2011 iMac 16gb of ram

[igoodso]

Do you need all this ram for gaming and just web surfing

 

[McGiord]

I do. Do You?

 

[mrfoof82]

Development. Particularly spinning up multiple VMs to test multi-tier applications. Need to ensure load balancing works, database failover works. Testing against databases with large working sets for a given query (analytics and DW, not OLTP). Spinning up virtualized Linux clusters for doing development against Vertica.

Small websites, iOS development? I don't need 16GB for that. For work stuff? I absolutely benefit. The Thunderbolt MacBook Pro I bring to client sites can devour its 8GB rather quickly. When 8GB DIMMs get cheaper, I'll probably bump up to 24GB.

Aside from that... I've had rendering jobs back in the day devour memory at a pretty ferocious rate. I did a large Minecraft map render recently that would've been sped up if I wasn't paging to disk as often (thing was clearly unoptimized, as the total commit charge for the render was 52GB).

 

[pawtracks]

"need" is a tricky word, most people will not use half of 16GB so I would classify it as a "want" for most. If you decide to get it, don't pay Apple $600, easily had elsewhere for $150ish.

Like here:
Amazon
$166 (need 2)

or

Newegg
Same price

Depends on your sales tax rules.

 

[archer75]

Do you need all this ram for gaming and just web surfing

No, not even close.

 

[Mobius 1]

8GB?

 

[likegadgets]

I run Parallels with Windows 7 - having 16 lets me allocate 4 to the Virtual Machine and still have 12 for OSX. An argument could be made that with 8 I could allocate 3 to the VM and have 5 left for OSX,

16 GB in the USA can be purchased for under $200 - so at that price point, for me was worth having the luxury.