>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)."
Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications.
This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
As opposed to years of garbage Windows laptops at the $600 price point, which you seem to expect will remain viable longer than the Neo ... ?
If any legislation comes out of this, it will simply be because of Apple's high profile. They were content to let e-rot fill the shelves for years before the Neo.
There could be an arguments that you can install a lighter OS on these machines. That's not as easy with MacOS.
That would be a wild argument to make for a consumer protection regulation. Consumer protections almost exclusively judge a product as-delivered in the way laypeople would use it.
Are you sure that’s not based on stale information? The M series of laptops by all accounts from the ASAHI developers were written specifically to make it easier to install alternative OSes and ASAHI is no more difficult to install than Linux on a Windows machine.
Asahi Linux is only able to be installed on an M2. They basically take 2 years per new chip, when Apple releases one yearly. At this point, they'll never catch up.
M3 is taking longer than 2 years now. That came out late 2023.
No. Nothing about MacOS prevents users from installing alternative OSes. Even with Apple's custom chips, that remains true. It's only that it's a smaller target that limits options as fewer people are writing software for that hardware than for x86.
See Asahi to verify[0]. I've been a donor since the week they opened a Patreon account.
0. https://asahilinux.org/fedora/
At Asahi's pace, the A18 Pro will be able to install Linux in about 8 years.
> Nothing about MacOS prevents users from installing alternative OSes. Even with Apple's custom chips, that remains true.
Reminder that the possibility of installing a third-party operating system on Apple hardware is not a given. The same silicon is used in iPhones and iPads where you absolutely cannot install another operating system.
The figure is likely wrong.
My Mac is currently using 9GB of RAM including 6.5GB of cached files with Safari and a few other apps opened. They likely forgot to subtract the cache from the used memory.
That's impressive on an 8GB system!
90 would've been impressive. 9 out of 8 is rookie numbers.
My Neo is currently sitting at 5.79 GB Used, 2.15 GB cached, thus 3.64 GB while Safari is open in the background and Activity Monitor is open in the foreground.
HN is completely out of touch with this laptop. No one cares about any of this analysis they just want a cheap Mac. This has sold so much that the A19 processor is having problems to being sourced .
Also 8gb is good enough for the target market.
M4 24gb screen broke after just 6 months.
Back to m1, just 8gb*. It sometimes hang for a second or two, but you know what. I'm happy with it.
That's when I have 38 tabs, two IDEs and try to grep some text on VS code.
M1 air, 16gb, second hand, 200 bucks, 200+ tabs in brave, photoshop, illustrator and premiere and kicad and sublime and chrome with one tab watching a youtube live stream. Plus text edit, notes and prolly some more apps. Works fine, zero hitch.. maybe too good for my own good.
When I spec'd a M1 air for my partner back in the day, even though she didn't really need it, I made sure to get the 16gb model for the longevity. Devices shouldn't be disposable toys. Apparently I had better foresight than expected...
I replaced my 10 years old macbook with a 10 years old macbook. 8 gigs. Good battery. A screen that is not broken. 80 bucks! I really don't see why I should upgrade. Need more compute? Rent a machine on vast.ai. Also I still use my old mac via screen sharing to run servers/databases/etc that tend to eat up RAM.
80 bucks!
I have been using an 8GB Macbook Air M1 for non-development work, and it has been fantastic.
Macos really excels at managing memory very well.
I used an M1 Air for developing iPhone Apps for years and it worked great. Not "wow" fast but I never had a complaint about it.
Heck, on Windows it would be 4GB if you're lucky.
I think this reasoning is just disconnected from reality.
Reality is, the iphone 16 sharing the same chipset is perfectly functional for many more years to come, running similar workloads (for the same target audience): mainly web browsing.
If the iphone 16 can have the usual 3-6 years of useful life, then the macbook neo has the same -- FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE.
And I wrote this because I did actually get the macbook neo and I'm using it daily for the intended purpose (mostly web browsing) and it's just fine.
(if anybody is wondering: i have a large machine with 16c/32t and 128gb memory that i use remotely via ssh to do the "heavy stuff")
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
That legislation is at least ten years late but apple is absolutely not the worst offender. There is the entire market of cheap android phones (and tablets) that barely last a year or two, and have essentially no guaranteed software upgrade. That should have triggered the legislation in the first place.
iOS takes a very different approach to managing app memory though. And the intended purpose of a phone isn't quite the same as that of a laptop either, especially not for people who don't have an extra 128GB memory machine lying around. I'm not sure the comparison makes a whole lot of sense.
The Neo not only exposes functionality that would prove limiting on the iPhone too, but it’s mostly used that way. First thing that comes to mind is true multi-window multitasking. The apps are standard Mac apps that don’t assume a RAM limited system, not dedicated “made for Neo” apps like the iPhone has.
