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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

Apple seem to have completely stopped carrying anything but the base models of the Macbook Air 11" and 13" in their stores, which may at least partially explain his pushing you to downgrade your choice.

Use the "check availability" sidebar link here to see what I mean: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD712LL/A?

I remember picking up my fully-loaded 13" from the store a couple of generations ago, so this is likely a new decision (or temporary while they figure out supply and demand). I strongly recommend the 8GB RAM upgrade, RAM gets eaten up really easily and is definitely worth the extra $100.

Ideally, he would have told you that the extra RAM might be useful, and also let you know that any upgrades would require delivery to the store or to you directly.

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" I strongly recommend the 8GB RAM upgrade, RAM gets eaten up really easily and is definitely worth the extra $100."

While I absolutely and totally agree with you that the 8GB of ram for $100 is a good deal - OS X (at least in 10.7.5) is astonishingly good at making use of shared libraries.

I have 30 applications running right now on my 4 GB 2010 MacBook Air, Including VMware running Windows 7, and Aperture (two hogs) - and the laptop runs really well - even though I do have about 14 GB of pageouts. I think the SSD/Flash Drives finally makes virtual memory useable again.

I'm looking SO forward to upgrading to the 13" Macbook Air (12+ Hour Battery, Insanely fast SSD compared to the 2010 (already pretty fast SSD) - and obviously I'll get the 8GB (I run a lot of VMware instances - and, after about three or four client OS's running - Aperture starts to have trouble cacheing) - but for 90%+ of the population, 4 GB is probably more than enough.

Well, 8GB of RAM also future-proofs you a little bit, and 4GB is starting to reach the cusp... 6GB would probably hold you over for the foreseeable future, but convention dictates 2GB => 4GB => 8GB.

It's also about dual channel configurations. You get better performance out of two identical memory sticks.

The effect is minimal though, 2-3% improvement if I recall.

Off-topic, but I'm curious about why you use VMWare instead of VirtualBox.

I can't speak for the OP, but my office chose VMWare over VirtualBox after finding VMWare to be about 3x faster running the unit tests for our main code repository, which are both I/O and CPU intensive.

I had similar findings in my office, with Parallels actually topping the list. I'm not sure if that was a fluke or not, as it was a windows VM that I needed to run, but VMWare definitely surpassed VirtualBox for that and some other tests.

I've used both on my various Macs, and I find that VMware Fusion generally seems to perform better. Parallels Desktop seems to have better virtualized 3D, though, so I've found myself moving more to that.

Less technical, but the VirtualBox interface looked like complete ass on OSX for the longest time.

I actually use VirtualBox when I'm running Dynamips (it has good hooks when launching network connected clients) - but for day-day productivity, Windows 7 Unity Mode in VMware is pretty great.

I can double click on a .vsd file and have it launch in Visio as a close-to-native app. Also, (and this may sound stupid, but it's handy) the little "Double-Arrow Start Icon" on my Menu Bar is handy for launching Windows Apps.

On my Windows Desktop System I use VMware Workstation because it reliably shuts down and restarts my linux guests, without me logging in to windows. (Though it took me a while to find out out how to do that). I.E. on a windows restart, VMware workstation gracefully shuts down the Client Operating System, and after reboot (and prior to me logging into the Windows Environment - I.E. Before I get to the office) - it restarts VMware Workstation service (not the app), and then restarts whatever Linux Guests I've selected in the "Shared VMs" panel.

This is important, as my Windows 7 Desktop System is now being rebooted by Microsoft two-three times a month for security updates - which I'm fine with as long as my Linux guests are there when I want them.

My office as well was a heavy user of VirtualBox until Vagrant 1.1 hit, and then we dropped a pretty penny on VMWare licenses.

One of the biggest things we noticed was a big bump in IO, especially with shared folders. We also experienced random mysterious crashes and hangs with VirtualBox, seemingly related to sleep/wake.

VMware definitely seems faster (I'm running Windows 8 as a VM inside Linux), but seeing as it's a paid product, there'll be choice-supportive bias all over the place.

>> Off-topic, but I'm curious about why you use VMWare instead of VirtualBox.

Faster, integrates much better into OS X, seamless mode, 3D acceleration, better linux guest tools, easier updates, lots of reasons actually.

VirtualBox is pretty good by itself, but I found that VMWare Fusion more than makes up for its (very reasonable) price.

Might be the OS X version but my work 2012 MBP, 10.8.4, has 4 GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. With a text editor, an email client, a couple of terminals, a couple of chrome tabs and an IDE open, the RAM gets loaded and the swap starts to trash. I get huge slowdowns all the time.

With my own MBPr (10.8.4), I have 8GB and never get into similar cases. And having a SSD instead of the HDD, I don't fear nearly as much the day I'll hit the swap.

The OS itself takes over 1.2GB of RAM, add to that ~1GB for the IDE (IntelliJ), ~1 GB for Chrome tabs, that's already > 3GB. Add the terminals, email client, various other processes and daemons... 4 GB is not much.

Re: Work MBPr - just curious, but did your work load down your native image with a bunch of Security Crap? I know a lot of people who have complained that once IT gets ahold of the MBPro, the systems become effectively 1/3rd the performance. Also - the SSD makes an insane impact on performance.

But - Yes, I think everyone on HN can agree - we'll all get 8GB when we have to make the decision.

