8 or 16GB of RAM?

Question

I'm planning on getting a MacBook Pro retina for Christmas this year. I want to upgrade to the 2.7 quad core i7 processor and been thinking about upgrading to 768GB of flash storage. My question is should I stick to 8GB of RAM or should I upgrade to 16? I've read many places that people should to "future proof" their macs, but i'm still unsure. I plan on downloading many apps and plan on playing many games. Price does matter here.

Answer 1

Besides the obvious doubling in available RAM, I discovered an interesting behavior that OS X has with memory management when 16GB are around.
I first got mine with the default (in those days) of 4GB, which I immediately upped to 8GB. Yet under heavy use conditions, especially when running multiple VMs under Fusion, and later quitting all apps, I was perplexed that the memory was not being freed. As seen in the System Memory tab on Activity Monitor, I was not getting back the green Free memory, it was staying as blue Inactive, with a corresponding lag when the memory manager needed to finally free it up. Then I got an Amazon offer for a 16GB Corsair kit, which I eagerly snapped up. With it the memory management behavior has changed completely: I've pushed the Mac to use up to 15 of the 16GB by starting up every darn app on the folder, including up to 5 VMs on Fusion. Yet when I quit all, memory gets completely freed immediately and I recover all of the memory (i.e., most of the pie chart goes back to green), with the corresponding speedup on the Mac's performance.
So yes, I heartily recommend a 16GB upgrade. Just be sure to install the correct Mac-certified memory for your specific model. Macs are famously finicky when it comes to RAM; generic bargain-bin sticks will be an unending source of headaches. And even though you'll be paying for the name-brand certification, it will amount to 1/3-1/4 of what Apple charges for RAM when configuring a new Mac.