Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing the next generation of Mac

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

871–880 of 1001 posts

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#871

Post by pjmlp »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

Because not everyone is on containers fashion running full blown clusters on their laptops and 8 GB are more than good enough for enterprise developers.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#872

Post by [deleted] »

nafey wrote: post #842
rusticpenn wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance of the phones seem to be smooth compared to Android phones with similar ( or more) RAM. The difference comes from vertical optimization, so the raw numbers on RAM would not give us a full picture.

The whole Android ecosystem is mostly written in Java which could also be another reason why it needs relatively more RAM for comparable performance.

[deleted]

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#873

Post by pjmlp »

GordonS wrote: post #865
enriquto wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? 8GB is a huge amount of RAM. I cannot imagine writing a serious program that needs more than 2% of that. The real problem is programmers using "frameworks" and shit that requires inordinate amounts of unused memory.

Do you only ever run a single process in some non-multitasking OS? The rest of us are using Linux, Windows and MacOS, where many processes run side by side, each with memory requirements.

Indeed, my first versions of Linux were running on 512 MB PC and my 8GB laptop from 2009 does just fine.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#874

Post by raverbashing »

kortilla wrote: post #859
coldtea wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? What about it? It's not like someone who mostly browses the web, checks email, works with office documents, and so on, will change what he does in a few years...

> will change what he does in a few years... The fatal flaw in this argument is the failure to realize that web pages are bloating, video is becoming more prevalent, higher resolution images, etc. So “browses the web” has ever increasing hardware requirements if you want to maintain the experience.

Not to mention they love talking about video editing, Neural Engine, etc. Those things eat RAM as well

8GB is definitely underpowered

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#875

Post by dash2 »

GordonS wrote: post #865
enriquto wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? 8GB is a huge amount of RAM. I cannot imagine writing a serious program that needs more than 2% of that. The real problem is programmers using "frameworks" and shit that requires inordinate amounts of unused memory.

Do you only ever run a single process in some non-multitasking OS? The rest of us are using Linux, Windows and MacOS, where many processes run side by side, each with memory requirements.

I run regressions on half a million data points. My 2017 Macbook Pro with (checks) 8 Gb of RAM works fine. I'm not sure what all you guys' mothers are doing.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#876

Post by m12k »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

Lots and lots of people use their laptops in a way where there's little to no noticeable difference between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Why should those people pay extra for something they don't need? I think the HN crowd - with 4 docker VMs, 3 electron apps, 50 Chrome tabs, ML training, long compile times, etc - need to realize that their workloads and needs are not representative of the majority of users. It's ok for Apple to also make computers for people that are not you.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#877

Post by scoopertrooper »

skrause wrote: post #843
BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

Even worse is that the RAM upgrade pricing hasn't changed in almost a decade. When I bought my 2012 MacBook Air more than eight years ago it cost me 100 euros to upgrade from 4 to 8 GB of RAM. Currently it costs 225 euros in the German Apple Store to upgrade form 8 to 16 GB, which is a higher per GB price than in 2012!

That's (slightly) unfair because obviously the RAM produced in 2012 isn't the same as the RAM produced in 2020. Better to compare Apple's price against the cost of top-of-the-line RAM available for other laptops. I checked around and it looks like you can get 8GB 3200MHz DDR4 from a highly respected brand for 56 USD, while Apple will sell you some mystery RAM for 200 USD. It's not an (ahem) apples-to-apples comparison because the Apple RAM is closely integrated with the SOC, but I think it's fair to say they're making a comfortable margin.

https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-HX424S14IB2-2400MHz-Unbuffered...

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#878

Post by mekster »

kbar13 wrote: post #40
SamuelAdams wrote: post #6

Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.

as a software dev who went for air before the current gen of pro macbooks with hardware esc, dont do it the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com

Which air?

I've used the last 2 Air for developing including Photoshop and VMware fusion but I could work just fine.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#879

Post by dnh44 »

gnicholas wrote: post #702
dnh44 wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a tripod and use my iPhone’s rear facing camera and I’m really happy with the setup.

Where do you position it? Right in front of your screen, or above/below?

Behind the monitor just above eye level.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#880

Post by tekkk »

m12k wrote: post #876
BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

Lots and lots of people use their laptops in a way where there's little to no noticeable difference between 8GB and 16GB RAM. Why should those people pay extra for something they don't need? I think the HN crowd - with 4 docker VMs, 3 electron apps, 50 Chrome tabs, ML training, long compile times, etc - need to realize that their workloads and needs are not representative of the majority of users. It's ok for Apple t…

Uhm. Adding 16GB RAM instead of 8GB costs almost nothing and which by far and large, is useful to all users. The only reason why they ship 8 GBs is because they want to sell you upgrades, similar to why Apple products come with miniscule SSD hard drives. Certainly, only professionals would need something like 512GBs right?
Post reply on HN