iBook + more RAM = Oh Yeah Baby

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Nearly three months ago I made the switch to a 14" iBook with 512MB RAM. Today added another 512MB (From microcenter @ $70) and am blown away by the improvement in performance. Whatever the minimum system requirements say, I think Tiger realistically needs at least 1GB of RAM to render a satisfactory user experience.



My typical app load is iTunes, Firefox, iCal and Tomato Torrent. I got tired of 10 seconds of beachball when switching from iCal to Firefox or iTunes. Glad to see the additional RAM seems to be helping so far. We'll see if the speed improvement holds up in the long run.



Have others seen this kind of dramatic improvement when upgrading from 512MB to 1GB of RAM? RAM is so cheap these days... why not just include 1GB from the factory? I paid $70 retail for 512MB RAM. Would anyone really balk if Macs were a tiny bit more expensive and came with 1GB RAM from the factory? I think the performance benefit would be worth it.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    When I upgraded the RAM in my 1.33 Ghz 12" PB from 768 MB to 1.25 GB I noticed no difference. But then again, I never ran Tiger on 768 MB. When I upgraded my RAM, I upgraded my OS from 10.3 to 10.4 too. Maybe that's why I didn't notice a difference.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    lundylundy Posts: 4,466member
    Apple has always done several things that I thought were very aggravating. Whether they made money or lost money with these policies I do not know, but I remember hoping that the return of Teh Steve in 1997 would change these policies. It didn't.



    - Video chips 2 or 3 generations behind current PC chips, but no price break

    - Base RAM included always a few months behind standard PC RAM allotment

    - Additional RAM always ridiculously overpriced.

    - If you want to BTO the faster CPU, you have to take the bigger hard drive too; with the AIOs like iMac, bigger screen always means bigger HD, faster CPU, etc.

    - SO-DIMMS designed so that one slot was always impossible to get to - the reason for this completely escapes me.



    I'd like to be able to click the dual 2.0 model, BTO it to a dual 2.5, and not have to take the bigger HD or any other upgrades. Or downgrade the HD and save some money. Or the reverse. But for some reason Apple does not allow this.
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