logoalt Hacker News

jeroenhdyesterday at 4:23 PM3 repliesview on HN

8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.

I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that.

The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going to confuse a lot of people. One of Apple's perks in terms of connectivity has been that you can basically assume all USB-C ports do everything. It also seems like they didn't include an SD card reader, like they used to. That's going to make the 256GiB rather cramped, I feel.


Replies

sodality2yesterday at 4:40 PM

Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.

nateb2022yesterday at 6:17 PM

> macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me.

Without context on total memory available, this is a meaningless metric. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

show 2 replies
stefan_yesterday at 6:28 PM

Since Apple Intelligence is terrible and behind, I'm sure its gonna be just fine.