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/Po

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...