As opposed to years of garbage Windows laptops at the $600 price point, which you seem to expect will remain viable longer than the Neo ... ?
If any legislation comes out of this, it will simply be because of Apple's high profile. They were content to let e-rot fill the shelves for years before the Neo.
You just run a CLI command and follow simple prompts.
On Windows PCs, you have to go buy a flash stick, download a tool for flashing it for your BIOS/UEFI (and maybe learn MBR vs GPT), wait while that happens, maybe learn about partitions and repartition your disk ahead of time, mess with your BIOS to change boot order, hope you don't wipe your data by selecting the wrong partition etc
(the fact that this is still the status quo is crazy. The nerds need to pay more attention to the funnel)
See Asahi to verify[0]. I've been a donor since the week they opened a Patreon account.
Reminder that the possibility of installing a third-party operating system on Apple hardware is not a given. The same silicon is used in iPhones and iPads where you absolutely cannot install another operating system.
That's because a Linux kernel maintainer was a jerk to the project's lead, causing him to quit. It was a Rust argument, as I recall. Also, their genius graphics dev got hired into a large company, though I don't recall who.
I don't have a lot of insight into who is working on what. I only know of these two people because they were noteworthy enough for articles or HN links to make me aware. That said, a lack of developers isn't the same thing as constraints from Apple. If you get people who are motivated to continue building Asahi, it absolutely could continue to expand to newer chips.
My Mac is currently using 9GB of RAM including 6.5GB of cached files with Safari and a few other apps opened. They likely forgot to subtract the cache from the used memory.
Also 8gb is good enough for the target market.
Back to m1, just 8gb*. It sometimes hang for a second or two, but you know what. I'm happy with it.
That's when I have 38 tabs, two IDEs and try to grep some text on VS code.
Sublime is sublime.
80 bucks!
Reality is, the iphone 16 sharing the same chipset is perfectly functional for many more years to come, running similar workloads (for the same target audience): mainly web browsing.
If the iphone 16 can have the usual 3-6 years of useful life, then the macbook neo has the same -- FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE.
And I wrote this because I did actually get the macbook neo and I'm using it daily for the intended purpose (mostly web browsing) and it's just fine.
(if anybody is wondering: i have a large machine with 16c/32t and 128gb memory that i use remotely via ssh to do the "heavy stuff")
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
That legislation is at least ten years late but apple is absolutely not the worst offender. There is the entire market of cheap android phones (and tablets) that barely last a year or two, and have essentially no guaranteed software upgrade. That should have triggered the legislation in the first place.
Overall this limitation has the potential to be much more visible on the Neo and Apple must make real sure that the OS stays lean because we all know average app devs don’t care about this.
Macos really excels at managing memory very well.
then i welcome it
MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.
A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.
Either way, I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity?
Either way, I agree with them, FWIW.
> I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.
In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory thanks to a misbehaving app that was taking 70 GB out of 64 GB physical RAM. Overall, almost 120 GB were used, most of it was compressed and a lot of it was swapped. It had absolutely zero effect on how useable the computer was, there was no unusual lag. Either Windows or Linux would have shat the bed long before that point.
That's why you usually want a userspace early oom service. Most preconfigured distros ship one by default. Linux is mostly focused on embedded targets, not servers or workstations. There is not a notion of mobile-style app lifecycle either, not in freedesktop environments that is, but XDG portals are working on addressing that sometime in the near future.
> In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory
Windows does that at since like XP and likely earlier. BeOS did that before Darwin based macOS was a thing. On Linux, I don't know which distros do that, but you're definitely much more likely to see an app die rather than be asked whether to kill it. Freezing, once again, is a result of not having a [working] early oom service.
Linux is not that bad, but traditional freedesktop model kind of is.
It's still much better than mac OS.
Also those replies just look like bots, they were really fast and not providing any value, that's what I meant.
So probably very old accounts
Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.
I’ll add on that the change to Apple silicon was an amazing improvement, even in the same OS version. Maybe these anecdotes mean your experience in this regard is dated. (I say this as someone who came reluctantly to Mac, and looks forward to returning to Linux)
My first was underspec'ed and I used Resolve, Lightroom and Photoshop on top of the usual other stuff and it was quite impressive. The relationship of performance to RAM for earlier machines felt incomparable.
Real life?
My macbook neo with 8gb memory is faster and snappier than my shit-tier thinkpad X13G1 even when the X13 is not swapping at all.
I have 8c/16t Ryzen 7 along with 32GB ram over there, running GNU/Linux.
And somehow my macbook neo running a phone chip is much more usable (and battery lasts longer, and suspend actually works).
Like using Chrome…
FWIW I've never really considered Chrome: First it looked ugly (weird UI and bad font rendering on Linux), then Google gave itself permission to be evil and then they limited ad blockers. They fixed the font rendering at some point.