I own a Mac Mini and when I bought it, it only came with 4 gigs of ram. I am a professional photographer and I work in RAW format and us Lightroom and Photoshop to edit my work. I was on a very small budget starting out and I could not afford an iMac or Mac Pro so I decided to go with the Mac Mini to get started. When I first started using the it to edit photos I had to restart my Mac about every 5th photo (not good when you are a wedding photographer editing hundreds of images). But ever since I upgraded my ram to 16gb from 4gb I have been able to do a whole wedding with no problems! No it is a no brainer that more ram will equal improved performance but what i loved about it too that the cost was much less then what Apple wanted (for the same performance specs). I am very happy with this and once I am able to upgrade this will be a great work station Mac for the office. The only reason I give it a 4 out of 5 was because I do not want people to miss understand, while the upgrade was great it is still not as powerful as I would like it to be, but that comes down to the limitation on my MAC. I would always recommend maxing out your RAM to 32gbs or higher. 16gbs is a great place to start but it will still prove to have limitations for working with video editing software.