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Apple introduces Macbook Neo - cheaper Macbooks starting at $599 (www.apple.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 31 points 6 months ago (12 children)

It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I'm genuinely amazed that it hasn't fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS' memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn't feasible.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.

    Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi's memory management wasn't as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).

    For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.

    Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it's still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn't surprise me given Apple's laptop history

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    They were talking about memory not storage

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.

    8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.

    Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.

    It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.

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