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I've seen a 2GB mini running Lion where Excel and Word were all but unusable whenever a Time Machine backup started. Perhaps a bit of tuning would have fixed the problem, but additional RAM was an easier fix. 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. |
I also use utilities like Alfred, etc... I can see how a fast SSD makes your system smoother.
An SSD is my next desirable upgrade.. but a considerable expense seeing as I need at least 512GB (I dualboot OSX and Windows)