8GB RAM? When I was buying my Yoga 2 Pro with 8GB RAM I already hesitated, it is a bare minimum these days. Browsers alone can eat it all with ease. Today I wouldn't buy a new laptop without more RAM or at least upgrade options.
I don't understand why everyone keeps banging this drum.
At 4GB, I'd agree with you. But I'm still running my 2009 (!!!!!!!) MBP with 8GB RAM, and it's fine. And no doubt, the new MacBook is a bajillion times faster than my somehow-increasingly-heavier-each-year-brick-of-aluminum MBP and will handle memory pressure like a champ.
And speaking of memory pressure, for it's intended use, even with 30 Chrome tabs, 8GB is fine. Plus, given Apple's track record of device support over the last 7 or 8 years, Apple intends this machine to be usable for at least 3 years.
As someone who upgraded my own 13" MacBook Pro to 16GB RAM, I would NEVER recommend 16GB to anyone except those who can justify it.
The extra RAM has some big disadvantages:
1. As I recall, I lost about 40 minutes run time on batteries.
2. It decreases battery sleep time. Prior to the upgrade, I could go for 4 or 5 days in sleep, and still have useful enough battery life. Now it is more like 2 or 3 days.
3. It dramatically increases time to sleep and wake from sleep.
4. It eats valuable SSD space. You need 16GB to sleep. And you swap files will be bigger. You likely need a bigger SSD to support the RAM
5. RAM does cost money up front.
If you do need 16GB, you know it and should be ready for these trade offs. As someone who regularly runs 2 or 3 browsers, Mac and Linux development tools, MS Office, Adobe, Linux and Windows VMs, etc, I am in the class of people who need the extra RAM. Most people do not.
>3. It dramatically increases time to sleep and wake from sleep.
Well, I'll have to call BS on that. It maybe increase it, but hardly "dramatically". In fact time to sleep/wake is fast enough to barely care about it.
And I have 16GB RAM and the older, 2013 era, SSDs. Newer MBP SSDs are 2x-3x the speed of mine.
Plus, since then Apple added memory compression...
Meh, even with a mbp with 16gb of memory, I still want more. I'd like 64 or even 32. I tend to be running enough linux vm's for dev with things like kernel stuff that the more the merrier.
I can only report on the reality of my own setup. I have a 2011 era 13 inch MacBook Pro with a 500GB Samsung SSD 840 SSD. When I upgraded to 16GB two years ago, I immediately noticed that my wake/sleep times went from a few seconds to more like 30 to 40 seconds.
Now I did do the RAM and SSD upgrades at the same time. I went from 8GB of RAM and a 250GB SSD.
I remember spending some time trying to figure out why wake/sleep times where so hugely increased. I could never pin it down exactly, but I strongly suspect it was related to the RAM increase.
Agreed. Last year, I had to have my MacBook's motherboard replaced. During this time, I cloned my system to a MacBook Air with only 4GB RAM. This did severely cramp my working style. I could not run multiple VM's, and things were slower with swapping.
However, I was surprised at how much work I was still able to do. I felt the slowness of the CPU far more than the limited RAM.
I am happy to be back to 16GB except when I look at battery life. And I could adapt to less RAM.
I'm still running 10.8.5 - I run my system very, very hard, typically 20-30 Apps simultaneously with multiple Fusion VMs, and 50+ tabs in the browser, all three browsers, running, Aperture, Full Office suite - and I've never run into an issue with memory. Unless you are running XCode, or Video Editing, or some of the heavy Adobe Suite/SomeOtherSpecializedNicheWorkstationApp - you really don't need more than 8 GiB on OS X (at lease as of 10.8.5).
I'm guessing that SSDs and swapping really changed the game around virtual memory performance on Mac laptops.
However, "Sleep" on MacBooks is a combination of what people commonly refer to as Sleep and Hibernation
I believe that the current method is to Sleep the system with both keeping the RAM powered AND write RAM to the drive. If there is enough battery, the system will wake fast by using the current RAM, if the battery dies, it recovers from the RAM image stored on drive.
This works well for most people using base configurations. For those of us using the limits of the hardware, it might not give the preferred results. There are various GUI and CLI tools such as SmartSleep to control Sleep and Hibernate based on your preferences and taking into consideration the current battery level.
Thank you so much - this is the application that I've been looking for so long. It does everything that I've ever wanted, and, in particularly, with the insomnia plugin, lets me disable sleep (Mail.app craps out if you return from sleep, a bunch of my VPN stuff goes nuts) when you close your lid. This avoids the insanely awkward dance I have to do holding a laptop 2" open and hoping I neither drop it, or accidentally close the lid.
And, as another bonus, I have a "Click to Hibernate" feature that I've been wanting for a long time. My return from hibernation is very fast, and, in theory, the battery loss should be fairly minimal while in a hibernate state.
If you need to prevent your machine from sleeping for a while (like if you've got something running that you really don't want interrupted) there's always caffeinate -t $NUMBER_OF_SECONDS[1]
I haven't experimented with using it to try and keep a machine running with the lid closed, however - that's traditionally considered risky for heat reasons.
On OS X, with a good flash drive, 8 GiB of ram is perfect. I never recommend average people get more - I've got 31 Apps, the entire office suite (Excel/Word/Power Point), VMware running OpenBSD + Windows XP, and Aperture, chrome with god knows how many tabs (at least 60) - and the system isn't slow in the slightest.
OS X really does work miracles with virtual memory - my 16 GiB Windows 7 machine starts spinning up and swapping if I leave google earth running in it overnight. And next morning - there is always a 60 second pause while everything swaps back in...
It's really not. Maybe for you it is, but no, not in general... 4gb is working just fine, yes you can browse, have netflix open, your photos app and some music in the background while you're primarily working on a paper with a few PDFs on a few screens. My gf is on her MBA 4gb, no issues with the above (and she has a LOT more crap open than me, she never closes... at least until I showed her what it does to her cycles and what that means) I' m on a rMBP 8gb, similar experience. Running multiple VMs is not the norm.
As someone who is still on 4GB. No, 8GB is not a bare minimum. Bare minimum for a pleasant day-to-day browsing, movie watching, coding and office style work is an SSD.
On a MBA with 4GB RAM I'm running Chrome with 9 tabs (some are google docs,gmail and incognito), iTerm2, Emacs, a vmware fusion linux VM with 768MB RAM and I don't have any lag or slowness whatsoever, still I can open safari, firefox, microsot rdesktop, sketch and it won't choke a bit. I don't know if this is OS X being very good a managing memory.
Of course, some people get crazy and have like 60-70 tabs open, that's just not my flow.
I still run an Air (mid 2011) with 4GB of RAM and 256GB. Still great for browsing, lots and lots of text (Word and FadeIn), lots of Adobe Premiere editing on the go and occasional Photoshop and After Effects. I've been eyeing for a new laptop for quite some time now, but I am not in a hurry. This thing just keeps going and I can't justify new purchase yet.
My Air can survive with 4GiB of RAM, but if I watch YouTube videos in Firefox for long periods of time, the thing starts to use 3GiB+ of swap and I have to quit the browser.
I'm on chrome, absolutely no issues at resolutions up to 1080p. Haven't bothered with higher since screen res isn't. I throw video and AE rendering on the machine when I'm out with it, occasional compile with gcc.. damn thing is great. I would love to see newer generation Air come to light. I'd buy one immediately.
MacBook has always had only one RAM option and came with it: 8gb. No 4gb or 16gb ever. The article is incorrect: they made an orthogonal change to MacBook Air (13" only) in making 8GB standard (which used to be an option).
