McMahonWeb

I read an article today on Gizmodo (actually, It was more of seeing a screenshot), about someone claiming to have 150 applications going on their Macbook Pro with 4GB of ram.  They included this screenshot to “prove” it.  Several commenters pointed out that there weren’t 150 different apps going, and not even close to that number of things actually showed in the dock.

I thought to myself, “I wonder what this little laptop can do?”.  This laptop is my wife’s Macbook from work.  It is a 2ghz Core 2 Duo, with 2GB of ram.  Nice little machine.

I decided to put it to the test.  I opened a finder window to the Applications folder, selected all, and chose “Open”.  There were many applications in subfolders, so it opened finder windows of those.  I had to go through them one by one, and open the applications inside.  Suprisingly, it didn’t take that long.  More suprising was that nothing crashed.  On top of that, one of the first apps to open, iDVD, had some theme video and music going in the background the whole time.

Once everything launched, and I responded to the various startup windows, like from Microsoft Office, I used expose to show all the various windows.  Here is that screenshot:

The “96″ count came from the number of running items in the dock.  There are a lot more windows than that open (due to the various finder windows, etc.).  In the end, it worked fine.  Was there lag? Yep.  Would I use my machine this way? Of course not. Was it “usable”? Yes, but not with the performance I prefer. Was it interesting to see? Yep.  Is it feasible for someone to run 150 applications on a MBP with 4gb of ram?  I would say so, but to claim no performance hit would be a lie.  They would also need to have 150 different applications installed, which I obviously topped out at 96.