I bit the bullet and bought an extra Gb of RAM for my Macbook Pro yesterday, bringing it up to its maximum memory capacity of 2Gb. It’s a pretty fast laptop anyway, but I was finding that when I had a lot of big programs open, and particularly when I was running Windows using Parallels, it would occasionally have a bit of lag when switching between running apps. Not any more…
The extra gig makes a big difference to the way that non-Universal apps run. Apparently there is a fair bit of memory overhead required for Rosetta (Apple’s built-in emulation layer that enables applications written for the PowerPC chip to run on the new Intel-based Macs), and even with the Macbook Pro’s standard gigabyte of RAM it works the machine hard to run Rosetta apps such as Office and Photoshop.
For anyone using a new Macbook or Macbook Pro, I’d suggest seriously thinking about adding that extra gig. I’d say it’s definitely worth it, although you ought to shop around as the aftermarket memory from places like Crucial seem to be much cheaper than buying memory directly from Apple.
One Fast Mac by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.