on 2012-03-29 24:37 Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote
I arrived home this evening and fired up my MBP 13", dropped a DVD in to rip (want to watch it on the iPad, so I rip them into an MP4 file) with WinX Ripper for Mac and started the ripping process. I did my accounting, started Lightroom 4 and imported a dozen new photos into it, edited them, output some JPEGs, annotated them with Photoshop CS5, posted them to DPR, did some other stuff. The rip is halfway done now. Activity Monitor has always had 40% green showing, even with Lr, Safari, WinX Ripper, Photoshop, and my text editor up, running and working...
not sure what you mean by "green" — user CPU%? free RAM? and it's notoriously hard to compare usage; my experience RIPping DVDs with Handbrake is that it is actually fairly conservative with RAM, and the OS schedules tasks well enough that it is a good citizen in the background
however in my usage, Photoshop plus Aperture plus many browser tabs plus email & RSS apps are a big memory load, and when i had 4GB i often hit the wall, with 8GB i still sometimes hit the wall; now with 16GB (and a faster GPU for Aperture), i feel like i haven't yet bogged this machine down
I wouldn't worry too much about memory, really. The MBA13" does just fine with Lr4 and 4G RAM.
because that machine can't be upgraded, you'll never know what it might feel like with more RAM, though on machines with SSDs the differential between RAM and disk speeds is smaller, so paging doesn't impact performance as dramatically ...
i have a lot of experience correlating performance with RAM upgrades, and i join a lot of others in advising that RAM is usually the best price/performance upgrade you can do
depending on your uses, at the point of making a choice on a machine, one with a better GPU can often be another good price/performance choice; SSDs can be good price/performance for those who are comfortable with a fairly small drive, but for me that would be very constraining, so SSDs are not in my immediate future
And what's this silliness about "Apple being weird about telling the memory limits"? Just go to the Apple site and look up the technical specs for any system. EG: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs-17inch.html It's right there in Processor and Memory. All current MBPs support up to 8G.
that's exactly what's weird about it; they support 16 GB but for some reason Apple doesn't tell you; that's one reason i use everymac.com to check specs on Macs
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