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Guesses of minimum RAM for Lion?

cambookpro

cambookpro

macrumors 604
Original poster
Feb 3, 2010
7,233
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United Kingdom
Since Lion will incorporate a lot of 'instant load' and apps always running, it's going to need a lot of memory, isn't it? Would 2GB now be the bare minimum for RAM? SL was 1GB, but that didn't exactly speed along on 1GB. I'd guess 2GB as that is the least RAM you can now buy from Apple.
 
I think 2 GB will be the minimum to run Lion, due to the fact that Lion only runs on intel macs, and all intel mac's support 2 GB's of RAM
 
pineapple216 said:
I think 2 GB will be the minimum to run Lion, due to the fact that Lion only runs on intel macs, and all intel mac's support 2 GB's of RAM
Click to expand...

If that were the case, SL would have required 2GB of RAM because it is Intel only. I'm going to assume that they leave the minimum requirement at 1 GB of RAM, why would they release a computer (MBA) less than a year before Lion ships, that would only ship with the bare minimum requirements as standard??? It's bad business and will piss a lot of consumers off; which will inevitably lead to bad press.

-Don
 
I'm wondering if the cut-off in Lion is going to be more to do with VRAM. Those original MacBooks with shared VRAM might chug along slowly given what we saw of the graphics effects in everyday use of Lion.
 
Dmac77 said:
If that were the case, SL would have required 2GB of RAM because it is Intel only. I'm going to assume that they leave the minimum requirement at 1 GB of RAM, why would they release a computer (MBA) less than a year before Lion ships, that would only ship with the bare minimum requirements as standard??? It's bad business and will piss a lot of consumers off; which will inevitably lead to bad press.

-Don
Click to expand...

The thing is that now the MBAs WILL be able to run Lion. Since every current Mac has minimum RAM of 2GB+, I think it makes sense.
 
SL is a RAM hog. There I said it. Apple has to do MAJOR RAM management optimization in oder to match Windows (as much as I am not fond of it) excellent RAM handling.

My fear is tho, that they are thinking that everybody will get a SSD to drive Lion and forget how bad RAM management/paging in OS X is.

My guess it won’t be more 1 GB RAM recommended. But as always it’S never accurate.
 
mabaker said:
SL is a RAM hog. There I said it. Apple has to do MAJOR RAM management optimization in oder to match Windows (as much as I am not fond of it) excellent RAM handling.
Click to expand...
Apple's track record for writing small effecient code is worse then Micosofts. Leopard was a memory hog, SL was not better. Looking at safari, aperture and apple's other apps and I'd say the odds that apple will shrink Lion's memory requirements is about nill
 
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1 gig cause this method saves ram not the other way around
 
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goobot said:
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1 gig cause this method saves ram not the other way around
Click to expand...

No, if Lion saves the state of every app it's going to use a heck of a lot more RAM.
 
cambookpro said:
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No, if Lion saves the state of every app it's going to use a heck of a lot more RAM.
Click to expand...

in ios even if there are a 100 apps saved via ios method it is still using a lot less ram than a few apps via regular multitasking. lion i believe does it the same way
 
cambookpro said:
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No, if Lion saves the state of every app it's going to use a heck of a lot more RAM.
Click to expand...

saving the state of an app uses a heck of a lot less ram then leaving it running

just looking at what I have running on my mac right now, iTunes (with nothing playing), iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, Pages...none of those actually NEED to be running, they're not doing anything. So if instead their state was just saved, it'd save memory
 
Dmac77 said:
If that were the case, SL would have required 2GB of RAM because it is Intel only. I'm going to assume that they leave the minimum requirement at 1 GB of RAM, why would they release a computer (MBA) less than a year before Lion ships, that would only ship with the bare minimum requirements as standard??? It's bad business and will piss a lot of consumers off; which will inevitably lead to bad press.

-Don
Click to expand...

You do realize that the first intel macs had 512mb ram right?
 
If you run SL with 1GB of RAM, it's your own fault. I can't even get along with 8GB, doing nothing fancy on my Mac Mini :rolleyes:

As long as you can upgrade virtually every Mac to run Lion, I'd also be fine with 2GB of RAM as a requirement.

I haven't seen much that justifies any kind of altered requirements on Lion so far though, remember that all that stuff runs on an iPad with 256MB of RAM and single-core CPU with 1GHz.
 
If it goes up to 2gb, I guess I'll have to update my Late 2006 MB's ram from 2.5gb to 3.3gb or whatever the max is. :p
 
2 gb. It is the standard for all of Apple's current computers, I imagine they will only cater for computers (not upgraded) a year back. More sales when Lion is released.
 
netdog said:
Those original MacBooks with shared VRAM might chug along slowly given what we saw of the graphics effects in everyday use of Lion.
Click to expand...

Don't you mean every MacBook ever? ALL MacBooks have integrated GPUs (and thus shared memory). The ones with the Nvidia cards are pretty fast, but they still have shared memory.
 
I am gonna say 1GB for minimum to just run it. However, once you start loading applications and running them on background.. then 2GB. If you start opening multiple pages and programs, then it will be better off with 4GB. iMacs will most likely move up to 8GB rams and most of laptops will be 4GB standard.
 
I expect RAM usage to lower in real world comparisons with Lion. I expect it to run ok on 512 and well on 1024 MB.
 
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