The price of an 8GB upgrade is cheap enough now that the gain in system performance is worth it. Yes, particularly if you’re a power user. Is upgrading the MacBook Pro to 8GB of RAM worth it? The MacBook Pro simply performs better with 8GB of RAM. With 8GB I am doing the same work now that I was earlier today, but earlier today I was using 1.5GB of swap and now there is none being used, the difference is remarkable – no more beach balls and halts. The reason for the slowdown I mentioned earlier, when Mac OS X is forced to start swapping data from physical memory to the 5400 RPM hard drive you feel the drag. If you throw in a virtual machine, you’ve long hit the point of painful slowdowns. On a daily basis I frequently have the following apps open all at once: Photoshop, iTunes, Preview, Terminal, Transmit, Transmission, Text Wrangler, iChat, and here’s the real RAM hog: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, when you have three web browsers open at once with a ton of tabs open, your system will often slow to a crawl (web developers in particular can relate here). 8GB vs 4GB on the MacBook ProĤGB of RAM is a good amount but 8GB is better. Anytime you can avoid using virtual memory your Mac will perform faster since it does not need to access memory contents from the slow spinning hard drive, remember the default HD speed in a MacBook Pro is a rather slow 5400 RPM, the speed of RAM blows this away. I have a ton of apps open right now and I’m not even close to hitting virtual memory (you can read more about virtual memory in Mac OS X here). This is what I see now in Activity Monitor:Īs you can see, there are no “Page outs” (the movement of data from RAM to hard disk). Why? RAM is fast and virtual memory is slow, with 8GB of RAM the threshold to hit swap is significantly higher.

Yes, it is noticeably faster especially under heavy app usage and system load. So now I’ll try to answer some common questions about having a Mac with 8GB of RAM:

From start to finish it takes maybe 10 minutes at most.

Installation is so easy it’s barely worth mentioning, upgrading RAM in the MacBook Pro is a matter of undoing a few screws on the bottom of the Mac, lifting off the aluminum case, removing the old RAM, and popping in the new memory.

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