can the iMac have any more than 4gb ram?

if I want a mac with more than 4gb ram I will need a mac pro right? or is it possible the next iMac in january might allow up to 8gb? because 4gb just isnt enough for me anymore, it is pretty much always maxxed out.

At this point, it can only have 4GB. There's always a chance that they will do some sort of a refresh around the time of MacWorld, but I have not heard any rumors pointing to it happening.

What do you use your iMac for?

The iMac will take up to 6G of RAM, there is a catch though: right now it's only useful if you have a virtual machine. If you allocate it to VM or Parallels, it works fine, but if a regular program tries to access it you get some strange behaviors and performance takes a hit. Sometimes it will even crash or you get Kernal Panics. Snow Leopard might fix this though, just sit tight!

yeah its kind of ridiculous that the max is 4gb, I mean come on. I pray that the next imac in january will allow more ram. otherwise the only other choice apple offers is mac pro. i guess beggers cant be choosers. oh and psyko, 4gb ram is practically maxxed out with merely photoshop, vmware fusion, and firefox open, nevermind all the other random apps that are also open.

What are you using that is showing you that all 4GB is being used? Are you using Activity Monitor?

dtravis7, yeah as soon as I notice apps lagging when I try to open them (bouncing on the dock longer than normal) I check in activity monitor and sure enough the green "free" ram is all gone, there is plenty of the blue "inactive" ram but I assume the inactive ram is already allocated to other open apps but just isn't being actively used by them at the moment. Am I wrong or is the ram maxxed out when the green "free" ram is all gone? Because I notice apps are definately slower when it is.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

If you need more memory, the amount of inactive and free RAM combined will be very low.

If you have lots of free blue inactive RAM, you're fine.

How old is your Mac though? Have you run Onyx, perfomed a full disk repair from booting with the OS X CD? Lagging can be fixed by doing these.