Overall this limitation has the potential to be much more visible on the Neo and Apple must make real sure that the OS stays lean because we all know average app devs don’t care about this.
[dead]
Now that RAM is getting more expensive, I hope the OS builders will rethink how they use so much memory. An OS that's lighter weight lets us save money on RAM.
> might trigger planned obsolescence legislation
then i welcome it
i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management
Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the Earth in back in mac os Mojave) caking on, at some point I just gave up on trying to fix it with continuously reinstalling and balancing it. My current portable has quarter the amount of workmem and is just incredibly snappy esp. compared to that mac book. And I don't even use portables for anything too heavy, I have an actual PC for that.
The stress tests with multiple Youtube windows open simultaneously, editing 4K video, and doing heavy duty image editing tasks, in some cases doing stuff like that all at the same time have been very impressive. It does have to fall back on swap, but even then seems to soldier on really well considering. Are you better off with more memory? Absolutely, but it still seems perfectly capable of managing even many low to medium duty pro workloads if you don't mind a performance hit.
MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.
A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.
https://box.co.uk/blog/macbook-air-memory-usage-macos
My macbook was UMA and memory compression has been used everywhere for dozens of years now. Symbian had memory compression. Is it just apple users catching up to what a snappy computer actually feels like…? (Doubt, since as I said I used Apple before) The article doesn't address the world outside apple either, and Darwin is objectively slow by its obsolete architectural design, down to the kernel. And not a single objective measure was brought up in replies, so it's my experience vs theirs. Not helpful.
I used a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of RAM for a while. It was fine; much better than Intel Macs or any other setup with low RAM.
Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P
Either way, I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
> Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P
That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity?
Either way, I agree with them, FWIW.
> I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.
In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory thanks to a misbehaving app that was taking 70 GB out of 64 GB physical RAM. Overall, almost 120 GB were used, most of it was compressed and a lot of it was swapped. It had absolutely zero effect on how useable the computer was, there was no unusual lag. Either Windows or Linux would have shat the bed long before that point.
> Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.
That's why you usually want a userspace early oom service. Most preconfigured distros ship one by default. Linux is mostly focused on embedded targets, not servers or workstations. There is not a notion of mobile-style app lifecycle either, not in freedesktop environments that is, but XDG portals are working on addressing that sometime in the near future.
> In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory
Windows does that at since like XP and likely earlier. BeOS did that before Darwin based macOS was a thing. On Linux, I don't know which distros do that, but you're definitely much more likely to see an app die rather than be asked whether to kill it. Freezing, once again, is a result of not having a [working] early oom service.
Linux is not that bad, but traditional freedesktop model kind of is.
It's still much better than mac OS.
Also those replies just look like bots, they were really fast and not providing any value, that's what I meant.
And here's yet another four-lowercase-letter-name for you, then. Dunno about the other two, but I've been using this handle for over twenty years, it was originally the auto-generated username I got assigned on one of my university's servers (generated from my initials).
Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.
> four random letter names
So probably very old accounts
One is a four letter set of characters without a vowel, the other spells a word with 5 letters. And so what?
I’ll add on that the change to Apple silicon was an amazing improvement, even in the same OS version. Maybe these anecdotes mean your experience in this regard is dated. (I say this as someone who came reluctantly to Mac, and looks forward to returning to Linux)
Have you used any of the Apple silicon machines? In discussions about modern Apple devices and RAM, I don't know that pre-Apple-silicon experiences are all that relevant?
My first was underspec'ed and I used Resolve, Lightroom and Photoshop on top of the usual other stuff and it was quite impressive. The relationship of performance to RAM for earlier machines felt incomparable.
With a 2015, is that a HDD or SSD?
Nvme SSD, user-replaceable.
> Source…?
Real life?
My macbook neo with 8gb memory is faster and snappier than my shit-tier thinkpad X13G1 even when the X13 is not swapping at all.
I have 8c/16t Ryzen 7 along with 32GB ram over there, running GNU/Linux.
And somehow my macbook neo running a phone chip is much more usable (and battery lasts longer, and suspend actually works).
Compared to Windows or Android, sure. Hopefully the Asahi folks will get around to supporting this device so we can run a proper lightweight OS on it.
Unfortunately Linux is pretty damn bad under memory pressure, I think you'd get an objectively better experience on macOS. I say this as someone running Asahi right now.
But then, you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things (for me with 32-128 GB depending on machine it's C++ builds using all cores and of course local LLMs). I guess a bunch of Electron apps would also do it for 8 GB.
> you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things
Like using Chrome…
Use Firefox then
Linux is pretty bad at handling out of memory. In my old thinkpad T14 with Mint everything came to a halt when webpack gobbled up my 16GB of ram. Couldnt even move the cursor, stuff just got stuck hard