That reminds me of Bill Gates saying that 640K of RAM is enough for everyone forever.
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Is 4GB ram enough for the new 13" rMBP?
- Thread starter Nilok64
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That reminds me of Bill Gates saying that 640K of RAM is enough for everyone forever.
Here's my take on this issue.
Disclaimer: All my Macs are SSD-equipped. I also try not to page out RAM to the SSD because SSDs have finite cycles of writes.
4GB of RAM:
I won a 13" base rMBP in a raffle, and tried to install Microsoft Office in it (I need Excel). The base package installation went fine, but when I tried to open Excel, an out-of-memory warning appeared and I had to free up RAM with FreeMemory before being able to open it.
If you're doing nothing more than word processing and web browsing, with iTunes in the background, 4GB is fine.
8GB of RAM:
Before I upgraded my 2011 15" MBP to 16GB of RAM, it came with 8GB of RAM. This is perfectly fine for just about any usage except running multiple virtual machines or a single virtual machine with quite some RAM assigned to it. Video editing with CGI isn't fine on this either (unless you're okay with paging out RAM to the SSD, but I'm not okay with that).
For a smooth Windows experience to make it operate like a native Windows system, I assign at least 4GB of RAM to it and 4 threads of my CPU (which translates to 2 physical cores).
8GB of RAM should last you for 5 years or more if you only intend to use a VM with 2GB of RAM assigned to it, or having Photoshop or perhaps FCP X with nothing much running in the background.
16GB of RAM:
Most people say that this is overkill, but I've come to appreciate the benefits of having 16GB of RAM. Besides allowing me to run Windows Server and Fedora together (4GB and 2GB of RAM assigned to each respectively), it doesn't page out either with a light Photoshop task in the OS X side.
To reduce the writes to my SSD, I also use tmpdisk to create RAM disks as an extremely fast scratch disk to work on Photoshop files and video.
Both my 2011 15" MBP and 15" rMBP (Haswell with GT750M) have 16GB of RAM.
Disclaimer: All my Macs are SSD-equipped. I also try not to page out RAM to the SSD because SSDs have finite cycles of writes.
4GB of RAM:
I won a 13" base rMBP in a raffle, and tried to install Microsoft Office in it (I need Excel). The base package installation went fine, but when I tried to open Excel, an out-of-memory warning appeared and I had to free up RAM with FreeMemory before being able to open it.
If you're doing nothing more than word processing and web browsing, with iTunes in the background, 4GB is fine.
8GB of RAM:
Before I upgraded my 2011 15" MBP to 16GB of RAM, it came with 8GB of RAM. This is perfectly fine for just about any usage except running multiple virtual machines or a single virtual machine with quite some RAM assigned to it. Video editing with CGI isn't fine on this either (unless you're okay with paging out RAM to the SSD, but I'm not okay with that).
For a smooth Windows experience to make it operate like a native Windows system, I assign at least 4GB of RAM to it and 4 threads of my CPU (which translates to 2 physical cores).
8GB of RAM should last you for 5 years or more if you only intend to use a VM with 2GB of RAM assigned to it, or having Photoshop or perhaps FCP X with nothing much running in the background.
16GB of RAM:
Most people say that this is overkill, but I've come to appreciate the benefits of having 16GB of RAM. Besides allowing me to run Windows Server and Fedora together (4GB and 2GB of RAM assigned to each respectively), it doesn't page out either with a light Photoshop task in the OS X side.
To reduce the writes to my SSD, I also use tmpdisk to create RAM disks as an extremely fast scratch disk to work on Photoshop files and video.
Both my 2011 15" MBP and 15" rMBP (Haswell with GT750M) have 16GB of RAM.
Wait...what? See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6oaUJPZKNc.
Also, the limited write cycles for SSDs, especially MLC SSDs, is irrelevant. This is documented in multiple places. The lifetime of the SSD will typically outlast the life of the machine in almost all scenarios.
The Air isn't a retina Pro. Iris will use up more system memory on the RMBP than the HD5000 on an Air because it needs more VRAM to drive the retina display.
I have read a lot of posts about the need or advisability of buying a new Macbook Pro with 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM, and reading many different opinions.
