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No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

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Basil

Basil

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No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Just 3 months ago, 16GB of RAM would have cost well over $1000 for my MacBook Pro. Lately RAM prices have crashed and I managed to pick up 16GB (2 x 8GB) (that's the most it will hold). It came stock with 4GB. Even with every app I use opened at the same time it barely puts a dent in it! I needed a bit more than 4GB, but 16 is over kill. However, since it was only $109 for 16GB (at Frys.com), I figured why not splurge!
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

That's a great price. Thanks for the news.

As I learned back in the Dark Ages (early 1990s), if a computer is getting slower and slower, the problem isn't usually virus, hard drive, dirty keyboard or dusty screen.

It just needs more RAM!

We still "type" at the same speed we typed when computers were lucky to have 64K memory, and storage was limited to 720k per disk. Everything back then was text based and cpu's basically just crunched numbers.

Now we have so many bells and whistles - slick user interfaces with gazillions of tools and choices - we need huge memory banks to hold all the 'stuff' the software comes with.

The young whip-snappers won't remember:

stat_drive_space.jpg


Tom
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

I paid $189 last May for 16gb (4x4gb). It's HDDs that have gone way up from what they were. Drives I was paying $50 for a year ago are up over $100. They're slowly coming down as the factories recover from the floods though.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

aerog said:
I paid $189 last May for 16gb (4x4gb). It's HDDs that have gone way up from what they were. Drives I was paying $50 for a year ago are up over $100. They're slowly coming down as the factories recover from the floods though.
Click to expand...

Yeah, 4GB sticks were pretty cheap even back then. I paid $49 for 8GB (2x4GB) that I put in my iMac. The iMac comes with 4GB (2x2) and 2 empty slots, so adding 2x4 to the empty slots gave me 12GB. It was the 8GB sticks that were outrageously expensive just a few months ago. Just May of last year, one 8GB stick of Corsair laptop memory was nearly $500 (Apple memory was slightly higher). Since my MacBook only holds two memory sticks, using 8GB sticks is the only was I could get to 16GB, which like I said, I don't really need, but at $50 a stick, that's 10% the price a year ago, so why not!

vzSRV.png


As for hard drives, I bought my Seagate Momentus Hybrid from OWC for $114 just before all the flooding. A friend at work waited and ended up paying $150 for the same drive just a month or two later.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Thailand is draining now. :smirk:
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Only a true computer guy would use a spread sheet showing part prices. :thumbsup:

That's classic!
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Programmers used to be required to write elegant and efficient code. Now they just force us to buy more memory. Try putting a code monkey today on a 64k RAM machine and tell him to write an entertaining video game.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

I remember the days when it took a mainframe to run a silly little space war game! If you were under attack and were in danger of being eliminated, you just pushed the left and right arrows at the same time to disappear. You then waited to see where you popped up again and hoped you were in a better location on the green monochrome screen.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

JamesWilson said:
Ah... 16GB of RAM for a Mac oddly reminds me of buying 16k for my Apple 2, decades ago... and I paid more for it, too.
Click to expand...

My first really "big" Hard Drive was a whopping 65 Meg (Meg, not Gig). I paid twice for it what I paid for a 2TB external recently.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

My first hard drive was 2mb. That thing was massive. When my dad got a 20 meg drive I wondered why, because we both knew no one would ever fill up something that big.

Remember, this was a time when an entire word processing suite fit on a 5 1/4" floppy disk.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Steve_S said:
My first hard drive was 2mb. That thing was massive. When my dad got a 20 meg drive I wondered why, because we both knew no one would ever fill up something that big.

Remember, this was a time when an entire word processing suite fit on a 5 1/4" floppy disk.
Click to expand...

Ah, those were the good old days! I remember browsing though "Computer Shopper" when it was a print magazine looking at "1 GB" Hard drives that were thousands of dollars!
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Basil said:
JamesWilson said:
Ah... 16GB of RAM for a Mac oddly reminds me of buying 16k for my Apple 2, decades ago... and I paid more for it, too.
Click to expand...

My first really "big" Hard Drive was a whopping 65 Meg (Meg, not Gig). I paid twice for it what I paid for a 2TB external recently.
Click to expand...

Our first real computer had a 40 meg Hard drive and we got a bank loan to pay for it.
 
Re: No, I don't "need" 16GB of RAM!

Stewart said:
I just wish the price of solid state drives would start to drop.
Click to expand...

They will! In the meantime, I put a 500GB Seagate Momentus Hybrid in my MacBook Pro. The Hybrid is a mechanical drive (7200 RPM) but has 4GB (or 8GB if you get the 750GB model) of SSD RAM onboard. It's "smart ram" which remembers which files are opened most frequently. This drive reduced my boot time from around 40 seconds to around 15 seconds. It's not a pure SSD drive, but with the smart cache, it's nearly as fast for most common applications, but has a lot of storage space. It was slightly more than a standard drive would cost, but much cheaper than a pure SSD. I paid $114 at OWC.
 
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