Quote:
Originally Posted by simmonjam1
One thing I think is a consideration, upgradability. My wife has a 2011 MB Air. It was the first ones after the redesign. You can't really upgrade anything on it. The memory is soldered to the logic board.
I have a Mac mini and MB Pro that I was able up the ram and hdd and get a few more years out of em.
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Yeah, I'd only purchase a Macbook with integrated memory if it had a minimum of 8GB of RAM (which all of the Retina class machines do), which should be enough for 3 years of use comfortably. One advantage of the SSD in this regard is that if/when you do get memory constrained, any swapfile access is much, much quicker so the impact to system responsiveness is lower.
Overall I don't feel like RAM requirements on desktop/laptop machines is going to dramatically increase any time soon, barring some massive innovation in user interface or functionality that we can't foresee right now. If you were running lots of virtual machines, you'd want to grab the 15" Macbook Pro with its 16 GB of RAM, but with 8GB you can very comfortably leave a Win7 or Win8 VM with 2 GB of RAM running in the background and not suffer for it.