Obviously everyone's needs are different, but my interest was in the idea of "future-proofing". So I decided to see how well future proofing worked in the past.
So I checked out the dates each version of OS X appeared and the minimum and recommended RAM for each one. Graphing these up showed some interesting facts:
The graphs are exponential (i.e. they plot as straight lines with the GB axis shown as logarithmic), with RAM doubling about every 2.5 years.
The gap between "Recommended" and "minimum" is also about 2.5 years (because the recommended is generally double the minimum).
Thus, if you want to get 5 years life out of your Macbook Pro, you need to get about double the recommended RAM or 4 times the minimum.
However these conclusions come with a big proviso - that you want to keep upgrading your OS whenever a new version is released (and presumably upgrade your other software too).
If you are willing to work within the capabilities of the OS and software you use when you buy your Macbook Pro, then it will become unusable much more slowly, but eventually it will be impossible. This is for several reasons:
Most of us connect to the internet, and as time goes on, websites, video formats, etc, upgrade their requirements, and eventually an old OS and browser cannot cope.
Likewise, most of us receive emails from friends with attachments, and gradually these attachments cannot be opened using an old OS and the software that goes with it.
(I have been using an old eMac with 640 MB RAM running Tiger for almost 10 years. It still works, allows us to use the internet and emails, but now it cannot play video or open lots of email attachments, and we cannot upgrade the relevant software because the Mac can't cope with it.)
So we can draw another approximate conclusion from my graph - if you are willing to stay with the same OS, you'll probably get a maximum of about 7 years out of your Mac if you start with the recommended RAM, and about 9 years if you double the recommended RAM - if other things don't fall down in the meantime.
Applying this information from past performance to the future is doubtful. Perhaps the technology will change completely (not just quantitatively) in the future, perhaps RAM specs will hit some brick wall like CPU speed did, who knows? But the past is the only guide we have, so I hope this info might assist somebody.
My conclusion in a nutshell:
1. If you're happy to upgrade to a new Mac every 2-3 years, get the recommended RAM for your usage.
2. If you want to keep upgrading the OS and want to replace your Mac every 5 years, buy 4x the minimum RAM or double the recommended RAM for your usage.
3. If you are happy to stay with the same OS and want to only upgrade to a new Mac when absolutely necessary, get double the minimum RAM at least.
For most users therefore, 8 GB will be fine if 2 GB is considered the minimum and 4 GB is the recommended, but if you need more than 4 GB now, get 16 GB for the future.
Obviously everyone's needs are different, but my interest was in the idea of "future-proofing". So I decided to see how well future proofing worked in the past.
So I checked out the dates each version of OS X appeared and the minimum and recommended RAM for each one. Graphing these up showed some interesting facts:
The graphs are exponential (i.e. they plot as straight lines with the GB axis shown as logarithmic), with RAM doubling about every 2.5 years.
The gap between "Recommended" and "minimum" is also about 2.5 years (because the recommended is generally double the minimum).
Thus, if you want to get 5 years life out of your Macbook Pro, you need to get about double the recommended RAM or 4 times the minimum.
However these conclusions come with a big proviso - that you want to keep upgrading your OS whenever a new version is released (and presumably upgrade your other software too).
If you are willing to work within the capabilities of the OS and software you use when you buy your Macbook Pro, then it will become unusable much more slowly, but eventually it will be impossible. This is for several reasons:
Most of us connect to the internet, and as time goes on, websites, video formats, etc, upgrade their requirements, and eventually an old OS and browser cannot cope.
Likewise, most of us receive emails from friends with attachments, and gradually these attachments cannot be opened using an old OS and the software that goes with it.
(I have been using an old eMac with 640 MB RAM running Tiger for almost 10 years. It still works, allows us to use the internet and emails, but now it cannot play video or open lots of email attachments, and we cannot upgrade the relevant software because the Mac can't cope with it.)
So we can draw another approximate conclusion from my graph - if you are willing to stay with the same OS, you'll probably get a maximum of about 7 years out of your Mac if you start with the recommended RAM, and about 9 years if you double the recommended RAM - if other things don't fall down in the meantime.
