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This speeds up programs on your computer. The more RAM you have, the less swapping back and forth of data between memory and storage occurs, and so the more applications you can quickly access on your device. If there’s no room in the RAM of your device, that data is saved instead of its data storage, which is slower to access. Put more technically, applications need to be quickly accessible if you want to use those apps fast, which means they need to be on your device’s RAM. If RAM is like a computer’s short-term memory, then its data storage is its long-term memory: you can hold more information there, but you want to store it in the short-term part of your computer if you need that information quickly. How Does RAM Affect Performance?Ī computer loads programs, the operating system, and data currently being used by the CPU. The amount of RAM on your computer is vital to determining how much your Mac can do at any one time without worsening its performance. Memory, also known as RAM, is like the short-term memory of your computer: it’s the amount your Mac can store on its system at any one time that’s ready to be immediately retrieved. Apple’s Calculator app alone uses around 28 megabytes of memory, or 45 times the entire usable memory space of a 640K RAM computer!īut how much memory do you need? This depends entirely on how much you will use your computer and what you’re going to use it for. Although the story is probably apocryphal, it did reflect the mood of some at the time: many people did believe that the future didn’t need much more RAM than what was available more than 30 years ago.Ĭlearly, we certainly need more than that now. According to reports, in the 1980s Bill Gates said that “640K RAM should be enough for anyone”.
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