[geeks] Mac memory falling in price

[Joshua Boyd]

On Nov 24, 2007, at 1:00 PM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 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.

You say no perceptible quality loss, but did you look at it printed  
very closely on a good printer?  Your project might not call for that  
level of quality, but I certainly appreciate that it isn't making the  
decision for me.

There are certainly programs that waste memory flagrantly though.   
Firefox and After Effects seem to be two particularly annoying culprits.

> 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 would imagine that Application programmers could always override  
that behavior if they wanted to.

> 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.

You could easily automate the flattening step.  Create a finalize  
folder and set up a folder action (right click on folder, select  
Configure Folder Actions) to run a script that does the flattening.

> 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... :)

Sure, but there is such a thing as determining what monetary  
threshold determines when you need it enough to justify the cost.