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Is Yosemite running smooth on your 4GB MBA?

Pretty awesome to hear... I just ordered a 4gb Air from points I earned at work, sounds like at this point it's a draw as to whether I'll find it loaded with Mavericks or Yosemite...

I was thinking of sticking to Mavericks if I had the option, as similar speed related concerns have kept me from updating my 5s to 8 anyway (though I did update my iPad 2 , killed it, part of why I'm ordering the Air).

But based on what people are illustrating in this thread... Suppose I'll at least try it.
 
motrek said:
I think you're overlooking the obvious fact that 4GB is the BARE MINIMUM that you can buy these days, so it can only be good enough to do the bare minimum amount of work. ;)
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Because writing, listening to music, watching movies and browsing the web requires 8 or 16 gb of ram. That's about 90% of what I do on my Air. The other 10% includes light gaming, photoshop, Lightroom, AutoCAD and sketchUp modeling which can all be done comfortably with 4GB of memory.

And iOS devices allow you to edit 1080p video with only 1GB. So there's that.

Not all professionals need the top of the line spec.
 
I have a work-issued late 2010 MBA and a personal mid 2013, both with 4 gb RAM. Yosemite public beta was installed on the older machine when it came out and it ran with a few snags here and there (mostly 3rd party apps such as VPN software, some oddities with Safari early on). Things got better with each update during the beta period. MS Office suite always ran fine.

This machine now runs perfectly with the Yosemite release though the fan does come on a high level occasionally. Of course this machine does not support handoff, the bluetooth chipset is too old.

The 2013 personal machine runs perfectly under Yosemite as well but is obviously faster at most tasks. I run VMWare and Win 7 on the 2013 machine for AutoCAD and SolidWORKS, no issues. I do some light video editing on the 2013 (Garmin VIRB and Contour camera output) and run Aperture, as well as occasional Steam games like L4D2. Fast and smooth even at high video settings.

Perfectly happy with Yosemite performance on these devices. Have not experienced any of the issues reported here by others such as WiFi isssues.

Definitely a good experience with Yosemite on the 4gb machines.
 
joshlalonde said:
That makes very little sense. If you got 8GB RAM for a stupid reason like that, then..

RAM requirements do not scale directly with level of work being done. It depends on WHAT work you are doing. Specifically, your software requirements. More RAM in general might be a good thing, but a cute little response like that isn't going to cut it. But hey, you can waste your money all you want.
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:rolleyes:
 
joshlalonde said:
That makes very little sense. If you got 8GB RAM for a stupid reason like that, then..

RAM requirements do not scale directly with level of work being done. It depends on WHAT work you are doing. Specifically, your software requirements. More RAM in general might be a good thing, but a cute little response like that isn't going to cut it. But hey, you can waste your money all you want.
Click to expand...

Calm down Josh. I thought my post was already dripping with enough sarcasm that it would be obvious but just in case I put the emoticon. I guess even that didn't work.

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jdechko said:
Because writing, listening to music, watching movies and browsing the web requires 8 or 16 gb of ram. ...
Click to expand...

None of those things (or even all of them combined) require 8GB or 16GB of RAM. What makes you think they do? I do all of those things no problem on my MBA and Mac Mini which both have 4GB RAM.
 
motrek said:
None of those things (or even all of them combined) require 8GB or 16GB of RAM. What makes you think they do? I do all of those things no problem on my MBA and Mac Mini which both have 4GB RAM.
Click to expand...
You might consider that other peoples posts also drip with sarcasm ;)
 
motrek said:
I think you're overlooking the obvious fact that 4GB is the BARE MINIMUM that you can buy these days, so it can only be good enough to do the bare minimum amount of work. ;)
Click to expand...

I thought you needed a BARE MINIMUM of 8GB of ram to power on the machine, and if you need to use something like calculator or iMessage, 16GB is the BARE MINIMUM:cool:
 
Ehh, I'll chime in.

