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I don't know. Both of my macs are over 7 years old, and have at least 32GB of RAM. Certainly would not buy an 8GB one now.
by auggierose 7mo ago
I don't know. Both of my macs are over 7 years old, and have at least 32GB of RAM. Certainly would not buy an 8GB one now.
- Gigachad 7mo agoGoing to guess you aren’t a student
- fpaf 7mo agoI have a teenager at home. Between freaking electron-powered Discord and Chrome, she's basically at the limit of her 12GB RAM (on windows 11)
- sspiff 7mo agoI haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB device in 2026, but this device isn't targeted at either of us. For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy. I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.
- pants2 7mo agoYou might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoApple has a great zram implementation as well.
- serf 7mo agothe slowest DDR4 is capable of 12.6GB/s~ish per channel . nowhere near the same performance.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoThe ratio between RAM speed and SSD speed is unimportant. Useful swap just needs a fast drive.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo agoFlash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoI’ve never had an SSD crap out because of read/write cycle exhaustion, and I’ve been using SSD almost exclusively, for over a dozen years. I’ve had plenty of spinning rust ones croak, though. You don’t solder those in, so it’s not really a fair comparison. I did have one of those dodgy Sandisks, but that was a manufacturing defect.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo agoBut how much RAM did you have? If you have 24GB of RAM and a 12GB working set then it's fine. Likewise if you have 8GB of RAM and a 4GB working set. But 8GB of RAM and a 12GB working set, not the same thing.
- spacedcowboy 7mo agoMac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors. A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following: smartctl --all /dev/disk0 ... Data Units Read: 1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB] Data Units Written: 154,244,108 [78.7 TB] ... Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 ... I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago> I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more It's non-linear. If you have a 17GB working set size, a 16GB machine is actively using 1GB of swap, but the 8GB machine is using 9GB. If you have a 14GB working set size, the 16GB machine doesn't need to thrash at all, but the 8GB machine is still doing 6GB. Meanwhile "SSDs are fast" is the thing that screws you here. Once your actual working set (not just some data in memory the OS can swap out once and leave in swap) exceeds the size of physical memory, the machine has to swap it in and back out continuously. Which you might not notice when the SSD is fast and silent, but now the fact that the SSD will write at 2GB/sec means you can burn through that entire 600TBW in just over three days, and faster drives are even worse. On top of that, the write endurance is proportional to the size of the drive. 600TBW is pretty typical for the better consumer 1TB drives, but a smaller drive gets proportionally less. And then the machines with less RAM are typically also paired with smaller drives.
- happyopossum 7mo agoIf yours are all over 7 years old you really have no idea what a modern Mac can do with 8-16GB of ram…
- auggierose 7mo ago8GB of RAM. Not 16GB. And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
- alwillis 7mo ago> And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM... The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705
- wolvoleo 7mo agoWell yes it's still only 8GB shared between macos, the VM and the graphics buffers. On a mobile chip.
- LeFantome 7mo agoPeople whip out “mobile chip” like this thing is going to crawl. It is faster than the Apple M1 (and runs the same software).
- nottorp 7mo agoI don't think Apple has used "desktop chips" in a looong time. With the lone exception of the Xeon Mac Pros.
- alwillis 7mo ago> On a mobile chip That's not really a thing with Apple Silicon. The A series chips and the M series have the same CPU and GPU core designs. Because you don't need to support Thunderbolt 4/5 controllers, PCIe lanes for NVMe storage, ProRes encode/decode engines (on Pro/Max/Ultra tiers) and multiple external displays in a device like a phone, Apple TV, or a HomePod these features are absent from A series chips. The A17 Pro corresponds to the M3, the A18/A18 Pro corresponds to the M4 and the A19/A19 Pro corresponds to the M5. Same core design, different implementations. It's not like Intel where there are many server processors, desktop processors and mobile processors. Apple uses the same core design they scale up or down as needed, for example the S series chips in the Apple Watch. The S9 is a scaled down A13 or A15.
- y1n0 7mo agoIf people want to emulate what it is like to have low memory on your current mac, you can run `memory_pressure` on the cli.
- drdaeman 7mo agoThat was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago. Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.
- pastel8739 7mo ago> even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic Why not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic
- josephg 7mo agoYeah. Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. The performance impact of moving applications in and out of swap should be much lower than it was a few years ago.
- drdaeman 7mo agoThat’s a fair point, I totally missed this factor, mostly thinking about binary sizes. You’re right, it would be different because of this.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago> Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. This is because they're newer, not because they're soldered. PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives can do ~15GB/s without being soldered.
