I think even worse than that is that they still only put 8 GB RAM in the base and middle options.
I believe we are now in the 9th year of 8GB being the baseline Mac laptop RAM config. It’s incredibly stingy. For a while you could make the argument that a lot of Air purchasers wouldn’t need it, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. My wife has an M1 Air with 8GB and between Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack she quite regularly gets beachballs and weird performance hitches.
> Office, Chrome, Teams, and Slack
Those are like the heavyweights of the app world. And I think the 4 combined is running more code than the OS itself (the last three are 3xChrome).
I was recently buying a Dell laptop for my sister and it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops. I didn't enjoy the process of looking through dozens of various lines that Dell has and then other companies like Lenovo and HP earlier in the process, just to find a "mid-range usable computer with a decent screen". If you didn't…
> I was recently buying a Dell laptop for my sister and it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops.
If you remember back in the day, Nokia also had a crazy number of SKUs for their phones. Nokia is no longer the power it used to be. Could it mean many SKUS means a lack of focus ? Thinking you can out market / out segment your competition rather than try to concentrate more on the product ?
I find AMD also has less SKUs than Intel. Here, as a challenger you can't really afford to segment the market as much as the leader. You need to concentrate your offerings in a few potent products.
My wife has been complaining to me about how she regularly gets the "choose which application to terminate" dialog on her Air. I knew in my heart that 8GB wouldn't be future proof, but I underestimated how fast it would be a problem. She pretty much just runs Safari and Libreoffice Calc too, nothing that should really tax the machine.
> "choose which application to terminate" What is that? I've been using macs for decades, and I've never seen or heard of such a dialog.
Usually when an application go rogue with the memory allocation.
So stop using Chrome. There are other browsers that are far more memory efficient.
That solves the browser. What about colima vm for docker? Intellij, gradle daemon, android studio, xcode, electron apps, android virtual device, slack, spring boot apps, iMovie, Davinci Resolve, python notebooks? Phones now have more than 8gb of RAM
Do you use everything together? My opinion is that if you'd use any of that seriously you buy the device that let it run correctly. Opening a multi-module project in Android Studio that requires something like 6GB or ram for the index, then running it inside a 3GB emulator on an 8GB laptop is just asking for problem. Be mindful of your RAM usage and select the suitable amount for your use cases.
I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work
How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?
Honestly haven’t felt like it didn’t have enough RAM even once.
My daily driver before this was a Ryzen 5700x desktop with 64GB RAM, so I know what a powerful processor + RAM combo feels like.
I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based. I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery l…
Good that it works for you and your daughter! I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with…
I agree with your misgivings about window management in MacOS. The way Windows does it is so much more intuitive.
For window snapping, there are countless apps that will easy solve your problem. But I get why you would struggle - I still get frustrated at times with the way MacOS works.
Shouldn't you be doing the opposite then? Keeping the baseline amount so you can know what it's like for people without a large budget and stop patronizing the applications without acceptable footprints in that circumstance? I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing. The Stable Diffusion XL model is ~13GB That's not a baseline consumer application. See m…
> I'm not a developer of native Mac apps. If I were, I would definitely have a baseline machine for testing. You expect every developer to buy a second Mac? They're all doing what you're doing and paying more for the machine with more memory because other applications need it, and then their application runs fine on that machine so they don't even notice the problem for the people with 8GB. > That's not a baseline co…
> You expect every developer to buy a second Mac?
It's very easy to check the memory usage of your project (it's kinda in your face on XCode). If you do a few minutes test or let the app stay open for a few hours and usage has ballooned to a few GBs, that usually means you have a leak somewhere to fix.
I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops. It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies…
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> What 'innovation' has Apple introduced in the last 10 years other than their M chips? Most of their 'innovation' is just marketing for people who don't know what they're buying
I was recently buying a Dell laptop for my sister and it boggles my mind how most other companies (maybe Framework is an except) still have dozens or even 100s of SKUs for consumer laptops. I didn't enjoy the process of looking through dozens of various lines that Dell has and then other companies like Lenovo and HP earlier in the process, just to find a "mid-range usable computer with a decent screen". If you didn't…
I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops. It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies…
Tastes differ. My work MacBook unlocks with a fingerprint (with random sensitivity, if my hands are too dry, for example, it does not register) even in 2024. My Windows laptops had been unlocking with face recognition for 10 years or so. I find the latter much more convenient, especially when I have the laptop on a stand and use an external monitor and keyboard/mouse. Does not look like Apple is ahead of anything here. Hardware wise Apple is actually okay for the price in the low end, but you can only add memory/SSD/CPU (at ridiculous $/{GB,GHz} ratio) for the higher end, you can't get an OLED display, or a good keyboard, or bigger battery at any price.