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How much RAM for OS X?

boomhower

boomhower

Diamond Member
I've pretty much decided on getting a new Retina MBP. Being my first Mac in close to ten years I know jack about the OS. How much memory does it take? I intend to use it for around four years. I don't do anything really intensive ram wise. My most intensive task in video encoding. No VM's, photoshop etc. Should I spring for 16GB's or will 8GB's suffice? I'm on W7 now and I'd say 97% of my usage is on the 'net. I'm thinking eight is good but again, I don't have a clue how memory intensive OS X is or may be down the road. Right now I have an i3 Dell notebook with only Intel HD graphics, 4 GB's ram, Windows 7, and other than the encoding it's fine for what I do.
 
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16. Video encoding loves more and more and more RAM.

OSX is not memory intensive, but being a 64-bit OS, it benefits greatly from more than 8GB of RAM.

Plus if you decide you need more RAM later on, you can't update the Retina MBP as RAM modules are soldered on.

So in my opinions, go for 16GB and stop worrying for the next 4 years.
 
Let me clarify the encoding if it makes a difference. I'm not making my own videos, just changing from various formats to h.264. Usually large ~10GB files.
 
boomhower said:
Let me clarify the encoding if it makes a difference. I'm not making my own videos, just changing from various formats to h.264. Usually large ~10GB files.
Click to expand...

Then you should be fine with 8GB. But I'd still say go for 16GB if you can afford it, simply because you won't be able to upgrade the computer down the road.
 
Yeesh. The soldering thing makes this a difficult decision. I have 16GB in my MBP and I am very happy with it. Then again, I have an almost permanent Parallels (W7) session running with 4GB dedicated to it. This leaves 12GB for other stuff. I have a large photo library in Aperture, but other than those 2 apps, I don't do anything besides Firefox/Word/Excel/etc.

I would say that I think I would generally be happy with 8GB. Everything that I run on W7 could run just fine on 2GB (or even 1GB) and I do not have any other apps that really require much more. I could get by with some a small amount of application/memory management (i.e. closing apps that I'm not using) and 8GB.

For me, it was a no-brainer. 8GB was $50, 16GB was like $140, IIRC (Newegg prices; my MBP came with 4GB by default). Only $90 difference, and I never have to worry about RAM again. I just looked at the prices on the new Retina MBP, and I have to say I am surprised that Apple is being somewhat reasonable with the 16GB option at only $200. At that price, I would definitely go for it. If they were up to their usual antics and charging like $500, I would definitely not.

Mac OS X really does make good use of the extra RAM, even just for caching if it's not actively being used. With an SSD as your storage, it might not be as big of a deal, but with the mechanical HDD in my MBP, 16GB of RAM makes a difference.
 
If it's your primary machine and you do some memory intensive stuff on it, get 16. If not, get 8.

I use 4 on my MacBook Pro and it's fine, but it's not my primary machine and I don't do memory intensive stuff on it. I have 12 on my main machine (iMac) and it's more than enough for me.
 
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