The crappiest 8GB RAM (?!) 256SSD M2 Air model is 1650EUR. 1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years.
The 16GB model is rounded 2000EUR, which was before reserved for a high-end gaming laptops. It's bonkers.
That did not have enough ram 3 years ago... the fact they are still trying to sell 8GB as an useful amount outside of extremely budget laptops is insane.
This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.
I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?
Cost of materials should not dictate the final price. There's always a lot more to it.
Personally, my newest main machine has 64GB of RAM (for now) simply because I never want to run out of RAM ever; RAM is cheap (when it ain't coming from Apple) and I hate dealing with swap thrashing.
Speaking more generally, I sincerely wouldn't suggest any lower than 32GB to any person asking for advice on a Windows setup today. Far too many programs demand far too much RAM now, with Chrome being just the leading example.
Lightroom Classic on my desktop uses less than 8GB of RAM.
That's BS. I ran Win 11 on a 8GB tablet PC just fine (although I wouldn't recommend it, get 16 instead).
I get it, we all hate windows, but can we please stick to reality and stop spreading FUD on HN?
With that said, I can easily break past 16GB just running Windows and Chrome. 32GB is the new minimum if you want an enjoyable time; swapping into the page file even with PCIE4 and PCIE5 SSDs is still miserable.
Opening task manager and checking if windows is using more than 16gb is not a method to tell how much you should spec, my PC has 128gb ram with page file disabled and regularly sits at 40gb ram, because windows will allocate ram if there is ram to allocate.
I run 1000s of users on vdi 4/16 is more than enough for 99% of users.
I've since upgraded from that machine to a new build with 64GB of RAM simply because so many programs demand too much RAM now, and I hate even the mere thought of hitting swap.
I find that hard to believe since Chrome now sleeps tabs. I have Chrome with 60+ tabs open right now (yes, I'm one of those hoarders) and only eats 2,7GB RAM with a total system usage of ~9GB including all my other apps I have minimized right now (Signal, Torrent, Weather, PotPlayer, etc).
So I seriously doubt you're blowing past the 16GB just with Chrome alone.
wut. I have a 16GB Windows machine and it's fine.
https://www.osnews.com/story/16675/vista-minimum-requirement...
https://winaero.com/the-real-system-requirements-for-windows...
Here's one for Windows 11
https://www.makeuseof.com/is-4gb-ram-enough-for-windows-11/
Seems Windows 8 was ok
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2221048/will-windows-8-...
Not all that much open and the memory usage is at 27 GB. Chrome, Teams etc. messaging apps, Xcode and other SW dev stuff.
Kinda regret I didn't go for 64 GB.
MemRegions: 1744370 total, 5771M resident, 234M private, 4726M shared. PhysMem: 31G used (2888M wired, 15G compressor), 74M unused.
A bit confusing even for someone who is comfortable dealing with low level kernel stuff...
I guess I'll need to install Homebrew, MacPorts or something.
Edit vm_stat says this. Looks like more reasonable output:
% vm_stat
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes)
Pages free: 4070.
Pages active: 387530.
Pages inactive: 385599.
Pages speculative: 241.
Pages throttled: 0.
Pages wired down: 185222.
Pages purgeable: 2.
"Translation faults": 458286513.
Pages copy-on-write: 18032218.
Pages zero filled: 230111374.
Pages reactivated: 9982494.
Pages purged: 4086524.
File-backed pages: 197104.
Anonymous pages: 576266.
Pages stored in compressor: 2007280.
Pages occupied by compressor: 1062310.
Decompressions: 6355861.
Compressions: 10204603.
Pageins: 13150790.
Pageouts: 252630.
Swapins: 52.
Swapouts: 30380.Physical Memory: 32,00 GB
Memory Used: 21 GB
Cached Files: 10,45 GB
Swap Used: 0 GB
I use both MacOS and Windows, both in a VM using Linux as the host OS, on a laptop with 64GB of RAM, and honestly Windows 11, not considering the fact that it tries to run ads on the start menu, feels lighter and snappier than MacOS.
Of course if you give it a lot of of RAM it will try to use as much as it can to aggressively cache stuff, but not differently from what MacOS does.
Speaking as someone who has and uses a Windows laptop with 8GB of RAM, that's an absurd statement. The "new minimum" in terms of what you usually see for sale, is (still) more like 16GB.
I wish I had 16GB but 8GB is _still perfectly fine_.
Hopefully it will work for a long time, but I think development could be good on a quarter of the mem/storage hardware. More cores would be nice, as always, but even there, go compile will light them all up but for far less than a second.
