6 ms·
Forget 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 m
by compounding_it 7mo ago
Forget 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 7mo 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 7mo agoI was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.
- AlanYx 7mo agoIt's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.
- Razengan 7mo 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 7mo 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).
- whizzter 7mo ago16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.
- mrheosuper 7mo agoCould it be all the corporate-tracking software ? I used to have a M1 Pro macbook with 16gb ram when it's first released, and somehow it still feel slow when compiling. Then try again on my friend personal M1 MB, it was night and day.
- whizzter 7mo agoWe're a small shop so nothing of that sort, it's more of larger Figma projects and modern web-apps being hogs. Honestly, these days compiling feels like really lightweight work in terms of memory compared to so much else.
- neoyagami 7mo agoThis is my use case, 4 ides. Chrome and docker, its a 14’ M1 Pro, it works nice, but im not installing tahoe any time soon xd
- sgt 7mo agoOn Tahoe, I upgraded only recently (maybe they made fixes after the initial complaints). Haven't noticed any regressions except for the weird corners but those I'm already used to. Super fast.
- post-it 7mo agoYeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game. Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
- etempleton 7mo agoI still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.
- crazygringo 7mo ago> id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
- bzzzt 7mo agoThat's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more). It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
- crazygringo 7mo agoChrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream. I don't see too many students running Teams.
- pooortal 7mo agoYes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?
- bzzzt 7mo agoClearly not Apple's.
- rbanffy 7mo agoLet’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue. Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.
- epistasis 7mo ago> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)
- elzbardico 7mo ago8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.
- rbanffy 7mo agoI agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.
- pants2 7mo agoCan't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.
- humanperhaps 7mo agoWhile I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.
- cocoto 7mo agoTons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.
- 7mo ago
- thatwasunusual 7mo ago> Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware. I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
- downrightmike 7mo agoCourt cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases
- BurningFrog 7mo agoApple is people, my friend!
- KevinMS 7mo ago> 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. I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.
- create-username 7mo agoI dream of a macOS installer in which you can decide the level of bloat, instead of then fighting against apple’s super user in your device (SIP) using scripts from generous Internet friends. “Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”
- menno-sh 7mo agoSomething like TinyOSX (or TinymacOS, which doesn't have the same ring to it) would be pretty awesome.
- mrheosuper 7mo agoApple has history of giving inferior device newer update because it's released later. Like the ipad pro 10.5 does not support later ios version, while the less powerful but newer base ipad does. So, there is chance the M1 MBA stop receiving update before the MB Neo