The Megabyte Myth

It's been shouted out again, and again, and again: RAM is better. More RAM buy more RAM. If you run OS X, BUY MORE RAM. If you're buying a Mac, BUY MORE RAM. It's almost as if all of the Mac pundits and Mac users on earth have been employed or bought off by the memory manufacturers for the last three years. Even above upgrading your hard drive or graphics card, memory is always said to be the first thing to be upgraded. It's this mantra which inevitably led to me putting my G4/400 out to pasture, after buying an inadvertently bad 512 MB memory module for it.

Now Macs Only! has decided to boldly challenge this almost zombie-like mantra with a variety of informal benchmarks using the controversial utility Xbench and a variety of other benchmarking stalwarts like Quake III: Arena.

It makes me wonder now if Apple knew this all along, and it was for that reason that they decided to ship many of their consumer-level and even mid-range professional level hardware with an apparently paltry 256 MB of RAM. Their arguement and evidence is convincing, though not fully conclusive; I'd be more interested if they shifted away from reliance on Xbench and used more "real-world" -style benchmarks. Note that they stress that the real reason why you should buy more RAM -- to kick ass at manipulating huge Photoshop files -- is far from what the intended target market of the Mac mini is supposed to be. And that kinda makes sense, doesn't it? You surely don't need a Dual-2.5 Ghz G5 to check your email, pay your bills online, or type up your letter to grandma...so why do you need 1 GB+ of RAM to do it?