Comment by auggierose
15 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.
15 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.
>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.
>that market is already saturated with a zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines.
Yeah, come back in a year when we have sales numbers for the Neo and tell me how saturated it is.
>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.
No, the real main reason is that the "zillion decent-spec chromebook style machines" are half-arsed and/or less powered and with worse build quality depending on the model. The "OS and fashion/reputation" are a bonus.
> 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). Which is essentially table stakes for the education market, but it's good that they've caught up.
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That market has new customers every year. Like the one for bicycles, L-sized clothes, etc.
Not sure why you've been downvoted, but you're absolutely right.
Plus, if the OP has 32GB in 7-year-old machines, they're running intel CPUs, which don't compare in how well they use memory and swap to/from SSD.
I 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. ;-)
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. ;-)
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.
100% Agree they will release an A19 Pro version in due course. Meanwhile the MacBook Neo with 8GB RAM will sell like hot-cakes!
Could they have even used the same CPU with 16GB? I'm skeptical of italics-easily.
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.
Flash 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.
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the slowest DDR4 is capable of 12.6GB/s~ish per channel .
nowhere near the same performance.
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Apple has a great zram implementation as well.
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.
Or disable SIP and sudo nvram boot-args="maxmem=8192"
I tried, DaVinci Resolve still works :)
Is it relevant with 5-15 year old RAM?
Going to guess you aren’t a student
I 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)
So, you are not in the market for a $600 computer then. Agreed?
I am not in the market for any laptop with 8GB of RAM that costs more than $300.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372989
Even if your only use case is using Chrome?
Especially if that is my only use case.
Strange. 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.
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Why are you flexing like this?
What's your purpose?
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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