Hello
I have an older 27" imac 32MB ram. I am having difficulties with redraw while using creative suite. I am going to upgrade to a laptop. What is unified ram? How much do I need to run photoshop, illustrator and indesign all at the same time. I have attempted to ask in store and the kids in there have no idea. So Im asking the community! What will give me speed and redraw I need?
How high is your RAM utilization currently? Try to monitor throughout a typical day / workflow.
That might give you an idea how much of the 32gb you are utilizing or if you constantly are maxing it out and doing a large amount of swapping to the drive.
View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac - Apple Support
The most common theme in "slow iMac" complaints here is the storage device. A mechanical hard drive will be glacially slow with pro apps and modern macOS versions. An Apple Fusion (hybrid) drive that is has a failed or non-registering component can be a slow as a mech drive. History here says your old iMac is not starved for RAM but could have an old-school storage device.
Every new Mac now comes with solid-state storage that will move data ~20X faster than the best mech drives.
However, the RAM you buy today will be your "forever" RAM in that computer. as no current Macs have user-upgradeable RAM. Order the computer today with the RAM you think you will need in two years.
Honestly ... all you can possibly afford to future proof it.
your current 27-in iMac ¿what model-year? should not be having problems with RAM at 32 GB.
in general, for the items you mentioned, 32 GB will be fine. what drive are you using?
You are likely running other stuff that is killing your performance.
By far the easiest way to cause instability and crashing is to install ANY third-party speeder-uppers, Cleaners, Optimizers, or Virus scanners. or a VPN that you installed yourself.
The idea that a third party, with no special knowledge of the inner workings of MacOS, can somehow find a simple way to protect your computer — that is not already being done by MacOS itself — suggests that the MacOS developers are somehow "holding out on you". That is absurd.
You should remove any and all (other than Apple built-in) virus scanners, speeder uppers, optimizers, cleaners, App deleters or VPN packages you installed yourself, or anything of that ilk.
Third-party file Sync-ers such as DropBox, BackBlaze, OneDrive, or GoogleDrive can also ruin performance, but are not inherently dangerous.
Hi Grant Bennet-Alder,
its a iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015), 4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
I run excel and word and email and teams and chrome of course, as I work remotely have lots of crap running in the background connecting to servers etc. The latest software seems to be really slow now it was fine before but they keep adding things and its slowed substantially on the last update.
Laptops - How much RAM do I need
