The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.
Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.
Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
My phone has more RAM than that. I can’t imagine running a computer with that little memory considering how poorly optimized software tends to be at this point.
I’m not sure what the overhead for Mac OS is, but that has to be basically rock bottom to be even considered functional unless you’re running one of the lighter Linux builds.
I mean, at its heart, Mac OS is a heavily re-tooled fork of the BSD platform, so it’s not inconceivable that it’s light enough to run on 8G. I doubt it would run well on 8G, but it could do it.
My M1 MacBook Air idles at 1.03GB, my XPS 13 running Gnome on Vanilla OS idles at 2.4GB
GNOME on immutable distros = very bloated. Try antiX instead, as it uses a lighter DE.
I’m not looking for anything lighter
MacOS’ kernel is derived from Mach, though with with some BSD code, and is Apple’s own work since then. Its API is compatible with FreeBSD, but it’s not FreeBSD. And the FreeBSD userland tools don’t have effect on systemwide memory management.
It runs fine, unless you load up on chrome tabs, or try to run pro apps. Itdoes basic photo editing and admin apps and phone holiday video editing just fine for average users. I have a lot of clients with 8GB M1 machines.
I have a 2013 MBP that shipped with 8GB, the minimum amount they came with.
Of course it also is upgradable. Which I did, to 16GB. A decade ago.
My 2013 MBP is still at 8GB. With memory compression, I rarely run into issues unless I’m doing VMs/Docker or something really heavy.
I got a free, going to be recycled, dell with 8gb of ram from work. I threw in an nvme and installed Linux. It’s not the lightest Linux install, but it is Arch, so definitely on the lighter side. I idle at under 1gb and under normal use don’t break 2. I do some coding which uses more but nothing super crazy. MacOS probably uses a little more ram, but it’s not Windows. I’d wager than the vast majority of people don’t come close to using all of that RAM, and power users are going to get hardware for the task, and this isn’t it.