MacBook Pro 13" Retina - do I need 16gb RAM

[maffski]

MacBooks hold their price well, I'd get the 8gb and if I out grow it sell it on to buy the 16.

For 'general office duties and watching a few movies' 8gb will be plenty anyway.

[theboss]

MHB said:

Jakg said:

Plus, it's £160 extra for 16GB vs 8GB. It's not cheap - but it's not £310!

The 8GB version is £1,249 in Dixons at Gatwick (£150 off the Apple price), but they can't do the 16GB version as this is only available on line. This would be the Apple price + £160 for the extra 8GB - hence the £310 difference.

At the standard Apple pricing I'd pay an extra £160 for 16GB every time just for the added versatility in running VMs and heavyweight apps, and future proofing, as I'd consider it a fairly negligible extra cost *however* given the overall £310 saving because of this special deal, I'd consider the 8GB model much better value especially if you're unlikely to exceed 8GB in general desktop use over the next few years.

[Jakg]

GregK2 said:

As already pointed out by IATM, the hard disk makes much more difference than RAM.

4gb of RAM with SSD is quicker than 5400RPM HDD with 16gb RAM
Difference between 8 & 16 with SSD is negligeable

You can't get the Retina with a mechanical hard drive.

[GregK2]

Jakg said:

You can't get the Retina with a mechanical hard drive.

Noted, but still interesting to see and still highlights RAM performance size vs effectiveness.

[MHB]

Many thanks to all for the replies, I am going to go for the 8gb version.

[HotJambalaya]

I'm on an 8gb 15 inch retina, 256gb flash hd, and its fine. The mrs uses a lot of photo editing software on it, I don't know if it keeps the programs open when we switch users, but even leaving photoshop, lightroom etc open, and switching to me with lots of web browsers open as well as a database its been fine,

I would be tempted to get more memory, but no chance at that price, I'm sure 8gb will be fine.

[ian in lancs]

the latest versions of photoshop don't use more than 8GB. I have desktop PC win 7 and run LR and PS extensively for editing and never had an issue. I have a MBA 11" kept the ram at 4GB and up specced the HD. Again, same use of LR and PS and no issues.

[Bushman1]

MHB said:

Many thanks to all for the replies, I am going to go for the 8gb version.

So are Dixons travel selling the MacBook Pro Retina 8gb, 512 ssd i5 or i7 for £1249?

[MHB]

It's the 2.8GHz i5 model.

[Bushman1]

MHB said:

It's the 2.8GHz i5 model.

Ok because I have a friend who's travelling to Florida and he's picking me up a MacBook 8gb 512gb ssd i7 around the £1200 Mark.

I thought if it's roughly the same at dixons I'd get it from there.

[P-Jay]

They're Core i5 based aren't they? Frankly for your intended use 4GB would be enough, let alone 8GB, unless Apple intend to roll out upgraded OS after upgraded OS that offers little meaningful extra functionality but seems to render older/lower spec machines useless...

I've got a Core i5 based windows laptop with 8GB of RAM and an SSD - I've just edited some HD video I shot at the weekend, streamed some music from Google Play, I've got 5 pages running on IE11 and I've synced Outlook - didn't blink.

[spants]

I went for the 16gb ram, 1tb ssd and i7 upgrade for my new 13" MBpro mainly because I use a lot of virtual machines. For office use, 8gb/512gb/i5 would be enough in my opinion.

[Opara]

I've considered getting my first macbook, I'm just starting my 2nd year of an electrical engineering degree.I'm drawn to it because we'll be doing some app development which I understand needs to be done on a mac.Secondly the retina screen seems like it would be useful for working with design programs.I was doing some work this year on a 720p laptop and it was a real pain always scrolling around.

Have I got this right or do you think a desktop would be the way to go?

Cheers