MBA 13", i7 8GM RAM enough for Fusion and OS X?

I have a 13" MBA with 4GB RAM and I run VMware with Win7 a lot for work
While I would prefer to have 8GB, the 4GB works well enough for me
I don't think you will have any issues with the 8GB

 

you can

 

I have a 128/4gb/i5 and use all of the following without any problems:

On OSX:

• Skype
• Spotify
• Chrome
• Outlook for Mac

At the same time, I run Windows 8 under Parallel's and run a fairly intensive day trading program that always runs perfectly. Also at the same time, I use Camtasia to record screen video, audio, and mic audio for demonstrations.

I would say you would have no problem with your needs!

 

No.

 

8gb? Yes, it'll be fine. On a 4gb machine, you can run other native OS X apps at the same time as vmware fusion hosting a guest machine, but you wouldn't enjoy it. Your available ram on a 4GB machine would drop below 500mg (more like 300mg) and everything except the guest machine would be slow. I upgraded a MBP to 8gb, and all the performance issues immediately disappeared.

 

When it comes to virtualisation with products like VMware Fusion two things matter: amount of memory and amount of iops. CPU & GPU aren't used all that much, the i5 will be enough for it. However, whatever you run in the vm can benefit from a faster CPU and/or a more powerful GPU.

Adobe Creative Suite has a version for OS X though. I recall something about a procedure where you can move your Windows license to OS X. Running everything in OS X is a better idea because it will free up some resources that are necessary for virtualisation and Windows. If I were you I'd look into that.

 

No (although my Win 7 VM is x64 and has a 2GB memory requirement)

 

210.5% CPU usage? That's nice...

 

2 cores are configured for the VM, but it sometimes exceeds 100% even with only 1 core configured. However, the screencap was intended to convey memory consumption, which exceeded 5GB.

 

Two