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Brave Ulysses
BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope.
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
 
2014-04-30, 21:35

Quote:
My girlfriend’s 2010 MacBook Air has 4 GB of RAM. Here are the apps she left running when she left for work this morning (I was hoping she had left over a dozen things running as she often does, but not this time ):



And this is the memory situation:



No memory pressure at all. Everything is quick and fully responsive.

I don't consider 3.26GB of 4GB of physical memory use and 5.5GB of Virtual memory to be "no memory pressure at all" despite what Apple's little memory pressure graph may say. memory compression isn't all that helpful if you are quickly going in-between multiple apps (Outlook/Mail, Safari, iTunes, Word, etc)

I never once mentioned Adobe apps or intense design apps either. However, I think it is beneath Apple to ship a machine that is not capable of running those apps sufficiently, especially one with no upgrade path. The machine is fully capable otherwise, other than being neutered in RAM. Apple does advertise the Macbook Air with Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, etc after all.

I'm also speaking from experience of having to use a machine with only 4GB of RAM for far too long. It is not a pleasant experience. Try scrolling through a large iPhoto library. Or a large Word document. Or scrolling through a large PDF in Acrobat Reader. Try doing the same thing while having Outlook open, Safari, and iTunes. It gets worse. Those aren't "professional tasks".... and even if they were, why is that an acceptable tradeoff?


Quote:
I don’t know the exact numbers either, but I know people like Cook really worry about small numbers. Besides, the engineers worry about power consumption. More RAM uses more power, constantly. A MacBook Air (or iPhone) shuts down or puts to sleep idle components to achieve very low power draw, but RAM modules need to be fed power all the time, even if they’re doing nothing. It’s harmful to battery life to power extra memory just for fun.
Show me some data on battery life of a 4GB vs 8GB Macbook Air. I bet you there is no difference. Show me a 4GB vs 16GB MacBook Pro I bet you there is no difference.

Having less ram also means you utilize virtual memory more. This uses the solid state drives more and also uses the CPU more to manage virtual memory usage. Solid State drives are more efficient than a hard drive but are they more efficient than RAM? (I don't know, I'm asking).

Last edited by Brave Ulysses : 2014-04-30 at 21:46.
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