6 ms·

So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web p

So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

philistine 7mo ago
Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.
dchest 7mo ago
Yes, it can -- to all questions.
quesera 7mo ago
This is wrong. My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app. Current RAM usage is 6.14GB. Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
- darkstar999 7mo ago
  How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.
  - kdheiwns 7mo ago
    There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy. 30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
    - ewoodrich 7mo ago
      It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.
    - quesera 7mo ago
      No need to be obnoxious. I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand. I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive. FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.
      - jombib 7mo ago
        How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand
        quesera 7mo ago
        The Sidebery extension is the key, for me. Tabs are vertical, hierarchical, and searchable. I also set the color of specific tabs (another Sidebery feature) that have some special returnability reason. I don't love the color options, nor the default ordering (would prefer the more traditional color spectrum order (red-blue or inverse) so that I could infer the tag/priority/etc from the color, but I only use a few colors and it's fine. I don't have a problem with duplicates. If it's a page/app that I return to often, I know that and just jump to it. I'm sure I have some dupes hiding in there though. NBD.
  - quesera 7mo ago
    I use tabs as temporary bookmarks. It's still a lot, sure, but it comes at no cost. The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up. It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count. Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost. Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.
  - alpaca128 7mo ago
    I am "only" ranging around 800-2000 tabs and 95% of them are practically bookmarks that aren't hidden in some menu but visible in the same visual context as everything else, which feels more natural to me. They're not loaded in RAM anyway. The brain is amazing at remembering the rough location where I have tabs of a specific site/topic, so I just switch to the right window and scroll for a few seconds. Only works with a vertical tab bar though. It's not the most optimal solution but the best that actually exists and works smoothly.
happyopossum 7mo ago
Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets. As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
- alpaca128 7mo ago
  As someone who used an M1 with 8GB and has hundreds of browser tabs I can assure you it is not enough and you'll have to restart the browser at least a few times per week to not make the whole system lag. 16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.
runako 7mo ago
> Can it run multiple programs at the same time? I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application. Typical sample of apps concurrently in use: - PostgreSQL (server) - TablePlus (db client) - Docker - Slack - Chrome - Safari - Zed - Claude native - ChatGPT native - Zoom - Codex - Numbers - Calendar - the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.) With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86). I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
- perardi 7mo ago
  Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while. It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
- ewoodrich 7mo ago
  I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player. I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising? I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
  - BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
    > I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
kube-system 7mo ago
This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.
falkensmaize 7mo ago
Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.

philistine 7mo ago

Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.

dchest 7mo ago

Yes, it can -- to all questions.

quesera 7mo ago

This is wrong. My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app. Current RAM usage is 6.14GB. Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.

darkstar999 7mo ago
How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.
- kdheiwns 7mo ago
  There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy. 30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
  - ewoodrich 7mo ago
    It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.
  - quesera 7mo ago
    No need to be obnoxious. I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand. I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive. FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.
    - jombib 7mo ago
      How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand
      - quesera 7mo ago
        The Sidebery extension is the key, for me. Tabs are vertical, hierarchical, and searchable. I also set the color of specific tabs (another Sidebery feature) that have some special returnability reason. I don't love the color options, nor the default ordering (would prefer the more traditional color spectrum order (red-blue or inverse) so that I could infer the tag/priority/etc from the color, but I only use a few colors and it's fine. I don't have a problem with duplicates. If it's a page/app that I return to often, I know that and just jump to it. I'm sure I have some dupes hiding in there though. NBD.
- quesera 7mo ago
  I use tabs as temporary bookmarks. It's still a lot, sure, but it comes at no cost. The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up. It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count. Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost. Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.
- alpaca128 7mo ago
  I am "only" ranging around 800-2000 tabs and 95% of them are practically bookmarks that aren't hidden in some menu but visible in the same visual context as everything else, which feels more natural to me. They're not loaded in RAM anyway. The brain is amazing at remembering the rough location where I have tabs of a specific site/topic, so I just switch to the right window and scroll for a few seconds. Only works with a vertical tab bar though. It's not the most optimal solution but the best that actually exists and works smoothly.

happyopossum 7mo ago

Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets. As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...

alpaca128 7mo ago
As someone who used an M1 with 8GB and has hundreds of browser tabs I can assure you it is not enough and you'll have to restart the browser at least a few times per week to not make the whole system lag. 16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.

runako 7mo ago

> Can it run multiple programs at the same time? I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application. Typical sample of apps concurrently in use: - PostgreSQL (server) - TablePlus (db client) - Docker - Slack - Chrome - Safari - Zed - Claude native - ChatGPT native - Zoom - Codex - Numbers - Calendar - the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.) With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86). I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.

perardi 7mo ago
Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while. It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
ewoodrich 7mo ago
I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player. I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising? I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
- BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago
  > I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.

kube-system 7mo ago

This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.

falkensmaize 7mo ago

Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.