I am contemplating getting a new MacBook but not sure how much RAM to get - an important decision as it is soldered on and not upgradable. My inclination would be to get more than I need right now as an insurance against future needs (I tend keep computers for several years), but I was wondering if this has an appreciable affect on battery drain.
No appreciable increase in battery consumption. If anything, there will be a noticeable decrease. More RAM means less hard drive use (which is relatively power hungry): more data can be cached (so fewer reads from the drive), and the system is less likely to page RAM contents out to disk (if you exceed your physical RAM capacity).
8GB is good - 16GB is great!
Good to know
Maybe not so much as Macs Books all use SSDs now.
Moot if your computer uses an SSD which (correct me if I’m wrong) all new MacBooks do now.
SSDs definitely improve the situation, but they’re still slower than RAM. In fact, the latest version of OSX (Mavericks) will compress inactive pages rather than paging them out to disk (SSD or not).
Almost, but not quite.
I think Blakeyrat meant the difference in power consumption is moot, since SSDs use much less power than hard drives. And they don’t draw power continuously like spinning hard drives do.
Right, but the two are related. SSDs use less energy not just because they don’t have to keep a motor running, but also because the increased throughput means both they and the CPU can drop back into a low-power mode that much more quickly. And of course RAM is even better, because the SSD doesn’t have to come out of its low-power state at all, and the CPU doesn’t have to spend any time paging things out. Sure, you start to hit diminishing returns, but it’s not zero–otherwise Apple wouldn’t have bothered with their page compression scheme.
Get the most RAM you can afford. There’s no single factor that improves the performance more than RAM and since you can’t upgrade it later, get it now if you possibly can. The new version of the OS, Mavericks, has included numerous optimizations to improve battery life. More RAM won’t make any noticeable difference.
The newest MacBook Air is supposed to get damn-near iPad levels of use out of a charge, 12 hours or so. The MacBook Pro claims up to 9 hours (!) which is way more than the 4 hours or so you used to get just a couple of years ago for a far less powerful machine with a much lower resolution display.
I’m running a mid-2010 MacBook Pro that I recently made into a Fusion Drive machine with the addition of a Samsung SSD. Even with the speed boost from that, and the extra 4 GB of RAM I added last summer, I’m feeling the new machine envy due to battery life and display. The Retina displays are seriously amazing when you see them for yourself. My at-the-time hi-res display looks like flaming dog shit in comparison.