Personal favorite vendor Other World Computing is at it again. Last time I heard from them that it was actually possible to cram 3 GB of RAM into a MacBook (with a Core 2 Duo). They’re contradicting Apple again, offering a full 32 GB of RAM in a Mac Pro (rather than Apple’s 16 GB limit). Just imagine having all that RAM at your disposal.
It’s a lovely thought that can be realized for a mere $6,579. Ouch. I don’t know about you, but that’s a bit out of my price range. It also brings another interesting topic to mind. Recently I’ve noticed that most people recommend installing the maximum allowable RAM (save for the Mac Pro). Has the maximum (2 or 3 GB of RAM) become the new sweet spot? What’s the sweet spot in a Mac Pro?
I have a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM. I would say that 2 GB is the sweet spot for this machine. With only 1 GB the machine had a hard time running Rosetta applications and would frequently thrash.
However, I don't think there are any important applications I use which aren't Universal (though I haven't purchased all the upgrades yet) so Rosetta should be less of a factor in the future.
For the Mac Pro I think the only question is how much RAM can you afford. But, I would imagine 4 GB is plenty for most users.
I bought an iMac 20" 2Ghz, 256MB Video RAM and 2GB RAM. I would have gone to 3GB RAM if I could have afforded it. 2GB is about right though for what the machine does--internet, music, movie watching and light Illustrator/Photoshop Elements work. I wanted more RAM to get better performance out of Rosetta with my PPC apps but to get 3GB was twice the cost of 2GB or more.
It also is a multiple user machine (up to 5 simultaneous log ins) and it does alright for fast-user switching.
When I win the lottery, thats when I will opt for 32 GBs of RAM. Looking at it from A "if I had won the lottery perspective", $6,000 is not that bad, heck, if the MacPro supported up to 64 GBs, I would probably spend the 14,000 for it. I definitely would want at least a 5 year warranty on it though and of course, it has to run Leopard since Tiger can only address that amount of memory through the command line.
OWC are a terrible vendor. I ordered 4gb of ram for my mac pro, and they sent me one of the dimms in an opened package, scratched and not working. It took countless hours and emails to get them to accept the broken ram. Not to mention I had to pay border taxes ($70) twice because of their stupidity.