I don't know how relevant you will find this info about my workflow but here goes. After purchasing my D800 I discovered that I could not use the cd to process the raw files because the 10.4.1 os of my iMac was too old.
My macBook has os 10.6.8 and could not use that either. Both have 2gb of ram. Not being able to spend more money on any type of upgrade of hardware, I decided to use Adobe DNG converter. There was a version I could use on the macBook, so I downloaded that.
So the workflow is like this:
1. Download from card to folder on desktop of macBook.
2. Do DNG conversion in a folder in USB external hard attached to macBook. This doesn't take as long as I thought it would. Btwn 10-15 mins for 100 or so raw images.
3. After conversion, I'm able to work on either computer using Aperture. Processing goes fairly quickly with no real issues, only an occasional "spinning ball of death".
I don't think that this is the ideal way to do work, but it didn't cost me anything. I do believe however that the conversion to DNG is not as color accurate as being able to dump everything into Aperture. But I can live with this and make the necessary adjustments. Creating the new tiff files to me my client's requirements (400 ppi) at native size results in files over 100mbs.
There is a fair amount of moving files around and I had to get rid of a lot of old apps that were taking up space, but didn't gain as much hard drive memory as I would have liked.
The take away here is that I found a way to make it all work. A interesting observation is that the .dng files seem to cause less lags in processing than the native .nef.
I hope that this helps some of you out there. If anyone has a suggestion that might improve all of this, I'm all ears.