One good thing about the 8gig Neo means that I think Apple will at least work to support M1 8gig for a few more years!!
MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
261–270 of 433 posts
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#262I'll be impressed when Apple can make a charger that can stay in the wall.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
how do you select text?
Three finger drag. That was the best and unique thing about apple touchpads since, like, early 2000s, but then it was buried deep down the menus and forgotten for some reason. But seriously - try it, you might never go back.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management
Compared to Windows or Android, sure. Hopefully the Asahi folks will get around to supporting this device so we can run a proper lightweight OS on it.
Unfortunately Linux is pretty damn bad under memory pressure, I think you'd get an objectively better experience on macOS. I say this as someone running Asahi right now.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#265>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)." Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications. This model might trigger planned obsolescence legis…
> might trigger planned obsolescence legislation
then i welcome it
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>making decent dongles a necessity I used a macbook air all throughout school, I never once owned a dongle or even plugged the thing in to an external monitor. My requirements were something that could run photoshop/illustrator and chrome. If I ever transfered something over USB it was a 300kb docx file or something else that would have copied instantly at 2.0 speeds. I think there's a huge problem of tech enthusiast…
I went to school too. Sometimes at school we would do presentations using a projector connected by HDMI, maybe you could get away with the room computer but that only had USB A ports being some ancient desktop. Sometimes we did group projects and rather than huddle around one tiny 13" or 15" laptop screen we used one of the big ass TVs in the rentable group study rooms.
It's not tons of super fast IO. It's pretty basic IO.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#267>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)." Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications. This model might trigger planned obsolescence legis…
i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management
Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the Earth in back in mac os Mojave) caking on, at some point I just gave up on trying to fix it with continuously reinstalling and balancing it. My current portable has quarter the amount of workmem and is just incredibly snappy esp. compared to that mac book. And I don't even use portables for anything too heavy, I have an actual PC for that.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#268Hmm besides the 8 Gb being there mostly for market segmentation...
Does this mean the Neo/Air aren't useful for lightweight gaming at all? Lightweight as in indie-ish games, not as in session length.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fanless CPU needs more, lower-clocked cores to have the same multi-thread performance as an actively cooled CPU with fewer cores, and higher core count CPUs cost more. So you only get a fanless CPU if you either a) get a low multi-thread performance CPU or b) pay for a high-performance CPU and then get only medium performance out of it by running it fanless. Notice that even Apple's highest performance laptops have…
This is oversimplified. It is sustained multithreaded performance that brings throttling with fanless cpu. Anything for a short enough amount of time is fine, and sustained single threaded stuff is also fine. Bursts are also fine. A lot of work that people do on a computer is fine. Fanless doesn't really hurt unless you process large amounts of data in parallel for some time. Performance in a cpu does not only show i…
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
5W Phone CPUs of today are faster than 105W workstation CPUs of ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a matter of whether it can do real work, of course it can. The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise? That's the trade off, and most people pick saving time and money over silence, so that's what most vendors offer.
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it. They do make them. There are AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W and fanless laptops that have them. They're just not as popular when you give people the choice.
Re: MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
#270I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.
I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.