Macbook Air with 4 GB RAM?

[Macnoviz]

My girlfriend is looking to buy a new laptop, and thinking of buying an Air. There's currently a promotion going on at a local electronics store with a 20% discount, which is huge for Apple products, but there's a catch: they can't be built to order. That means it would be the stock 4 GB version, in either 128 GB or 256 GB.

Our question is: will 4 GB be enough for the next 2-3 years, considering the laptop will be mainly used for chrome, mail, IM, and watching movies with VLC?


Also:
We're thinking of getting the 128 GB version, since the SSD (unlike the RAM) is upgradeable. Does anyone have experience with upgrading the SSD in a 2014 MB Air?

 

[charlyham]

4gb will be good enough

I have a 2013 air 13" with 4gb ram and 128gb storage and the ram is more than sufficient for the usage you reported. If you can afford the larger 256gb storage, go for it now. You probably won't save any money by upgrading it yourself. I don't even know if there is storage upgrade larger than 256gb from third parties like OWC. I also use a Nifty Minidrive with a Samsung EVO sdxc 64gb that works nicely for additional storage for the Air. I got both for under $100 on Amazon. I was hoping to be able to use it for Bootcamp/Win7 but it is not bootable so I just use it for extra data storage. I think Nifty has a new 128gb Minidrive for the Air that doesn't need and sdxc card.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

For that use case it's fine

It's fine for those uses, to be honest if you just need srorage for files videos and music a transcend nifty drive or similar in your SD card slot gives you an easy way to expand storage..

 

[charlyham]

4gb will be good enough

I have a 2013 air 13" with 4gb ram and 128gb storage and the ram is more than sufficient for the usage you reported. If you can afford the larger 256gb storage, go for it now. You probably won't save any money by upgrading it yourself. I don't even know if there is storage upgrade larger than 256gb from third parties like OWC. I also use a Nifty Minidrive with a Samsung EVO sdxc 64gb that works nicely for additional storage for the Air. I got both for under $100 on Amazon. I was hoping to be able to use it for Bootcamp/Win7 but it is not bootable so I just use it for extra data storage. I think Nifty has a new 128gb Minidrive for the Air that doesn't need and sdxc card.

 

[xylitol]

Just remember that you're not supposed to fill up the SSD, so 256GB would be a better choice

Consumer SSD prices are finally low enough where we're no longer forced to buy the minimum capacity for our needs. Whatever drive you end up buying, plan on using only about 75% of its capacity if you want a good balance between performance consistency and capacity.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6489/playing-with-op

(75% is well on the safe side)

 

[Pootan]

on my baseline 11" i5/4/128 is a work machine, I keep Xcode, visual studio, unity, office, parallels with 40gb win7 vm, dropbox sync, and several projects and tutorial videos and tons of documentation/screenshots and still have over 40gb to spare.

But if I intended to keep music or movies on it too (instead of streaming), I would definitely go higher than 128.

 

[iolinux333]

I have a 2013 air 13" with 4gb ram and 128gb storage and the ram is more than sufficient for the usage you reported. If you can afford the larger 256gb storage, go for it now. You probably won't save any money by upgrading it yourself. I don't even know if there is storage upgrade larger than 256gb from third parties like OWC. I also use a Nifty Minidrive with a Samsung EVO sdxc 64gb that works nicely for additional storage for the Air. I got both for under $100 on Amazon. I was hoping to be able to use it for Bootcamp/Win7 but it is not bootable so I just use it for extra data storage. I think Nifty has a new 128gb Minidrive for the Air that doesn't need and sdxc card.

Are you sure it's not bootable? I boot off an old USB thumb drive running an ancient copy of Ubuntu all the time.

 

[SD-B]

on my baseline 11" i5/4/128 is a work machine, I keep Xcode, visual studio, unity, office, parallels with 40gb win7 vm, dropbox sync, and several projects and tutorial videos and tons of documentation/screenshots and still have over 40gb to spare.

But if I intended to keep music or movies on it too (instead of streaming), I would definitely go higher than 128.

Thanks. I was wondering the same as the OP as I figured the lower one would be fine with all the external drives many of us have now a days but what you said there just convinced me to buy the upgrade version. If you only have 40 gigs left and don't even have movie files, MP3s or other audio format files, movies, and so ohm thats too close for comfort and i see why that extra space is needed.

To be honest, coming from 500 gig hard drives, thank you for that explanation. I believe if i get the AIR i now know i would have to get the larger file size......thanks again

 

[BenTrovato]

For that type of usage it should be good enough for the next 2-3 years. No need to over analyze.