Is 4GB RAM enough with Retina?

I only use the laptop for internet, email, Office, movie.

 

Should be okay. But nowadays 8GB is pretty common amount of ram and it's pretty cheap.

 

Except the RAM on a Retina MacBook Pro isn't upgradable unless you do so at the time of purchase/ordering.

 

That's fine.

I do the same stuff on my Fujitsu Lifebook T5010 with 4 GB of RAM.

 

This. Soldered-on RAM/SSD and glued-on battery FTW!!!

 

Most people don't care.

Only some people like you and I care.

Apple has already shown that most people will still buy locked down laptops because they either don't care about upgrading their computer or don't know.

 

Actually I don't really care either. I've built my own PC's in the past and I'm perfectly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the rMBP yet I would still love to own one. But people who may not be so aware of the appliance-like nature of some of the new-age devices need to understand what they're getting themselves into as far as speccing out the machine before purchase, lest it comes back to bite them in the butt later on. And this goes for not just Macs but iOS, Android, and Windows 8 devices and Ultrabooks, All-in-Ones, etc.

 

Assuming you are talking about Retina MBP 13", I strongly recommend you to get 1499$ one -- as others said, RAM and Storage in MBP are not user-upgradeable. Having 128GB more SSD and 4GB more RAM definitely worth $200 premium -- especially since 4/128 is on low side for modern computing.

 

128GB really isn't a whole lot of storage. When I had my 128GB 13" MBA, I quickly filled it up and continually had 1-2GB of free space on it. I ended up upgrading the drive to an aftermarket 240GB SSD and that allowed for much more breathing room. Even if you won't exactly fill it up now, you could very well fill it up 2-3 years from now. 4GB of RAM is more than enough for general computing and whatnot but the SSD capacity is a little on the low side. Given the current price of the 13" MBPr, I would just spend the $1500 as previously suggested.

 

Go for 8GB minimum. As folks have mentioned, it's not upgradeable down the road so it's worth investing now. It will help with the resale if/when you do try to get rid of it.

 

To get 8GB is $100. This is $100 you will not regret spending three years from now when [FUTURE WEB 3.5] tech crawls in 4GB.

 

What do you mean by Future Web?

I'm used to changing batteries , RAM , SSDs , WiFi cards , WWAN cards , etc. in laptops in order to help keep them up to date in some areas but you can't really do that with a Mac or Ultrabook (in most cases).

I had 8 GB of RAM in one of my 2008 Fujitsu Lifebook T5010s but it didn't make much a difference when it came to normal tasks.

It's not like word processing needs a lot of RAM. I don't see how basic web browsing can use much RAM either.

 

What do I have open of value here?

Chrome
IRC client
Mail
iTunes
Messages
...

This is not a bizarre assortment of unique apps. The kernel task alone is using over 700MB.

 

Its not really enough, you'd probably be better off spending $1300 on a windows equivalent such as the yoga 2 pro for example.

 

In Windows my typical usage is a lot less.
I guess OSX has more intensive stuff running in the background.

Also I don't normally use IRC , iTunes , a mail client , etc.


Some things I have running:
Antivirus
Firefox
Microsoft Office Onenote
PDF reader

 

Actually I think Future Web 3.0 will be much faster, leaner, and ligthweight, because all the web developers will be ditching that CPU-wasting, RAM-sucking abomination known as Adobe Flash for HTML5.

For all we know you could be running a hundred tabs in Chrome with ten of them playing back those godawful resource-intensive Flash videos.

Also, iTunes. One of the most bloated pieces of software in existence.

I was surprised when I learned just how bloated OS X is. It's just as much of a resource hog as Windows, if not more.

 

Which is why web browsers today use less RAM then they did three years ago. Right? For reference, just loading the Gmail web interface takes ~200MB in Safari. ONE tab. And this is not some random obscure page. It's a webmail page, of one of the biggest email services on the planet. You could hate Gmail and Safari and whatever else, but a large portion of the planet use Gmail, and your typical Mac user likely uses Safari. But Chrome is not much better. It's not so much bloat as attempts to isolate tabs, security things, stability things.

I have three tabs open. One of them is this website. Neither of the others is intensive enough to cause my Mac to be warm.

