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OSX lion on MacBook Air?

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Xgm541

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 3, 2011
1,098
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For anyone who has the developer preview or whatever its called, how does lion run on the air? I have the base 11 model and am satisfied about performance with SL, but i read somewhere that 2gb ram is too little. Any thoughts?
 
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It runs very well. However, get 4GB Ram, 2GB is fine for certain tasks but you may hit a spot where you are limited, so for the future i recommend 4GB Ram.
 
I would custom order it off the apple website but it is finals week and unfortunately I cannot return this one I bought 2 days ago until my finals are finished which will actually be after the return period. Hence, getting the 4gb model is out of question. I thought about asking the manager at the apple store I got this at if he would be willing to order a 4gb model for instore pickup for me but I highly doubt they'll accomodate me.
 
Xgm541 said:
I would custom order it off the apple website but it is finals week and unfortunately I cannot return this one I bought 2 days ago until my finals are finished which will actually be after the return period. Hence, getting the 4gb model is out of question. I thought about asking the manager at the apple store I got this at if he would be willing to order a 4gb model for instore pickup for me but I highly doubt they'll accomodate me.
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Try your luck. 2GB RAM is to low for me. I had google chrome open playing a youtube video, steam running, portal 2 running, and Sparrow Mail running, and iCal running and I had 250 MB of RAM left lol... I have the 4GB RAM 13.3" MBA haha. The funny part is, there was no noticeable lag what-so-ever.
 
at this point it would be up to the discretion of the manager. I called the 1800 apple number they told me probably not.
 
Xgm541 said:
at this point it would be up to the discretion of the manager. I called the 1800 apple number they told me probably not.
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There are thousands of users out there with 2gb of ram. I read many threads from those users that they are not having any type of lag and very satisfied. Per SR71 only have 250mb available with a ton of apps open, well that is because he had it available to draw from, but was it actually needed. There are many threads on that too.

My point is, you have a great machine and I don't think your future proof is going to be from the 2gb of ram, you will be fine until you decide it is time for your next upgrade.:cool:
 
IngerMan said:
There are thousands of users out there with 2gb of ram. I read many threads from those users that they are not having any type of lag and very satisfied. Per SR71 only have 250mb available with a ton of apps open, well that is because he had it available to draw from, but was it actually needed. There are many threads on that too.

My point is, you have a great machine and I don't think your future proof is going to be from the 2gb of ram, you will be fine until you decide it is time for your next upgrade.:cool:
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I just read up on what you said about me having that amount of RAM to draw from and I now understand why the number was so low. I just re-did everything now that I understand how to correctly read OSX's usage of RAM and it was normal.
 
I have the base 11" and use it for remote support out of my home. I normally have the following running with no noticeable slow down

Parallels 6 running XP (was running Win7 but wanted to save SSD space)
Linkinus
iChat
iTunes
Skype
Numbers (on and off as needed)
Safari

The system really surprises me at what it can take without slowing down.
 
The Air has a fast SSD, so it can swap data in and out of the page file much faster than computers with traditional hard drives. That may make up for the smaller amount of RAM.

How much RAM you need depends on how you use your computer. If you multi task a lot with heavy applications, such as running Photoshop and many Safari tabs with some other stuff, 2GB won't be enough. But if you're only going to browse the web, listen to music and write essays, it's plenty.
 
I tried. Unfortunately apple stores dont carry any custom order laptops. Oh well guess I'm stuck with 2gb.
 
baryon said:
The Air has a fast SSD, so it can swap data in and out of the page file much faster than computers with traditional hard drives. That may make up for the smaller amount of RAM.

How much RAM you need depends on how you use your computer. If you multi task a lot with heavy applications, such as running Photoshop and many Safari tabs with some other stuff, 2GB won't be enough. But if you're only going to browse the web, listen to music and write essays, it's plenty.
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I am using first generation mba /2gb ram with lion and was never as satisfied as I am with all the apps running including XP on vmware, ms office, mail, safari etc.simultaneously. I did upgrade to windows 7 on Fusion but that was taking too much space, reverted back to xp.
 
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I'm running a 13inch MacBook Air 2.13 Core 2 Duo with 4 GB ram and the 250 gb hard drive.

Lion runs like lighting on this thing. I attempted to play around with Lion twice a few weeks ago when preview 2 was released in March on my MacBook Pro. It was a 2009 model 2.53ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb and a 320 7500RPM HDD and well Lion ran like crap on it. It really disappointed me.

I thought since I just literally got the MacBook Air on Tuesday, I'd give Lion another whirl.

Holy cow, I'm loving it. (McDonalds anyone?)

No real problems yet either. Although it's only been a few days.

The only thing I've noticed so far is I can't get permission to edit my hosts file.
 
Xgm541 said:
For anyone who has the developer preview or whatever its called, how does lion run on the air? I have the base 11 model and am satisfied about performance with SL, but i read somewhere that 2gb ram is too little. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

If there is any Mac model that Lion is guaranteed to run well on, it's the Air. It's the newest of the Mac models and is displayed on all the screenshots of Lion on Apple's website.
 
Running the preview on my base 13" Air and I think it's great so far. No signs of slowing down and takes most of what I throw at it.
 
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