Because OoM errors are oh so fun.

do you also say that about hdd space? about money in the bank?

because memory access performance is not O(1) but depends on the size of what's in memory (https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html). Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.

When you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about.

On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.

You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.

In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)

Yes, the person you are replying to has explained that.

The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.

How do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.

Ha, wasn't it windows vista that allowed you to plug an SD card to use for swap space/fake ram?

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If your machine isn't reporting memory pressure and/or the user isn't experiencing pageouts, then the machine is well-suited to the user's workload.

Probably a badly behaved app. Run `IOAccelMemory` to check.

Uptime of 13 days. My WindowServer is at 441Mb. ??? (32Gb RAM M2Max MBPro)

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I have heard this before and am curious what kind of sites you open in the tabs?

I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).

> Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.

Just how quickly do you think the SSDs will die? Because there are a lot of 8GB M1 machines out there that have been getting daily use for five years, mostly with 256GB or 512GB storage configs. When do you expect them to fail?

Not the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP.

Early 2020 i3 macbook air

M2

Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.

I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?

I'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed.

i think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue.

the keywords here are "depending on the workload".

edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.

    | device                      | cpu                               | single core | multi core |
    |:----------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
    | iPhone 16 Pro Max           | Apple A18 Pro                     |        3428 |       8531 |
    | iPhone 16 Pro               | Apple A18 Pro                     |        3445 |       8624 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) | Apple M1 Pro @ 3.2 GHz (10 cores) |        2385 |      12345 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores) |        3696 |      14729 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores) |        4228 |      17464 |

My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.

Mac is good at managing low memory conditions. Linux is not. When I was on Linux, if I hit 16gb ram used the entire system would freeze for minutes. I would have to go in TTY2 to kill something to get it responsive again.

> running Linux

Problem exists between user and hardware. Applied the Firefox salt over the wound doesn't help either. It's a discussion about Macs btw.

Honestly, I don’t know which one to look at and was purposefully hand wavy. I just knew they were looking at the stone one…

The typing part is easy. Honestly the backlighting is mainly useful for a few situations:

1. Hitting an FKey or the keys like brightness that use the Fkeys. 2. Locating the Fn key on PC laptops (honestly even on the Mac I forget that it's in the corner) 3. tapping a keyboard shortcut like `,` or `c` while watching YouTube

Yes. Especially if I'm typing 'y-o-u-t-u-b-e-.-c-o-m' with one hand while laying in bed at night.

I do. I touch type, but I still like being able to see the letters that I am pressing.

Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man.

As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home).

A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.

That’s part of the EU USB-C regulation. You must offer a version of the laptop without a charger (unbundling) in order to reduce e-waste. Apple adheres to this by only shipping the MacBook without a charger.

it reads like a 2026 version of CmdrTaco's famous iPod review, honestly

There is Displayport support. Over USB-C. If you need an adapter you can get one.

Just like no floppy on the iMac was insane.

When there is a better way, why would you spend money and effort supporting the old outdated way?

Bad news. It's physical trackpad. https://youtu.be/mBkYho_4CSg?t=226

So true. Regarding those magnetic USB connectors: not just a fire hazard but also a tendency to eventually burn out whatever is on the other end of them IME.

Maybe ok for giving power if you are careful I think, I never had any fires, knock on wood.

But it's a bummer to zap/kill the data-functionality of USB ports on nice stuff just because a non-spec connector was used in between the two things being connected, for convenience.

So I don't trust them except for conveniently connecting power to low-cost devices. Whether Neo fits that... I doubt but YMMV.

oh, probably not enough contact pressure. resistance is inversely proportional to contact pressure after all.

Can't see the keys in a dark classroom or bedroom.

Yeah; but then the police will compel you to put your finger on the button + get pissed when it doesn't work.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Aren't classrooms usually well lit?

> I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.

The reputation problem was kind of baked in. Vista launched the same year netbooks did, and even though Vista was a disaster, "runs the latest Windows" is the smell test normal people use for whether something is a real computer.

Netbooks didn't pass.

The storage situation made Windows users miserable anyway. The SSD models had 4-8GiB of flash, and XP alone ate well over half before you'd done anything. So people bought the HDD variant instead, more space, sure, but spinning at 4,200rpm, which wasn't even the slow-but-acceptable 5,400 of a normal laptop drive. Then pile the standard bloatware on top of that.

