This is probably like a browser extension and 45 minutes of vibe coding. I threw together a minimal MetaMask clone in a day, a simple page translator can’t even be a fraction of that. I actually love this idea so I might do it myself.
Well iWork too. Before that, AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, but yeah, there's things like OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/LibreOffice/NeoOffice which are pretty much all the same lineage (StarOffice and its derivatives). Zoho's is Zoho Office Suite, which at least adds an extra word.
"Work/Works" tended to be used for specifically integrated office suites (AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, and then Microsoft Works). Though iWork is _not_ one, granted.
I think integrated office suites have now entirely died out.
LibreOffice is like Office a collection of intercompatible apps. Microsoft Works was a single application offering Word/Excel/Outlook-like functionality.
1980s office suites very commonly included terminal emulators, because they were in high-demand back then
Most large enterprises, you’d have core business applications running on a mainframe or minicomputer or Unix host, and you’d need a terminal emulator to access them from your PC/microcomputer. A lot of places used mainframe/minicomputer-based email/calendar (e.g. IBM PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, Office/36, OfficeVision; DEC ALL-IN-ONE; DataGeneral CEO; HPMAIL; etc) and centrally hosted word processing systems (e.g. IBM DisplayWriter) were commonly used for document/content management. And then added to that you had services like CompuServe and BBS systems
It is likely the Microsoft Works developers dogfooded its terminal emulator a lot, since at the time Microsoft ran its business on Xenix servers, until they eventually migrated to Windows NT in the first half of the 1990s
In fact, MS-DOS was initially developed on mainframe/micros and targeted the IBM PC via cross compilation and link cable, they weren't doing it directly.
Well no, it’s about legally gating the ability to copy so the original author doesn’t have to compete in the same market to sell his own book with every other bloke with a printing press and a copy of the book. Everything else is an addendum.
Don’t confuse the social justification with the actual purpose of copyright law just because it’s written into the US Constitution that way. America didn’t invent copyright law.
> Why doesn't America deal with political questions using their political process?
Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States. This has made a lot of people very angry because a bunch of States have got it all wrong, and the exact way they got it wrong depends on your point of view on the subject, but no matter which side of the debate you’re on, some on your side most assuredly want to preempt all the States that got it all wrong with Federal law.
That Congress hasn’t come to a political consensus is the Federal political consensus.
> Since 2022 we do. But it’s through the political process of the States.
Which is exactly as it should be. There's nothing in the Constitution which gives the federal government power to act on this issue, therefore it should be decided on a state by state basis. Government works best when it is done based on the values and needs of the local population, not one solution for an entire heterogeneous nation.
Exactly! What the Constitution /says/ and how it is interpreted... The Tenth Amendment is written (IMO) incredibly short to underscore its importance AND breadth:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But I've very seldom heard the phrase "states rights" uttered by anyone who isn't pro-gun and anti-abortion. I doubt they'd feel any freer if their state came down like a ton of politically-angered bricks on unfettered gun ownerships and anti-abortionists.
While the American left has largely ceded the term “states rights” to the American right (and was/is well on the way to ceding the term “Free Speech”) they have their own share of “states rights” issues. Medical and recreational marijuana is a “states rights” issue. “Sanctuary cities” are a “states rights” issues. The fact that the Trump administration can’t (yet) force California schools to drop teaching certain things is a “states rights” issue. California deciding they’re goin to just gerrymander the heck out of everything in response to the current administration is a “states rights” issue. In fact basically every state level opposition to the current administration is a form of a “states rights” issue.
It’s immensely frustrating to me that what should be a huge lesson in the importance of limited government power and diffusion of that power across multiple governmental levels isn’t likely to result in that lesson being learned. I have a real fear that in history Trump will have been an inflection point on the road to an ever more powerful federal government in general and executive branch in particular, rather than a historical anomaly at the high end of that same power dynamic.
The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder. Start from the bottom and climb up picking up features along the way until you reach the point where you’ve got what you want or you’re not willing to spend more money.
