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You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 p
by MYEUHD 7mo ago
You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)
Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.
Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM.
macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
- post-it 7mo ago> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage." I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.
- MYEUHD 7mo agoIn macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files" I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here. In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
- KerrAvon 7mo agoHow do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.
- MYEUHD 7mo agoI mean at that point (13 GB memory used), the "Swap used" is at several hundred megabytes. And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow. The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p
- intenex 7mo agoWhen you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about. On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%. You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice. In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)
- parl_match 7mo agoYes, the person you are replying to has explained that. The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.
- Twirrim 7mo agoThe old mental model doesn't fit how any OS manages RAM. Every OS plays all sorts of fun guessing games about caching, predicting what resources your program will actually need etc. The OS does a lot of work to ensure that everything just hums along as best as possible.
- qmr 7mo agoWhat are you slicing? What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
- post-it 7mo agoI'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed.
- tomcam 7mo ago> I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. Most cool. Is it an M1?
- alistairSH 7mo agoNot the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP.
- tomcam 7mo agoSame. I've been programming in Go on an M1 for years and perf is spectacular.
- post-it 7mo agoM2
- sudo_cowsay 7mo agoEarly 2020 i3 macbook air
- astrange 7mo agoThere's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms. I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
- znpy 7mo agoi think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue. the keywords here are "depending on the workload". edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.
- wrs 7mo agoIndeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?"
- jcelerier 7mo agobecause memory access performance is not O(1) but depends on the size of what's in memory (https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html). Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.
- SkiFire13 7mo agoMemory access performance depends on the _maximum size of memory you need to address_. You can clearly see it in the graph of that article where L1, L2, L3 and RAM are no longer enough to fit the linked list. However while the working set fits in them the performance scales much better. So as long as you give priority to the working set, you can fill the rest of the biggest memory with whatever you want without affecting performance.
- stevefan1999 7mo agowhy is it not O(1)? It has to service within a deadline time, so it is still constant.
- yunnpp 7mo ago> Every byte used makes the whole thing slower. This is an incorrect conclusion to make from the link you posted in the context of this discussion. That post is a very long-winded way of saying that the average speed of addressing N elements depends on N and the size of the caches, which isn't news to anyone. Key word: addressing.
- rileymat2 7mo agoI am not following, isn't this just a graph that shows that how fast operations happen is largely dependent on the odds that it is in cache at various levels (CPU/Ram/Disk)? The memory operation itself is O(1), around 100 ns, where at a certain point we are doing full ram fetches each time because the odds of it being in CPU cache are low? Typically O notation is an upper bound, and it holds well there. That said, due to cache hits, the lower bound is much lower than that. You see similar performance degradation if you iterate in a double sided array the in the wrong index first.
- nomel 7mo agoIt also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.
- Yizahi 7mo agoMemory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM. I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
- nomel 7mo ago> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised. Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user. The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly. 8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.
- macintux 7mo agoGruber said something[0] that parallels your point, and emphasizes the target audience for this Mac: > If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want. Apple has made extensive tradeoffs to make this price point, but they all seem to be reasonable tradeoffs for casual users. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_macbook_neo https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...
- sufehmi 7mo agoAfter several days of usage, Activity Monitor will usually shows that "WindowServer" is using 6 GB of RAM. Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
- amazingman 7mo agoUnused RAM is wasted RAM. If your machine isn't reporting memory pressure and/or the user isn't experiencing pageouts, then the machine is well-suited to the user's workload.
- alright2565 7mo agoI'd rather my ram go to my page cache, not have bloated apps hoarding it.
- mrtesthah 7mo agoBut I thought Electron was the future?
- gizajob 7mo agoHave you tried turning it off and on again?
- peapicker 7mo agoUptime of 13 days. My WindowServer is at 441Mb. ??? (32Gb RAM M2Max MBPro)
- astrange 7mo agoProbably a badly behaved app. Run `IOAccelMemory` to check.
- cmontella 7mo agoI remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch just precaching commonly used programs to give better application startup times.
- torginus 7mo agoTbf when Big Sur was released, it was leaking like crazy. It was a daily ritual for me to kill Dock and Finder after they've eaten all my RAM.
- uncSoft 7mo agoHa, wasn't it windows vista that allowed you to plug an SD card to use for swap space/fake ram?
- ForOldHack 7mo agoSpeedBoost was supported by vista through windows 10, and although windows 11 regognises a speed boost USB, I do not know it it uses it. When I put windows 11 on two i5 8gb machines and plugged in two speed boost drives, it did not swap a lot to them, whereas in windows 7, under memory load it would use them, at least until I found ChacheMem v2.1 it would manage memory much better than windows ever could. Windows back to window 2.1 386 supported swapdisks, i.e fake ram.
- nilsbunger 7mo agoI found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.
- msh 7mo agoI have heard this before and am curious what kind of sites you open in the tabs? I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).
- nilsbunger 7mo agoIt was my son’s laptop , he’s in high school. General Google Classroom / Google Docs / Gmail / web research stuff. He’s not technical at all. I bought him the 8GB machine thinking it would be fine, but it became a big problem for him. I do think part of the problem was number of tabs open. It was a little better when I taught him how to manage tabs and I also turned up all the memory saving features in chrome. But even with all of that, it would still slow down with what looked like a pretty minimal workload. I spent a few hours with him on it, but he still had these kinds of issues. It just seems like it requires a decent level of sophistication to work with a small RAM budget if you’re using Google software.