Bear in mind, people chose the HDD version because it ran Vista: the thing that made it a "real" computer. The SSD variant, the one that actually worked, got ignored for exactly that reason.

Run Linux on the SSD variants though, and the thing was actually great.

I suspect Asahi Linux would appreciate work to support A18 Macs as well!

    > I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.

I think the M2 was the last one they made with 8 gigs of memory.

It's not the first Mac that has an iPhone/iPad chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

And yes, absolutely. All you need is a bootchain exploit. However unlike in the old jailbreaking days when people found and publicized them for fun, these days they are worth millions. Apple will pay you $500k for sandbox escape into the kernel. If you nail the bootchain, it'll be in the millions. From Apple. And god knows how much such a thing would go for in the black market.

They likely based this on the fab node with the best capacity to price ratio.

That has not been my experience at all; I get pretty much the same times on the same machine on Linux and Windows. Something weird has happening to that person. Someone mentioned Defender, and that could certainly be it, as I have it totally disabled (forcibly, by deleting the executable).

WSL is fantastic - apart from the fact that you need to clear it intermittently via disk compression. I use it for work and it's great until you get something incredibly frustrating, like needing a pass-through for your hardware.

The one thing I can say with my macbook as someone who's switched from a decade of windows, is that stuff tends to just work, minus window swithcing.

At least 10 years ago, some IBM tools I was forced to use worked faster in a linux VM on Windows (through VirtualBox) than on Windows.

WSL is the best way to avoid all the Windows slowness as far as the VFS and the forking overhead.

Afaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night.

They don't bury it. It's literally on the spec page these days. And LPCAMM2 falls somewhere between the base M and Pro CPUs while still being replaceable.

The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.

Intel iMac?

I have an Air. Maybe active cooling prevents it from getting too hot. With the Air, the metal body is kind of the heatsink.

I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...

Don't all macbooks have one?

Makes me wonder if this is an ADA requirement for education devices. (assistive listening devices)

This isn't news, all MacBooks have one.

Also for males it is natural birth control. Can be a plus depending on your situation

I, too, am a dinosaur, but touchscreens on removable screens/tablets are the way to go!

My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.

When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.

It's awesome!

You might want to actually click the links and spent a couple of minutes before typing comments. This is not a laptop with a touch screen - it's a tablet with a kickstand and detachable keyboard.

Touchscreens can be disabled in software.

I accidentally got a pair of ThinkPads that happened to have touch screens, and I absolutely love the touch screen, often it's easier than the touchpad or keyboard nub.

Shh... we don't talk about those dark ages any more. Times were different.

> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

> - Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.

(Hey, Eric!)

We test these things in production.

P1 comes to mind

Yeah, I have a 64GB M1 Max and can run local models pretty well. I bought it on release and even now it never feels slow. I may upgrade just because I want to move to the 14” since I travel more now.

You mean all of that running all the time is 70gb?

I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.

Yeah, good luck with that at current RAM prices though. DDR5 RDIMMs are going for $20/gb+ right now which means 1tb is $20k, and that's with fairly conservative pricing too.

I've been looking at building a high memory workstation recently but the RAM prices are just prohibitive. Best option atm for 1tb+ seems to be to go back a couple gen and buy DDR4, you can get 1tb at under $5/gb right now. But obviously you're giving up some performance in the process.

Are you sure they're doing great? By what metric?

What have they produced recently? I found a few lists online and looked at Wikipedia, and their big hits are all > 10-15 years old (or sequels/re-releases). Many of those are decade-old acquisitions of franchises that were ancient at acquisition.

Revenue, or forward revenue? Their most recent quarterly games revenue was down 9% YoY. XBox console sales (leading indicator) are down 32%: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/xbox/microsofts-gam...

Market share? The top N companies from this list have $197B in annual revenue. MS Studios is toward the top of the list, but they only have 12% market share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...

Distribution and marketing? I wouldn't even know how to buy one of their games. I have a Linux gaming PC, a Mac, a switch, an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and a XBone. We spend a few hundred dollars a year on video games, but I haven't seen anything suggesting any MS studio products work on any of our hardware, or are available on any distribution channels that reach any of our devices. Maybe they're on iPad, iPhone or Android? I haven't checked because we don't use those for gaming.

