Comment by NearAP

>They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience.

"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.

Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.

Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.

Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.

Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.

I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.

I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.

But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.

As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.

I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.

I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.

Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.

Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?

>People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.

Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.