Hacker News Reader

Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

View on HN

With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.

I have an 8GB M1 MacBook Pro and it’s the perfect computer. I always have lots of tabs and Docker open etc. It works great. I want to upgrade at some point but probably don’t need to anytime soon.

8GB is fine (on macos anyways) for what you're doing, but like it or not more and more AI is being (unnecessarily) shoved into applications and it needs memory for the GPU.

Memory (both system and GPU) is usually best thing to future proof a computer at buy time, especially as it's not user-replaceable anymore.

You can get a 512g/24gb for $1104.00 USD. Still seems pretty great to me. If you’re disciplined with your internal/external storage you could also stay at a 256gb SSD and get 32gb of ram.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/30/apple-8gb-16gb-ram-mac/

Base model is 16gb as of the M4 release.

You also don’t have to get the base model. You can stay under $1000 while increasing to 24gb of ram.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com