I don't think we're that strange for having zero windows machines. It's down to ~ 30% of web browser market share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Windows is at ~ 95% of steam market share, so I guess that's one bright point for MS studios. However, many game developers release on Steam and console, so it doesn't imply that 95% of those other studios' customers could run a MS studio game.

Customer retention? The last time I plugged the XBone in, I spent 45 minutes screwing with bugs in the account password dialog, finally logged in, and then walked away. I unplugged it for good after the updates completed. In contrast, I spent less time than that installing Linux + Steam on my most recent PC. I guess they dropped support for XBox One at some point? I started having problems with it five years ago. I don't remember a big compatibility-break launch since I purchased it, so I'd expect it to be able to turn on + connect to their servers, or at least run the games it's already downloaded + installed.

I do own one MS game that still works: A copy of Minecraft. It took over 8 hours to figure out how to get it stop constantly asking my kids for my master MS account password. That did convince me to actually wipe all data from my Microsoft account, so I guess it was a win.

Game studios are great, the problem is the multiple meanings of XBox.

There is XBox the console, XBox the online store for PC games, XBox the streaming platform, XBox the studios that are first party to the console.

Then there are the other studios acquired via Bathesda, ABK, or directly.

Finally all roots down under Microsot Gaming Studios as publisher.

Among the hardcore fans, they usually only see Xbox as the console.

Apple seemed to copy this one exactly as iCloud asks you the same all the time. Honestly these days Linux feels like the only sane platform as you can customize it properly.

Dell Pro Max, I think the Latitude line disappeared. But I feel Lenovo is the last one too, the only brand I trust for a Windows or Linux machine these days. I like Apple hardware and have my reservations with macOS, but it is still better than Windows.

You're right. "Build Quality" isn't the right term.

Maybe "Overall Quality" or "Device Quality" would work better. The point is that my MBP has held up MUCH better over time than my Surface, which is barely able to charge at this point.

Taking the laptop to the office and back home again daily. The hinge has gotten weak over time. The connection to take off the screen is very fragile, tapping the button to enable removal only works about half the time. Then, when re-attaching the screen sometimes it doesn't catch, or the keyboard connects but doesn't realize it is connected so the machine stays in tablet mode. The trackpad has gotten spongey and harder to click.

It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable. *Edit: This was covered under warranty, thankfully

This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.

I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.

While I was in high school, as a punishment for a fake "hacking" prank [0], I had to spend half of my lunch breaks with the school IT guy for two weeks as he went around and fixed the damage students were doing to the school computers.

There wasn't actually THAT much going on and we mostly just sat in his office and chatted, but when he did have to deal with something, it was absurd the vandalism that happened. One kid had unplugged a mouse and managed to jam the plug into the floppy drive. The IT guy was like "It takes talent to be this much of a piece of shit" as he had to disassemble the case to get it out.

When it comes to issuing laptops to public school students, I'm torn. On one hand, people need computer skills, but on the other, I just don't think many students can be trusted with a piece of equipment costing hundreds of dollars. Hell, how many people can't even own a personal cell phone without somehow shattering the screen in just a few months?

[0] I had created a two-page slide deck with a black background and white text, then filled both slides with the same text that made it look like a DOS prompt and that Windows had been deleted. It had a C:\> prompt, and on one slide, there was an underscore after the prompt. I then made the slide show auto-play and loop, making the underscore blink, which made it look like an actual prompt. Keep in mind, these were Macs. There was no "C" drive, and certainly no Windows. A teacher insisted I broke the computer, despite showing that pressing any key ended the show, took me to the Principal's office, who gave me my punishment. My first time talking to the IT guy, he was like "you did what now?" and I showed him, and he thought it was funny as hell. Honestly, my "punishment" ended up being pretty fun. That was all 25 years ago. I wish I remembered his name so I could look him up.

Not just durability, but ergonomics. My kids have crappy screens, literally the worst trackpad I’ve ever used, and awful keys that hurt my hands minutes after typing (but I go all day on my personal computer).

If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).