My Air 6,2 delivered with Mavericks... I was hoping it wouldn't, so I wouldn't know what to compare it to when I upgraded.

I upgraded Mavericks and all pre-installed apps, played around on Mavericks for a day without installing anything, mostly just playing on GarageBand/Pages/web... Took the plunge, everything's perfect, couldn't be happier with Yosemite :) 4gb.

(Although tbh the Mavericks design language is more appealing.)

Sigh of relief. Didn't want my brand new MacBook crippled out of the box. If there are performance issues, I'm apparently not going to see them with my level of use.
 
Danley said:
Sigh of relief. Didn't want my brand new MacBook crippled out of the box. If there are performance issues, I'm apparently not going to see them with my level of use.
Click to expand...
Don't know why people believe that :apple: is going to sell them a >1k$ laptop that is crippled out of the box.
 
motrek said:
Calm down Josh. I thought my post was already dripping with enough sarcasm that it would be obvious but just in case I put the emoticon. I guess even that didn't work.

----------



None of those things (or even all of them combined) require 8GB or 16GB of RAM. What makes you think they do? I do all of those things no problem on my MBA and Mac Mini which both have 4GB RAM.
Click to expand...

Funny how you quote one person saying you were being sarcastic when the second person you quoted was also being sarcastic.
 
Moderately positive assessments here, which is encouraging.

My MBA6,2 (2013-13"-Haswell-4GB-256GB) came with 10.8.x and the upgrade to 10.9.x was fine, except:

-it occasionally refuses to come out of sleep mode, requiring a reboot to get going again

-the keyboard's back-lights no longer work. Anybody else have that problem?

I am kind of hoping that updating to 10.10 will rectify these issues, but previous experience with OSX/iOS have taught me that they usually come with a performance hit.
 
Meister said:
Don't know why people believe that :apple: is going to sell them a >1k$ laptop that is crippled out of the box.
Click to expand...

You'd think not. But they still sell the 5s new, and while significantly that phone is not a $1k laptop, from what I understand the new iOS performance is sub what it was under iOS 7 . My paranoia emerges around similar Apple and non-Apple scenarios.

My backlights work fine.
 
Danley said:
You'd think not. But they still sell the 5s new, and while significantly that phone is not a $1k laptop, from what I understand the new iOS performance is sub what it was under iOS 7 . My paranoia emerges around similar Apple and non-Apple scenarios.
...
Click to expand...

iOS 8 might be slower than iOS 7 but that doesn't mean it's slow.

I have an iPhone 5S and it runs iOS 8 no problem at all. The performance is excellent. I would have no problem telling somebody to buy a 5S new.

Also, BTW, does anybody have any reason to believe that Yosemite would be slower than Mavericks? Why wouldn't it be faster? Apple has done a bunch of OS X releases that improve performance, e.g., Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard. Why do so many people seem to expect performance to be unacceptable on current, brand new Macs, not to mention ones that are only a few years old and have 2GB of RAM?
 
motrek said:
iOS 8 might be slower than iOS 7 but that doesn't mean it's slow.

I have an iPhone 5S and it runs iOS 8 no problem at all. The performance is excellent. I would have no problem telling somebody to buy a 5S new.

Also, BTW, does anybody have any reason to believe that Yosemite would be slower than Mavericks? Why wouldn't it be faster? Apple has done a bunch of OS X releases that improve performance, e.g., Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard. Why do so many people seem to expect performance to be unacceptable on current, brand new Macs, not to mention ones that are only a few years old and have 2GB of RAM?
Click to expand...

Well, experience has taught me differently.

1) My 2007 iMac felt pretty quick on Tiger and Snow Leopard. Lion turned it into a swamp of molasses.

2) My 2009 MacPro was blazing fast with SnowLeopard. It still performs well with Mountain Lion but it's noticeably slower, which is confirmed by a 600-700 lower Geekbench score.

3) My iPhone 3GS was plenty snappy with iOS4, felt similarly snappy with iOS5, but iOS6 has made it almost unusable.

