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I am going to have to agree with Nicole060 here.
I recently bought one of the new Macbook Pros for work - non retina, 4GB RAM. It became as slow as hell. I am a developer.. I need at least one VM with IE open, I need to have Chrome open, photoshop open, xcode, etc. Luckily I was able to upgrade it with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and it's now a pleasure to work with. Apple only offers an 8GB increase on their online store at 100$ for my macbook pro.. and at a 100$ increase.. In my opinion, 8GB should be standard. I love my Macbook, wouldn't give it up, I like using OSX, but I really do believe that Apple tends to rip us off when it comes to specs. And FYI, I can't imagine using OSX with 2GB.. my mac mini had 2 GB of RAM and it ran like a pig until I got 4GB of RAM into it. We all know Apple has outrageous margins on their products.. fine, I am not against them making money. However, I do wish they invested more into their products. |
On the other hand, on my 4GB (Ivy Bridge, 11-inch) MacBook Air, I regularly run Visual Studio on Windows (8, 32-bit) under VMware, with IE, IIS, and MS SQL Server running in the VM, along with a number of OS X apps (Terminal, Activity Monitor, Console, Safari, Mail, Preview, Emacs, X11, Script Debugger, and several resident utilities like Alfred and SizeUp), and have no problem dipping in and out of larger apps like Illustrator and Photoshop as needed with few performance problems beyond short (no more than a second or two) delays when switching to a long-inactive app. Do my 8GB MBP work more smoothly? Undoubtedly. But I'm running a much larger Windows (Server 2012, 64-bit) VM on this, and often another Windows, FreeBSD, or Linux VM, and I rarely quit anything unless I'm updating it or rebooting, so I generally have all of the above open plus iTunes, Xcode, Transmit, Excel, QuickBooks, and half of CS6. The only time I see even minor delays is when I nearly overcommit RAM or CPU cores in VMware, open insanely large files (in Photoshop, say), concurrently run several large, parallel compilations that manage to peg nearly an entire core in kernel mode, or go to town with live output from frequently fired dtrace probes.
Were you, by chance, swapping to a mechanical hard drive? If so, and for anyone else whose Mac "crawls" with lots of apps loaded, the single best way to make your machine usable is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. All recent MacBooks that don't come with "built-in flash storage" have user-replaceable hard drives (as in, "easy directions in the manual and doesn't void AppleCare"); the Sandy and Ivy Bridge models even support 6Gbps drives at full speed.
As for the iPad 1, I thought it was slow even on iOS 3.2. It was still quite usable and useful, however.