Chromebooks don’t have a durability problem. I doubt the MacBook is any more durable, even with an all metal construction - if anything, that probably makes it worse at absorbing impact than nice soft bendy plastic.

This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.

https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished

Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition. It would take a restructuring of laptops within the school system to kids/families having a joint ownership over the laptop to stop them intentionally destroying them. Even then, there are complications like kids that will absolutely destroy anothers' for fun.

And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.

That's a big if. Kids are little engines of chaos and destruction. The Neo might not be more durable, just more expensive.

I don't think institutions will care much about the enhanced durability since they treat laptops as disposable units anyway. Apple can only complete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.

I could see the Neo as a viable option for teenage students. The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards. Most students feared seeking a replacement device when theirs would break without having done anything wrong. A device with higher build quality and software longevity has the potential to save these institutions a reasonable sum of money in the long run.

Younger students on the other hand, Chromebooks remain the way to go. Most of the time, kids'll win in a race between their destructive tendencies and crappy hardware giving out.

Certainly possible. But, in the US consider that Google and "one-to-one" Chromebooks are generally dominating and the curriculum more or less requires extensions and setting.

As an example, my kids try to do school work on one of the house Macs, but there's too many roadblocks so they just use their Chromebooks.

I used to buy my kids Chromebooks for school, but, since the pandemic, the school issues them, so I haven't bought any since.

> Apple stuff they will likely be better made

It depends on what you mean. Apple uses higher quality parts and is more sleek.

Chromebooks are more durable, take more abuse, are very repairable, and parts are cheap and plentiful. These are keys to schools. We're at a point where schools cycle out old models and either keep a bunch around, or strip parts from them, because some parts are interchangeable between generations.

> So what segment does it target in your opinion?

- Low end consumer

- College students

- People who have a desktop computer, but want a cheap portable for on-the-go.

> The "surface" market is minuscule

Probably so, but then again, I see a lot of Surface devices out and about and they are fairly popular with non-teacher education staff. While they aren't competing with Chromebooks or Apple on volume, I'd bet they're doing well.

>a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.

Citation? I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts. Heck, there's someone in this very discussion saying the same with actual prices paid in their comment showing real first hand experience and yet you come in here with a hand wavy unsupported claim that Apple gives breaks for bulk buys.

Completely agree. I hate kids being stuck in a Google ecosystem. Apple’s classroom app is really good.

> Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer.

An iPhone Pro is 3 times more expensive than an average Android phone too. If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.

Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.

Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.

Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.

I have a $120 android for the last 3 years. Please tell me how excatly Iphone Pro can beat it.

Truth. I've seen some of them with carts full of MacBook Pros. But these schools are a small fraction of the overall population.

It should also be noted that Washington state schools are still generally heavily Microsoft and Windows, despite Google's dominance.

There used to be FleetSmith which was a very simple Apple-only MDM system.

It was great, very simple to use but still had all the features you needed.

They were acquired by Apple who then promptly killed the product.

I do because we asked Apple about Neo pricing.

We do because this is historically the norm. Schools pay roughly the same as the "college student" pricing, aside from the occasional deals they toss us.

Chromebooks are the SaaS of hardware where the user is not the buyer. No one says “I would love to have a Chromebook at home” any more than they desire to run Salesforce at home.

A Chromebook at the same price point will get you similar if not better specs, 14" 16:10 FHD IPS display, convertible with touchscreen and pen input, backlit keyboard and 10h+ battery runtime.

Current school laptops also have touchscreens for drawing and other activities. It’s a cheap feature.

Yes, my kids all started using one in Kindergarten, although it took to 4th grade before my oldest started bringing home one every night.

They take standardized tests on it. Questions have a button to speak the question. Same with answers.

>They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience.

"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.

Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.

Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.

Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.

Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.

I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.

I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.

But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.

As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.

I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.

I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.

Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.

Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?

>People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.

Or, she can keep the macbook air as it basically has the same specs as the neo. What is the point of buying the same laptop twice?

Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.