The Neo is either easy to recommend or rather easy to not recommend. It has a fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web. Others… disagree. Either way, it might entice some schools and school districts assuming they can volume discounts where 8GB is probably enough and it fills the spot in the Walmart part of the sales channel previously occupied by an 8GB RAM M1 MacBook Air Apple hadn’t sold itself in years.
From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.
I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. It’s a great computer, but even on days where I’m doing fuck all but using the web I can pressure that memory easily. I also have a tendency to never reboot until that becomes the fastest way to fix whatever performance bottlenecks I’m running into.
I’m not saying you can’t get away with 8GB of RAM. You can, but I won’t recommend a Mac with only 8GB of RAM to anybody for a few reasons: 1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time. 2) they’ll spend $600 and even if RAM isn’t as much of a bottleneck for them today, with modern web developers and modern web browsers, it will be much sooner rather than later. And everything is a web app now.
For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way nor should it last less than 7 years and still be a kickass experience. Ideally it should last longer. The Neo is great for what it is, but the RAM is the deal killer for me.
macOS will pop up a window that says the system has run out of application memory, asking you to quit applications. I have a friend with, I believe a base M3 Air, who runs into this constantly with nothing but Firefox open.
(Been trying to get them to switch to Safari, but they prefer the Firefox name. I don't think there's anything wrong with Firefox other than it being less native.)
Does Safari use less RAM because it shares some parts with the rest of the OS? (e.g. in the same way Edge probably uses a bit less because half of its components are already idling on the OS)
You could say that. WebKit is in the dyld shared cache, so all of Safari's subprocesses share the same copy of it (and JavaScriptCore, etc.) in memory. But I would say it's more efficient because it integrates better with the platform's QoS primitives. I'm not sure what Firefox does in that regard, other than stuff from other platforms that don't have QoS (such as the throttling of JavaScript APIs like timers). Safari seems better at prioritizing the tabs you have open and backgrounding everything else, letting things go to swap, killing resource hogs, etc.
I have an M2 Air 24GB/1TB that has been such a beast that I haven't touched my 16" Pro in months. I have four browsers running, with a ton of tabs in Brave (daily driver) and I'm sitting at 21/24GB utilization with all sorts of apps running (granted, Docker is not at the moment, but it still doesn't make it sweat). I had ~8 pro laptops in a row going back to the late 2000s, but Apple Silicon has changed how I work. A future 14" OLED that was similarly light might turn my head, but if I had to replace it today I'd just buy another M5 Air with at least this much RAM. [FYI I never installed Chrome after M1 came out. Brave has been rock-solid for over a half-decade now.]
24GB is definitely solid. 16GB is like my minimum recommended for any kind of Mac, but if you can go for more you should go for more. I think 24GB should last a good long while though.
16GB, depending on your use, can be constraining and, sometimes, you need to get creative with complex processes. My colleagues complain about developing with several containers running peripheral services. In similar situations we asked the services teams to provide mocks that answered the same APIs without needing a large memory footprint.
> “1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time”
> “For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way”
In the article, Gruber normally uses a 64GB Mac, expected the 8GB RAM to be a problem and was surprised to find that it wasn’t, and judged the Neo as not being a bad experience in any way.
Gruber has also had it for a week at most by the time he published his review. It’s enough time to run some tests, not enough time to properly review what it will be like to actually live with it. I like the guy, but I also understand the limitations of how he reviews products.
8GB can be limiting on an iPad Pro, which runs a generally more memory efficient branch of Apple’s XNU-based system software and it’s not difficult to get it into a state where it is constantly paging out an app you had in front of you two minute ago if anything you’re doing involves the web at all. A Mac will just swap at that point, but swapping is also slow.
You could get away with 8GB 5 years ago and you still can do it now, but Macs are expected to last longer than that, and starting now with 8GB might become limiting 5 years from now. Here we retire them at about 10 years, or when the last OS they can run is EOL’ed.
Not to be devils's advocate here, but I'd suspect Apple is aiming for a smaller retirement window for this kind of product.
