8 gigs is more then enough unless you are doing serious video editing or using multiple VM's. We are using just 6 gigs on our Prepress Production Mac pros and we get Zero page outs. I usually have 12+ applications open at a time with multiple documents open in Photoshop, Indesign, illustrator, Pac Pro and Prinect, along with 6+ tabs in Firefox or Chrome. People that insist your average user needs more then 8 gigs have NFI.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
What do we need 16GB for?
- Thread starter dilgit
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
LOL. You misread the image, it shows GPU speed at 350MHz and memory speed at 798MHz. Since it is dual channel, the actual speed is 1596MHz. The clue is in the heading "Current Clocks (MHz)".
I'd tend to believe Apple's own support site before believing what any of the clueless Apple reps say.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3246
Furthermore I have actual proof...
...as you now seeProps for being able to admit when you were wrong, unlike blow45, who is continuing to mislead everyone by telling them the HD 4000 gets 1GB VRAM despite overwhelming evidence pointing to the contrary.
If I'm wrong I am the first to admit it. I appreciate the apple link, I've been looking for SOMETHING that states this data from Apple, but they are always so minimal on their tech specs, you have to go digging to find the answers! Now I'm even more annoyed with that store.
Not only did the sale person feed me misinformation, I ordered my rMBP on Tues with them through my business and they sent me an invoice saying I would get an order confirmation soon (they said within the hour). 3 days pass and I never got a confirmation. I went to the store to check on whats taking so long, and he said they were backed up and haven't received anything from Apple yet, should be soon. Later that night I still hadn't received confirmation, so I emailed them to cancel the order and ordered it online. I had a confirmation in 15 mins.
That store sucks!
I'd be pretty upset too, but I guess that is why doing your own research is important, even with Apple. (whose reps are generally better informed than those at Best Buy or something like that)
That actually may not be their problem. I ordered my rMBP half an hour after WWDC ended and it took 6 days to receive a confirmation.
not really sure what this whole discussion is all about but i'd like to throw my to cents into it...
just for the fun of it, i just launched every (to me) important application i currently have installed on my 8gb rMBP and if possible, put some content into them:
*) firefox with 6 tabs and one flv-live stream in 720p
*) vlc plays a sd-quality movie up right
*) adium
*) mail
*) iterm2 with six running ssh-sessions
*) textwrangler with two opened documents
*) ical
*) xcode with having a medium sized project open
*) cyberduck being connected to a server over sftp
*) libreoffice having a single document open
*) aperture showing a high-res picture
*) some openvpn gui with three running tap-sessions
*) ms-rdp client with one open session
*) citrix receiver connected to another server
*) itunes playing a muted playlist
*) steam
*) and last but not least previewing with a pdf-file
and i am still having 2.62 GB of ram available according to istat.
I haven't put adobes cs 5.5 on my machine yet, but I expect that launching ps and / or indesign will lower that just another GB. and no, i didn't forget about virtual machines, but assigning 2gb of ram to a virtual machine is a lot for most things one's gonna be doing in there, too - and bit a paging here in there won't slow down things too much either.
hell, aside from the fact that being human and even male and therefore genetically not even able to handle multitasking and using all of the apps, and not even able watching and listening to all of what's currently playing and going on here, I'm having a hard time getting what 16gb of ram could be useful as of today.
i'm NOT saying that there are NO usecases at all for having a 'workstation' with that amount or even more ram (they do exist) but i'm pretty sure (from my professional experience) that most people won't need 16GB for the next couple of years.
there were times i was havily used and sick of stuff being paged out (ram was expensive and so were fast 15k scsi-drives to compensate on that a tiny bit) but since solid state drives have become available, I see no point in closing applications you're not using it anyways. launch times of anything have gotten so drastically reduced, they can be ignored at all as far as i'm concerned.
on my old mbp libreoffice took almost 25 seconds to open. the ssd reduced that to three to five seconds now.
i have always been someone saying that you can never have enough of ram but when saying that, i almost alyways refer to machines running services like ESXi, terminal / application / database / file servers.
workstations as of today are so ********* fast that the only show stopper around is the person in front of it
i'd rather always recommend going for more local storage space with any highly MOBILE machine so you can leave you big and heavy external harddisks at home while on the move.
