Anybody with a 2013 Haswell Macbook Air running a 4GB RAM configuration? Experiences? What's your primary use? Heavy lifting or light duty stuff? Any hiccups or stutters?

What about those with 8GB? Have you ever used a 4GB Air? Notice any differences?

Use would primarily be web, email, photos, streaming/mirroring via AppleTV, watching videos but no real video editing, maybe Windows virtual environment for occasional login to work PC, no gaming.

I'm thinking the speed of the PCI-based SSD should/would make up for the relative lack of RAM?

Thanks.

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The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado

I have not used either, but as a general rule with soldered memory, I get as much as possible as a hedge against the future. That $100 you spend now, will not only get you a more functional machine out of the box, but may extend the usable life of the machine up to a year, or more. I'm sure 4GB is going to be perfectly usable right now, and the difference for what you're doing between the 4GB and the 8GB is probably going to be minimal, but 2 years down the road, having the 8GB may be much more useful.

The story is different however if you have a set upgrade schedule. If you're upgrading after 2 years then you probably are fine with the 4GB.

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DRR
...get as much as possible as a hedge against the future.

Edit: I have not see anybody test this on OS X yet, but having 16 GB of RAM in Win7 was shown to extend the life of SSD's because there is less swapping to memory.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/01/2013 09:18AM by Filliam H. Muffman.

all's well.....that HASWELL.....???

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I reject your reality and substitute my own!

Little Bro has 8GB w/ 512GB SSD, and we have 4GB w/ 256GB SSD... his is better, but nowhere near twice as better. We'll see what Mav brings to the table, but I doubt we'll regret our decision to skimp comparatively. The MBA doesn't get pounded on like the MBP, MP, MM, or iMac... if it did, it would need more oomph. LB has convinced himself that he has future-proofed his purchase, but everybody knows he'll get a newer 32GB/2TB/i9 MBA (or whatever) long before his 8/512/i7 is unusable,

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Sometimes it is what it is...
and then there's times when it's really better.



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IMHO, video card has much more to do with future-proofing than amount of RAM.

That said, once I boosted my machine (10.6.8) to 8GB of RAM, it's been rock-solid.

We have a 2012 MBA with 4 GB RAM, and a 2013 Haswell MBA with 8 GB RAM.

The reason we went with 8 GB RAM is our usage:

We were having 3 people each logged into the same 4 GB MBA. Each person invariably had 2-3 browsers open (with 15+ tabs), Word, Flash loaded (Youtube). We would see many spinning rainbows and I figured it was due to RAM.

With the 8GB MBA, we are seeing much fewer spinning rainbows. We also have tried to keep 1 MBA to each user, so fewer instances of multiple logged in users.

Hope that data point helps.

pinkoos, 4GB RAM would likely be fine given the use-cases you describe.

But if they want to run Parallels AND do a lot of stuff, the windows environment will likely be slow.

I used a SR MBP from 2007 and 4GB of RAM with 10.8. Worked great.

Thank you all for the replies.

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Filliam H. Muffman

Quote
DRR
...get as much as possible as a hedge against the future.

Edit: I have not see anybody test this on OS X yet, but having 16 GB of RAM in Win7 was shown to extend the life of SSD's because there is less swapping to memory.

Conversely, booting from an SSD should reduce the cost of unnecessary RAM.

Quote
Buzz
Little Bro has 8GB w/ 512GB SSD, and we have 4GB w/ 256GB SSD... his is better, but nowhere near twice as better. We'll see what Mav brings to the table, but I doubt we'll regret our decision to skimp comparatively. The MBA doesn't get pounded on like the MBP, MP, MM, or iMac... if it did, it would need more oomph. LB has convinced himself that he has future-proofed his purchase, but everybody knows he'll get a newer 32GB/2TB/i9 MBA (or whatever) long before his 8/512/i7 is unusable,

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Is your brother's an i5 or i7? If i7, any issues with heat, fans or battery life compared with yours?

Thanks.

I have had the late 2013 rMBP 2.4Ghz i5/8GB/256PCIe (the middle of the line, $1500 model) for about a week now. It is very fast and I am happy with my purchase. It seems to handle editing for my YouTube videos and other heavy applications very well. I have only experienced one problem. When I first opened it up, after about 15 minutes the trackpad and keyboard became completely unresponsive (I just about **** myself), but after restarting and regaining full control of the trackpad and keyboard again, I checked for updates and saw that Apple had 2 updates available, both for this issue. After updating I have seen no further hints of this issue. Other than that it seems like a rock solid machine with good battery life and lots of power. No regrets, yet.