Comment by jeroenhd

11 hours ago

8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.

I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that.

The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going to confuse a lot of people. One of Apple's perks in terms of connectivity has been that you can basically assume all USB-C ports do everything. It also seems like they didn't include an SD card reader, like they used to. That's going to make the 256GiB rather cramped, I feel.

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jeroenhd

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nateb2022  9 hours ago

> macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me.

Without context on total memory available, this is a meaningless metric. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

  • jeroenhd  7 hours ago

    That's used RAM, it doesn't include things like caches.

    Even with macOS deep into swap space during development (about 6-8GB of swap), macOS internals will happily keep 2GiB of memory reserved for window management and spotlight.

    Apple's fast SSD is the only reason this laptop doesn't get bogged down under load, and with it being irreplaceable I wonder how long the disk last being used like this.

    Obviously you're not going to use Apple's new netbook to do heavy development, but I don't expect the base model to remain usable for long with only 8GB. I don't exactly get the impression macOS has gotten lighter to run over the years.

  • ux266478  6 hours ago

    > Free RAM is wasted RAM.

    Very bad truism that's not even compatible with the first half of your post.

sodality2  10 hours ago

Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.