Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Macbook Air with 4gb ram..can you only get online from Apple?
- Thread starter one028
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Indeed. FWIW, I got mine in December from PowerMax. They had a number of alternate configurations in stock.
My Apple Store only had the Ultimate of each version with 4GB. I got lucky and a refurbished unit came up on apples website. For $100 the RAM can't hurt.
It's really the most reasonable of all the upgrades.
It's really the most reasonable of all the upgrades.
Personally, I'm incredibly surprised that the MacBook Airs don't all have 4Gb of RAM as standard. All of my machines (iMac, MacBook Pro) have 8Gb in them, and even then I start to hit that ceiling when I have a few applications open!
4Gb is the bare minimum these days, in my opinion.
4Gb is the bare minimum these days, in my opinion.
...
If you are in Canada you can get it from futureshop.ca they carry them in the online store...not only that but they seem to have a price error last time I checked and the 4gb is only $50 more than the 2gb not $100 more like on the apple site
If you are in Canada you can get it from futureshop.ca they carry them in the online store...not only that but they seem to have a price error last time I checked and the 4gb is only $50 more than the 2gb not $100 more like on the apple site
Jesus Christ, are you kidding? Are you editing an IMAX film in Final Cut while mixing the Boston Philharmonic in Logic Pro?
To answer OPs question: The memory is not like previous MacBook models where you could change it out yourself. The memory on the new MBA is literally soldered to the motherboard. At this time there is no reliable or necessarily safe way to add RAM besides changing out the motherboard or exchanging the MBA altogether.
Jesus Christ, are you kidding? Are you editing an IMAX film in Final Cut while mixing the Boston Philharmonic in Logic Pro?
Ha, close I'm a developer by day and an amateur photographer by night.
For development, I have a few virtual machines with "clean" installations of Mac OS X Server, Windows XP and Windows 7 for testing. Xcode + Mail, iTunes, etc + VMWare pretty much fills 8Gb.
For photography, I use Aperture, which uses as much memory as you have, it would seem. There's definitely a difference in Aperture's performance between 4Gb and 8Gb when working with large RAW files.
In Australia most stores like JB HiFi / David Jones / Apple Stores / Next Byte etc only have the 2GB models in stock, and if you want the 4GB version you have to go CTO online for it to be custom built for you. Hence why I purchased online and my MBA 13" / 1.8GHz / 128 SSD / 4GB Ram should arrive tomorrow. Even the Official Apple store at Chermside in Brisbane's northern suburbs only has the 2GB versions in stock - very odd indeed.
Then what you meant to say was bare minimum--for me. Some of us do just fine with 2GB of RAM.
Does anyone know whether the UK Apple Stores stock the 4GB versions too? It seems the stores in Australia don't, so its not the same everywhere.
My wallet is getting twitchy and my credit card is upset because I haven't used it for weeks...
My wallet is getting twitchy and my credit card is upset because I haven't used it for weeks...
no if you're doing basic stuff like word and web browsing. if you have more stuff going on at the same time things will run smoother with 4gb.
I got the 4gb for this mainly, i cant comment on what 2gb would be like, but running parallels with video streaming and working on word and excel at the same time in the mac environment runs really smooth on my Air....
