Comment by mixmastamyk
1 day ago
Uncles don’t let relatives buy less than 16gb ram. That has been my standard since ~2010 and our 2013 mbp is still running fine because I insisted on it.
I prefer FW for freedom reasons, that’s worth a few hundred as well as the ram. Would also wait for the new intel chipset that is more efficient however.
Finally I think the FW 12 is weirdly positioned, as the 13 is already thin and light. For a tablet, I recommend the Star Labs Starlite instead. Both in same package? Clunky.
Guess I’d recommend a used FW 13 and Starlite instead. That’s what I have now and no real reason to upgrade, and freedom to tinker is off the charts, perfect for a student.
> Uncles don’t let relatives buy less than 16gb ram. That has been my standard since ~2010 and our 2013 mbp is still running fine because I insisted on it.
Just last weekend I bought 8gb ram thinkpad t14 for an elderly relative. 240 EUR.
It replaces his thinkpad x220 where the fan and ssd slowly dies.
I doubt it becomes an issue, and if it does then I can upgrade it later.
You can do it once and spend an extra hundred dollars or do it twice, including occasional restrictions to the user. Poor tradeoff imho.
This is a young person with a long life ahead, we shouldn’t buy disposable ewaste with a short life.
Someone has to buy that (presumably second-hand) laptop to prevent it from becoming e-waste. 8GB can be plenty for a student, most don't need much beyond a browser and PowerPoint. Many of my university colleagues were using new $5,000+ MacBook Pros exclusively for Google Docs, that seems more wasteful to me.
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> we shouldn’t buy disposable ewaste with a short life.
Indeed. That makes two of us.
MacBooks don't need as much ram - I have an m1 air with 8gb of ram and it's perfectly serviceable, I can even run IntelliJ on it...
I never run out of memory on macoOS on my M1 Air 16GB. Now that I use Asahi on it, I had plenty of OoM crashes.
macOS is really good at memory management, including the compression and offloading to the fast SSD.
Do you use Firefox? I have a theory that there's some kind of Firefox-aarch64-linux-specific memory leak but I haven't been able to track it down. I have a 16GB x86-64 Thinkpad and I rarely get OOM issues, whereas my 32GB M1 MBP running Asahi is always on the brink of OOM.
You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.
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Compared to what? Not really true, and hard on the swap drive. Penny-wise meet pound.
Well it's still kicking just fine years later, shrug