It looks like a good value if you can get by with 8 GB of RAM. This is a market niche that will sell, but it doesn’t replace the Air. The Air has 16GB standard and can be ordered with up to 32. I’m also curious about the benchmarks between the A18 Pro and the M5, although for a lot of people that’s going to be less important than the RAM.
Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.
8gb was standard not that long ago and was just fine for most people.
It’s great if you run max two “web apps” at a time. More, and it’s heading into “may be a problem” territory.
I’ve seen a Gmail tab eat 2.5Gb of memory all on its own… just sitting there. And you need some headroom for content and file caching and such to keep things feeling snappy.
cache uses whatever you have
im sure that gmail tab is just casually caching gigabytes of email, just in case the user opens it.
I'm still working on an 8GB M1 Pro. It's just about ok. VS Code plus podman plus Teams plus Slack plus Firefox and it hits the limits; usually Slack is the thing to get killed.
I’m on a 16GB M1 Pro. Slack, Zoom, then browser tabs for Jira, PagerDuty, GMail, Confluence, and a Google doc and it’s swapping like mad. It’s that fast SSD and the integrated memory, so it swaps quickly. Swapping is still swapping though.