|
| ▲ | no_op 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this. |
| |
| ▲ | jsheard 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that. | | |
| ▲ | qn9n 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers. Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks. | |
| ▲ | dagmx 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why not? They’re the same core OS. | | |
| ▲ | jsheard 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them. | | |
| ▲ | pram 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They added iOS-esque stuff a long time ago in Lion/Mavericks like “App Nap” and “automatic termination” so it kinda has this, but it’s inconsistent. | |
| ▲ | dagmx 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway? Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too. People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be. | |
| ▲ | qn9n 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | ycombinator_acc 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them. Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory. This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB. |
|
|
| ▲ | akmarinov 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still |
| |
| ▲ | jasongill 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well. | | |
| ▲ | 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | nateb2022 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence. | | |
| ▲ | dchest 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 8 GB M1 MacBook Air does support Apple Intelligence. | | |
| ▲ | nateb2022 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes it does. I was clarifying what the commenter was saying; not making his statement myself. akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say. | | |
| ▲ | jasongill 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | correct, I thought he meant that the Neo does not support it, since his M1 Macbook does support Apple Intelligence but perhaps he's not aware of that or hasn't updated yet. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | drnick1 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE. |
| |
| ▲ | qn9n 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for. |
|
|
| ▲ | r0fl 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'll get one for my mom who uses facebook and pinterest and the occasional recipe website. I'm sure it'll be enough power for the average user. |
| |
| ▲ | qn9n 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people. |
|
|
| ▲ | stevenhubertron 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take. |
| |
| ▲ | DaSHacka 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts. I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each. | | |
| ▲ | qn9n 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for. | |
| ▲ | turtlebits 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers. | |
| ▲ | NetMageSCW 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe you should try a MacOS device. | |
| ▲ | ezfe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bruh if 32GB of RAM feels insufficient your computer is broken. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | unethical_ban 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 8GB will run chat, web browsing and word processors just fine. Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm. |
|
| ▲ | tw04 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser. |
| |
|
| ▲ | baal80spam 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable C'mon, man. |
| |
| ▲ | fartfeatures 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient. | | |
| ▲ | nateb2022 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient. Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM." If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it. Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full. | |
| ▲ | tw04 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop. Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days. | | |
| ▲ | fartfeatures 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone? Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week. | |
| ▲ | qn9n 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly 128MB might be too much... |
|
|
|
