MBA with only 2gb RAM- how good is it?

[nik911sc]

I have been waiting patiently to buy an Air but the specs just appear to be too light on. I admit its to be a portable unit mostly for email and documents etc but I feel that at 2gb RAM just wont cut it for OS X and have been holding out for a 4gb model.

In the meanwhile I thought I would ask those with an Air if they have found the RAM limitation slows them down and if it is a major issue in particular since Snow Leopard was released.

I am on my Mac Pro now with nothing major running and it already has 3gb used.

 

[gr8tfly]

No problems here on our rev. A running SL.

Almost zero pageouts over 5 days use. Running Pages, Mail, Safari, Word X (yep, Office X), iChat and iTunes. (136154(0) pageins, 42(0) pageouts)

When you see "used" that usually includes RAM in the inactive state. That's available RAM for the previous or new app. It's the ratio of pageins vs pageouts you want to look at for physical RAM requirements.

 

[NikFinn]

I have been waiting patiently to buy an Air but the specs just appear to be too light on. I admit its to be a portable unit mostly for email and documents etc but I feel that at 2gb RAM just wont cut it for OS X and have been holding out for a 4gb model.

In the meanwhile I thought I would ask those with an Air if they have found the RAM limitation slows them down and if it is a major issue in particular since Snow Leopard was released.

I am on my Mac Pro now with nothing major running and it already has 3gb used.

Oddly enough, I was wondering the same thing. (double weird, my name's Nik too.)

 

[ayeying]

is it actually being used or is it wired/active?

 

[adamjackson]

Yeah those are two different things.

Here's my current usage on my MacBook Pro w/ 4Gbs of ram. i'm running a ton of apps too.

http://grab.by/76v


The MBA I have is great! I used it daily and it's an awesome computer for most things.

 

[1rottenapple]

Only when I am running three screens of flash, or one flash screen running on the 24 inch external monitor do I experience slowness. NOt sure if it is a ram issue or the 1.86 ghz, but everything else, my rev b with ssd works well.

 

[nik911sc]

Oddly enough, I was wondering the same thing. (double weird, my name's Nik too.)

LoL and I have a Nikon too - d1x

 

[IgnatiusTheKing]

I have a Rev A and haven't had any real issues with memory, even when running Adobe CS3.

 

[jimboutilier]

I have been waiting patiently to buy an Air but the specs just appear to be too light on. I admit its to be a portable unit mostly for email and documents etc but I feel that at 2gb RAM just wont cut it for OS X and have been holding out for a 4gb model.

In the meanwhile I thought I would ask those with an Air if they have found the RAM limitation slows them down and if it is a major issue in particular since Snow Leopard was released.

I am on my Mac Pro now with nothing major running and it already has 3gb used.

I used a RevA MBA 1.6/2/80 traveling on business for about a year. For mainstream business apps (running 10-20 apps at a time) 2gb ram was just fine. It should not be an issue for any of the thing you mentioned. But if you run virtual machines or memory intensive multimedia apps like photo and video editors you may want to hold out for 4gb.

I did an experiment on a MB once with 1gb, 2gb, 3gb, 4gb. I found 1gb ran fine but did not feel snappy. 2gb offered a considerable performance improvement and things really felt fast. 3gb offered a very slight performance improvement but I found I did not reach into the 3gb range much except when running VM's. 4gb seemed to have no noticeable performance increase but I got a fair bump in battery life.

I ended up going back to a MB 2.4/4/320 as the MBA just did not have the storage capacity I needed and running VM's was possible but not optimal. When Apple releases a MBA 2.x/4/256 I will be heading back that way though.

 

[financeguy]

What about when running VMware Fusion with Windows? Any limitations there?

 

[ayeying]

What about when running VMware Fusion with Windows? Any limitations there?

If you wanna run 10 VMs at once, yes. Otherwise, one or two won't have too much limitations. I have Vista SP2 Business x64 running constantly in the background. I have 1GB ram dedicated to it and it doesn't slow down my OSX side at all.

 

[musicpenguy]

Wow - my original Macbook Pro that I got three years ago maxes out at 2GB! - The machine is still a great machine but I have been able to run VMs on it without a problem.

 

[darngooddesign]

I'm running 2GB on my unibody MBP and it handles everything fine. Unless you are doing very demanding work its fine.

 

[1rottenapple]

Yeah I think my slowdown that I posted earlier has more to do with my slower processor than anything compared to the ram. I think having the 2.16 (i think that is the speed) would improve performance but ah well.