P.S. It’s not hard to unfriend someone on Facebook, think about using it.

Good point about the memory bottleneck, I think I made a passing reference to it, but I should have emphasized it.

I was using Kekus’ Calico, which yields remarkably good results despite being fully automated, thanks to the University of British Columbia’s SIFT algorithm. Nowadays I use AutoPanoPro, which also uses SIFT but gives you more control to rectify curving horizons.

I agree RAM is the limiting factor for PS and other apps, which is why I upgraded my MBP to the LED-backlit 4GB-capable 3G model as soon as it became available, but even the 1G model was competitive with my dual 2GHz G5, despite the latter having 5.5GB vs. 2GB. I only used one photo app at a time, and did not use PS at the time since it was not available native Intel, but Lightzone instead for tonal correction and cropping of the resulting panoramas (Aperture couldn’t deal with pixel widths over 32K). On the other hand that may have been because of old OS X bugs (fixed since) that would cause G5 performance to actually decline if you had more than 4GB installed.

The importance of RAM only makes all the more galling Adobe’s refusal to release a 64-bit version of PS until Apple makes 64-bit Quartz libraries available, not just Cocoa. I always found John Nack’s feeble rationalizations as to why you don’t need 64 bits just as laughable as Intel’s efforts to justify segmented addressing way back when. Given what I keep discovering about Adobe bloat, I am chomping at the bit for a viable replacement. Did you know Acrobat includes a full copy of MySQL, and CS3 has not one but two instances of Opera embedded inside the app bundles.

Given the shared memory bus bottleneck on current generation Intel chips, Bare Feats testing shows for most apps 8 cores perform barely any better than 4, so Nehalem should bring in major improvements, and I don’t think it makes any sense to get a Mac Pro today if you can wait 6 months and get at least 30% higher performance at the same clock speed.

I’ll admit that saying it is a “complete waste of money” is harsh, if I said it which I didn’t. In fact, I’ll go further and say “outrageously” was probably an improper adverb to be using. But then again, I think the myriad of times I used “only” in the post was similarly extreme. That was done for a reason and in future edits this language tends to get toned down. I do suggest you read the comment mouseovers and linked study though before feeling that my opinions don’t have a (mostly) sound basis.

If you look at the link, the SSD version has superior non-sequential read speeds. During bootup, the reads are nonsequential as it loads a lot of little files (compiling a unix application is similar). The mouseover text explains this as well as mentioned that most of the tests claiming that the SSD version is inferior are flawed since they need to distinguish non-sequential reads vs. raw throughput on large files that these benchmarks do.

Having said that, I think they could do even better, as flash RAM technology has the capability of reading as fast as regular dynamic RAM, hence my recommendation against it at this point. I personally think that the gain in non-sequential read speed (as well as the increased resistance to shock by it being electronic instead of mechanical) is not worth the cost in price and decreased performance and I think this would be true for 19 out of 20 MacBook Air owners, though I feel this will change soon—it’s a “disruptive technology.”

…

Photoshop takes advantage of as the RAM that is available through a different system than the operating system. If you are running a lot of Photoshop filters (see my post on nik Color Efex Pro), then the system will start to swap if you flip back and forth between applications—this occurs when editing an Aperture tracked image in Photoshop. What program were you stitching with? I do my stitching on PTMac which only allocates/uses 1GB of RAM during the stitch (this is configurable). Also, when doing that, I don’t need to have file open in Aperture because the PSD/TIFF is imported and replaced, not dynamically updating like in the case I mentioned.

Finally, for a lot of typical photographic workflows, the fact that an unpaired 3GB system outperforms a paired 2GB system shows that RAM size is a big bottleneck. The fact that my 2×2 Ghz G5 with 8GB handedly outperforms my dual core MacBook Pro with 2GB when working in Aperture roundtripping with Photoshop, but the reverse is true in regular Aperture use, only emphasizes that current notebook RAM limitations makes the Mac Pro worthy of serious consideration for professional work (which I am not).

* 2×2GHz G5 with 5.5GB RAM, 160+750GB HDD, a 23″ and 30″ display

* a SSD MacBook Air

I wouldn’t say the SSD is a complete waste of money - the superior read speed means it boots like a speed demon - all my apps are running with hardly a bounce, in less than 2 seconds, and my compiles are ridiculously quick. That makes me think I might use a SSD as boot drive when I upgrade my PowerMac to a Nehalem Mac Pro around the end of the year. That said the $1K premium is hard to justify.

On the other hand I had to spend 3 months in Vancouver with only a first-gen 15″ MacBook Pro maxed out to 2GB RAM, running Aperture and stitching humongous 40,000×2,500 panoramas, and I did not feel particularly cramped.