007 MBP (Core2Duo with 4GB RAM) was a nice machine, but it couldn't handle all of that (browsing over 100 .indd layouts via VPN in Bridge was enough to make it slow as hell), so I preferred to use my private machine as much as I could have.
So to answer your question:
yes I got a SSD - the used 15" MBP that I bought came with 2 SSDs (I know!), so I swapped one into the 13" Macbook and its 750GB HDD went into the 15".
I know I could have lived with 4 gigs of RAM, but like I said - it wasn't expensive. The local Apple reseller had a good offer for RAM and they didn't charge anything for the upgrade at that moment, so I went with it since I'm not so good with handling small objects.
At least now with 8GB of RAM I don't know what lag is - both on the 13" and 15" MBP
I know it's an overkill for now, but I plan to keep them for at least 3 more years, so I don't regret the money.So wouldn't you agree that an opinion put forth from ignorance would only mislead others?