Don't know. Plugged it in one morning, and it wasn't turning on. So I tried detaching it from its base because that had been a problem before, but it was dead, so you needed to find the little manual release thing that's inside one of the vents, which I didn't have a tool for, so I gave up on that. Then I turned to ask a coworker to try their charging cord (as mine had to be replaced once after it failed, and I assumed the same thing had happened again), and by the time I got back to my desk a small whisp of smoke was rising from the keyboard, which is strange, because to my understanding that's not where the computer bits are in that laptop.

So I unplugged it, at which point I noticed the smoke was increasing. So we doused it in CO2 (maybe N2, idk, some cheap gas we had lying around for the wetlab), pried the computer part off of the base, and then IT handled sending it back to M$.

That’s the ideal. Apps shouldn’t concern themselves with pixels. It’s the OSs job to know the hardware the machine uses.

ahhh....good catch. i used the wrong name: i meant surface pro 13, which has the detachable keyboard. yeah, it's odd that the surface laptops are lower res.

> cheap laptop with 8gb of ram and using USB 2.0 ports.

A nitpick: there are two USB ports, one of them is a 10GB/s USB 3 port.

What options do you see available on the market today that meet those needs? I agree that all of those are super nice to have

A touch screen by itself doesn't noticably increase the weight of the screen. It's only when you put everything else up there that it becomes heavier.

Yes... barely. I wouldn't miss it if I didn't have it.

Sorry none of that makes any sense to me. Go to BestBuy where they have Surface laptops on display. Open the browser and go to a website where a grid with 1px horizontal lines are displayed. I immediately notice that the lines are disproportionately thin. You may not notice it and that's fine.

Maybe I am in the minority but MacOS always feels so bloated and heavy to me.

Never used an 8GB Mac I see.

> they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.

If your MacBook has a glowing apple, you might be running Snow Leopard. You need to upgrade like now.

The Apple logo is on the wrong side of the screen to be concerned about. Apple's OS and user experience is miles ahead of the competition and so are the displays they use.

Glowing logo for Starbucks dig? What year is it?

"With 8GB". 8GB on Apple Silicon acts more like 16GB on a PC.

Which companies?

Apple leaves gamers alone, it does not even attempt to be a nontrivial gaming platform and makes no promises. Why would gamers and gamedevs hate it? It just doesn't exist in their market.

Bootcamp was a hedge when Apple was a lot less dominant than it is now.

When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, it wasn’t clear that was going to work. Being able to boot into Windows was sort of an insurance policy that’s no longer necessary.

I know and I'd rather just stop using modern tech than willingly go back to Apple or Microsoft software.

Well, last I checked most people don't work for MS so I reckon their experience might be a bit different

Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.

egacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping

To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.

Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

15 tabs? I manage multiple projects, one per window, and have about 15 to 30 tabs per window. So maybe 300 tabs.

Less-so if you do it in Safari than using a non-Apple browser.

Then you're not the intended market for the MacBook Neo.

Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.

Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.

But is the system choking? Or, are you certain it would choke with half the RAM you have? It's a well know thing that OS will book majority of the RAM you have and that's actually not a problem at all.

if you had 64GB you'd be using some 59GB. I have a 128GB machine and it happily hits around 40GB of used memory in no time at all.

> Teams

You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.

Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.

Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.

I don't see too many students running Teams.

Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?

16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.

This is my use case, 4 ides. Chrome and docker, its a 14’ M1 Pro, it works nice, but im not installing tahoe any time soon xd

Adobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff.

Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.

That's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives.

I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".

ARC isn’t a garbage collector.

Yeah they always try and talk me out of battery replacements, saying it doesn’t need it because it’s on 81% durability rather than 80%.

Interestingly it's cheaper than the iPad with the $250 magic keyboard.

I didn't realize that. I thought it was a different architecture - or different enough that the two couldn't run the same binaries. Are they indeed binary compatible?

Yes. Thanks.

macOS actually does the opposite; to avoid wearing down the drive it will hold 7-10gb of your most commonly used files in memory and release them when the memory gets allocated for something else. In theory you could get away with editing gigabytes of files and using dozens of apps without ever wearing down your drive at all.

> I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB

Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.

Sorry, I should have said that running that same stack on Windows/macOS Intel with 16GB resulted in tons of sluggishness in my experience. I would consider that a 32GB workload on Intel, so I was surprised that 16GB was enough for it.

