Re:Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell a...
by snowwrestler on Friday January 27, 2017 @11:06PM
(#13504841)
> I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using 12G.
You can't take the RAM usage reported in Activity Monitor and extrapolate performance. If you were running the same apps on a recent Mac laptop with 8GB RAM, you'd see them taking 6GB of RAM and running just as fast as they do for you.
The only way to tell when you need more RAM is to load down a machine until it swaps too hard to keep up--then you know you need more RAM. And one of the things to keep in mind about new Mac laptops is that they have very fast SSD I/O, which also helps mitigate swap slowness.
You can't take the RAM usage reported in Activity Monitor and extrapolate performance. If you were running the same apps on a recent Mac laptop with 8GB RAM, you'd see them taking 6GB of RAM and running just as fast as they do for you.
The only way to tell when you need more RAM is to load down a machine until it swaps too hard to keep up--then you know you need more RAM. And one of the things to keep in mind about new Mac laptops is that they have very fast SSD I/O, which also helps mitigate swap slowness.