[geeks] Mac memory falling in price

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Nov 24, 2007, at 11:34 AM, Lionel Peterson wrote:

>
> My advice is to buy the memory you need when you need it, don't buy  
> it because the price is lower than you previously paid...

Right now I have 5GB, and I'm trying to decide if I should upgrade or  
just wait.  I just happened to notice the price had dropped by nearly  
a third and was commenting on that.

Since I'm "on the fence" at the moment, the price is more of a factor  
than need.

$210 to stop minimal swapping is pretty borderline value, so another  
big price drop would certainly be a factor.

The thing which will probably push me to update will be in a few weeks  
when I start doing more photo editing and document processing.

I'm amazed at what a hog even Pages can be.  It evidently doesn't  
flatten images when you import them.  If you work with Photoshop  
files, it keeps the entire file with all layers internally.

I created a 12 page server inspection report with Pages this week with  
photos of a machine I was testing, and the document was 148MB, and the  
PDF file generated by Pages was 75MB.

To make it smaller, I printed to PostScript, and used Adobe Distiller  
to bring it down to 3MB, with no perceptible quality loss.

In some ways, Apple framework's ability to read in almost any kind of  
data is a liability, because it seems to process and store the data in  
its native import format, which makes it quite inefficient.

I guess I will have to start adding a flattening step to my workflow,  
it's just easier if that is automatic in the destination app.  Once I  
commit layout, I'd really like the program (Pages or whatever) to  
convert data to a format which matches desired output.  Clearly a WP  
doesn't need to maintain layers, for example.

It's no wonder RAM is getting cheaper... :)

> I'm considering getting another 4 Gigs for my 2x Quad core server, I  
> paid $265 for the first 2x 2 Gig DIMMs, and once it dips below $200  
> I'll probably go for the extra RAM (then I'l lhave the machine maxed  
> out)...

I thought you said you should buy memory when you need it... :)



-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com