As has been mentioned above, the new macbook pros effectively come with up to 2 terrabytes of extra RAM in them, for all serious intents and purposes. The SSDs are fast, and page-outs aren't exactly something that happens every day when you have 16 gigs of ram. We're talking about saving a few seconds of your life, every once in a while, or having to shut down a couple programs. Programs that launch ultra fast as well. And for the vast vast majority, we're talking about adding an extra room to your house with no door to it.
It's all a bunch of noise about nothing.
People wanted to find stuff to hate about the new Macbook Pros, and on top of that, the computer industry has trained people to care wayyyy too much about CPU and RAM numerical specs rather than performance.
A lot of people overestimate their use of RAM. The thing is, the first 3 gigs just run the OS and random whatever. So the difference from 4-8 is huge. It's the RAM that allows you to use programs that have fine textures and embedded images, big clipboards, hi-res wide-colour imagery – all the postmodern conveniences. The next 4, from 8 to 12, lets you run really taxing programs, and lots of them at once. Maybe you're making the imagery rather than just looking at it and manipulating it. After that, from 12 to 16, we're talking busiest-time-of-the-year luxury RAM. After that, 16-24gigs of RAM, jesus, you just have to be either working on a Hollywood movie, or actually making a video game, or testing a humongous website for a major company on a huge number of platforms. Or, dude, why the hell are you running Battlefield in a VM copy of Windows while you have Civ and a bunch of different work projects open in the background on OSX? Just close a couple programs for christ's sake.
You get the picture.
Great find, OP.
