Note that 8GB of ram on a Mac plays out a lot more different than 8GB on a PC.
I work professionally on a Macbook Air 16GB now and I have quite a few docker images and services running bare metal, + browser, vscode etc. on top. Not a problem until I start loading up some LLMs.
The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
If anything, I'm much more bound by the CPU limitations and the eco-cores than the memory.
On a PC, I wouldn't think about less than 32GB for a dev pc.
If I had a fulltime gig programming C, I'd even say I could work on this A14 8GB device. Why not? It's as powerful as a 10 year old powerful machine; probably. Or in that ballpark.
> The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).
Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.
Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.
There are lots of reviews on YouTube of people demoing the performance of the Neo in typical non-power-user usage scenarios (multiple apps, lots of browser tabs, etc.) It works perfectly fine for typical consumer usage.
I can't be the only one who remembers the celebration 18 months ago when Apple finally stopped selling Macs with 8GB of memory... only for 8GB to suddenly be excused again when the Neo arrived. Perhaps it's not the same people but the general vibe is giving me whiplash.
Because people can’t differentiate between the cheapest MacBook available, then or now, and what they may need? For some reason they think it’s okay to expect Apple to give them stuff for free.
My money is on 12GB in the second gen since that's what the A19 Pro has, and it would still conveniently differentiate from the other MacBooks with at least 16GB.
I've had an 8GB M1 since they came out and had almost no problems with memory shortage. The only thing is Firefox sometimes gets in a loop and takes up 20GB+ doing nothing much and you have to close it but that's not really the laptop's fault. You can have programs use >8GB because it swaps to the SSD very well.
Eastern europe here. At mobile operator that offers laptops for 2 year no interest loans. The only laptops that are cheaper than Neo are essentially atom garbage with crappy screens. And those that cost about the same are also 8gb ones.