- Foobar8568 7mo agoNo you don't work just fine with all that or you aren't doing much. Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast. Just rust plugin in vs code uses 3gb of ram. Add a browser, and you are already over 8GB.
- wtallis 7mo ago> Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast. Just how quickly do you think the SSDs will die? Because there are a lot of 8GB M1 machines out there that have been getting daily use for five years, mostly with 256GB or 512GB storage configs. When do you expect them to fail?
- Foobar8568 7mo agoDepends of the usage. I just know that with 48GB I have a few TB or tens of TB written within a couple of hours when playing with homomorphic search.
- wtallis 7mo agoSo you're predicting that 8GB machines will fail prematurely based on extrapolation from an extreme niche use case that doesn't remotely fit on those machines?
- jval43 7mo agoUsing an M2 8GB Mac Mini, I only ever ran into problems when trying generative fill in Photoshop. There I get insufficient memory errors if the selection is too large.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- api 7mo agoLinux does this too. It uses 100% of your ram always, using free memory as cache. Actually figuring out free RAM is kind of confusing.
- tedmiston 7mo ago> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending): | device | cpu | single core score | multi core score | |:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:| | iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 | | iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 | | MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3708 | 14698 | | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 | | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 | | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 | https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
- wffurr 7mo agoPut the M1 in your comparison - I think the A18 Pro compares favorably to it and it's a good baseline for people who bought in on Apple Silicon early and are still using it.
- josephg 7mo ago| device | cpu | single core | multi core | |:----------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:| | iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 | | iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 | | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) | Apple M1 Pro @ 3.2 GHz (10 cores) | 2385 | 12345 | | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 | | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 | The single core performance difference is wild. Far more than I expected. My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoThats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications.
- izacus 7mo agoDepends on which metric do you look, right? :)
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoHonestly, I don’t know which one to look at and was purposefully hand wavy. I just knew they were looking at the stone one…
- Aurornis 7mo ago> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM. I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast. Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
- redeeman 7mo ago> Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine. if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)
- Lerc 7mo agoI'm using a (fairly crappy) HP laptop with 16 gig, running Linux. I find that the combination of FireFox and Visual Studio gets to the point where it fills up to the point where things get killed (with swap filled as well). Mate system monitor hilariously reports code using 71MB and firefox-bin using 1.1GB because it has a tree view that doesn't show the usage of collapsed nodes beneath it. Using smem shows each using multi GB and at my current level I've got 6GB of cache to eat up before it kills code again. Ordering by size Ghostty is the first thing that is not firefox or code at 78MB total. (and about 1GB of non-cache kernel use) . So essentially it's only those two apps that are the problem. Can Macs get by simply because Safari is better with RAM?
- tokinonagare 7mo ago> running Linux Problem exists between user and hardware. Applied the Firefox salt over the wound doesn't help either. It's a discussion about Macs btw.
- pfg_ 7mo agoMac is good at managing low memory conditions. Linux is not. When I was on Linux, if I hit 16gb ram used the entire system would freeze for minutes. I would have to go in TTY2 to kill something to get it responsive again.
- waterTanuki 7mo agoIf you're concerned about the amount of RAM, this isn't the laptop for you. Grandma doesn't need 16GB to browse Facebook and look at family photos. I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.
- eviks 7mo agoIf your "market pressure" worked we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
- nytesky 7mo agoThis is a Mac Chromebook. You use it for cloud stuff and every now and then you can run a real application in a pinch. You can also develop locally which is significant.
- tracerbulletx 7mo agoModern pcs use the ram given to them. Its not like a fixed quantity it requires.
- dotancohen 7mo ago> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup My Debian (KDE) uses just under 1GB on startup. If one is not using animations and things syncing in the background and daemons monitoring file system changes and whatnot, can the stock MacOS memory usage be reduced? What, in fact, is it doing? I'm of the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.
- browningstreet 7mo agoFor $300 more the base MacBook Air is a significantly better machine than the Neo.
- hollandheese 7mo agoIt's $500 more. Basically double the price.
- EagnaIonat 7mo ago> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM. Well for starters MacOS version is currently 26.3 (Tahoe). Apple ecosystem, if you are not using RAM then it is wasted RAM. So it always optimise to use as much as possible. The main point however is you are not the target audience. Apple realised that the majority of users don't do anything beyond the power of what the phone supplies. That who this is intended for.
- zadikian 7mo agoRight now with "green" memory pressure and not so many Safari+FF tabs open, I see 16GB physical, 13.41 used, 2.68 cached, 2.32 swap, 6.57 app, 2.52 wired, 3.89 compressed. Why is there swap used when I have free memory? I don't know, long ago gave up on understanding this fully. Memory pressure is the only good signal. Or just how slow the Mac feels.
- wtallis 7mo ago> Why is there swap used when I have free memory? That data may have been evicted during a previous moment of higher memory pressure. If it hasn't been needed since, leaving it in swap probably makes more sense than preemptively paging in data that's known to be cold.
- zadikian 7mo agoYeah you're right. But now I'm wondering if it preferred writing to swap over evicting the cache at that time... can make sense if the cache is being hit more than the pages it's swapping out. 13GB app usage is also odd. I feel like running the same thing with half the RAM wouldn't really result in like 5GB of swap.
- gentleman11 7mo agoThe limited ram is planned obselescence. It leads to massively increased swap usage and will wear out your non-replaceable ssd to make you get a new machine. In theory