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They have to be REALLY careful. I have a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and an M1 for personal use, work insisted on getting a 16" MacBook Pro M2 with 32GB of RAM

They have to be REALLY careful. I have a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and an M1 for personal use, work insisted on getting a 16" MacBook Pro M2 with 32GB of RAM and it's completely wasted. There is zero reason for me to have anything but the cheapest MacBook Pro/Air, in fact the smaller screen size mean I'm more likely to use it outside the office, meaning I get more use from it. I'm not allow to use it without a monitor an keyboard most of the time anyway, so for most hours of the day the screen size isn't important. For Go, Python, shell scripting and admin tasks the M1 Air is perfectly fine and if they made a cheaper version that would probably cover most/all of my home usage.

bdcravens 3y ago
Air only supports 1 monitor (without using a DisplayLink software and dock), but other than that, I can't see any tangible difference for most power users.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  I forgot about the one monitor, really should be a minimum of two for professional use.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    I'm using 2 via a DisplayLink dock, but it's less than ideal, and comes with some compromises.
nomilk 3y ago
What Apple loses from existing customers downgrading could be made up for by new customers who appreciate the lower price (students, early career professionals, countries with weak currencies). Many of these new customers may stick with the Apple ecosystem. The low cost MacBook could be a 'gateway' product.
huijzer 3y ago
I went for 16GB of RAM because it cannot be upgraded and have already found one situation where it was a life saver (some Docker x86 image that ran poorly on Aarch64 and required 9GB of RAM to finish). Also I cannot see how 8GB of RAM can be sufficient. What is your RAM usage when having just a browser open with a few tabs?
mrighele 3y ago
I own one, and I found 8GB to be a bit limiting. If you work with something like emacs or vim probably you're fine, but if you try to run Xcode or you program in Java, good luck.

bdcravens 3y ago

Air only supports 1 monitor (without using a DisplayLink software and dock), but other than that, I can't see any tangible difference for most power users.

mrweasel 3y ago
I forgot about the one monitor, really should be a minimum of two for professional use.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  I'm using 2 via a DisplayLink dock, but it's less than ideal, and comes with some compromises.

nomilk 3y ago

What Apple loses from existing customers downgrading could be made up for by new customers who appreciate the lower price (students, early career professionals, countries with weak currencies). Many of these new customers may stick with the Apple ecosystem. The low cost MacBook could be a 'gateway' product.

huijzer 3y ago

I went for 16GB of RAM because it cannot be upgraded and have already found one situation where it was a life saver (some Docker x86 image that ran poorly on Aarch64 and required 9GB of RAM to finish). Also I cannot see how 8GB of RAM can be sufficient. What is your RAM usage when having just a browser open with a few tabs?

mrighele 3y ago

I own one, and I found 8GB to be a bit limiting. If you work with something like emacs or vim probably you're fine, but if you try to run Xcode or you program in Java, good luck.