It's basically a Laptop engineered in the iPhone/iPad space of the company, it's only natural for Apple to target a shorter lifecycle.
8GB RAM is maybe the best way to achieve that, many of the MacBook Neo buyers of today will be very compelled to upgrade to a newer (or higher-tier) model in ~3 years from now...
If the Neo would have 16GB of RAM today, it would be harder to justify an upgrade in 3 years from now, when the common entry-tier for laptops is likely still at 16GB...
Over the years since the M1 has launched I’ve cycled through Firefox, Safari, Arc, Zen, Orion and Vivaldi. For the past year my primary browser has been Orion on one M1 Mac, and Firefox has been the main on another M1 work machine for the past 5 years with frequent dips into Chrome on that one, but I don’t leave it sitting in the background when I’m done with it either.
What actually kicked off my browser exploration on the personal was dissatisfaction with Safari’s performance, and 20 tabs or less was enough to make it drag at the time even with disciplined use. I don’t think it had any significant advantages over a Chromium-based browser that particular year except probably battery life but battery life has not been an issue for me these entire 5 years. RAM and swap are something I do end up monitoring more each year (and I’m not in Tahoe yet for either of them), but I’m planning to drive these into the ground before replacing them.
I particularly enjoyed (hated) "... is now the _least RAM browser_ ...".
Reminds me of a childhood friend of mine who always said "it looks very 3D" when he meant "the graphics are good". Pissed me off back then, and apparently still does.
Safari is the highest for 10 tabs but second-lowest for 20? This reads like AI slop, but even if it's not, it's definitely blogspam with no methodology.
in practice, I can have ~infinte tabs in Safari on my M1 MBP. I'll have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs open and I've never seen it stutter once.
It's actually enabling my worst tab-hoarding tendencies. In the Intel days I'd pay a performance price at some point and have to tend to my tabs, but now they just keep propagating....
Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.
It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.
The M1 Air would have blown people’s minds in 2000. 128MB of RAM was luxurious at the time for a laptop. In 2003 I borrowed and bought several sticks for a presentation (senior thesis on 3D presentation software), and got to 1GB in my desktop and felt like I’d broken some law of physics.
Shortly after I had a TiBook (PowerBook G4) that was _only_ 1-inch thick! Compared to 1.75” Dells my coworkers had, it seemed like the future. DVD drive, modem, Ethernet, full sized DVI port, FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, optical audio in and out, gigantic display with a bezel that was unrivaled for years, even among Macs. What a beast!
(I know you meant 2020, but it’s fun to think about the air in 2000).
In the year 2000, a M1 MacBook Air would have been the world's fastest supercomputer (or second fastest if you had the base model with the 7-core GPU).
Impressive, of course; but not quite that impressive.
Only true if all you're running is matmul (supercomputer has general purpose CPUs so more flexible than M1 GPU) - also those flops are probably FP64 in supercomputer ratings and FP32 in M1.
As a smart man I knew used to say, supercomputers are about I/O not raw compute. Those have terabytes of RAM not 8GB.
Your question hits directly at latency vs. throughput distinction. Depends on which you mean by "fast."
Throughput-wise, the supercomputer is competitive because it has a lot of local RAM connected to lots of independent nodes, which, in aggregate, is comparable to modern laptop's RAM throughput (still much more than disk) with a caveat, that you can only leverage the supercomputer bandwidth if your workload is embarrassingly parallel running on all nodes[1]. Latency-wise, old RAM still beats NVMe by two or three orders of magnitude.
[1]: there's another advantage that supercomputer has which is lots more of local SRAM caches. If the workload is parallel and can benefit from cache locality, it blows away the modern microprocessor.
as someone who wasn't around for PowerPC mac times (I was alive but I didn't have internet and only knew apple for iPod and Apple II), did non artist people use FireWire for anything other than synchronizing their first generation iPods? Was it common to have a firewire external drive and were there any other devices that aren't cameras, film scanners or audio interfaces that utilized firewire?