Applying this information from past performance to the future is doubtful. Perhaps the technology will change completely (not just quantitatively) in the future, perhaps RAM specs will hit some brick wall like CPU speed did, who knows? But the past is the only guide we have, so I hope this info might assist somebody.
My conclusion in a nutshell:
1. If you're happy to upgrade to a new Mac every 2-3 years, get the recommended RAM for your usage.
2. If you want to keep upgrading the OS and want to replace your Mac every 5 years, buy 4x the minimum RAM or double the recommended RAM for your usage.
3. If you are happy to stay with the same OS and want to only upgrade to a new Mac when absolutely necessary, get double the minimum RAM at least.
For most users therefore, 8 GB will be fine if 2 GB is considered the minimum and 4 GB is the recommended, but if you need more than 4 GB now, get 16 GB for the future.
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Great. Thanks for establishing you don't fully understand what you're talking about. The difference in VRAM usage will not cause a user to get an "out of memory" message. You know, I don't even see the point in trying to explain to you. The fact that you actually use "Memory Cleaners" demonstrates clearly enough that you don't understand the concept of RAM.
I have heard this before and it is such a joke. My 2010 Macbook pro was running great with 4G memory until the day I ungraded to Mavericks. I eventually gave up and upgraded to 8Gb and it is so much better got rid of the frequent beachballs.
Obviously. But that does not mean you'd be out of memory simply by opening a MS Office program. Also, is the RAM data your work?
Intel Iris featured on the 13" MacBook Pro's can use upto 1024Mb of RAM as graphics memory. Even though the MacBook Air has roughly quarter of the resolution, the Intel 5000 can still use upto 1024Mb of RAM. That video that was shown above was pushing the system so at a guess, the Intel 5000 was most likly consuming 1Gb of RAM. The MacBook Pro, would be able to consume the same max amount (but doing less due to the increase in screen res.) so the RAM doesn't matter. If a MacBook Pro has 8Gb of RAM, the GPU will still only be able to use 1Gb of that as graphics memory.
In the past two days of using my new rMBP I haven't come to a point where I felt like I needed more RAM. I typically run 5-6 tabs in Chrome, a music app, and sometimes another few random apps. Alas, I'm not a heavy user and upgrade my computer every 2 years or so.
I really didn't need you to explain that. I'm well aware that most recent MacBooks, with integrated graphics, dynamically use up to 1024MB of video memory. And I don't do assumptions, I work with evidence; provide evidence regarding VRAM usage. You can't just assume that it's using max VRAM because more programs happen to be running. Also, the point, in reference to other poster, was that the retina Macbook Pro, with 4GB RAM, does not run out of memory as easily as claimed by that poster.
Sorry, that was meant to be posted in reply to the person you were arguing with. I'm on your side.
Personally I think that for the basic user (whom uses there Laptop for Web browsing, watching videos, viewing pictures, sending emails...), 4Gb of RAM is defiantly enough. For today though, I must add. We don't know what tomorrow brings so it would be best to go with it as £160 for a RAM upgrade is a lot less than £1249 for a new MacBook Pro. Personally though, for such a user as described above, I don't think the MacBook Pro is for them anyway.
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You have really created the Moores Law of RAM you know
You have really created the Moores Law of RAM you know
Funny enough, I want to see what that poster has to say about the fact that there's another poster who provided similar observations and used the same graphs as evidence. Here's a thread with similar information, but by a different poster: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1686227/
I already read the other thread (post 2 or 3 comments on it), I thought that was the thread starter lol looks like we have a post stealer on our hands
FWIW, I recently upgraded the kid's 2009 iMac to a mid 2010 model and installed an extra 4GB to total 8GB. Made a world of difference. Surely some of the extra speed and responsiveness is down to the upgrade to Core i3 from C2D, but probably not that much of it since the kids don't ever really do any processor intensive work. HDD speed is the same 5400 as the old machine. The extra memory did the trick.
We also occasionally experienced the above on the old 2009 iMac with 4GB RAM. Problem has been banished on the 2010 iMac with 8GB RAM.
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