How much is 4gb of ram enough for?

photoshop is enough. But you should consider 8gb when buying your mac, just because you can't upgrade it at all later on. System takes about 1GB, Photoshop Takes about 1GB, leaves you with a little less than 2GB to play around with before your system will slow down a lot.

Like most people you're underestimating what you can do with 4gig of RAM

The answer is a LOT

Photoshop. ....downloading...10 web tabs and several other things all....,at once.

Once you hit swap, the computer starts to slow down. No matter how much the OS compresses the memory, swap kills your computer's performance and if you have a ssd install it will slowly kill off the life of the ssd. Sure, you can do a lot, but once you hit swap, your performance will degrade very quickly and you can see it. Things start to slow down, programs that are moved to swap and loaded back to memory will stutter or freeze for a couple seconds, etc. You can even see the genie or scale effect of minimizing and maximizing your applications stutter. Maybe, for the general population 4GB may be enough, but if someone is developing and application or using photoshop, it is really easy to lose track of memory usage especially if you are working on multiple photos at the sametime. Adobe products are always a memory hog.

Something else you might want to do is get an app that clears up RAM that is being taken up but not being used. The one I use is Free Memory. They display how much memory is available at the top dock and if it gets low and there is RAM that can be cleared up you can have it clear up the excess to speed up the computer.

Also on the topic of photoshop, Adobe CS2 is completely free now, but does not work on the current operating system. 😐

Mavericks uses RAM differently, RAM cleaning APPS were bad before,

now theyre awful and can cause issues for use with Mavericks.

I have a MBA 2011 4GB RAM

I can run:

Matlab and Word

Matlab and Word and Endnote

Word, Excel and PowerPoint [WEP]

WEP and Acrobot Pro X

Lightroom and Photoshop

Aperture and WEP

iWork and WEP and Endnote

Only issues running these apps simultaneously, and even then it was more of a processin problem:

FCP X and iMovie

Safari running YouTube, Netflix at the same time + multiple tabs running flash or other media content.

Each line was group of apps I could run simultaneously with no issues (I could have run more, but I did not).

I wanted to mention that the apps below were not running well together..and those included the one's mentioned below that statement:

FCP and iMovie etc.

The "only issues" was directed to running these movie editing apps or playing multiple videos. And even when that was a problem, it was mainly because of running high on CPU cycles.

OS X does a great job of managing RAM, and althought it may look like all of the RAM is being used (active+inactive etc), OS X dynamically manages it and you really dont have to worry about it.

Most important thing is, you can use the Mac and do a lot with no problem. The only apps that may need more ram are CAD and Video editing tools.

Sorry for the confusion.

Here is a list of apps I have been able to run, individually (at once) without any performance issues:

Endnote 7

Matlab 9

Photoshop CS6

MS Office 2011

Lightroom 4

Aperture

iWork suite

iLife suite

Final Cut Pro X - gets choppy because of high CPU cycle usage

Rosetta Stone

Photoshop Elements

Autodesk Fusion

Corel Draw 12

IBM SPSS 21

QuickTime online streaming

Dreamweaver

Google Earth

Acrobat Pro X

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

Mavericks uses RAM differently, RAM cleaning APPS were bad before,

now theyre awful and can cause issues for use with Mavericks.

Can you explain specifically how they are bad and what exact issues occur? The claim that every single RAM cleaning app is bad is pretty bold and could use some support.

I don't know what version of Mac you have but they help my computer and make a noticeable change in the speed of my computer. Rather than going and manually cleaning up the RAM yourself you can get an app that detects what is using excess RAM and ending that. I have never had a problem with that.

RAM cleaning APPS are not only useless, theyre frequently detrimental.

Mavericks is optimized to use RAM correctly, and no 3rd party can either equal or best this operation.

Nearly 100% of "RAM cleaning" applications have extremely low ratings for a reason.

They are not recommended and often "worse than useless".

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/12/compressed-memory-in-os-x-109-maverick s-aims-to-free-ram-extend-battery-life

Mavericks uses RAM much more efficiently than any other previous version of OS X. Mavericks now has a memory compression feature that will compress the memory occupied by applications that aren't being actively used and give the freed up RAM to the application that needs it the most. Memory Pressure graph that tells you how stressed is the system in terms of memory.

Fore more information about OS X Mavericks new system management technologies visit:

http://www.apple.com/osx/advanced-technologies/

See page 5 here:

http://images.apple.com/media/us/osx/2013/docs/OSX_Mavericks_Core_Technology_Ove rview.pdf

I went to those websites that you referenced, and they talk about how great Mavericks is. I agree that Mavericks is an improvement in the operating system.

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

RAM cleaning APPS are not only useless, theyre frequently detrimental.

...

Nearly 100% of "RAM cleaning" applications have extremely low ratings for a reason.

They are not recommended and often "worse than useless".

Now, your claims about how aweful these apps are remain unsupported. While you may be against them personally for your own reasons, saying that they are useless and detrimental does not have any evidence. There are no specific reasons for why you think they are bad besides saying Mavericks doesn't need them.

Here I see 14 memory cleaning apps with at least 4 stars, and much less with low ratings. So saying "nearly 100% of RAM cleaning applications have extremely low ratings" is just false.

They are detrimental in Mavericks, as Plotinus already remarks !!!

The stars does not say anything about the quality of an app in the Appstore and have nothing to do with any Apple recommendation. You do not know who makes the star evaluation nor who he works for, not what his capacity is in evaluating apps.