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Comment by sspiff

12 hours ago

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.

7 comments

sspiff

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pants2  9 hours ago

You might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.

  • AnthonyMouse  6 hours ago

    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.

    • spacedcowboy  2 hours ago

      Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors.

      A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following:

          smartctl --all /dev/disk0
    ...
    Data Units Read:                    1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 154,244,108 [78.7 TB]
    ...
    Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
    Error Information Log Entries:      0
    ...

      I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.

    • ChrisMarshallNY  2 hours ago

      I’ve never had an SSD crap out because of read/write cycle exhaustion, and I’ve been using SSD almost exclusively, for over a dozen years. I’ve had plenty of spinning rust ones croak, though. You don’t solder those in, so it’s not really a fair comparison.

      I did have one of those dodgy Sandisks, but that was a manufacturing defect.

  • serf  7 hours ago

    the slowest DDR4 is capable of 12.6GB/s~ish per channel .

    nowhere near the same performance.

    • Dylan16807  4 hours ago

      The ratio between RAM speed and SSD speed is unimportant. Useful swap just needs a fast drive.