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MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

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Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#191

Post by dlcarrier »

jorisw wrote: post #185

> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Love this

Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.

Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#192

Post by sho_hn »

jorisw wrote: post #185

> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Love this

I occasionally port software I make to MacOS, while mainly being a Linux user, and I settled on a base model, 8 GB M2 Mac Mini for this as well. If it's zippy there, it'll be zippy on the larger models.

On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.

The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#193

Post by grey-area »

chocochunks wrote: post #75
wlesieutre wrote: post #37

> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port. You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than eno…

Yeah, but that USB 3 port has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It 's also the only video out port making decent dongles a necessity. On a $600 PC it's not uncommon to have USB A (at 3.0 speeds), HDMI in addition to USB C and maybe even Ethernet.

This cheap laptop is not for people with external displays. Almost everyone buying this would have no desire for an external display, they wouldn’t even feel this as a limitation.

If you want a separate display or super fast data transfers, more usb ports or more than 8MB of RAM buy one of the more expensive laptops.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#194

Post by wqaatwt »

refactor_master wrote: post #153
wiseowise wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you forgot the best part: it is completely silent.

Still baffles the mind that Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago, and others _still_ haven't. I remember being basically surrounded by jet engines running Word in school. A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the…

> Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago

All the i7/i9 Macbook pros that I used back in the day were obnoxiously load. Even when not under particularly heavy load.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#195

Post by tracker1 »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #177
tracker1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bumped up to 16gb ram and more storage... it's still running great for when I use it, which is not much tbf... I mostly use my desktop because my vision has gotten exceedingly bad the past few years and my 45" desktop displays are significantly easier for me to read and use... I can kind of manage with the M1 display set to max size/scale... but many apps and sites are problematic.

Have you tried the screen zoom in accessibility settings? The responsiveness is great with the trackpad gestures.

I haven't... Should probably look into it. I always hated Windows full screen zoom... But I regularly use the triple tap zoom in Android. I'll look into it next time.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#196

Post by HPsquared »

dlcarrier wrote: post #191
jorisw wrote: post #185

> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Love this

Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties. Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.

Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#197

Post by ben-schaaf »

dlcarrier wrote: post #191
jorisw wrote: post #185

> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Love this

Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties. Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.

Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#198

Post by invalidSyntax »

interludead wrote: post #167
epistasis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on my M1 Air, 16GB, since a few weeks after launch, more than six years now. I still use it daily with lots of Docker containers, VS Code, tons of Electron apps, a small macOS arm VM, and lots of browser tabs simultaneously. Recently, Claude's VM environment is getting exercised simultaneously. Usually the memory pressure is into yellow, but responsiveness is still far higher than any Mac from the Intel day…

My concern with the Neo is that it may have the same "feels impossible for the price" quality early on, but the 8GB ceiling gives it much less room to become the kind of absurd long-lived machine your Air turned into

You can't change the RAM, so using it as a student, and then use it as a reliable sub pc in the future might make it last long.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#199

Post by tomwphillips »

darkteflon wrote: post #38

I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school. It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 year…

I was in a similar boat with my M1 Pro. I have an M4 Pro for work but rarely notice the difference.

Unfortunately the display in my M1 has failed and a replacement is £500-700. Very frustrating.

Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

#200

Post by Affric »

HPsquared wrote: post #196
dlcarrier wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties. Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.

Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.

Tragic
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