There were FireWire HDDs too. Non-artist people also used FireWire for their DV camcorders for home videos. It wasn't really common because most PCs didn't have Firewire.
It was also used by the PS2 for local multiplayer between multiple consoles. Although Sony eventually removed that port.
I have a 2008 iMac with (I think) 16Gb of RAM which is used for just Firefox. I've been meaning to upgrade it to Linux but that generation didn't boot from USB, need to burn a CD.
All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.
I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.
I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM.
(Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
32GB is starting to feel like a minimum for a common workflow: Dockerized development + git worktree + Claude Code or equivalent for working on multiple branches at once.
Definitely brings our engineers' 24GB MBPs to their knees primarily b/c of the RAM chewed up by those multiple Docker instances.
Will 32GB also start looking paltry soon? It's hard to say. I want to say the realistic upper limit is 3-4 simultaneous worktrees for a given developer (at this point the developer becomes the bottleneck again?) but it's a wild guess that may be hilariously low.
Weird .. I easily run 40 docker containers on an 8GB MacBook just fine!
(Just posting this to show that you have to be very specific when talking about these kind of things. Yeah maybe you need 32GB because you run some large deployment 3 times. Others mayb be totally fine with less if they just develop a basic Python web app. Who knows. The devil is in the details. Omitting them makes the discussion ambiguous and just difficult.)
I've got an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and it runs Ableton and Serato so well I don't actually need a Pro anymore, so Mac may have shot themselves in the foot there.
> I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need
Mac devices have been able to get away with less RAM (and higher priced upgrades) for well over a decade. During the Intel era, they were the first ones to adopt SSDs as the default option while everyone else still installed spinning rust. That alone provides for way faster swap storage to conceal a relative "lack" of RAM.
And when they went for their own fully integrated stacks of soldered RAM and SSD? Then everything went off the rails - close proximity and no sockets means very low latency for both RAM and persistent storage on one side and on the other side it also allows for much higher bandwidth because of much cleaner signals - remember, even at "measly" hundreds of megahertz you're already in the territory requiring precise PCB design.
On top of that, macOS's scheduler seems to be much, much more efficient and outright better in constrained RAM (and CPU) settings to provide the feeling of "the system is still responding" than either Windows or Linux. The only setting where macOS goes into molasses is when you not just run out of RAM but of free disk space as well.
If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.
Depends on the course I think.
But 8Gb is more than enough to run a Java 'Hello World' GUI app or even something heavier. Students don't - as a rule - get to deal with millions of lines codebases.
Just tried out a simple Java Swing popup and it uses 6Mb of heap so that's allright then ;). (on my machine it will reserve 160Mb of memory for thread stacks, code caches, buffers and GC but that won't be a problem unless you use it)
In the 90s I also thought that was wasteful (my first PC had 32Mb). Nowadays with Electron apps taking up gigabytes it doesn't seem that bad anymore.
> "From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong"
Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow.
One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer)
Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!
I don't doubt that 8GB is enough for most uses today. But is it closer to "more than enough" or "just barely enough"? Seems unlikely to be the former at a price point this low.
Five years from now, I have no doubt that the processor will still be fine for most uses, but I doubt that 8GB will be. Especially given that some of the most common memory hogs aren't under Apple's control (cough Chrome cough).
A $600 laptop bought new should absolutely still be useful in 5 years. It should be useful longer than 5 years. That people’s standards are so low is a condemnation of the modern computer market.
My M2 has an IDE and a couple active Firefox tabs open and I'm sitting at 30GB RAM usage, with about 5GB more on swap. It's a 32GB machine and I'm constantly opening Activity Monitor to kill Firefox tabs whose memory usage just seems to grow unbounded over time.
Software shouldn't be written this way. I shouldn't have to disable mds-store because it likes to take up 2-3 cores at full throttle when I'm on 10% remaining battery. But it is, and 32GB isn't enough for me to even have a basic computing experience anymore, it seems.
> fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web.
The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.
