Comment by jorisw
7 hours ago
> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.
Love this
Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.
Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.
Tragic
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Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.
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Web browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.
But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.
Isn't Slack just mIRC with a skin? /s
I occasionally port software I make to MacOS, while mainly being a Linux user, and I settled on a base model, 8 GB M2 Mac Mini for this as well. If it's zippy there, it'll be zippy on the larger models.
On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.
The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)
Meanwhile GitHub tab in Firefox/Chrome eats 6GB RAM alone.
because they decided that running elasticsearch on your machine is a great idea!
GitHub, GitHub…where else have I seen that name recently?