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.
8gb ram is not enough for normal browsing if you are forced to use windows 11 which eats easily half of it.
> 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.
>You have a buggy program.
As in memory leak? No.
> Zswap has been available for quite a while.
Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use (https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment..., https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...). Zsawp itself is enabled by default in Asahi.
Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit.
There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.
zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up:
https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...
I'm yet to see a linux distro with memory configured correctly out of the box. (I haven't looked too hard, but the defaults are abysmal.)
Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.
Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.
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