Why are people scared of 4GB of RAM?

[urkel]

Just like how 95% of us will never be famous actors or athletes or millionaires, 95% of us "regular folk" use a Mac for the Internet, YouTube, MS Office, movies, and music.

I can see the average person needing 8GB if they run VM Windows, but other than that, how come people immediately say 8GB is mandatory? Particularly when you see college kids who will be using their Mac for simple note taking or programming asking if 4GB is too small?

Here's a real world example.

I got my mom a $1500 stock Air 2012 256GB model and am teaching her how to make a movie using iPhone footage and the iMovie. 4GB was plenty for most tasks, but when you start hitting these messages while using the INCLUDED software then it should be easy to see how this is a problem.

The easy answers to this used to be "just upgrade your memory" but what if a user is beyond their return policy? It's now their fault for not knowing that bundled software will have higher system demands than what is provided?

Im fine with them locking in my battery, gpu and taking away my ports. But installing memory upgrades in relatives computers has saved them thousands in unnecessary full system upgrades so its understandably sucky for end users who get blindsided by memory intensive apps.

 

[throAU]

I'll add this: if you're running more than 1 virtual machine (to do any sort of serious workload), you'd be insane not to spend the extra for 16gb of ram, if it is available in your chosen machine. 8gb is usable, but more is better.

Otherwise, well... its simple math:

RAM needed for you = RAM needed for each and every VM + RAM needed for OS X.

OS X on a spinning disk runs like crap these days on 2GB. 2gb is about the minimum usable for a Windows 7 VM to do much at any sort of decent speed.

So thats 4gb to run 1 VM with the rest of the machine running like crap, before you start. Want to run 3 VMs (say, a Linux web server, Windows XP and Windows 7 - to test your website on all common platforms - not an uncommong workload)?

1gb for XP + 2gb for Windows 7 + 1gb for Linux + 4gb for OS X to run half decently = 8gb. And thats before running any other memory intensive apps under OS X.


How about simulating a network with GNS3 and a couple of VMs?

Well, GNS3 needs a few GB to simulate a few routers (lets be generous and call it 2gb), 2 Windows VMs on each side of a network = 2gb, plus 2gb for your Mac to continue working = 6gb

And thats a very basic network.


Don't even get me started on editing HD video (off your phone) or playing with ableton live, etc.

And that's TODAY

Requirements will only go up over the next couple of years - when 16gb of RAM is running you $100, you can bet that optimising for RAM usage will go out the window (relatively speaking) and developers will be using more RAM for caching (optimising for speed), sandboxing (security), etc.


Oh sure, you can swap to SSD to make OS X not run like crap (after all, this is the MBA forum and they all come with SSD), but SSD wears out. It has a limited number of writes. Minimise the writes to it, buy more RAM. To get an SSD big enough for that sort of thing is prohibitively expensive, anyway. Better off buying a hybrid or spinning disk and throwing RAM at it.



Its not so much that 8gb is mandatory - but buying 4gb (or less!) and future-crippling your machine, when 8 or 16 is like... 5-10% more money is well.... stupid.


edit:
and before people say "buy a workstation for that!"

it isn't needed.

none of those tasks need masses of CPU power or GPU. a laptop will do those tasks just fine, FAR more cheaply by just putting some RAM in it. I know this, because it's what I use my MBP and work PC laptop for.

And even if they did need CPU, the mobile i7s are just as fast as the workstations from a couple of years ago anyway. They're not slow.

 

[dyn]

It highly depends on what kind of vm you are running (think of OS, application(s) used, etc.). Some don't need 512MB, they'll work fine with 256MB while others require at least 4GB (think CAD, maybe even VisualStudio).

The biggest problem with the Air is that you need to know how much RAM you'll be using now and in the future because you can't change it afterwards. This causes a lot of problems because quite a lot of people have no idea how much they'll need in the future; the now isn't that hard, you look at your current machine. Look at the costs. When you need more memory you need to sell the old and buy a new one. This in most cases is more expensive than upgrading to 8GB right now. On the other hand, if you did the upgrade and never use it you have wasted money. Since nobody knows what the future holds you simply are taking a gamble and that is what makes people scared. Being scared of the unknown. Very normal human behaviour if you ask me.