just why is everyone worrying about that how much memory is available to ivys integrated graphics chip? it sucks when it comes to graphics intensive stuff NO MATTER how much memory it can access. it doesn't cosume as much power as the dedicated nvidia but if you're going to play games, you'll be having your power supply around anyway.
well, i fully agree to anything what 'themacbookpro' guy is and has been saying and that 'blow45' is just full of it... sry
just for the fun of it, i just launched every (to me) important application i currently have installed on my 8gb rMBP and if possible, put some content into them:
*) firefox with 6 tabs and one flv-live stream in 720p
*) vlc plays a sd-quality movie up right
*) adium
*) iterm2 with six running ssh-sessions
*) textwrangler with two opened documents
*) ical
*) xcode with having a medium sized project open
*) cyberduck being connected to a server over sftp
*) libreoffice having a single document open
*) aperture showing a high-res picture
*) some openvpn gui with three running tap-sessions
*) ms-rdp client with one open session
*) citrix receiver connected to another server
*) itunes playing a muted playlist
*) steam
*) and last but not least previewing with a pdf-file
and i am still having 2.62 GB of ram available according to istat.
I haven't put adobes cs 5.5 on my machine yet, but I expect that launching ps and / or indesign will lower that just another GB. and no, i didn't forget about virtual machines, but assigning 2gb of ram to a virtual machine is a lot for most things one's gonna be doing in there, too - and bit a paging here in there won't slow down things too much either.
hell, aside from the fact that being human and even male and therefore genetically not even able to handle multitasking and using all of the apps, and not even able watching and listening to all of what's currently playing and going on here, I'm having a hard time getting what 16gb of ram could be useful as of today.
i'm NOT saying that there are NO usecases at all for having a 'workstation' with that amount or even more ram (they do exist) but i'm pretty sure (from my professional experience) that most people won't need 16GB for the next couple of years.
there were times i was havily used and sick of stuff being paged out (ram was expensive and so were fast 15k scsi-drives to compensate on that a tiny bit) but since solid state drives have become available, I see no point in closing applications you're not using it anyways. launch times of anything have gotten so drastically reduced, they can be ignored at all as far as i'm concerned.
on my old mbp libreoffice took almost 25 seconds to open. the ssd reduced that to three to five seconds now.
i have always been someone saying that you can never have enough of ram but when saying that, i almost alyways refer to machines running services like ESXi, terminal / application / database / file servers.
workstations as of today are so ********* fast that the only show stopper around is the person in front of it
i'd rather always recommend going for more local storage space with any highly MOBILE machine so you can leave you big and heavy external harddisks at home while on the move.
just why is everyone worrying about that how much memory is available to ivys integrated graphics chip? it sucks when it comes to graphics intensive stuff NO MATTER how much memory it can access. it doesn't cosume as much power as the dedicated nvidia but if you're going to play games, you'll be having your power supply around anyway.
well, i fully agree to anything what 'themacbookpro' guy is and has been saying and that 'blow45' is just full of it... sry
yeah, that's unacceptable, especially on a 4 week delay! Like I said, when I ordered online I got a confirmation 15 mins later.
Might be that their system was overloaded when I ordered it (luckily mine still got into the 5-7 day batch). Can't say for sure about the store you ordered it through though.
Why not make everything integrated into the motherboard so any point of failure requires the replacement of the entire computer.
Clearly you do not understand the point of module designs and the benefits of it both environmentally and economically.
Clearly you do not understand the point of module designs and the benefits of it both environmentally and economically.
Thankfully if you bought apple care, EVERYTHING is covered! They will repair or replace the unit if something goes wrong.
not really sure what this whole discussion is all about but i'd like to throw my to cents into it...
just for the fun of it, i just launched every (to me) important application i currently have installed on my 8gb rMBP and if possible, put some content into them:
*) firefox with 6 tabs and one flv-live stream in 720p
*) vlc plays a sd-quality movie up right
*) adium
*) iterm2 with six running ssh-sessions
*) textwrangler with two opened documents
*) ical
*) xcode with having a medium sized project open
*) cyberduck being connected to a server over sftp
*) libreoffice having a single document open
*) aperture showing a high-res picture
*) some openvpn gui with three running tap-sessions
*) ms-rdp client with one open session
*) citrix receiver connected to another server
*) itunes playing a muted playlist
*) steam
*) and last but not least previewing with a pdf-file
and i am still having 2.62 GB of ram available according to istat.
well, i fully agree to anything what 'themacbookpro' guy is and has been saying and that 'blow45' is just full of it... sry
You opened one preview file and one libreoffice document plus six tabs and you think you are stressing your machine? The only thing that might demand some ram is xcode and aperture. Your list is long not your demands. What's going to stress your machine, ical and mail? Textwrangler? Cyberduck and an rdp client?
