Questions about my first mac purchase

[sanchopanza]

I am going to buy my first mac, which is 15" base retina model, and I have some questions about it. I will be glad if you help me.

1- How much of the 256 gb capacity will be available when I open my mac first time?

2- I read sonewhere that mac OS uses some of my ssd's capacity when go sleep or ram's memory is full. If this is the case should I extract additional 8gb from the available capacity of my ssd?

3- Does macbook gets slower as available ssd capacity gets reduced? Because that was the case with my iPhone 4.

4- Will I have problems w/o dedicated gpu when watching 1080p or 4K movies? And I am power user, I use applications heavily and simultaneously; like editing several office documents, playing songs on itunes and surfing safari with tons of tabs open and a few more apps running background. But I have nothing to do with gaming and video editing. Is 15" base model enough for everything works fast for next 3-4 years?

Thanks a lot.

 

[T-Bob]

About 220 odd free.

If you did a full suspension it would put whatever is resident in memory onto disk yes, upto whatever you are using.

If TRIM is working then the speed should not decrease no. Android devices were having issues without TRIM which has recently been fixed, perhaps the ifone4 also had this issue.

1080p videos no, there have been reports of several 1080p flash videos running simultaneously in one review. 4k is going to be cpu decoded anyway and the quad should be fine for that, the dual cores probably too depending on the complexity though (current 4k youtube videos are pretty low bitrate).

As for will it be fast in x years that is impossible to say really, especially as new hardware will be faster so your definition of fast will change as well.

 

[enjoimorenow]

1. Expect to lose 20-30gb off the initial 256 for your OS install.

2. Confused by what you are asking here? RAM and SSD storage are two different things.

3. Yes, all computers will slow as they run out of storage, I would plan to leave at least around 5-10% of the drive unused so that it is not running low on memory.

4. No, and I'm sorry, but editing documents and having a lot of tabs open in safari does NOT make you a power user! Maybe in comparison to the most basic computer user, but you are still performing very simple and easy tasks. A power user is someone who is going to be using performance demanding programs like CAD, Video Transcoding, Video Editing, Graphics Creation/Editing, Software Development, Web Development, Music Creation, Gaming, etc. Those are power hungry apps... browsing your email, the web, iTunes, and pages does not define a power user, as those are very basic computing needs. Any mac will be able to handle these tasks just fine.

 

[sanchopanza]

About 220 odd free.

If you did a full suspension it would put whatever is resident in memory onto disk yes, upto whatever you are using.

If TRIM is working then the speed should not decrease no. Android devices were having issues without TRIM which has recently been fixed, perhaps the ifone4 also had this issue.

1080p videos no, there have been reports of several 1080p flash videos running simultaneously in one review. 4k is going to be cpu decoded anyway and the quad should be fine for that, the dual cores probably too depending on the complexity though (current 4k youtube videos are pretty low bitrate).

As for will it be fast in x years that is impossible to say really, especially as new hardware will be faster so your definition of fast will change as well.

Thank you very much for comprehensive reply.

Do I need to do anything about TRIM feature after purchase or is it already working on new macbooks?

And as you implied talking about future speed is useless. What about current time? Do you think aforementioned tasks will work smoothly or should I go for the higher 15" model?

Thank you again.

 

[rMBP2013]

If TRIM is working then the speed should not decrease no. Android devices were having issues without TRIM which has recently been fixed, perhaps the ifone4 also had this issue.

Umm, just to let you know: an SSD which is 90% full will be significantly slower than one which is not.

 

[T-Bob]

Umm, just to let you know: an SSD which is 90% full will be significantly slower than one which is not.

Not if they have ample provisioning. If they don't many allow you to set it manually. But yes it isn't a good idea to stuff the drive full if you also want peak performance.

 

[rMBP2013]

Not if they have ample provisioning. If they don't many allow you to set it manually. But yes it isn't a good idea to stuff the drive full if you also want peak performance.

True. But please note that provisioning further reduces the available storage at hand.

That's why I'm just astonished why someone would even bother with 128 GB SSD as that will be the first bottleneck in terms of performance once the drive gets close to being full.

 

[enjoimorenow]

True. But please note that provisioning further reduces the available storage at hand.

That's why I'm just astonished why someone would even bother with 128 GB SSD as that will be the first bottleneck in terms of performance once the drive gets close to being full.

maybe not everyone tries to store their movies, pictures, and music locally?? Maybe people have cloud services/server setups/networked media drive at home which don't require them to keep every movie and picture on their hard drive.

Also, not everyone who uses an Air, uses it as their PRIMARY machine.