Is there a straightforward answer to this question? (If not, move to IMHO, please)
Assuming a MacBook Pro User wants to use BootCamp-based Windows on a new MBPro Retina, does an advantage accrue for a 16 GB RAM upgrade that is not necessarily so evident if you are just going to use it as an Apple device?
The Mac forums seem to have a consistent opinion that 16GB is overkill for 90% of Mac users b/c of the way Macs use that memory. I don’t see that sort of opinion expressed as commonly in the Windows world, where more RAM is more aggressively promoted.
Assuming Windows 8.1 on a MBPro Retina Display, would the typical Windows rule of more RAM is better apply b/c you are running Windows, or not?
IOW, 8 GB is fine unless you are going to run Windows out of BootCamp, in which case you might as well get the 16GB (and concomitant 4 week delay) version…
(In my current Windows world, video editing of long and HiDef files from my adventures seems to give my computer its most rigorous workout)
beowulff has it right.
Unless you plan on booting into Windows and either running multiple VMs or running video editing apps, then 16 GB is not better than 8 GB.
Thank you both.
Since the switch to Intel hardware, I guess a Mac device running Windows must be so close to a PC running Windows that one can treat even the hardware configurations as if it were a native Windows machine.
FWIW I owned the original Mac (Feb, 1984, maybe?) and am now going to return after a long absence. Except for the Windows 8.1 touchscreen paradigm, I now see no reason not to get a MBPro and do both worlds as needed…
I highly recommend Parallels.
I originally used BootCamp, but for the last 4+ years I’ve used Parallels, and have never felt the need to actually boot into Windows. The ability to run OS X, Windows and Linux in three different virtual screens is fantastic. I don’t play games, but my understanding is that the Parallels virtual machine is good enough to allow game playing.
If you decide to do this, 16GB would be a big help.
Get the additional memory if you think you’ll have that machine 3+ years from now. Lack of memory is the thing that kills performance and the capabilities of an older computer more than anything else.
(more memory means it can fit bloated applications even if it runs them slowly)
When I first bought my macbook, it was severely underpowered due to a lack of ram. Anyone that says that Macs don’t benefit from increased RAM is not telling the whole story…
I think the suggestion is that Windows needs more RAM than OSX, for the same level of performance on the same bare metal. It sounds like rubbish to me. The operating system itself, be it OSX or Windows, is not the memory hog, it’s the applications.
You can run most desktop OSes just fine in 1 GB of RAM, or even 512MB, with one or two heavyweight applications open. But it is 2013 - who wants to run like that? (apart from tablet users). 8 GB is nice if you habitually have lots of browser tabs and also have several other big applications running, and you don’t want to wait while your computer swaps stuff in and out from disk.
The memory management of the OS may control how much of the RAM used by the apps gets swapped out… and whether or not the part that gets swapped out needs to come back from disk or not.