You know I too can make a list of 30mb apps, a 100 item list and say, see no problem.
Where are a few documents open in office, where's preview with 3-4 textbooks and/or brochures and reference manuals? When older people work, you know, not kids they could have 4-5 company or competitor brochures open in preview, as well as 3-4 technical manuals that they search for reference, they have spreadsheets open, documents, database files. They have journal papers open, journal paper managers. They don't open aperture and have it sit there with one high res picture or libre office with one document.
Anyone being involved any sort of research, journalists being a prime example might open about 20+ tabs on a topic they are looking into. This happens routinely.
How about a couple of browsers, or safari with 20 tabs? how about then adding to the mix some real pro software like some specialized data processing application, or say autocad with a few drawings?
And you have just initialized most apps, just let them there a while and report to us back on the memory.
Inadvertently you proved my original point that in no way is 2gb enough for a modern mac lol. Running pretty much vlc, aperture (with one picture) and xcode (yeah and 6 tabs in safari...
) and you are at 5.5gbs. Actually not only did you prove my point, you proved also that 4gbs of ram are not enough even, just for aperture, xcode, and browsing 5 tabs while listening to some music.
Last edited by a moderator:
I beg to differ. At my job (where I support Mac and PC users) I see a lot of different levels of user savy-ness. One thing they all have in common is that they keep opening tabs in their browser and new documents in Excel, Outlook/Entourage, Word and CS whatevs until the machine slows down or crashes. Then they frantically call me moments before a big meeting!
Last edited:
No buddy, you are full of it.
You opened one preview file and one libreoffice document plus six tabs and you think you are stressing your machine? The only thing that might demand some ram is xcode and aperture. Your list is long not your demands. What's going to stress your machine, ical and mail? Textwrangler? Cyberduck and an rdp client?
You know I too can make a list of 30mb apps, a 100 item list and say, see no problem.
Where are a few documents open in office, where's preview with 3-4 textbooks and/or brochures and reference manuals? When older people work, you know, not kids they could have 4-5 company or competitor brochures open in preview, as well as 3-4 technical manuals that they search for reference, they have spreadsheets open, documents, database files. They have journal papers open, journal paper managers. They don't open aperture and have it sit there with one high res picture or libre office with one document.
Anyone being involved any sort of research, journalists being a prime example might open about 20+ tabs on a topic they are looking into. This happens routinely.
How about a couple of browsers, or safari with 20 tabs? how about then adding to the mix some real pro software like some specialized data processing application, or say autocad with a few drawings?
And you have just initialized most apps, just let them there a while and report to us back on the memory.
Inadvertently you proved my original point that in no way is 2gb enough for a modern mac lol. Running pretty much vlc, aperture (with one picture) and xcode (yeah and 6 tabs in safari...
Good luck installing all that "pro software" into your 256gb SSD. LOL.
It's good to hear "official" verification of this from a professional. That's my workplace scenario too.
And I think apple's idea of saving states and autorestoring windows has been very poorly thought out because of this. (lion interface in general has been very poorly thought out). The end result of this is that users can end up minimizing browser windows or application documents (preview) for example on the dock icon and then forget they are even there while they constantly hog ram and the perpetually restore themselves minimized on the dock icon.
An app has to reset itself when you shut it down.
There's no inherent advantage of keeping a state in the app. It's a flashy ios like feature with no real substance. You shut the app, it resets, and opens up again afresh. If you want to have it restore your documents there should be an explicit command there, that's the right way they should have implemented this: restore state command. So you get everything back.
And that's if there's a point to do it all, anyone can go open recents and just open the files again.
