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.
I can’t speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it’s awful because of all that bloat. I’m guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.
The only time I ever use more than 8gb on my M4 Mac Mini is when I run a Win 11 VM through Parallels
So I presume you’re saying that the entire system shouldn’t slow down when Firefox starts swapping?
Macs don’t have copilot so that’s like 4GB saved right there
Can it be debloated? I might do that for my parents home PC.
Idk about copilot, this is my recommended debloat tool
Ha ha ha. True!
8GB of ram on Macs is fine for work and medium photo/video editing, as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
I’m running Mint on an 8BG laptop and I’m surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn’t even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.
Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.
I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.
Oh…I guess I’m the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.
One day I closed one window and it said “Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?”
I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?
When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you’re looking for when you have that many open?
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
Zen (firefox (gecko) derivative, No AI, focus on decluttered interface) has bloody excellent tab management these days, workspaces, folders, horizontal tab lists (like sideberry), essentials (tab icons pinned to the top), auto unload, all built in, and everything disappears when reading a page.
Glance is the most used feature on Zen for me. Everything else I like Firefox for more, but that damn Glance feature really helps me when doing research or looking into things! I NEED it for Firefox! :'(
Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they’ve sat unused for awhile?
I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of…
Get Sideberry for your sanity.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
I literally have over a thousand tabs open in one window.
8Gb ram. Mint. 10+ year old pc.
Yeah sidebery is the goat. I too have thousands of tabs open.
on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.
7.9gb of ram use.
it’s not that bad really, I mean it’s a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.
I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it’s been absolutely fine.
If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.
Many entry level MacBooks of the last decade have probably been 8 GB. I have a M1 MacBook Air and that is 8 GB. It is fine for me.
Not “probably”. They were. For the last decade, up until like last year. And they were awful, and a ripoff. At least they’re not trying to charge $1k+ for this one.
Hard disagree. I have the same MacBook Air and it’s still crazy fast. What are y’all really doing that more RAM is so necessary?
Probably having thousands of Chrome tabs open.
Ugh, I see this on people’s computers at work during screen sharing. First off, Chrome is the clunkiest browser you could possibly use on macOS and second, why so many tabs? How do y’all need 20 tabs open — like you can’t even see the titles because there are so many?
You don’t need to see the titles (and you can always see them with vertical tabs anyway). There are good cases for having many tabs open. It’s just that chrome is terrible at dealing with them.
I typically have two tabs of the same website open and need to know which tab belongs to which page. Just having the icon looks so sloppy to me and I always see coworkers cycle through their 4,000 tabs to get to anything.
A handful of apps and a few browser tabs will do it. I can go through twice that fairly frequently.
And the RAM upgrade prices have been a consistent Apple profit center for over 20 years now.
Yeahhhhh no
But it is for most people.
Again, no.
Most people still browse bloated websites, doesn’t matter what OS you’re using 8GB is going to be tight.
As a web developer… what?? If your website needs 8GB on the client to run there are serious, deeply ingrained problems with your front end. I recently scoffed at coworkers who wanted 8GB of memory for just one instance of their web server — I can’t even fathom how cursed the codebase is if the browser plows through 8GB of RAM on a page load.
8GB wouldn’t be one site, but between the OS & a couple of bloated sites 8GB is easy to hit.
Windows maybe? I’ve been using macOS (UNIX), FreeBSD (UNIX) and Linux for the past 20+ years.
I’m sat in front of my work computer(OSX) and may personal laptop(Linux).
Both are using well over 8GB just for the browsers.
On OSX vscode is using an additional 4GB and the windowserver east up 1GB too
On Linux/KDE my window manager is much lighter but for some reason my akonadi is using 2GB on my contacts resource
Sure you can technically run Linux on much less memory but a modern browser, hitting modern websites will use up 8GB pretty quickly.
Exactly. I am not a heavy user but occasionally I need to multitask a bit. I upgraded from 16 gb to 32 gb a while back because with 4 open workspaces, a browser window in each one plus an email client, signal, a couple libreoffice apps open, and my notes app, it was having to use enough swap space that I noticed the performance hit. I’ve had to use some very poorly optimized sites for work that literally used a gig of ram for one tab. A small number of very light users might be ok with 8gb, but most will likely have issues.
