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

jdhodges.com

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

#201

Post by skiing_crawling »

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 bought a 8gb m1 air just a few days ago to use as a travel laptop. The 8gb gives me memory anxiety coming from my 48gb m4, but it did force me to turn off some settings I never liked (siri, spotlight indexing) and I also discovered zed, ghostty, and orbstack to replace vscode, iterm, and docker desktop.

The memory limit is probably in my head now, it does pretty well as long as I'm not obsessing over activity monitor.

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

#202

Post by simonh »

justin66 wrote: post #31

> Yes, 8GB of RAM is a real limitation. But give it a year and the next version will almost certainly ship with 12GB and a modest CPU bump. We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?

According to some reviews I’ve seen, it tops out at around 60.

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

#203

Post by nicce »

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

Meanwhile GitHub tab in Firefox/Chrome eats 6GB RAM alone.

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

#204

Post by lynguist »

Seriously what is this ugly engagement optimized LLM slop of an article doing here yet again on the HN front page?

I love the Neo as much as any other enthusiast, so yes, the subject matter is subjectively “cool”.

But this “article” is indigestible. Not only it regurgitates the same thing over and over (and it has links to other articles on the same page where they already did the same), on top of that the writing style, content, intentionality does not exist in the slightest. I feel like having been offered chocolate, but having received artificial cocoa flavored petrochemicals.

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

#205

Post by hbs18 »

tcoff91 wrote: post #165
wiseowise wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The quiet isn’t even the best part of passive cooling. It’s that the cooling will never stop working due to dust clogging fans.

Surely the thermal paste will degrade at some point, right?

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

#206

Post by lifestyleguru »

Gigachad wrote: post #180
interludead wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 8GB is harder to defend in 2026 than it was in 2020, but maybe Apple's low-end machines may be staying useful long after the spec sheet says they shouldn't...

Ram is massively more expensive in 2026 than it was in 2020. And the tasks the average person does hasn't changed in that time. I think it could be a good thing that Apple is setting a baseline that your apps should run with 8gb, there isn't a good reason you couldn't work with that amount.

> And the tasks the average person does hasn't changed in that time.

Absolutely untrue. Your 2020 CV makes you completely unemployable in 2026.

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

#207

Post by dlcarrier »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #197
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.

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...

That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.

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

#208

Post by throwaway27448 »

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.

Web browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.

But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.

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

#209

Post by nwienert »

Affric wrote: post #200
HPsquared wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you decry bloated web apps and use Chrome on their Mac... there's Safari. It's far more efficient and has a far snappier UI.

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

#210

Post by throwaway27448 »

dlcarrier wrote: post #207
ben-schaaf wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.

It's not so much "full circle" as we never came up with a better way to render general purpose rich text content than html/css to begin with
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