To the major point of can it (Neo 8GB) run multiple programs at the same time, my experience would say it would have no issues doing so given what one can do in 16GB on lesser Mac hardware. (Maybe I am wrong and MacOS takes all 8GB for itself, but that seems far-fetched.)

They're giving an example of a very heavy workload on 16GB. It stands to easy reasoning that a casual consumer could be fine on 8GB.

There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy.

30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.

I use tabs as temporary bookmarks. It's still a lot, sure, but it comes at no cost.

The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up.

It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count.

Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost.

Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.

You'll look like a mega nerd if you pull that out in a classroom, assuming you even have the desk space. Not to mention the qol improvement of having your pen touch the screen you're drawing on.

the difference between writing on a screen and writing on an external tablet is hard to overstate...

also, they still sell paper notebooks )

If digital version is important, there are probably some scanning apps.

Not iPads specifically, but digital devices. I did a show of hands poll in a big university course a couple of weeks ago, and 70-80% of students are writing their maths notes on a digital device. iPad is most popular, but Surface and other Windows devices are also popular, quite a few use Android (as do I for my lectures), and a tiny number use ReMarkable or other e-paper. Many students bring both a tablet and laptop to class, and I see handwritten notes viewed on non-handwriting laptops pretty often while they're writing other things on a tablet.

A lot of lower division math and computer science courses now presuppose iPads or other digital pen devices for working through handouts during lecture. Printed handouts are often available at request, but not the expectation / default.

On the other hand, I've seen more professors — especially in the humanities, but also upper div CS — start banning devices in lecture partially or altogether. Complete distraction (scrolling Instagram, etc.) during lecture is extremely prevalent, and they keep citing noticeable improvements in engagement after banning devices. This also coincides with a shift back to less take-home assignments and more exam-style assessment since they want greater assurance people aren't completely offloading their cognition to LLMs.

I haven't been on campus in a few years but even then paper was basically absent on campus. A class where a professor wouldn't allow tablets or laptops to take notes would be an aberration and a PITA. I remember I had to write like a paper check once and I had to physically go buy a pen since neither I nor anyone around me had a regular writing utensil on hand.

The exception was when people were taking orgo or a diagram heavy class. For that semester not everyone would have a tablet and some people would have pens and pencils. Or writing classes that still required a handwritten essay for the final exam

Yes, iPads (at least at my university) are incredibly common. I would guess they’re at least on-par with paper. So many people swear by Goodnotes because you get all the benefits of handwriting your notes without giving up the niceties of search-ability, auto correct, etc.

I don’t know anyone who uses any other tablet besides an iPad, they’ve basically conquered the market.

Not necessarily replaced. Some classes still ban all electronic devices unless you have some medical accommodation, this was in response to people not listening while being on their phones, tablets, and laptops.

Agreed, I really prefer using my reMarkable 2. I see it less like an iPad and more like a bottomless pit of scratch paper and printouts that I can carry more conveniently than individual dead tree products. This is probably furthered by my not using their cloud subscription and using a USB cable or SSH to transfer files instead.

It's better for reading epubs/mobis.

iPads are better when you need to be constantly highlighting and making notes, like for school. And for PDF's you need to be panning and zooming.

That's why I'm rocking a Scribe. Do not really care much about note taking but my poor eyesight welcomes the bigger font size.

The way people use laptops, the screens are generally much lower than they should be for good ergonomics.

iPads/Kindles are better because they're smaller and lighter so you can position them with far greater flexibility.

The laptop is better in many situations as the screen stands on its own.

When reading in bed I use a stand to hold my Kindle at the best position. I would need a much heavier stand to be able to do that with my iPad.

It makes it easier to pirate your app if you enable that checkbox. macOS attempts to disable iOS apps when SIP is disabled to prevent this but it's not difficult to bypass [1]. I don't necessarily agree with it but this probably does factor into their decision process.

[1] https://github.com/paradiseduo/appdecrypt

We got my son a Mac Mini when he was 6. I was surprised at how many kid games just didn't work with the Mac, or how many did work but didn't support an external microphone and camera. I guess since most young kids have iPads or Chromebooks there's no market.

That's fair...actually totally slipped my mind that today this would be much more feasible to do on a single device.

yep

Ty!

> This is going to be a primary complaint people have

No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.

I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...