4) My 2013 MacBookAir feels about the same with Mavericks (shipped with Mountain Lion), but the update disabled my keyboard's back-lights, and now the computer won't come out of sleep mode, requiring a restart.

So excuse me if I'm not all that optimistic about updating.

I bought an iPhone 5S (32GB) yesterday, and while it is nice enough, it is not the speed monster I was expecting. Not to mention I can no longer use my old wallpaper and self-made ringtones.
 
zephonic said:
Well, experience has taught me differently.
...
Click to expand...

I didn't say that new versions are always faster and always better and never have any bugs.

I said that sometimes new versions of OS X are faster than old versions, so I don't know why it's automatically assumed that Yosemite is slower and requires more memory than Mavericks. (i.e., all the questions about "is 4GB enough to run Yosemite etc." ... of course it is.)
 
It's the same argument every time. If Apple doesn't update, then they get complaints that they aren't supporting equipment that could handle it. When the older equipment is supported but runs slowly, people get mad that Apple messed up their perfectly good machine.

There are people on both sides that think it's a conspiracy by Apple to get you to upgrade sooner.

Either way, it's a no-win situation for Apple.
 
I'm not holding it against Apple. Practically, realistically? I basically bought the lowest spec. new Mac that I possibly could in getting a 4gb, Core i5 11" MacBook Air. It shipped with Mavericks and it ran fine on Mavericks. If I had to stick with Mavericks to get decent performance, I happily would have continued to do so.

I wouldn't blame Apple either way. But as a realist, I just wanted my machine to run well, considering it's not the most top spec Apple made, and Yosemite covers a broad range of system specs.

Glad I can run the latest OS. Won't be surprised if the next one gets slow. Will probably be ready to happily get a new Macbook.
 
Danley said:
I'm not holding it against Apple. Practically, realistically? I basically bought the lowest spec. new Mac that I possibly could in getting a 4gb, Core i5 11" MacBook Air. It shipped with Mavericks and it ran fine on Mavericks. If I had to stick with Mavericks to get decent performance, I happily would have continued to do so.

I wouldn't blame Apple either way. But as a realist, I just wanted my machine to run well, considering it's not the most top spec Apple made, and Yosemite covers a broad range of system specs.

Glad I can run the latest OS. Won't be surprised if the next one gets slow. Will probably be ready to happily get a new Macbook.
Click to expand...

Don't worry, your MBA will be able to run the latest and greatest software no problem for years to come.

OS X memory requirements have stayed relatively stable. They switched from 1GB to 2GB five years ago. If it takes them 5+ years to use an extra gigabyte, then your 4GB is good to go for the next 10+ years.

Also, processor performance has more or less plateaued over the last 4-5 years and there's not much reason to believe that processors in the next 4-5 years will be much faster than what you have now. Lower power, certainly, but not much faster, and that's what matters re: which software you're able to run.

Also, I'm not aware of any technical differences/abilities between your MBA and, say, a maxed-out 13" rMPB that might prevent you from upgrading your software later on. The reason most people can't upgrade to a current version of OS X is because they have a Mac with a 32-bit EFI which Apple stopped supporting. No such issues with current products that I'm aware of.

So, rest assured that you bought a nice laptop that will last you a long time. No need to worry about whether or not you should have bought upgrades or whatever.
 
Early 2014 / i5 / 4gb / 128gb

Yosemite is fine. I get the occasional beachball but only because I'm crap and probably doing something wrong.
 
bchreng said:
I realize there are threads regarding Yosemite and the Macbook Air, but this one is for a more specific model. I own a mid-2013 i5 13" with 4GB of system memory and was wondering if Yosemite runs as smooth as Mavericks does. Can any fellow owners out there chime in with their thoughts? Is there any sort of lag or delay in the animations?

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Sure it does, even on my Mid 2010 Macbook Air. So you should be in an even better shape.
 
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