That's fine. However, it's the music player that comes with OS X, and it's a lynchpin of much of the iDevice and music usage on a Mac. People use it, they will continue to use it, complaints or not. This is not about "don't use that because it sucks" it's about "I have to use this because it syncs my iWhatever and I like iTunes Radio."

Much like Windows, OS X does caching tricks and scales to the RAM available. This is why they can still sell 4GB machines with a clear conscious. It also is partially due to all the software at work maximizing battery life, controlling rogue processes, managing various aspects of the system. It can be as bloated as you want to believe it is, but it still runs 12+ hours on an Air. So..

But I don't think locking in to 4GB RAM today is wise. We're not talking about doubling the cost of the machine to add 4GB more. It's $100. That's out of the ~$2000 being spent. There are laptops at *Walmart* with 8GB RAM. Are you so petty you can't compete with computers sold at.. Walmart? Nevermind things like virtualization, which you ain't gonna do well on a 4GB machine, regardless of bloat or anything else.

 

Although I agree with (mostly) what you're saying, I can assure you that virtualization is completely possible with 4GB of RAM. My mid-2011 MBA had 4GB of RAM yet I would run a Windows XP or a Windows 7 VM all the time. Each one was assigned 1GB of RAM and they ran fine. I always had Excel open in each VM (Excel 2010 in XP and 2013 in 7) along with MATLAB compiling and running a series of macros (50+) while each macro had thousands of lines of code (some were 3,000 while others were pushing 70,000). That was all with 4GB of RAM. OS X was able to scale back properly and my MBA didn't really slowdown. I eventually upgraded to a system with a quad-core CPU as the one in my MBA couldn't keep up with all of the VMs I had to run at once. I had to start running Windows XP, 7, and 8 all at once each doing the same thing (I had to make sure my macros worked in an older OS with an older version of MATLAB all the way up to the most modern Windows OS and version of MATLAB). It became easier for me to just have all the VMs opened at once so I could drag-and-drop files between them if I needed to make changes. My MBA could run all three VMs at once but the CPU was hurting pretty badly. OS X also seemed to not like running with just 1GB of RAM but the biggest hit was to the CPU.

Really? Someone had to take it there. The OP asked about 4GB of RAM in a MBPr and someone just said "f*** that system, get a Windows machine instead!" I don't really understand why people continue to do this. It annoys the Hell out of me and I wish it would stop. Why make a reply like this when it doesn't answer the OP's question and does nothing more than fit within the stereotypical "Ha ha ha lolz. Getz a Windowz machene!" type of responses that plague Mac related forums.

 

I'm aware of that, but I'm not talking about SuperFetch and other types of precaching. Those are actually good things, speeding things up and increasing system responsiveness by utilizing unused RAM. Unused RAM is wasted RAM as they say. No, I'm talking about all the fancy graphics that have become the norm in recent years on Windows and OS X. Things like the 3D desktop, transparency/translucency effects, and fancy animations. These can use up not an insignificant amount of CPU cycles, RAM, and VRAM. Which is why gamers get increased performance when they turn of Aero in Windows 7 and switch to a basic Windows theme or disable desktop composition for their games. And turning off Aero becomes almost a necessity for some users of Surround/Eyefinity setups since it can save hundreds of MB's of VRAM. Even as OSes have become more efficient at utilizing resources, all things considered there's no denying that their system footprints have increased.

 

I recommend 8GB for future proofing purposes.

 

4GB should be enough for what you're using it for, but 8gb is so common now. Also, 128 gb is really small, and if you find yourself running out of room, your options are really limited on the new retinas.

 

With the Haswell refresh, only (1) Retina model still has 4GB as a base config. The other (4) configs are all 8GB minimum.

 

I also got the 8GB / 256GB model on the second or third day it came out. The double amount of SSD space is worth the step up. I'm coming from Thinkpad X230T. Sold that one for $900 (which I bought for $1020 /w 3 years warranty, then added a intel 80GB mSATA SSD), bought this new rmbp13 for $1400 with student pricing. I love it so far.

 

Are you having any battery issues? I have the same model but mine is getting 4-5 hours with Chrome browsing/music.

 

No battery issues.

If you have battery issues, open up task manager and see if some process is using 100% CPU all the time. That's probably why you have poor battery life. Without those rouge process running, I get 10 hours for simple web surfing. I do get rouge processes sometimes, such as Kernel running at 100%.