And I think apple's idea of saving states and autorestoring windows has been very poorly thought out because of this. (lion interface in general has been very poorly thought out). The end result of this is that users can end up minimizing browser windows or application documents (preview) for example on the dock icon and then forget they are even there while they constantly hog ram and the perpetually restore themselves minimized on the dock icon.
An app has to reset itself when you shut it down.
There's no inherent advantage of keeping a state in the app. It's a flashy ios like feature with no real substance. You shut the app, it resets, and opens up again afresh. If you want to have it restore your documents there should be an explicit command there, that's the right way they should have implemented this: restore state command. So you get everything back.
And that's if there's a point to do it all, anyone can go open recents and just open the files again.
Please don't think you are better then everyone else because you can use 16GB of ram. Please stop assuming the work you do is more important because you can somehow fill up 16GB with it.
This thread of back and forth of "I can work with 8GB because I'm good at managing my resources" vs. "I need 16GB of ram because I do really cool stuff you can only dream of doing" is awfully juvenile.
Are you for real? Where exactly did I say or even insinuate that my work is more important because I can go over 8gbs of ram?
Where did I say I claim I do really cool stuff and I need the 16gbs cause I am better than you guys...jesus christ where are you getting all that from?My point is os x does use a lot of resources and people in the market for a pro model will be well served with upgrading their mac to 16gb since they only get one chance to do so, otherwise their machine stays stuck at 8gbs. And then if they feel like they could use the extra ram they can't pop by their local ram store and just get some some more ram for a few extra dollars.
That's all I've been saying and I keep getting attacked by people who claim the average user reads a blog, opens 5 tabs, has one word document and listens to a bunch of tunes.
Here we had a pro just a few minutes ago validating that in work settings people keep opening on tab after the other, one entourage and preview document after the other and then their machines are about to crash. I was happy that someone else with actual experiences from workplaces backed up what I was saying.
Of course, and I 've already said this, there are people that will say, that's all I can afford, to which of course the only thing I can say is great, buy your mac, be happy with it and you 'll probably won't find 8gbs restrictive anyway and if you ever get over the ram the ssd will make up for it (despite that costing in wear cycles).
But to anyone who can afford it I am saying don't underestimate the amount of resources the os uses in terms of ram, don't think, nowadays even 4gbs can prove to be too little, max this baby up at 16gbs, because you only get one chance and it's a shame not to. You might find out that you actually do need the ram as your usage changes over time, and you are going to be giving 1gb of ram to the igfx which is very important for the driving the retina too as well as external diplays so you do need all the igfx vram you can get.
Last edited:
Did some photoshop work the other day, I have 6GB of RAM and still got a 4GB Swap file... I'd love to have 16, max on mine is 8. Blurgh.
Trying to work out what the average user needs is next to impossible and there is way too many different permutations to take into consideration.
If anyone is unsure if they need 16Gb of RAM then the chances are they DO NOT need it and the people who want 16Gb won't create a thread asking if they need it or if it's necessary they will simply order it with that option.
I am the average user who would be happy with 8Gb if I only used my laptop for web browsing, emails, facebook, youtube etc but as I use it for work as well with up to 4 or possibly more VM's running simultaneously 16Gb is the ONLY option.
If anyone is unsure if they need 16Gb of RAM then the chances are they DO NOT need it and the people who want 16Gb won't create a thread asking if they need it or if it's necessary they will simply order it with that option.
I am the average user who would be happy with 8Gb if I only used my laptop for web browsing, emails, facebook, youtube etc but as I use it for work as well with up to 4 or possibly more VM's running simultaneously 16Gb is the ONLY option.
The issue here has come up because apple (in their infinite wisdom) have decided to make one of the standard upgradeable parts of a notebook computer non upgradeable. It's thus pertinent to ask not only do I need, but will I ever need 16gbs in the future, because you never get a chance to upgrade then, ever.
Since this is a pro notebook I am sure most users will be very well aware of their needs. But there are some that might be underestimating their usage as well as how memory hungry and inefficient in managing ram os x is.
In any case in my mind the advice is simple, if you can afford to upgrade do so, you are allocating one gb for the integrated gfx and you are future proofing your device as much as you can.