My work MBP has a spinning drive and FileVault 2 (whole disk encryption) turned on. Anything I/O bound (booting, starting applications, paging) is super slow.

Yup it is, that sheds some lights on the huge gap of performance.

Spinning rust + low RAM in OSX = not a nice time. Is there a reason you can't just upgrade your work laptop to have 8GB?

I've asked for 8 GB, I think it's on the way.

Does the work machine have a 5400 rpm drive? I know that a 7200 wouldn't touch the speed of an SSD, but I'm wondering if slightly more rotational speed makes any difference with swap/otherwise. I'm starting to see quite a bit of slowdown on my 2010 MBP and the worst offender is always when it has to hit the HDD, yet I already have maxed the RAM.

I stuck a 512GB SSD in my (8GB RAM) 2010 MBP maybe a year(?) ago. The general speed boost was incredible, of course, but the thing that made the biggest impression was definitely seeing several GB paged out, with little performance degredation.

I have had some weird experiences when pushing it hard, though. At one point when I got up to ~15-20GB swapped out, I encountered a kernel panic. I wasn't doing anything fundamentally weird, just loading a large amount of data into "RAM".

I should try it again and see what happens. I wonder how hard Apple stresses this functionality in QA?

All of my kernel panics and spinners of death were due to running some Java IDE or XML tool loading up 100MB files and the like (sometimes in-memory parse trees for those sized files can push the heap to multi GB levels).

Were you using a JVM when you ran into the system glitches?

No, the memory-hungry process I was running was reasonably simple C that I'd written myself. It was semi-contrived, reflecting the extreme of an internal use case, but fundamentally I was just moving around/massaging bytes in big, boringly-malloc'd blocks of memory.

I can't swear that there were no Java processes running on the machine at the time, though. And I often have a Windows or Linux VM running in the background.

I stuck an intel SSD in my 2011 mbp, as well as 16gb of ram (it was really really cheap..).

I disabled the pagefile completely, and things are as snappy as ever - I can't think of an application I use that would use up so much ram that I need to page to disk.

Unless it has changed, the really crazy thing is that you can't upgrade the RAM later. (Though, surprisingly, you can upgrade the SSD, even though it comes in an unconventional form factor)

yeah it's soldered to the board. and i'll guarantee you're gonna regret going for 4gb.

Yep, I think that still is the case. Generally Apple products are terrible for repair and upgradeability.

Somewhat tangentially, iFixit's self-repair manifesto is great: http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto

If only Apple realized that allowing people to repair and upgrade their devices is worthwhile. If they really cared about their customer's best interests, they'd publish detailed repair manuals and make their devices user-repairable and upgradeable.

And the "making our stuff beautiful/sleek adds difficult design constraints" doesn't cut it: they could at least make an effort. There are many, many ways they could make their devices more user-repairable without compromising on the aesthetics.

It definitely varies, with glue holding some products together, while others are extremely elegant inside and easy to upgrade.

Yup. I just ordered a 512GB ssd + 1TB spinning disk + 8GB ram for my 2009 MBP to try and squeak some more life out of it. Like 12 screws and it's done.

Not just Apple, but most UltraBooks suffer from not being upgradeable these days.

That's not surprising, since the whole concept of an UltraBook is to replicate a MacBook but with Windows.

My old Sony VAIO 505g claims otherwise.

Apple has guides for some of the easier-to-upgrade MacBook parts. [1][2] Wonder if they've ceased the practice because upgrading isn't as easy as it used to, or because iFixit's guides are generally of a higher quality.

[1] http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/MacBook_13inch_HardDrive...

[2] http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/MacBook_13inch_RAMdoor_D...

> Generally Apple products are terrible for repair and upgradeability.

This has become true, especially recently, but was not always true.

The white plastic macbooks were really great for user repair, very easy to breakdown. It was clear that they actually spent some resources on increasing user-repairability with that model.

But obviously do not anymore. I am curious what changed in Apple decision-making too, have some guesses.

When I worked in telco, if a customer came in knowing what they wanted I would not offer alternatives unless we did not have stock of what they were after. If you do, the moment something goes wrong, the salesperson is immediately the person to blame (in the same way that if you help someone who is computer-illiterate with their PC, everything that goes wrong in the future is because you touched it). Customers will come back, sometimes multiple times a day, to harass you because you 'made them buy this damn phone'. It never happened to me, but I saw it happen to many of my coworkers (especially the few who were happy to talk customers out of an iPhone purchase for an Android one, back in the 2.x days of Android).

He may have been trying to be helpful, but like you said, I suspect it was because they didn't have stock and he wanted to make a sale for his KPIs.

Yes. Not to disappoint anyone, but several of my friends actually had problems buying higher spec machines in Europe. To the point where they had to either convince the sales guy or go trough corporate sales to and often wait several weeks to get it. And as you say, you do want the ram upgrade because not having it will decrease the lifetime of the product and you can't updrade later.

I think this might just be the fact it's a new release (unless they just don't sell that many maxed out Airs). My work just got me a maxed out MBPr on Thursday. Was in/out in 10 minutes without reserving it online or whatnot (we're three doors down from our local Apple store.

Maybe that's a bigger store. Tacoma WA, my 15" RMBP was only available in-store in the absolute base, no customization models on the online store. Anything else had to be ordered in.

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