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Comment by moneywoes | Hacker News Reader

8gb of ram seems like a poor decision

I regret it. My M1 air is already showing its age and is a bit slow at times. Not sure if the extra RAM would have helped.

I've only had a couple instances during intense hackathons where I get the low memory popup though. but when it happens its annoying af

It's funny, lots of people complain about it, and I tend to be sensitive to performance issues, but honestly I have zero complaints. I've been using a min spec M1 Air for years and it works great for me. I mostly browse the web and use VSCode remote tunnels and for those purposes it's by far the best laptop I've ever used.

Well, yes, if you mostly do things which don't require much memory, then the device's low memory won't be an issue.

8GB is not a lot in this day and age, though. I paid for the upgrade to 16GB in my current (2016 13" MBP, now seriously showing its age) and am very glad I did.

Everyone's complaint about Chrome and Electron apps like VSCode is that they are (supposedly) enormous memory hogs...

For 649 this machine will run circles around anything in the same price bracket.

.. until running out of RAM.

You need to start thinking outside the box with ram. These new chips have a unified bus and so swapping to disk is not nearly as costly as it is on normal machines.

Yes, it will suffer compared to an M1/2/3 with 16+ GB of ram but again for 649 you will be running circles around a comparative x86 PC even if it has more memory. Asahi Linux is a huge perk, too. Battery life and chassis strength are also things that should not be discounted. This is a chromebook on steroids.

So the solution to running out of RAM is more wear on the disk? Doesn't this thing have soldered-on storage that you can't replace when you wear it out?

649. It’s a wear item. You replace it when it dies.

Isn’t that’s even worse? It would cost almost 0 to add more RAM and make it a durable machine. What Apple does here is basically the definition of planned obsolescence.

I'm sorry, but for $649 it's not "running circles" around this:

https://www.amazon.com/GEEKOM-IT12-Mini-i9-12900H-Computers/...

I will admit it's pretty decent for a laptop, though... especially if you like living in the gated Apple ecosystem.

You’re missing the (slightly better than) 2K OLED monitor. Seems like you can get something like that for $200, which will downgrade your hardware significantly. The linked computer probably uses more power than a Macbook for the same task even if the Macbook is running its display.

I don’t love Apple’s gated ecosystem (which isn’t as bad on Mac as on iPhones) but this thing is an absolute steal for what it is, especially considering 90% of what people on these days is in a browser or electron app.

That’s a mini PC. Not even remotely comparable. Why are you even posting this? No display. No battery. It’s a raspberry pi lmao.

desktop / mini PC. not really comparable, and comes with Win11, which is a more miserable choice than Win10 or Apple's gated nonsense.

you could probably put Debian on it, though. one of the reviews mentions how loud it is, lol.

A little while ago I got a $250 Ryzen 5 laptop with 16GB of ram and a HD display. The keyboard is awful and its not great at gaming but it has a lot for the price.

B-but Mac RAM is different than PC ram.

Isn’t it now though? Soldered in to the SOC and therefore super fast

We still have a ton of these in use for general office work and they are still more than fine. For light use these should be good plenty longer, but I would not pay full price for them anymore.

I was suspicious of this, and they should really include more. But I have 30 tabs open on my 2017 intel version and this m1 is ever better.

Is it enough for a teenager to edit video? That's probably one of the most demanding tasks an average teen might need.

Probably not. Only 256GB of storage. Video, even with a bit of compression, will chew that up pretty quick.

Yes. It'd be limited more by the disk space taken by 4K footage than anything else, but a decent external drive with USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3+ would cover that.

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