Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

Memory¶

237 words

OS X’s memory usage is just obscene. Sure, the system does many things. But it also requires shitloads of memory to do that. Luckily I had upgraded my computer to 640 MB a while ago and that seemed generous. I mean, it’s like 2¹⁰ times as much memory as any decent person could possibly require. But since using X.4 – which seems to produce even more, but more reasonably sized swap files than X.3 – even that seems less than ideal. Particularly the occasional use of the Dashboard usually involves delays which I’ve heard aren’t that much of a problem if you’re having a gigabyte of memory or so.

When having used my computer with 512 MB of RAM only last week, I was suprised how much slower it felt during that time. Even with not too many applications running, many things seemed sluggish. I’m wondering to which extent this makes people unhappier with their computers. Seeing them offering 256 MB on the ‘low’ end and 512 MB on the ‘high’ end, suggests that Apple don’t think so. And if it doesn’t make people unhappier, it hints that speed isn’t an issue at all for most people. But then I once more fail to understand why anyone would buy things like iBooks, iMacs or mini Macs with a higher clock speed which probably gives you less of a speed improvement for your everyday work than another RAM chip.

July 23, 2005, 0:50