Apple's New Mac mini--Is 256MB of RAM Enough? Our Pre Hands-On Trials

2004–09January 18, 2005Bill FoxReviews
Early in the life of Mac OS X, Apple was providing a meagre 64MB of RAM with many of its Macs, RAM was expensive and people were grousing. So we conducted a study of how much RAM was needed to run Mac OS X smoothly. We found that the sweet spot for general Mac use was 256MB, i.e. the benefits from increasing RAM dropped off precipitously using over 256MB. Of course, that was early in the development of Mac OS X, G4 CPU speed was stalled at 500MHz and RAM was more expensive than today. Does our conclusion still apply today?

Many long-time Mac users are now used to using more than 256MB of RAM and the real power users are pushing installed RAM well past 2GB. The speed of processing large image files is nearly directly related to the amount of RAM. But most Mac users from among the 14 million using Mac OS X don't process huge images. All of today's consumer Macs come with 256MB, as do the low end of the PowerBooks and Power Macs, and the top end PowerBooks and Power Macs come with just 512MB.

The base consumer $499 Mac mini and upscale $599 model also come with 256MB. So what is all the grousing about? It is partly because Apple made the Mac mini difficult to get open to upgrade RAM or anything else for that matter. This is a smart move by Apple because the margin on the base Mac mini has to be really thin. People fiddling inside will surely result in more repair returns and help suck the thin profit out of the Mac mini. In addition, it provides an opportunity for resellers to get a bit more out of a sale for those wanting more RAM.

Why do people want more RAM? Well, some are just plain used to it. Then, there are some who see the Mac mini as a cheap alternative to an iMac G5 or Power Mac G5 for work that should be done on an iMac G5 or Power Mac G5. Really? C'mon, give us a break.

The Mac mini is an inexpensive base Mac that runs Mac OS X and it is intended for general low end users, especially Wintel users. Apple has clearly gone through great pains to ensure that it does not compete with an iMac G5 or Power Mac G5. But this does not mean that the Mac mini might not fit some niches of current Mac users. We see several and plan to get a base $499 Mac mini as soon as they are out.

We can't really answer the question of whether we need more RAM or not without actually having a Mac mini in hand. But we can use a Mac that is roughly similar in specs and see how it performs as guidance. So we used our upgraded 1.4GHz G4 Cube as a proxy to try 256MB, 512MB and 1GB of RAM. Here is a chart comparing the two:

Specs of the $599 Mac mini and Our G4 Cube
Feature
$599 Mac mini
Upgraded G4 Cube
CPU Speed
1.42GHz
1.4GHz
L3 Cache
0
2MB
System Bus
167Hz
100Hz
Graphics
Radeon 9200, 32MB
GeForce 2, 32MB
Hard Disk
80GB, 4200RPM
80GB, 7200RPM

The upgraded G4 Cube has a faster hard drive and L3 cache but otherwise the $599 Mac mini has a slight speed advantage.

We used Xbench 1.1.3 to test the speed the G4 Cube with Mac OS X 10.3.7 and 256MB, 512MB and 1GB of RAM. We tested it with no other applications open and with a RAM-sucking set of applications open: Safari, Apple Mail, iTunes, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Someone was able to run Xbench on a $599 Mac mini with 1 GB RAM at Macworld and posted the results. Here are the results as compared with the posted $599 Mac mini results:

RAM Utilization at Different Amounts of Installed RAM
256MB
512MB
1GB
RAM Allocation
No Apps
Apps
No Apps
Apps
No Apps
Apps
Wired
38
47
50
60
67
75
Active
97
134
81
137
81
122
Inactive
56
70
52
180
51
166
Subtotal Used
192
250
183
377
200
364
Free
64
6
329
135
824
660
Total
256
256
512
512
1024
1024

We opened enough applications to just use up the available RAM at 256MB. There is only 6MB of free RAM with 256MB of RAM and all applications, including Xbench and Activity monitor. The average user will likely not have all of them open at any given time.

Xbench 1.1.3 Scores*
256MB
512MB
1GB
$599 Mac mini
Test
No Apps
Apps
No Apps
Apps
No Apps
Apps
No Apps
CPU
167
153
167
156
167
160
171
Thread
119
115
121
117
120
115
126
Memory
99
101
102
101
103
101
139
Quartz Graphics
148
145
153
152
150
148
145
OpenGL Graphics
125
117
128
119
124
119
122
User Interface
227
203
229
212
225
211
201
Disk
87
85
87
88
88
88
55

*Average of 3 runs.

First of all, the Xbench scores for the tests without open applications (green columns) are virtually identical among the three installed RAM levels for the Cube. They are also similar to those of the $599 Mac mini, except for the Memory test due to the Mac mini's faster RAM and System Bus. The three tests at 256MB that show the most effect of saturating memory with open applications (comparing the green and red columns) are CPU (-8%), OpenGL Graphics (-6%) and User Interface (-11%), noted in yellow in the first column. These effects are still fairly small and may not be statistically significant.

The question is, are the effects significantly ameliorated by adding more RAM? The CPU and OpenGL effects are slightly ameliorated. For the largest effect, User Interface, the 11% gap is reduced to 6-7%, not worth the cost of adding additional RAM in our opinion.

From these tests, we conclude that it is unlikely that the base Mac mini would need more that 256MMB of RAM for most low-end general computer users. We will see directly when we get our base Mac mini--stay tuned.

[Bill Fox]


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