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Squeakr, reading through your posts in this thread is truly pathetic. You're trying to win a worthless argument that is detrimental to anyone seeking information from this thread. The fact is, you can tell the difference between ssd speeds vs 2.5. Your milliseconds ram argument is laughable. You should really admit you have no idea what you are talking about because you're coming off as a babbling fool with every post.
 
is 1.75gb free bad! i opened everything i would use on my mac and thats what i was left with so i would say I'm good. Its not that i would never upgrade to 8, but i wanna wait til maybe things in the future use up more ram and my computer runs slower, if that makes sense.
 
come again?:D

What are you confused about?

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is 1.75gb free bad! i opened everything i would use on my mac and thats what i was left with so i would say I'm good. Its not that i would never upgrade to 8, but i wanna wait til maybe things in the future use up more ram and my computer runs slower, if that makes sense.

No, it's not bad. The question is less how much you have free and more what your pageins vs pageouts ratio is...
 
For someone looking to upgrade from the 4GB default to 8GB RAM in a MBP, would you all suggest buying a 4GB stick of Samsung RAM (the default Apple RAM, I believe) or buying 2 4GB sticks of Crucial?

I'm not sure if my 2011 MBP has one 4GB stick or two 2GB sticks, and I'm considering upgrading to 8GB RAM.
 
Based on all I've read about the "average user" in the last year or so, most don't even need a computer. An iPad is fine for them.

This, oh so very this:


People are confusing their uses with "average user". Your average user would be happy with an iPad with a keyboard.

For most people's uses, 4gb is fine. 8gb is nice, and I wouldn't suggest your average user turn down 8gb, but I would also suggest most people not spend the money on the extra 4gb.

For most people the $200 extra would be better spent on an SSD. From Apple, replacing the HDD with a 120gb SSD is $100, or aftermarket, you can get a 160gb SATAIII SSD.

The average user will notice that upgrade and performance increase. They "might" notice the extra 4gb, but they will notice the HDD->SSD performance boost.

Anyone using "48gb of ram" is not an average user. Truth be told, nobody on this message board is an "average user". And any discussion like this needs to recognize that.
 
before Lion I would of said no. but my girlfriends 2011 macbook pro is pretty slow constantly getting the beach ball. I think 8gb would severely improve it so im probably going to invest in it soon.
 
Everyone's needs are different. I think 4GB of ram is sufficient for many people. I do have 8GB of ram in my current machine, but I am not what you would call just a "casual" user. I do photo/video editing, and load up multiple tabs on safari with porn...Those vides are quite ram consuming you know.

*snicker*

I've 8GB in mine - I too do a lot of photo editing, web design/development, a Windows VM for Office 2010 (which alone eats 1GB of RAM :( ), and that pesky porn stuff you mentioned as well... :eek:
 
I'm not sure if my 2011 MBP has one 4GB stick or two 2GB sticks, and I'm considering upgrading to 8GB RAM.

Apple ALWAYS uses matched pairs in their computers, so your setup is 2x 2 GB. You'll need to buy 2x 4 GB to get 8 GB. Personally, I like Crucial.
 
To be honest, I lived with a 3GB RAM Windows laptop for 3 years and when I got my 8GB RAM MBP I thought it was major overkill. Now I wish I had at least 12GB.
I wish a dual channel 12GB kit was possible...
 
I just browsed Safari and listened to iTunes, solely, with no other app running, for the last 4 hours, and now I have 4.2GB free out of 8GB. Safari has only 4 tabs.

So I'm starting to think that we'll see a "is 8GB enough for the average user" next year, and I'll bet on myself saying something along the line of "get 16GB because it's less than $100 and it stops the beach ball".

Seriously, though, I do think that computers have grown to the point where we simply need more RAM... and more storage.

The nature of *nix is that it will make use of all the RAM available to it, even if it doesn't need it. If you took out 4GB, I doubt you would see any change (unless of course you're doing anything particularly demanding in photoshop, but then I would argue any photoshop user cannot be classified as a bog standard average user).

I had a friend who ran a little linux server. He knew how to chuck bits and pieces together and run a few Linux commands to get a basic home built Linux web server running, but not much else. Anyway, he had phpsysinfo running which kept telling him the machine was using 99% of its memory. He chucked gigs and gigs into that machine before I told him what was happening.

As above, I'm not even running Photoshop, and I'm already feeling the constraint of less than 8GB.

If *nix makes use of all of the RAM available for it, then the truth is still that more RAM is better, as it can make use of more in that case.

If average consumers are to be the guinea pig, I'd bet that many of them wouldn't even know how to quit an app completely. In which case, more apps will just start eating up RAM more, unless OSX has a mechanism to force an app into suspension like iOS when memory runs low, which I know for sure it doesn't. If OSX runs out of RAM, it simply makes use of the swap files, and that's something that I can easily trigger with Photoshop running.
 
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Still rocking my first gen intel with 2GB of RAM and it's fine. Had friends who did editing on even older macs and they lived. 4GB is way more than enough for the avg user.
 
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