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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

#271

Post by znpy »

beloch wrote: post #254

>"~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 this reasoning is just disconnected from reality.

Reality is, the iphone 16 sharing the same chipset is perfectly functional for many more years to come, running similar workloads (for the same target audience): mainly web browsing.

If the iphone 16 can have the usual 3-6 years of useful life, then the macbook neo has the same -- FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE.

And I wrote this because I did actually get the macbook neo and I'm using it daily for the intended purpose (mostly web browsing) and it's just fine.

(if anybody is wondering: i have a large machine with 16c/32t and 128gb memory that i use remotely via ssh to do the "heavy stuff")

> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.

That legislation is at least ten years late but apple is absolutely not the worst offender. There is the entire market of cheap android phones (and tablets) that barely last a year or two, and have essentially no guaranteed software upgrade. That should have triggered the legislation in the first place.

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

#272

Post by trvz »

remix2000 wrote: post #267
throawayonthe wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 E…

I used a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of RAM for a while. It was fine; much better than Intel Macs or any other setup with low RAM.

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

#273

Post by criddell »

wvh wrote: post #270

I'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 use…

Buy one and try it. Apple returns are hassle free in my experience.

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

#274

Post by znpy »

remix2000 wrote: post #267
throawayonthe wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 E…

> Source…?

Real life?

My macbook neo with 8gb memory is faster and snappier than my shit-tier thinkpad X13G1 even when the X13 is not swapping at all.

I have 8c/16t Ryzen 7 along with 32GB ram over there, running GNU/Linux.

And somehow my macbook neo running a phone chip is much more usable (and battery lasts longer, and suspend actually works).

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

#275

Post by edelhans »

zozbot234 wrote: post #260
throawayonthe wrote: post #257

Earlier 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.

Linux is pretty bad at handling out of memory. In my old thinkpad T14 with Mint everything came to a halt when webpack gobbled up my 16GB of ram. Couldnt even move the cursor, stuff just got stuck hard

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

#276

Post by d1sxeyes »

gib444 wrote: post #217
d1sxeyes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is yours for as long as you want it, and it (mostly) runs all the software it was compatible with when you first bought it (there are some quirks around software you had access to but didn't install, like Garageband, where you may no longer be able to access the original version). Stuff doesn't just 'stop working', as a rule, but the rest of the world does move on. I'm not sure what you think should be done about…

> Stuff doesn't just 'stop working' They didn't say that. In fact they said the total opposite > As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely Somewhat true for Intel Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)

I did read between the lines here:

> After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser.

But I don't think the lines were particularly far apart.

> Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)

M1 was six years ago, M2 was four, both within the seven years OP was talking about.

You can run Linux inside a VM on any Apple Silicon Mac already, even if there is no progress on native Linux on Apple Silicon.

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

#277

Post by feisty0630 »

wvh wrote: post #270

I'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 use…

It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised.

I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day.

For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.

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

#278

Post by victorbjorklund »

SXX wrote: post #247
socalgal2 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I lived in the reality. My 2014 MBP and 2019 MBP’s fans come on quick and loud

Apple silicon is only been around for 5+ years, but people tend to forget how bad Intel macs overheated, throttled and hand tons of other thermal related issues.

Totally. I had an Intel Mac until 2 years ago and it was loud. Not worse than other laptops from the same year. But far from silent.

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

#279

Post by fooker »

It’s 8GB because they want to sell you a 16GB model for the same price when the dram crisis is over.

That way the marketing can be: double the memory for the same price. Apple has done this again and again, the more time people are spending talking about one single deficiency in your product, the less time they are spending on any other product. Then you solve that single issue in the next cycle.

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

#280

Post by Gigachad »

chocochunks wrote: post #266
Gigachad wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 bas…

Even then the problem can be solved by a cheap usb a + c flash drive. At least in offices every meeting room I’ve used for a while now has a usb c dongle for the TV.

HDMI has been less common than usb c on laptops for quite a long time now.

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