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Comment by daven11 | Hacker News Reader

I use a macbook air mid 2011. 1.7 Ghz i5, 4GB 133MHz DDR3, 128GB SSD, intel HD graphics 3000 384 MB memory, and it works fine. I run Yosemite on it and develop iOS apps. I actually run a Windows 8 VM on it as well - but I have to be careful with the memory usage :-). I keep looking for an excuse to upgrade it but I have no reason :-(

If you buy from Apple you can return it in 14 days no questions asked - at least in Australia last time I looked. I tried this once with an external hard drive (too noisy) and it was not a problem.

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What you seem to suggest is that there is no need to even upgrade the RAM.

I could check how well it works for a while before spending the extra on the RAM.

Thanks.

I'd get 8GB, I do have trouble now and then with the 4GB, but only because of the VM (I have to reboot), 8GB will give you a longer lifetime I think (I didn't think you could upgrade the RAM in the mini's any more).

If you read the tech specs as below, http://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

In the memory section, it says it's upgradeable.

And I think this is a link from Apple's own instructions on how to do the upgrade.

https://support.apple.com/en-is/HT4432

Are you sure? - from the site https://support.apple.com/en-is/HT4432

Mac mini (Late 2014) Mac mini (Late 2014) does not have user-installable RAM. You can configure the memory in your Mac mini (Late 2014) when you purchase it.

I'd ask over on http://apple.stackexchange.com to get a couple of other opinions to :-)

Yes. I just saw that. I cant reply to your comment directly as there is no reply button below your comment (probably nested too deep). stackexchange might be a good place to check. I think the 2012 mac mini was eating into their higher end machine sales and crippling the 2014 mac mini is move on their part to counter this.

oh, I just had a look and the base model doesn't have an SSD - I'd really not consider developing without an SSD any more. It will work but compile times are slower, how much I couldn't say. But then I've developed for years without an SSD before that so...

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That's why I thought of 16Gb Ram. I'm thinking, The whole of XCode and the compiler and my program source would be in the buffer cache. So after the initial loading from disk, the dev experience would be quite smooth (that's the guess I'm making).

Indeed, and you could do the old trick of making a ram disk for your compiles

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