Early 2011 MacBook Pro 13" max RAM

Apple support suggests it’s 8Gb; other places (eg Crucial) suggest 16Gb works. Anyone know if the latter is true?

16gb is fine. had 16 in my 2010/2012/2013 MBP i3’s

think it bumps the shared graphics up to 1gb from 512 when you up ht dram too.

I put 8 into my 2009 mac mini, apple site suggested 4 was max. I got info and advice from MacRumours forum and how to guide from ifixit and elsewhere.

I think 8 will be enough for that machine of you upgrade to Mavericks (free, make sure you have.a backup etc). Have a look at forum below for answer, unless you are using super memory intensive multiple applications I donut 16 is worth paying for. FYI I put a 750gb HDD in mine too although the MacRumours standard advice is an SSD will be best and most probably make more difference than ram from 8 to 16

MacRumours MBP

Thanks. Anyone any suggestions where to buy from? Crucial showing out of stock…

I can confirm that putting a SSD in makes a huge difference. I’ve just done it for a mate and we put a crutial 500GB SSD in his i7 MacBook Pro with 8GB ram and its quick. Opens Photoshop in secs with barely a bounce on the dock.

up ht dram too.

should be ‘up the ram too’

as for where to buy just find the kingston number for the ram, something like KTxxxxxxx/16 and google that part number.

Opens Photoshop in secs with barely a bounce on the dock.

start-up time is irrelevant if you only start up once a day. it’s the speed of scratch disk after the ram has been used (why more is always better) and the speed of read/writes when saving and opening that make a difference to productivity not opening an app.

i work on CS files between 2and 10gb and a spinning normal HD takes about a minute to read a GB so saving every hour or less when working on a big file and that downtime soon adds up. thats why i now use a retina MBP with ssd.

The machine will indeed accept 16GB, even though Apple says different.

Thing is, even with 8GB in it, the RAM won’t be the performance bottleneck in the system. Got 8GB in my mid 2011 i7 13″ MBP, the 5400rpm drive and the dual core processor hold it back more than the 8GB of RAM does. Though upgrading from 4 did make a substantial difference…

I bought Corsair, along with Kingston and Crucial seems to the brands most used/recommended. Double check you get the right speed (1066 / 1333 etc). Also would suggest you compare price of 16 vs 8 plus SSD. I paid something like £150 for 8gb and 750 HDD but as machine was 2 and 160 both needed upgrading. If your HDD is quite full and you only have 4gb ram the two things being full really slow the machine down. Mavericks has improved memory management and more and more forum posters are saying 16 is overkill for almost everyone. On balance I would suggest you try Mavericks upgrade first and see how the machine runs for a couple of weeks. If you’re doing it yourself watch the various videos and it’s not uncommon to have to remove and reset the RAM as it must “click” into place to be seated properly.

Another RAM question thread FYI here

Interesting as I put 8Gb in my 2010 MBP as that was supposedly the max it would take. Might try 16 Gb if it will take that.

Mavericks has improved memory management and more and more forum posters are saying 16 is overkill for almost everyone.

Things are actually a bit slower since upgrading, which is what made me think more RAM would be useful. HDD a long way short of capacity, too.

@ratherbe – ok got it, would suggest RAM upgrqde then. My gf has 2011 mbp and it is better withavericks but we will go from 4 to 8 when we have money. We agreed cost of 16 was too much and forum comments suggest its overkill. If money was no issue wed go 16 I would imagine

Strangely enough the thing that was eating my RAM was Chrome, and having switched to Safari there is much lower memory utilisation. 8GB might well be enough…

@rather – is the machine actually running slowly / giving the spinning cd (beach ball) ? Reason I ask is many forum posters look at memory usage and are worried that Mavericks is using lots of memory, responders have said Mavericks does this deliberately often pre-loading commonly used apps and if the memory is needed by an active app it’s just clears out the pre-loaded stuff. If you have 8gb already that should be fine. Interestingly I was using a 2009 iMac today with only 4gb and lots of programmes open and it was running really sweatly (more so than gf’s rMBP) with no “beach balls”

4 is supposed to be Max in my 08 MacBook, running 8GB.

16GB is supposed to be Max in my MacMini, thinking of ramping it up to 32GB…

Strangely enough the thing that was eating my RAM was Chrome, and having switched to Safari there is much lower memory utilisation. 8GB might well be enough…

Chrome is notorious for eating memory.

4GB at the moment; was getting lots of beach ball but now much improved.

Hadn’t been aware that Chrome was such a big problem until I sent a snapshot of Activity Monitor to my friendly Mac geek who asked what all the Google instances were, and why were they using over 1Gb of RAM…

16GB is supposed to be Max in my MacMini, thinking of ramping it up to 32GB…

Are you editing/rendering videos, developing photos, playing games, listening to iTunes and running four browsers all at the same time? If not, 32GB is complete overkill. I doubt that most people would notice notice any significant issues with 8GB, or even 4GB if all you’re doing is browsing. More RAM is not the answer to every computer ‘problem’.

Swapping out the HD for an SSD has made a massive improvement in my MBP. Processing 10s of Gb of photos is now blisteringly quick….

Are you editing/rendering videos, developing photos, playing games, listening to iTunes and running four browsers all at the same time? If not, 32GB is complete overkill. I doubt that most people would notice notice any significant issues with 8GB, or even 4GB if all you’re doing is browsing. More RAM is not the answer to every computer ‘problem’.

VMs. And lots of them.

I’d like to get a dedicated box to run them all on, buts that far out of budget unfortunately.