

Ask HN: Is it worth paying $200 to get 16gb RAM on mid-range Mac mini? - sahilkhosla


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paulrpotts
If you are buying a 2014 model, given that it seems to be non-upgradeable, I
suppose the answer is "yes if you want that much memory." Whether you want
that much memory depends strongly on your application needs.

If you already have a 2012 mini or earlier, I would look at crucial.com. It
looks like the 2012 models are pretty easy to upgrade. Older models, I know
from personal experience, are quite fiddly and difficult to take apart, so I
wouldn't recommend it unless you have experience taking apart laptops and
tools available such as spudgers and spatulas and extra kapton tape.

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lostinpoetics
FWIW, i used a mid-2011 2.3Ghz i5 with 8 GB of RAM for about 4 years as a
lightly used dev machine (read: basically ruby/rails, pg, and sublime text
with some crud stripped out and running on OS X [not server]) that also hosted
about 25-30 (low bandwidth) rails apps for internal use that did a lot of text
processing and never really had too many complaints. flash forward 2 years of
sitting idling without any activity and it's a bit sluggish now (granted
that's because i've done literally nothing on the machine other than let it
run)

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bbrks
What is it being used for?

~~~
sahilkhosla
Mostly for development purposes, running an IDE (Eclipse or IntelliJ), Android
emulator and a local Apache server. Besides development, I might have light
usage of Photoshop but no video editing or gaming.