I have 13 tabs open over two browsers (Safari and Firefox) and a text editor open on my Mac and I’m using 1.82GB
M1 Max MacStudio
They said websites, not website
And that’s why we have adblockers
Different people use computers for different things you know.
I use my computer for simple tasks and can power through double that pretty easily. My family is full of Mac sheep who are constantly coming to me to make their computers faster and I have to tell them I can’t help because their machine was deliberately kneecapped by the OEM and there’s no way to fix it. Fortunately one of them just upgraded to the new Air w/ 16GB and they remark how much faster it is. Obviously it’s faster in lots of other ways, but none of those would do anything if they were still capped at 8GB.
Been enough for me.
My old laptop is running Pop!OS on 8gigs really well. I mostly do document editing, vector graphics, and a little light gaming. Have not updated to COSMIC yet so will see how that goes. I definitely dont load it up like my beefy desktop though.
I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.
How so? I have a work Mac and it uses more ram in general despite both the Mac and my personal laptop both employing memory compression and caching.
What?
I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn’t been my experience at all
To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier, if you have it to spare. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you’re out of RAM you’re out if RAM. It’s less likely to happen at all on Linux though.
What compression algorithm? The osx kernel is largely open source so they aren’t doing some secret compression, do they hardware offload it or something?
OSX enables zswap by default, but on a laptop that regular uses it, I’m not convinced it’s a trade-off that’s worth it, although swapping is different on OSX (IMO worse on modern desktops as it swaps whole apps) so I could be wrong.
MacOS doesn’t shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.
There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:
Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out. But when your using actual swap it’s in my experience more noticable on OSX than Linux, which at least for me remains responsive until you’re using a lot of swap.
Maybe Arch & Flatpak users hit this, but avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for and avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for. Although the ability to restore apps after closing them is pretty sweet and built in to OSX in a way that lets me safely kill apps to reduce the memory I’m using.
I think the main reason my Linux setup consumes less memory is probably because I used Kate for most file editing instead of vscode, which is probably an unfair advantage to Linux.
I disagree. If the OS automatically identifies unneeded pages and compresses them or swaps them out, it’s certainly using the physical memory more efficiently than if it wasn’t doing these things.
But they can’t if the applications they want to ship don’t all use the same version. E.g. Ubuntu ships GTK 2, 3, and 4. Arch even still ships GTK 1 in addition to these three.
What happens is you run KDE but then you still want to run Firefox so you still need GTK.
It’s basically iOS at that point.
MacOS is like 6 gb of ram doing nothing
That’s not true at all.
I constantly have Illustrator, Photoshop, Sibelius, Scrivener, and about 100 browser tabs open on my 10 year old MacBook with 8gb of RAM without issue.
What version or macOS?
Sequoia.
That is pretty surprising to me. I noticed a significant bump in resource requirements for Sequoia and again for Tahoe. I’ve got a stack of macs next to me I’ll see if I can find one still running sequoia and reassess my opinion.
Yeah, I’m not sure about Tahoe since my machine is too old so it won’t let me upgrade, but at least Sequoia has been fine with 8GB.
It can also do things and still use the same 6 gigs.
MacOS caches a lot. That memory is freed when it’s needed for other things.
No I keep seeing this “caches a lot” thing keeps getting repeated. Memory break downs already accounts for that. They shows the different break downs of ram usage. In use vs cached.
This is 6gb of inuse memory while the laptop is chilling. Cached memory is typically like 80% of whatever the ram is on your device. If you hit that 8gb your app is getting killed before the kernel kills a system process.
Okay I don’t think you’ve actually used MacOS lol
Ive got a stack of them right next to me. I work on them regularly. I know older versions of macOS are lean but Tahoe and Seqouia are noticeably heavier. Its not a problem because the devices running them have 16gb+ of ram. But I’m worried 8gb will impose contains on usage. I know it’ll do basic stuff like run a browser but i think people are overestimating how capable this device will be.