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The MacBook Neo

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Re: The MacBook Neo

#691

Post by alwillis »

SllX wrote: post #641
crooked-v wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point the RAM only matters if you've got something that actually needs all that RAM continuously, likes games, virtual machines, or heavyweight user workflows like 4K video editing. For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.

> For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist. You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.

> Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD

People always forget that Apple does realtime compression on data that's in RAM allowing more things to fit in RAM; it also effectively increases the bandwidth of the SSD.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#692

Post by timothyduong »

p_ing wrote: post #283
drcongo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how often people who post on here about hating macOS have only just got a Mac for the first time and simply can't be bothered to learn, or hate that the keyboard shortcuts are different, or desperately want their OS level adverts back or something. It's lazy.

Been using macOS for years, even main it for both personal and work. It has a LOT of UX issues and requires many 3rd party tools to "fix" it. macOS has plenty of it's own OS adverts.

'Plenty' vs an atrocious amount that constantly nags.

MacOS's ads whilst I still detest, is a one-off prompt. Window's ads can sometimes only be removed with registry key configs OR deployment of management policies...

Re: The MacBook Neo

#693

Post by SanjayMehta »

jrockway wrote: post #444
dhosek wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.

Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did. It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world wh…

I have a 2008 iMac with (I think) 16Gb of RAM which is used for just Firefox. I've been meaning to upgrade it to Linux but that generation didn't boot from USB, need to burn a CD.

All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.

I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#694

Post by JohnBooty »

SllX wrote: post #641
crooked-v wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point the RAM only matters if you've got something that actually needs all that RAM continuously, likes games, virtual machines, or heavyweight user workflows like 4K video editing. For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.

> For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist. You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.

Right, I mean even a fast SSD has an order of magnitude less throughput, and 2-3 orders of magnitude higher latency from RAM. No dispute there. If you are doing random access across 16GB of data and your machine only has 8GB of physical RAM, you're in the pain zone.

OTOH, if you are using multiple RAM-heavy apps that aren't actively hammering that RAM (e.g. an instance of Photoshop that is using 10GB but is just idling or whatever) then MacOS and their stupid fast SSDs handle that pretty seamlessly.

Most use cases are probably somewhere in the middle.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#695

Post by radpanda »

gib444 wrote: post #376
cannolicannon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big players are just awful at marketing; too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup: - Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants) - Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants) - Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 1…

> Dell Pro Max Premium > Dell Pro Essential At least they have a sense of humour Pro... Essential?! If the sold hotel rooms they'd offer a Deluxe Economy ??

Hotel branding might be worse. Marriott has 30+ brands, each supposedly with its own identity but I can’t really see how having that many makes sense. Should I stay at the Fairfield or the AC or the Four Points or the Aloft or the Moxy or the CitizenM … how about just the Marriott?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#696

Post by newAccount2025 »

p1necone wrote: post #577
mikestew wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes. But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name…

The first thing I do with any new system is immediately wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows/Linux, so bundled shovelware is meaningless to me, and presumably many others. (Of course it would be even better if they just came with a totally stock install already, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me)

That’s an added windows license though?

Re: The MacBook Neo

#697

Post by jwilliams »

drnick1 wrote: post #174

> You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality. I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled ga…

I think the thing is "MacOS" itself hasn't really been evolved for some time - what has been happening is taking iOS ideas and concepts and porting them back.

I think that's ended up with a bit of a mess.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#698

Post by tom_ »

WorldPeas wrote: post #639
retired wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Mac isn’t really a walled garden though. You don’t even need an Apple account to use one. Unlike Windows.

but to make a binary for it? You do. Even if it's not-for-profit. Why do you think web interfaces are so popular for OSS, a lot easier for the code to be JIT'd and run in a browser than pay a $99 vig for something you did in 10 days to speed up a process for yourself etc.

You're sort-of right, I think, because you do need an Apple account to sign in to the Mac App Store to get current Xcode in the first place - but the $99 is entirely optional!

For distributing your program without the fee, you'll probably moan about the hoops that people have to jump through to run your stuff: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40616/mac - and I can't say I love this myself, but people can run your stuff, and no fee necessary.

(I've got a couple of (somewhat niche) FOSS things for macOS, and I build the releases using GitHub Actions with whatever default stuff the thing uses, then make up DMGs that people can download from the GitHub releases page. I added a bit in the documentation about visiting the security dialog if you're blocked - and that seems to have been sufficient.)

Re: The MacBook Neo

#699

Post by pvdebbe »

Arainach wrote: post #531
Certhas wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updating video drivers in Ubuntu is so so so much easier than under Windows it's ridiculous. Windows has more drivers for more things, but if Linux has drivers (e.g. you buy a Laptop with Linux support) then driver management is massively easier. I spent god knows how many hours getting the windows drivers for my last self built gaming PC working. Linux I just installed and was done. In reality the Windows experience…

Unless you have very specialized needs, the driver experience on Windows is "turn the machine on". The driver update experience is "connect to the internet" and occasionally "reboot". That's it. Linux is significantly easier than it was 20 years ago but still not as easy in general.

Tell me what happens if you run a Windows machine for say 12 months and decide to switch the GPU from NVIDIA to AMD (or vice versa)? Yeah.

In linux it tends to be a nonissue.

Re: The MacBook Neo

#700

Post by tpmoney »

thewebguyd wrote: post #339
enraged_camel wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days. One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence. Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.

The goal is different. Jobs wanted to make the product spread simple to understand. Apple's current method is a pricing ladder, make it simple to spend $200+ more than you planned. MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better. Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and…

I think you are completely misremembering what the Apple product lineup looked like even with the Steve Jobs cleanup. At its absolute simplest, it contained the iMac, iBook, PowerMac and PowerBook lines. Within each line was a "Good", "Better" and "Best" pre-configured model each being a few hundred different from the other and each of those models was further configurable to add additional storage / memory etc.

That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002 when the 14 inch iBooks, the 17 inch iMacs and the eMacs were introduced, followed by the 12 and 17 inch powerbooks in 2003. By 2005 they had also introduced the Mac Mini. And again most of these had a "good", "better", "best" variant, though in some cases (like the first 17 inch iMacs, the "best" tier was also the next model variant).

Apple's lineup is undeniably more complicated now than it has been in the past, but the simplification was never really about cutting model types down, so much as it was about making distinct model categories that people could easily understand why they would pick one or the other.

I think they still do a relatively good job at retaining that distinction, and I agree that the iPad lineup is probably the most muddled. Though special mention goes to the "Macbook Pro with M4 Pro" branding, which anyone should have caught and thought that maybe they needed a better moniker than "Pro" for the processor variant (and of course also, is the "Pro", the "Max" or the "Ultra" the best?)

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