4GB of RAM.[0]
It's the stupid websites that require GB of RAM to display a couple pieces of written text and the hundreds of MB of JS that tally up to the additional 28GB you may be thinking of. Oh and all the electron apps which add additional browser requirements where there shouldn't be any. I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular fault though, I would be curious to know how they accomplished it.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-...
MacOS isn’t, but Apple Silicon laptops sort of are. Seems the onboard flash and flash controller integrated into M1 and M2 chips are fast enough that disk paging doesn’t impact performance for most day-to-day task. I’ve personally been very surprised at how much performance Apple have squeezed out of 8GB of RAM, it’s certainly far more than I was accustomed to in the Intel era.
Windows laptops on the other hands hold incredibly well at 16GB of RAM. There are also windows laptops with the same weight as Macbook Air at half the cost and double the specs.
It tells a lot regarding how that application is written.
Maybe I'm an extreme case, typically running all the time: phpStorm, Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Excel, Terminal, TextMate, WhatsApp, Messages, Calendar, MS RDP Client, Mail, Notes, Reminders.
Also kind of a trip, I installed Stats at home to troubleshoot bottlenecks. Just noticed I didn't install it at work.
98% of users can live with 8 just fine, and 16 is great. 32 is a waste for most folks.
Generally 8 works for me but I do sometimes end up needing more. At which point I curse my financial situation when I had to purchase my computer which I am otherwise happy with.
Also remember, the GPU also uses memory. 8GB isn't even the same as 8GB when iGPU wasn't a thing.
There are only two things that prevent me from going cheap: poor video performance when I plug it into my large USB-C external monitor; and, my addiction to the Apple Watch that is a device that makes me rethink how I expect technology to fit into my lifestyle.
One friend uses the Air for business only and an iPad Pro for personal/family use.
But I bought a M2 Mini with base everything (8gb/256gb) and it is still absolutely killer for 99% of things. I do a lot of dev, gaming, and casual stuff. It plays WoW at 100fps, Dota, streams all my GFN games, and the swap is fine when doing web dev.
Most of the people who are saying that that 8gb is not enough haven’t actually used one.
A lot of them extrapolate that because their Mac with 16/24/32gb uses more than 8gb doing basic tasks, 8gb is not enough.
They don’t consider that modern OS’s and browsers are happy to use RAM that they don’t need because it is just sitting there otherwise.
The rest have memory heavy workflows (docker or VMs, usually).
If you are doing development, video work, lots of multitasking and if your productivity per hour is important, then you probably need more RAM.
Maybe your argument applies when running Chrome (?), but I had no issues whatsoever running Safari, and not even using an ad blocker.
The price is still stupid, but a potential customer not needing to give a crap about his new computer might just make the steep price worth it.
But I think they were also talking about the overall convenience-quality tradeoff.
I mean, you can get a light and thin Surface laptop. But it’s in the same price range as Macs. But M2 definitely beats Intel on battery life.
I'm sure the resale value is much, much higher. I purchased my very first iPhone, an iPhone 13 pro, largely due to the fact that it will still be worth a significant amount after 2 or 3 years.
If you take that into account, the difference probably isn't as noticeable.
Although I’d probably just buy a 3 year old Air for 800euro rather than buy a new one at that price point.
For durability, I would expect that old Air to last longer than a brand new Lenovo.
If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.
Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.
From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.
From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.
Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).
That's more the OS scheduling and userspace software than actual hardware. I don't experience any lag even on my father's 10yr old laptop.
Needless to say I use my own computer instead.
Is there added taxes / tarrifs for the european prices? That's much worse than just the EUR/USD exchange rate.
My m2 air 24/1tb from work was 2300 or so, my personal m1 air 16/512 was 1850 a year earlier. Don’t see a huge difference between them, but the work one in particular is a giant leap ahead of the 5tr old mbp it replaced.
No doubt they’re pricey
So to fairly compare prices by exchange rate you always need to discount the European price to subtract its VAT first.
Even then, it's imperfect. Some of us in the US do not pay sales tax.
Because then you're simply comparing the price without tax in both places, the money Apple actually receives.
On what do you make that prediction?
My 12-year-old MacBook Air runs Safari fine. I used it just this past weekend.
I don't think an M2 is going to be unusable in 2025.
With the way some of us use tabs, that's not enough RAM to run the browser now. :-)
they'll sell just fine in the US and parts of Asia
the EU is becoming poor, and its being reflected in the costs of imported goods