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Lack of space. I own a 3 year old MacBook Air 11" with 4GB RAM and that works surprisingly well. It even runs Photoshop fairly good. I'd say 8GB is ok unless
by woof 11y ago
Lack of space.
I own a 3 year old MacBook Air 11" with 4GB RAM and that works surprisingly well. It even runs Photoshop fairly good.
I'd say 8GB is ok unless you do extensive image or video editing -and then the MacBook (or the Air) is not the right machine any way.
- EthanHeilman 11y agoDevelopers often use much more than 8GBs of RAM, especially if they are running VMs, databases, compiling code, running tests, IDEs and emulating smart phones. More and more I'm seeing a distinction in requirements between "user machines" and "engineer machines".
- woof 11y agoMy 4GB MacBook Air 11" is slow with Parallels, postgres, apache, emacs and the usual programs (mail, chat, multiple browsers etc.) -but usuable. Even my 3-4 years old MacBook Pro with 8GB was a little slow, but processor speed was the culprit. My year old MacBook Pro (2,4 i7) with 16GB is fast, but I have more memory then I actually need... I've even used it with three simultaneous Parallels instances (FreeBSD Server, FreeBSD CI and Windows 7 client) and it runs fine. 8GB memory is not a dealbreaker for me, I'd buy the new MacBook any day :)
- eropple 11y agoI dunno--even as a developer (JVM, some Ruby) I honestly don't use that much RAM anymore now that I don't work for a company that thinks it is a grand idea to load eight gigs of crap into memory just to start the application server. I think we're moving towards much more composable systems that have much less need for fat memory specs. Even when working on my game in Windows I only have 4GB allocated to the VM (VS2015, C#).
- cmsj 11y agoIf you're doing all of those things at once, you want a MacBook Pro