Who knows in the future you might want to do a bit of coding, or photography, or video editing... no one ever regretted buying more ram, it makes for a computer that has enough space to not wait for os x to free inactive memory, it makes for a computer that doesn't wear the ssd with page outs, it makes for a system where you will be allowed to leave a few more documents open and laying around, it makes for a system that if you ever need some windows application on the mac, or a windows system to have some function os x is not offering, you 'll have ample space to do so without worries.
Like I said in my mind it's simple, if you can afford it buy, 4gbs are the minimum now on a mac, 8gbs is pretty good maybe even ample to a lot of people, 16gbs is untying your hands and being able to throw most anything to this mac and take advantage of the four cores and processing speed.
This discussion would be much different of course if the ram would be upgradable. I would then be suggesting, buy if absolutely needed (and from a third party of course not apple). It's the non upgradability that makes all the difference here.
Since this is a pro notebook I am sure most users will be very well aware of their needs. But there are some that might be underestimating their usage as well as how memory hungry and inefficient in managing ram os x is.
In any case in my mind the advice is simple, if you can afford to upgrade do so, you are allocating one gb for the integrated gfx and you are future proofing your device as much as you can.
Who knows in the future you might want to do a bit of coding, or photography, or video editing... no one ever regretted buying more ram, it makes for a computer that has enough space to not wait for os x to free inactive memory, it makes for a computer that doesn't wear the ssd with page outs, it makes for a system where you will be allowed to leave a few more documents open and laying around, it makes for a system that if you ever need some windows application on the mac, or a windows system to have some function os x is not offering, you 'll have ample space to do so without worries.
Like I said in my mind it's simple, if you can afford it buy, 4gbs are the minimum now on a mac, 8gbs is pretty good maybe even ample to a lot of people, 16gbs is untying your hands and being able to throw most anything to this mac and take advantage of the four cores and processing speed.
This discussion would be much different of course if the ram would be upgradable. I would then be suggesting, buy if absolutely needed (and from a third party of course not apple). It's the non upgradability that makes all the difference here.
well, lets all agree, we disagree...
to any other user, maybe this helps to decide on what amount of memory you need:
http://www.crucial.com/support/howmuch.aspx/
to any other user, maybe this helps to decide on what amount of memory you need:
http://www.crucial.com/support/howmuch.aspx/
So what is the big deal with page outs and using the swap space?
I got 8gb for my rMBP and from cold wake I am not using more than 2.5 gigs with chrome, itunes, mail open. Slowly these programs are starting to consume more ram and the inactive part of the memory (blue portion) is becoming bigger and bigger. At this moment I need to reboot or purge or it is going to start paging out.
But seriously what is the big deal with that anyway? I never notice when it is paging out at all until I look at my activity monitor. The way I see it is that it is better to save the $200 now and buy a brand new ssd later in the future. Which are going be much cheaper and faster by then. Or even use that $200 for the purchase of a new rMBP in the future.
You honestly aren't getting any bang for buck at all with the 16gb
I got 8gb for my rMBP and from cold wake I am not using more than 2.5 gigs with chrome, itunes, mail open. Slowly these programs are starting to consume more ram and the inactive part of the memory (blue portion) is becoming bigger and bigger. At this moment I need to reboot or purge or it is going to start paging out.
But seriously what is the big deal with that anyway? I never notice when it is paging out at all until I look at my activity monitor. The way I see it is that it is better to save the $200 now and buy a brand new ssd later in the future. Which are going be much cheaper and faster by then. Or even use that $200 for the purchase of a new rMBP in the future.
You honestly aren't getting any bang for buck at all with the 16gb
For your usage 8Gb is adequate but for what I am going to be using it for it would be insufficient for my needs.
Paging or not paging it's still many times slower than physical memory and for that there is no substitute and even though OSX is very good at memory management a lot of people here would benefit greatly from 16Gb.
I'm still trying to understand the Activity Monitor stats. During the ongoing session I have had 52.4 GB of Page ins, 3.9 MB of Page outs, and 2.09 GB of Swap used.
The Swap used seems to indicate that I'm running out of memory, but the minimal Page outs seem to indicate I'm good. What do people think?
The Swap used seems to indicate that I'm running out of memory, but the minimal Page outs seem to indicate I'm good. What do people think?