Many of the apps non-devs use will likely be universal binaries, or adapted from iOS versions. Chrome, Safari, Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Zoom, Claude, Contacts, Notes, Maps, Music, Pages, Numbers, etc. These are apps that run concurrently with no issues on the iPhone Pro 16. I'm not sure why people expect those same apps would cause issues on materially the same hardware because its package includes a hardware keyboard.
(The most RAM you could purchase in an iPhone until late 2024 was 6GB. iPhone 11 had 4 GB of RAM. I have not at any point since approximately iPhone 6 heard anyone complain about the speed of an iPhone Pro for "normal" consumer/not professional media stuff. iPhone 6s was released in late 2015 and had 2GB of RAM.)
Yes, MacOS is a different OS than iOS. But the very same company who built the Neo also make MacOS. They are known to adapt the OS to the hardware they are shipping. I'm willing to bet the experience for the non-dev is similar to the experience of using an iPhone 16 Pro in 2026.
> On iOS if an app remains in the background for over ~30 seconds, it gets killed.
Except 1) that's not entirely true (famously: music, Zoom) and 2) yes, cooperative state management. Users do not know or care that an app is not actually running if it appears that it is still running when they switch back to it. #2 obviously does not work for many dev use cases, but it would not impact my workflow if e.g. ChatGPT or Chrome were suspended when not in the foreground.
> The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.
I have 8GB of RAM in my M2 iPad Pro running iOS (yes, it’s “iOS” despite what Apple’s crack marketing team might call it), and I’ve certainly started to complain. Doing anything with the web, and like one or two other apps is enough to have apps I’m switching between page out like every two or three minutes.
Yes, I think they changed something in the new iOS; they are trying to get people to swap old devices.
I had issues with swapping before, but with the latest iOS, it has become very annoying on an old iPhone with a small amount of RAM (3GB, I think).
Apple fanboys laugh at Android users for many things, but they can use their devices longer even though they might not have the fastest CPU around (8GB+ has been normalized forever in Android world).
At this point the RAM only matters if you've got something that actually needs all that RAM continuously, likes games, virtual machines, or heavyweight user workflows like 4K video editing. For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.
> For everything else, swap usage on Apple machines works so well that RAM might as well not exist.
You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.
Right, I mean even a fast SSD has an order of magnitude less throughput, and 2-3 orders of magnitude higher latency from RAM. No dispute there. If you are doing random access across 16GB of data and your machine only has 8GB of physical RAM, you're in the pain zone.
OTOH, if you are using multiple RAM-heavy apps that aren't actively hammering that RAM (e.g. an instance of Photoshop that is using 10GB but is just idling or whatever) then MacOS and their stupid fast SSDs handle that pretty seamlessly.
Most use cases are probably somewhere in the middle.
Browser use on the modern web is enough to put you in swap territory early and often on 8GB of RAM. My much more RAM efficient M2 iPad Pro with the non-desktop OS and 8GB of RAM frequently has to page out apps I had open two minutes ago if I’m doing anything with the web and like one or two other applications. This things eventual replacement in like 4 or 5 years is going to need twice or thrice the RAM for me to consider it an upgrade.
> Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD
People always forget that Apple does realtime compression on data that's in RAM allowing more things to fit in RAM; it also effectively increases the bandwidth of the SSD.
> Windows 10+ and Linux also have memory compression, though I don't know how the implementations compare.
A combination of Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) and hardware-accelerated instructions (SIMD/NEON) makes RAM compression on Macs very efficient. Because the storage controller is integrated into the SoC, the bandwidth is high enough that the transition between "Compressed RAM" and "Swap" is very smooth.
And because the CPU and GPU share the same memory, there are no wasted cycles moving data between VRAM and System RAM.
Apple uses WKDM (Wilson-Kaplan Direct Mapping), a specialized, high-speed compression algorithm designed specifically for in-memory data. WKDM is "architecturally aware"—it was built to compress the specific types of data structures found in a computer's RAM, such as pointers, integers, and memory addresses. WKDM treats RAM like a collection of 64-bit integers and pointers; and it's designed to fit entirely in L1/L2 cache [1]. This shipped in MacOS 10.9 Mavericks in 2013.
Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient. The vast majority of Windows and Linux machines don't have unified memory or storage controllers connected to their processors.
Because of this, Apple can often compress a page of memory using fewer CPU cycles than Windows or Linux, which is why M-series Macs can be so aggressive with compression without you ever noticing a "hitch" in the UI.
The fallback algorithm is their LZFSE algorithm, which is like "Zlib-level compression with 2x-3x the speed and efficiency". LZFSE achieves a nearly identical compression ratio but uses Finite State Entropy (FSE) coding, which allows it to decompress data significantly faster while using much less battery power.
LZFSE is optimized for the ARM NEON instruction set to minimize "wake time" for the CPU, making it arguably the more "green" choice for mobile devices [2].
It's safe to say that neither Windows nor Linux has the combination of hardware and software optimizations that Apple has when it comes to RAM compression.
[1]: Compressed Memory compresses the least recently used data residing in memory using the WKDM algorithm, which not only frees up memory but also reduces the amount of swapping going in the background. Not only is this faster than swapping to disk (even to SSDs), but Apple also claims it saves power -- essentially, that compressing data in memory uses less power than writing data to disk without compressing it. -- https://www.osnews.com/story/27121/os-x-109-mavericks/#:~:te...
> Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient.
That doesn't really follow. There are faster and slower compression algorithms no matter what, and 64-bit integers are kind of a waste of memory much of the time.
Also, unified memory has tradeoffs. The GPU improvements are real but it mostly means more pressured on memory, not less.
Very cool, thanks for the detail. This leads me to wonder....why haven't Windows and Linux done any similar optimizations? I assume they do lots of hardware optimizations in all sorts of places, but this seems pretty core.
Nobody forgot anything, and I certainly didn’t. You can tell when you hit swap, and it doesn’t matter what Mac OS X is designed to do, when you hit swap, you hit swap. When you’re hitting swap a lot, you’re hitting swap a lot.
> You can tell when you hit swap, and it doesn’t matter what Mac OS X is designed to do, when you hit swap, you hit swap. When you’re hitting swap a lot, you’re hitting swap a lot.
I have a 16GB M1 Pro machine from 2021 with 200 GB/s memory bandwidth; I can't tell when it's hitting swap, even with tons of browser tabs open, 3 or 4 terminal sessions, and several apps running. I often run two browsers with dozens of tabs open and there's no noticeable lag.
RAM Doubler was a third-party application in the days when a top-of-the-line Mac had 128MB of RAM, with a 40Mhz processor. The level 2 cache was 256 bytes.
That's not in the same universe as hardware compression on a 6-core, 64-bit ARM processor with cores that can run at 4GHz.
> The iPad line makes a lot more sense when you’re just shopping and realize you’re just on a price ladder.
That is ultimately what keeps saving Apple from turning into Dell. They want to offer you one model per price point. You'd be hard-pressed to find two iPads, Macs, iPhones with the exact same price. There's always a price difference with Apple, which helps immensely.
The original article doesn't dwell too much on the RAM limitation, but I agee with you that 8 GB is too little
for the near future or even today.
I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026.
Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning some features. Currently, the OS uses much of the available RAM for caching (I've seen "40%" of total OS RAM usage) to make the system faster, whereas 8 GB RAM permits only essential caching.
(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
That's nothing compared to my car! It fires on all cylinders, instead of saving 3 out of 4 cylinders for a day when I will really need the power.
The reality is that nobody outside of HN cares about 8GB vs 16GB of RAM. You can do anything you want or need to do with an 8GB Macbook, including running a million dollar business, or working with anything creative on the highest level. If you are actually doing something which requires 16GB of RAM on a Mac, then you are doing state of the art tech stuff and should be rolling in money already and have no problem spending thousands and thousands on your computer.
>(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.
> Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.
