The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.
Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.
Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
My phone has more RAM than that. I can’t imagine running a computer with that little memory considering how poorly optimized software tends to be at this point.
I’m not sure what the overhead for Mac OS is, but that has to be basically rock bottom to be even considered functional unless you’re running one of the lighter Linux builds.
I got a free, going to be recycled, dell with 8gb of ram from work. I threw in an nvme and installed Linux. It’s not the lightest Linux install, but it is Arch, so definitely on the lighter side. I idle at under 1gb and under normal use don’t break 2. I do some coding which uses more but nothing super crazy. MacOS probably uses a little more ram, but it’s not Windows. I’d wager than the vast majority of people don’t come close to using all of that RAM, and power users are going to get hardware for the task, and this isn’t it.
Under 1GB on a modern build is pretty light. I run CachyOS and I’m pretty sure I idle at significantly more than that. Though I honestly haven’t checked, and don’t really want to close everything out to find out haha. I do know I’m currently using more than 8GB and not doing anything super heavy, but I do have multiple programs running. And multitasking is always going to be a killer for a system with low RAM limits. There is a reason my laptop has 32 and my desktop has 64.
I did just check and I was wrong. I idle at 1.6GB. I may have been thinking of a single app I had open when I looked the other day. I did just open Firefox and it took about a gig. Opening about 20 tabs and navigating to different sites did Bum it up to about 5gb. So yea, 8 is on the lower end, but it’s usable and I’d bet most people would be fine. Throw in things like swap and high speed storage, I feel most people wouldn’t notice. Definitely not enough for high usage though.
I miss when 4gb was good enough.
I run CachyOS with Gnome and it idles at just under 2GB
What the fuck are you doing on a phone that you need 8 GIGABYTES of RAM? Damn son!
It’s great for multitasking. I’ve seen phones boot and already consume 3-4GB of RAM. Alas, that’s how much some of this software uses now, depending on your needs.
I mean, at its heart, Mac OS is a heavily re-tooled fork of the BSD platform, so it’s not inconceivable that it’s light enough to run on 8G. I doubt it would run well on 8G, but it could do it.
MacOS’ kernel is derived from Mach, though with with some BSD code, and is Apple’s own work since then. Its API is compatible with FreeBSD, but it’s not FreeBSD. And the FreeBSD userland tools don’t have effect on systemwide memory management.
It runs fine, unless you load up on chrome tabs, or try to run pro apps. Itdoes basic photo editing and admin apps and phone holiday video editing just fine for average users. I have a lot of clients with 8GB M1 machines.
My M1 MacBook Air idles at 1.03GB, my XPS 13 running Gnome on Vanilla OS idles at 2.4GB
GNOME on immutable distros = very bloated. Try antiX instead, as it uses a lighter DE.
Even a bloated GNOME runs with much less ram than Windows
I’d be curious to see what Gnome looks like on Debian stable or the like
I’m not looking for anything lighter
I know it was lighter than windows the last time I used Mac, but that has been quite a few years now. Hopefully it is a decent machine. Computing just keeps getting more expensive, so having more budget options is definitely good as long as they are reasonably functional.
I have a 2013 MBP that shipped with 8GB, the minimum amount they came with.
Of course it also is upgradable. Which I did, to 16GB. A decade ago.
My 2013 MBP is still at 8GB. With memory compression, I rarely run into issues unless I’m doing VMs/Docker or something really heavy.
Just to play devil’s advocate: a smartphone is definitely a computer and has no trouble competing with older laptop CPUs in benchmarks. I see this as a difference without a distinction beyond form factor.
8GB is 💯 barely serviceable. I see this is a product for a casual user only, with excellent build quality. I don’t think it ages well when pushed.
I mean… of course it’s for the causal users what kind of observation is that?
What appears to be common sense to you is hardly common sense to the consumer. I choose to be more inclusive thinking of a person who might not necessarily know what 8 GB means. That’s a ton of Apple’s customers.