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I would not use Neo, Air with 24 GB ram should be your minimum because you will want to do some work locally even when you're running a VPN/SSH thin client setu

I would not use Neo, Air with 24 GB ram should be your minimum because you will want to do some work locally even when you're running a VPN/SSH thin client setup. I'm currently SSH-ing into my workstation from my M4 Air with 24 gb ram and it's ideal for this flow. Slack/editors/clients/browsers/etc. easily gobble up over 16 GB. I have no more dev tools/compilers/source on my client machines, everything is dockered up on remote workstation in isolated VMs (too much supply-chaining). My only downside to using a pro is not having 120/4k HDMI port on air and my dock won't support it with Apple (it does with windows)

bilsbie 1mo ago
Can that run qwen? Also can you explain what you meant by the downside ?
- rafaelmn 1mo ago
  If I was going to run LLMs locally I would definitely go for a pro. I meant the only downside of not using a pro for my use-case is that I don't have a HDMI port on device with high refresh rate. I have a decent dock that can give me 4k/60hz HDMI but not 120hz refresh for macs (it works on windows). It's a minor thing but having 120hz is nice when I'm docked at home.
jwrallie 1mo ago
It heavily depends on your workflow and how many (electron) programs you need to run simultaneously. I found that if I’m mindful of closing things I’m not actually using, and let macOS do its swap magic, the Neo will just work. I’m also the kind of person who close tabs and I like to work on one task at a time.
davedx 1mo ago
I'm sorry but that's a bit ridiculous. I'm still using an M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM and I have quite heavy usage - docker, other heavy native apps, a bunch of VS.Codes and coding agents, things running in the terminal, background processes. It's just a big exaggeration that general regular productivity apps "easily gobble up over 16GB" (Edit: saying this as someone who just paid for a new 128GB M5 Pro Studio -- but that's for LLM's, not regular work)
- rafaelmn 1mo ago
  I have an identical gen mac mini I bought for testing out the apple silicon for my workloads a year and a half ago, except it's 16GB min spec version - I got ram throttled on that thing constantly as soon as I start using it for development. If it was just productivity I could get away with it - but as soon as I start something like JetBrains Rider on it or VSCode with C# language memory pressure is in the yellow and if I start a next server for frontend the machine just grinds to a halt. Even when I'm using remote workstation my memory usage is hovering above 20gb with active swap on my laptop. Soo many electron productivity apps eating up ram like crazy. If it was more readily available on retailers such as Amazon I would even recommend 32gb ram air for local workflows - if you're doing development these days you're just going to need it - especially with LLM workflows and parallelizing work. The price difference between 16 and 24 is not even close to not justify picking it for a work machine. Thing is having more cores/faster cores might make your workflows 1-2x faster but hitting swap is going to be like >10x degradation

bilsbie 1mo ago

Can that run qwen? Also can you explain what you meant by the downside ?

rafaelmn 1mo ago
If I was going to run LLMs locally I would definitely go for a pro. I meant the only downside of not using a pro for my use-case is that I don't have a HDMI port on device with high refresh rate. I have a decent dock that can give me 4k/60hz HDMI but not 120hz refresh for macs (it works on windows). It's a minor thing but having 120hz is nice when I'm docked at home.

jwrallie 1mo ago

It heavily depends on your workflow and how many (electron) programs you need to run simultaneously. I found that if I’m mindful of closing things I’m not actually using, and let macOS do its swap magic, the Neo will just work. I’m also the kind of person who close tabs and I like to work on one task at a time.

davedx 1mo ago

I'm sorry but that's a bit ridiculous. I'm still using an M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM and I have quite heavy usage - docker, other heavy native apps, a bunch of VS.Codes and coding agents, things running in the terminal, background processes. It's just a big exaggeration that general regular productivity apps "easily gobble up over 16GB" (Edit: saying this as someone who just paid for a new 128GB M5 Pro Studio -- but that's for LLM's, not regular work)

rafaelmn 1mo ago
I have an identical gen mac mini I bought for testing out the apple silicon for my workloads a year and a half ago, except it's 16GB min spec version - I got ram throttled on that thing constantly as soon as I start using it for development. If it was just productivity I could get away with it - but as soon as I start something like JetBrains Rider on it or VSCode with C# language memory pressure is in the yellow and if I start a next server for frontend the machine just grinds to a halt. Even when I'm using remote workstation my memory usage is hovering above 20gb with active swap on my laptop. Soo many electron productivity apps eating up ram like crazy. If it was more readily available on retailers such as Amazon I would even recommend 32gb ram air for local workflows - if you're doing development these days you're just going to need it - especially with LLM workflows and parallelizing work. The price difference between 16 and 24 is not even close to not justify picking it for a work machine. Thing is having more cores/faster cores might make your workflows 1-2x faster but hitting swap is going to be like >10x degradation