I think it’s as simple as: 8GB is what the iPhones using the A18 Pro had. It’s this thing Apple likes to do where to keep costs down, they use some iPhone part or other SoC/SiP they have laying around as close to its standard configuration as possible with minimal changes.
Their new Studio Displays for example have an A19 Pro and 128GB of NAND. For basically just the firmware. Why? Because that’s the least amount of storage Apple ships with an A19 Pro iPhone, because like the previous Studio Display from 2022 which had an A13 Bionic in there, they probably just shoved an iPhone board in there to handle the logic and I/O.
So in theory, if they update the MacBook Neo next year to an A19 Pro, it should have 12GB of RAM.
Like freeways, it's not clear that increasing the baseline ram for basic laptops is an effective way to mitigate software bloat. Rather it likely creates bloat.
Yeah, that iteration of the MacBook was more an executive toy notebook, and it wasn’t a particularly great computer either introducing to the world Intel’s Core i3 line, the now infamous butterfly keyboards, and USB-C. That last one worked out, but there was only the one port plus a headphone jack.
Sure. Small thin notebook you can throw in a bag or a purse and it’s a tank? What’s not to love? It was still technically a bad computer and the butterfly keyboards did become a significant issue, mind it it them harder where it really mattered with the MacBook Pro line since they sold a lot more of those.
Had one, loved it. Though it wasn't my only mac laptop. I used it for traveling and it was great. I had that thing for many years and eventually sold it to a friend. They used it for a couple of years after I sold it to them. I've always been able to get a ton of life out of Apple machines.
> That's a false dichotomy. The alternatives includes giving each country an equal standing without a veto, votes proportional to the population, or even fully direct democracy by every person in the world, and a million other alternatives I could think of if given an afternoon.
These are certainly alternatives but they would take what’s basically an acceptable-ish arrangement and turn it into what’s effectively a world government, and that’s completely untenable.
If liberal secular democracies that respected free speech and private property rights were the order of the day, we might be able to set something like that up, but not in today’s world with today’s leaders, and the UN has to account for all of those differences. That’s why the UN feels unsatisfying and why it will never “lead” the world.
But that's the thing - the UN just accepts its strongest members doing things that go against its founding charter and can do nothing about it. At some point the the center just cannot hold.
If the UN actually had any teeth, then it’s the UN that would be targeted and destroyed by its strongest members.
The UN only survives because it is toothless, and the permanent seats of the UNSC are essential to guaranteeing buy-in from members that otherwise wouldn’t allow it to exist.
Why do you think the charter of the UN says that all the power is invested in the security council and each of the great powers have a veto there?
It's almost as if the UN is the creation of the Great Powers, as a meeting ground where they can coordinate their actions, and is not intended to be some authority that tells the great powers what to do.
I don't know where these people learned alternate histories of the UN as being some kind of force that can keep nations in check.
It was never intended to play that role, and the UN Charter forbids it explicitly.
The real problem with the UN is that it is obsolete even for the role it was empowered to play, because with the advent of videoconferencing and abundant communication, it simply has no meaningful role to play. What it has become now is a jobs program where well connected people can obtain diplomatic posts and party in New York while not paying any parking tickets. That's literally all the UN is right now.
All those items in the context menu are one of the reasons that context menus are so good. Ideally you never need to go to the menu bar for much of anything because the right menu item is right there in the context menu where your cursor is already aiming.
There’s a reason every POTUS has a Secret Service detail. So yeah, it’s been imagined. Presidents have been shot and killed before, and Trump himself was shot during the lead up to the most recent election.
Again, the Secret Service is there to protect against all threats and the US Military there for every single other threat above the Secret Service’s pay grade and scale.
It’s the most dangerous and most protected job in America no matter what the POTUS is actively doing at any and every single moment.
I think y’all are so quick to try and criticize everything around the President that you’re kinda missing my point:
Of course there are people that would love to target the POTUS. The Secret Service detail exists for a reason. That reason being that yeah, it’s an unsafe job, and having them there is how we prevent a foreign adversary from just walking right into the White House and doing what we did to Maduro.
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