- drdaeman 7mo agoBecause look around - same code compiled for x86_64 and aarch64 is not that drastically different in size, save for some special cases (like NumPy). Data structures are going to have even less differences. Then, assets are the same. I’ve cursorily checked few programs and difference seemed to about 10-20% (with some exceptions), so 8GiB RAM on an aarch64 is like 10GB on x86_64. Significantly nicer, not a life-changing nicer - you’re still very limited. Edit: Next comment has a very good point about memory and SSD bandwidth increases, allowing faster swap and compressed RAM performance. That’s something I haven’t considered. So maybe it’ll feel closer to a 16GiB old machine or something like that…
- cj 7mo agoEven if your only use case is using Chrome?
- auggierose 7mo agoEspecially if that is my only use case.
- cj 7mo agoStrange. I'm still using a i5 powered 8gb ram Pixelbook for day to day browsing. Honestly works great. But I'm also not one of those people who feel the need to keep 300 tabs open all the time.
- auggierose 7mo agoWell, I am just saying it is not for me, and neither for anyone else who is not a newbie. It for sure is a great first laptop for kids or students (in the humanities).
- cj 7mo agoIt's not a great look when you need to put other people down as a way to defend your viewpoint. > Well, I am just saying it is not for me, and neither for anyone else who is not a newbie Objectively, no, that's not what you're saying if you read the 2nd part of your sentence.
- auggierose 7mo agoI don't think I am the one trying to put anyone down here. Just telling you how it is. I stand by every word. I mean, I wouldn't exchange my 7 year (!) old laptop for this. It seems also to be Apple's opinion (Macbook Newbie, I mean Macbook Neo).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- LeFantome 7mo agoSo, you are not in the market for a $600 computer then. Agreed?
- auggierose 7mo agoI am not in the market for any laptop with 8GB of RAM that costs more than $300.
- mgh2 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372989
- coldtea 7mo agoIf you have 32GB Macs, and you had them 7 years ago already, you're not even remotely close to the target market for it. Parent said "In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point". That has zero overlap with the "felt the need for 32GB 7 years ago" not-exactly-crowd.
- serf 7mo ago>If you have 32GB Macs, and you had them 7 years ago already, you're not even remotely close to the target market for it. that market is already saturated with a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines. The only reason the Neo market is even slightly different is to cater to crowds that want the apple offerings for OS and fashion/reputation. The market we're talking about has no real reason to care what kind of chip is in the thing. They just want YouTube/Discord/Zoom/EduWebsites to work right.
- derefr 7mo ago> a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines The interesting/unique thing about Apple's offering at this price point is the build quality, not the spec. If you're a school IT department buying these in volume, you want something that actually lasts more than a year before pieces of plastic begin chipping off, hinges start wearing out, etc. And you want something that's easy to clean / sanitize sticky little kid fingerprints off of, and also to undo e.g. residue (from kids who thought it'd be a good idea to stick stickers on their take-home laptop) without worrying about either the adhesive or the thinner permanently damaging the chassis. In both cases, Apple can actually promise this with the Neo, while none of the Chromebook OEMs can for their equivalent offerings at this price point. (The other OEMs can promise it, but only for offerings at higher price-points schools aren't willing to pay.) Also, Apple can now promise that you can keep a pile of spares and spare parts, and swap parts between them easily, replace consumables like batteries, etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y). Which is essentially table stakes for the education market, but it's good that they've caught up.
- 7mo ago
- ulfw 7mo agoWhy are you flexing like this? What's your purpose?
- nelsonic 7mo agoI daily-drive a base level MacBook Air M1 with 8GB RAM for writing docs and some light coding in VIM/VSCode. Never had any issues. When I need more I offload tasks to a remote VM (usually AWS/GCP). I can easily afford a top spec Mac but chose this because I want to have a “entry level” device that I don’t mind my kids breaking or getting stolen at public co-working space. Plenty of people will get MacBook Neo and never hit its limitations. Most students/educators and many professionals just use the web all day and never need much RAM. Having said all that, Apple could easily have made it 16GB cleaned up the market place and nobody would be talking about Neo being under spec’d. But Tim Cook has to be a Tim Cook and squeeze every last penny of profit. ;-)
- commandersaki 7mo agoHaving said all that, Apple could easily have made it 16GB cleaned up the market place and nobody would be talking about Neo being under spec’d. But Tim Cook has to be a Tim Cook and squeeze every last penny of profit. ;-) I think this has more to do with binned A18 Pro SoCs which enables Apple to do this with economies of scale. A later version may get the 12GB variant of the A19 Pro SoCs.
- nelsonic 7mo ago100% Agree they will release an A19 Pro version in due course. Meanwhile the MacBook Neo with 8GB RAM will sell like hot-cakes!
- Dylan16807 7mo agoCould they have even used the same CPU with 16GB? I'm skeptical of italics-easily.