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by dgxyz10 hours ago |
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upvoteby vessenes9 hours ago|
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Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.
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upvoteby dgxyz9 hours ago|
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Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.

As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.

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upvoteby engcoach9 hours ago|
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The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.
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upvoteby dgxyz9 hours ago|
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I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.

They should all be native apps.

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upvoteby 9 hours ago|
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upvoteby nicoburns9 hours ago|
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You cna use of all Teams, Outlook and Slack from an actual browser if you want to.
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upvoteby dgacmu9 hours ago|
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My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.

This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn't great but 8 with apple's really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.

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upvoteby jp_nc9 hours ago|
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FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
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upvoteby drnick19 hours ago|
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> 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world.

Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.

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upvoteby dgxyz9 hours ago|
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It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.

The problem is when you start throwing half the modern tech stack crap on top which is built on standalone browser engines. They are NOT memory or CPU efficient compared to native apps. Really kills a nice machine dead.

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upvoteby NetMageSCW1 hours ago|
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Why would you think the cheapest MacBook available would be intended to use those applications? Apple makes MacBooks for people that need more RAM.
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upvoteby jp_nc9 hours ago|
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Having used both... it's 100% true
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upvoteby jghn9 hours ago|
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I still use my M1 Air with 8gb as well. I don't do my daily dayjob work on it, but it's more than fine for everything else I do.
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