Hi,
Doug is correct; you can't configure the new MacBooks with more than 4
GB if you order from Apple and you would need one 4 GB module and one
2 GB module to load 6 GB. Ramjet offers 4 GB memory, but it's
expensive. Generally, there are advantages to adding memory in paired
modules, although it's still worthwhile to add memory unpaired, but as
Jacob mentions the new MacBooks appear to be unstable when used with
more than 6 GB. Best guess is that this is something you wouldn't
want to try now, but that will contribute to the overall extensibility
of this laptop when Snow Leopard comes out. The new MacBooks also use
faster memory (DDR3-1066 vs. DDR2-667), which makes current memory
expansion more expensive. I'm not sure if the statement that OX
doesn't seem to take advantage of more than 4 GB of memory is true.
Pasted from a Macrumors post: (user with a new Aluminum MacBook and 5
GB of memory -- 4 GB memory add-on)
<begin quote>
[Oct 23, 2008, 01:03 PM]
So...
I now have 5GB of RAM running in my MacBook Alum (nVidia chipset).
So far, it seems to be flying and i have opened as many programs as I
can:
VMware VM allocated with 2.5GB of RAM
Photoshop CS3
iWeb
iPhoto
iTunes
Safari
Firefox
All MSFT for MAc 2008 apps (Entourage, Word, Excel, PPT)
Mail
My activity monitor shows the following:
Wired: 2.4GB
Active 1.56GB
Inactive 782MB
Used: 4.72
The free memory keeps jumping around with the inactive. Free is at
20-35MB
VM size: 63GB
Page ins: 3.59GB
page outs: 29MB
Swap used: 84MB
Not sure what all this means but those are the readings. It is amazing
how fast everything is right now. Ill keep it open and see what
happens. Let me know what else I should try...
UPDATE: As I played around, and opened safari tabs and photoshops
windows, the swap files jumped to 500mb and the page outs jumped to
250mb.
<end quote>
To bring this back to potential impact on VoiceOver, I think this will
result in snappier performance, especially down the line. Some of it
will be indirect, as apps that use graphics memory are optimized to
use the new nVidia chipset and offload those requirements. Remember
that the earlier generation MacBook's Intel video chipset shares
memory with the computer's normal RAM, and that is one of the
distinctions from the MacBook Pro. (Maybe Ryan can comment here; he
gave one of the best technical summaries I've read of the distinctions
between MacBook and MacBook Pro last January, just before the release
of the Penryn-chip-based MacBooks in February 2008.) Some of the
performance improvements we've seen on the new MacBooks and operating
system come from more memory, and better use of available memory in
apps like Safari (the 900-pound gorilla that is the source of those,
"Safari, busy" messages you're all familiar with -- especially if you
started with older computers).
This can also be a factor for those of you who run memory-hungry apps
-- and many other operating systems as virtual machines, which have to
share memory resources. I'm sure a lot of the new functionality in
the new model MacBook will be for video applications and gaming, which
may or may not be of as much interest. This is basically a
speculative decision about whether by paying more now you will get
possible longer term extensibility.
Just my thoughts. YMMV.
Here's a link to an older TidBITS description of the memory
situation. It links to the (start of the) MacRumors forum discussion
thread that I pulled the quote from:
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9839
Cheers,
Esther
On Nov 4, 2008, at 5:14 PM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
This is because, while you can install more than 4gb of ram in the
newer Macbooks, they only seem to actually take advantage of the
first 4gb. While the motherboard appears to support more than that,
and indeed will report more than 4gb if you install more, OS X
doesn't seem to take advantage of it. This is interesting, as OS X
does support more than 8gb of ram natively. I'd guess it's an issue
with that motherboard and/or the os x chipset drivers for it.
Apparently some of the newer macbooks, if you go higher than 6gb,
will become unstable even though the ram will be recognized properly.
A way to confirm this, for anyone who has a new Macbook, would be
to install another UNIX on it, such as FreeBSD or Linux natively
and see if the ram is taken advantage of on that operating system. I
can't try this, as my Macbook is a previous generation.
On Nov 4, 2008, at 22:01, Doug Lawlor wrote:
On 11/4/2008 1:19 AM, Esther wrote:
And I might as well correct the "6 MB" maximum memory to "6 GB"
-- a Freudian slip there.
It's interesting when you go to configure a new MacBook on the
apple store web site you can only configure up to a maxumum of four
GB of RAM. This may have changed since I looked at this last week.
Doug
