Why do new Macs ship with only 128 mb of ram?

[themacko]

Well, I know why. I understand that the more ram the Macs ship with, the more they're going to cost. But I purchased an eMac 2 weeks ago and decided to wait to purchase extra ram for a few weeks.

I am blown away at how poorly OS X runs with only 128 mb of ram. It's very frustrating and borderline unusable. Now please understand me, I have been using the computer quite a lot these past two weeks, but when I throw down $1200 on a brand new computer I expect it to run great as-is. I don't want to have to take it home immediately upgrade so it performs decently.

My roommate's 3 year old Dell runs Windows better than my brand new Mac runs OS X. I may just be venting, but explain to me the logic behind this. All these Windows users are supposed to switch to Macs are not going to understand why their computer runs like shat right out of the box.

[edX]

apple has traditionally sold their hardware with the minimal amount of ram required to run the current system. at least ram is something you can add at a reasonable price and getting it from a third part is far cheaper than from apple. this is one reason the web stores like macmall, clubmac, etc, have offers that often are better than buying direct from apple, even with an edu discount - because they offer some great free ram upgrade packages.

[kendall]

128MB of RAM is not a realistic minimum requirement for Jaguar 10.2. My PB G4 667 DVI ran ok with the factory installed 256MB of RAM in 10.1 but when I upgraded to Jaguar, performance took a huge hit.

I ran "top -u" in a terminal to see what was going on and found that Jaguar uses almost twice as much memory than 10.1 did. I purchased a 512MB DIMM online for $109, upping my total RAM to 768MB and found that Jaguar runs like a charm now.

XP doesn't run that well on the minimum required RAM either but OS X is a joke without enough memory. Computer companies like Apple buy so much memory in bulk, I doubt it costs them more than $30 for a 256MB stick. Heck, I can go on http://www.pricewatch.com and get a 512MB PC133 DIMM for $36 so it's probably a lot less. Apple could certainly up the minimum RAM it ships with their Macs without much cost to them and look a lot better in the process.

I think themacko is experiencing the difference many PC users feel towards Macs. Despite the beautiful graphics and awesome applications, performance-wise, Macs don't hold a candle to most PCs out of the box like themacko is finding out now with only 128MB of RAM.

[genghiscohen]

My wife's 400MHz G3 iMac ran 10.1.5 barely aceptably with 128 MB of RAM. When I put 10.2 on it, it craaaawled. I've been telling her for months that she would be better off with more RAM, and she finally agreed with me (a rare occurrance, hehe). So I upped her machine to 320MB, and she's now a happy Jaguar user.