9 ms·
If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)
by reacharavindh 8mo ago
If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)
- dgxyz 8mo agoWhile I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right. We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
- ClarityJones 8mo agoParticularly when paying for more RAM means buying a completely new computer.
- thewebguyd 8mo agoEven on an upgradable machine. We're looking at ~$400 for 32GB of DDR5, and the price is only going to keep going up. We're at a point now where Apple actually charges less for RAM upgrades than it costs to upgrade your own machine. Insane.
- zozbot234 8mo agoThere is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.
- philistine 8mo agoJoke's on you; Swift has no garbage collector.
- compounding_it 8mo agoForget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
- Razengan 8mo agoI used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering. and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
- compounding_it 8mo agoI was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.
- AlanYx 8mo agoIt's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.
- Razengan 8mo agoAdobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff. Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.
- sgt 8mo agoI'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).
- stetrain 8mo agoThey'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.
- aziaziazi 8mo agoAs a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM. 2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though. 2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer. We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
- poly2it 8mo agoIn all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.
- aziaziazi 8mo agoThat's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives. I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".
- 00deadbeef 8mo agoWhatsApp has a native Mac app
- jaydenmilne 8mo agoPeople forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure. This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive). Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
- f311a 8mo agoThat's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoMy Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.
- odo1242 8mo agoI feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)
- Retr0id 8mo agoIt's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.
- kyriakos 8mo agoWin 11 is actually way better at memory management than Windows 10. It's just more bloated.
- citrin_ru 8mo agoI doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed. Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
- k4rnaj1k 8mo ago[dead]
- 00deadbeef 8mo agoBut the Mac has a huge trick up its sleeve: it can run iOS and iPadOS apps. Meaning developers only have to make relatively minor adjustments to make it nice in the desktop and bin off the electron app on Mac.
- citrin_ru 8mo agoAmong the biggest offenders when it comes by my daily usage are Youtube and Facebook web sites. Both have iOS apps but did choose not to provide native Mac OS apps. I don't think MacBook Neo will make them to reconsider this policy.
- transcriptase 8mo ago“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
- thewebguyd 8mo agoThat's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron. The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then. That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time. macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
- DrBazza 8mo agoI'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
- mpweiher 8mo agoNeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations. With builds running on big build servers.
- inetknght 8mo agoWhere are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.
- wslh 8mo agoThis is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.
- antfarm 8mo agoThe worst memory hogs today are websites.
- tonymet 8mo agoI love the new reduced resources Era. MS was clever in launching Xbox series S + X and demanding all published games run on the lower spec machine (similar to Xbox One-S specs). Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience. It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.
- merrvk 8mo agoBye bye electron
- einpoklum 8mo agoI'm afraid it doesn't. People most everywhere in the world don't buy these overpriced machines. And you can get a new budget laptop with 16 GB of RAM for well under 200 USD. However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...
- import 8mo agoCurious where can I find new budget laptop with 16g under 200? N100 mini pc’s sold for 350 at Amazon.
- einpoklum 7mo agoI don't use Amazon (and am not in the US). But look for manufacturers like Xiaomi, Chuwi, Mechrevo, Teclast, or even less-prominent ones; here's one example: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010041415903.html https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010041415903.html
- larodi 8mo agoThere was this argument by someone the other day that Electron is so attractive, because native APIs are shit and too complex. On the other hand, all software, even simple stuff like messengers or app managers, seems so bloated thanks to Electron and similar frameworks. I like to think of these packaged webapps really as prototypes, and now start to imagine that agentic swarms can effectively translate them to native code, which would save resource both on the hardware and human-ware side.