[Patrick]

I'm in the market for a new iMac. The question is, how much memory works best with OS X? Apple ships them with 256MB, but some resellers are giving free memory upgrades. So is 512MB good for the average user?

I'm sure it's fine, but I'm wondering because in the past (before OS X) Apple included relatively small amounts of RAM. I had an old rev. A iMac upgraded to 64MB, but I eventually came to need more. Being too lazy to upgrade, I used virtual memory, which slowed things down. There's a thread here about using it in OS X, but I want to avoid that if at all possible. Besides, I've heard that it doesn't allocate memory in the same way as OS 9 and before.

[Patrick]

EDIT: hit the reply button instead of the edit button by mistake. Could the mods delete this? thanks

[Randman]

Two rules of thumb.

Get as much ram as you can afford. The more the merrier. It's as important as mhz/ghz speed.

Secondly, Apple ram is WAY overpriced.

[Millennium]

The general rule of computing in pretty much any Unix is that you can never have too much RAM. OSX is no exception.

This said, 512MB is the current point of diminishing returns for most. You should be fine with that.