Aperture vs Lightroom advice

Mostly agree with the RAM statement; however the Apple RAM is guaranteed to work (or they replace it).

I was sat in the Apple store on Saturday and some guy brought in his MacBook and said it keeps crashing. They checked the RAM and he had stuffed it full of third party. They took it out and by by crash.

Sure Apple RAM is way over priced but if you don't know what you are doing and just drop your dollars on the cheapest option you should be prepared for possible problems down the line. It is very difficult to return RAM that is not working in your computer as they will generally just put it in a low spec computer and say "no it's fine..."

It's easy to knock Apples RAM pricing but we all sing the mantra of "your paying for the quality and reliability of the Mac HW" when attacked by PC build it yourself gurus about the cost of Macs. The same mantra can be applied to their RAM.

all very true, and this did cross my mind. fortunately my computer shop specializes in mac stuff and they stand by their third-party stuff so I felt pretty at ease that I would be looked after in the event of incompatibility or quality issues.

As for the price differential between Mac and Windows based machines, I have never regretted this one bit. I love my Macs. I never had such a high level of enjoyment with any much cheaper PC I owned.

And as for photography, well don't even get me started! I know that the 24" iMac screen isn't perfect and pros who need absolute confidence will cite limitations and problems. But by jebus photos on this baby are a joy to behold for me. I never had any idea what I was missing before. I can't even bear to look at my pics on my old compaq presario laptop. Forget about trying to process them!

Hopefully, the price of proprietary mac ram will come down like everything else.

Les

OWC (www.macsales.com) offers their own third party ram with a lifetime warranty, but they offer, at a slightlly higher price, the exact same Samsung RAM that Apple ships. So high quality RAM identical to what you would get with Apple is available at about half the price Apple charges, and it comes with a lifetime warranty. If, after installing or using 3rd party RAM, you have constant problems with crashing or stalling, you need to check your own RAM with Memtest X, and if a stick is bad, send it back for a replacement.

--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}
http://www.dougwigton.com/

Doug, if that is the case, then I stand by my initial brash view that paying full price for RAM upgrades through the Apple Store is something to be avoided on economic grounds. If cheaper and guaranteed alternatives are available, the worst thing that can happen is I will save a lot of money

You got it!

--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}
http://www.dougwigton.com/

When I upgraded my iMac RAM to 4GB last summer for about $400+tax, I congratulated myself for my great economic savvy, since at that time the price for "official" Apple memory from the Apple store was about twice that.

I see that Apple memory has dropped to a still very expensive $600, whereas at that MacSales site third party stuff has plummetted in price to at most $100 per 4GB set, even less for the OWC brand you mention.

I had no idea that the trend would be so drastic. When I got 2GB from my trusty campus store in the fall 2007 for a then new black MB, the price had come down to about $170+tax, so I guess the writing was on the wall, but I never would have guessed that 2GB would end up at about $50 per stick only 5 or 6 months later.

I have 2.5GB in the MB and am waiting to get back the 1GB that I gave months ago to a friend who eventually figured out she can't use it since she has a much older iMac. At these prices, I might as well just splurge $100 on a paired set of 2x2gb and be done with it!

But what to do with all of these 512MB and 1GB RAM sticks I have around? Maybe someone on eBay, a collector, likes to buy up obsolete electronic stuff. Otherwise you can't seem to give the things away!

I have to add my voice to the calls to maximize RAM. I just spend a frustrating few hours fooling with A2.1 on the MB with 2.5GB and it is so sluggish as to be unusable, at least compared to my iMac with 4GB of RAM. Lots of jerky and irregular slider response, and the spinning beach ball comes up more than I like to see. Toggling to and from full screen with F and zooming with Z takes a couple of seconds. No such issues with 4GB.

So, I am off to get me another 2GB of cheap RAM!

Les