Comment by auggierose
6 hours 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.
6 hours 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.
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.
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.
I 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.
You might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.
Why are you flexing like this?
What's your purpose?
If people want to emulate what it is like to have low memory on your current mac, you can run `memory_pressure` on the cli.
Is it relevant with 5-15 year old RAM?
So, you are not in the market for a $600 computer then. Agreed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372989
Going to guess you aren’t a student
Even if your only use case is using Chrome?
That 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.
> 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
Because 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…
Yeah. 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.
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If yours are all over 7 years old you really have no idea what a modern Mac can do with 8-16GB of ram…
8GB of RAM. Not 16GB. And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
> 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
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