The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.

Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.

Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.

  • BigTrout75@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I can’t speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it’s awful because of all that bloat. I’m guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.

    • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      6 days ago

      I’m running Mint on an 8GB laptop and I’m surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn’t even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.

      Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          8 days ago

          I use my computer for simple tasks and can power through double that pretty easily. My family is full of Mac sheep who are constantly coming to me to make their computers faster and I have to tell them I can’t help because their machine was deliberately kneecapped by the OEM and there’s no way to fix it. Fortunately one of them just upgraded to the new Air w/ 16GB and they remark how much faster it is. Obviously it’s faster in lots of other ways, but none of those would do anything if they were still capped at 8GB.

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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        8 days ago

        It can also do things and still use the same 6 gigs.

        MacOS caches a lot. That memory is freed when it’s needed for other things.

        • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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          8 days ago

          No I keep seeing this “caches a lot” thing keeps getting repeated. Memory break downs already accounts for that. They shows the different break downs of ram usage. In use vs cached.

          This is 6gb of inuse memory while the laptop is chilling. Cached memory is typically like 80% of whatever the ram is on your device. If you hit that 8gb your app is getting killed before the kernel kills a system process.

            • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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              8 days ago

              Ive got a stack of them right next to me. I work on them regularly. I know older versions of macOS are lean but Tahoe and Seqouia are noticeably heavier. Its not a problem because the devices running them have 16gb+ of ram. But I’m worried 8gb will impose contains on usage. I know it’ll do basic stuff like run a browser but i think people are overestimating how capable this device will be.

              • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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                2 days ago

                Okay, fair, I haven’t used Tahoe or Sequoia myself. But I think we’ll see how these fare when people actually start using them. I’m very much not the target audience, I’m looking at the M5 or M5 Pro models myself.