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.
For Windows if 8 gb of RAM is not enough that’s an own-goal. Because it is. Or it should be. Windows 11 is not so dramatically better than Windows Vista SP3 to require a 10x better computer to use comfortably. Actually, in many ways Windows 11 is a massive downgrade from what came before it.
I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target. That means we aren’t jumping the gun on saying “actually you need 12 gigs of RAM” as if that should be normal for a usable computer.
XP used to just have ram sitting there empty waiting for something. Then over vista and 8 and 10 they started more and more preloading because hey if the ram is empty it’s wasted. Like database servers, they always suck down all the RAM possible. Problem is windows doesn’t release it when the cache or whatever isn’t useful and something else wants it.
It’s been a while but I think macOS is considerably better at both parts of that equation.
There’s no reason that computers need to be so powerful other than MBAs saying “optimization is too expensive, just push the feature.”
MacOS is significantly better than windows when using their first party apps, but many third party apps are ram hogs and things get forced to swap more often.
Swap isn’t terrible though, a lot of current gen mac hardware has very fast SSDs and very low latency controllers so it’s pretty transparent in normal use.
I think if you are on a website like this, this computer isn’t for you, but it is for a lot of people who use nothing but a web browser with one tab open 90% of the time.
Vista called it SuperFetch, and preloading pages into memory is not a bad technique. macOS and Linux do it, too, because it’s a simple technique for speeding up access to data that would otherwise have to be fetched from disk. You can see that Linux does it as you check the output of
freeand read out the buff/cache column. Freeing unused pages from memory is very fast, because you can just overwrite dirty pages.Yeah, conceptually it’s good, but the free up is important and seems to be a secondary concern. Perhaps it’s the third party devs.
Wasn’t super fetch what they called the high speed usb flash drives you could use as swap? That reminds me of a time I was optimistic about technology. Vista RC and Office 2007 on my MacBook Pro.