this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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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.

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[–] BigTrout75@lemmy.world 164 points 3 days ago (21 children)

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.

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 135 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Macs don't have copilot so that's like 4GB saved right there

[–] BigTrout75@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

Ha ha ha. True!

[–] kratoz29@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can it be debloated? I might do that for my parents home PC.

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago

Idk about copilot, this is my recommended debloat tool

[–] MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 69 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

8GB of ram on Macs is fine for work and medium photo/video editing, as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.

People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.

[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 33 points 3 days ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 33 points 3 days ago (7 children)

Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs,

Oh......I guess I'm the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.

One day I closed one window and it said "Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?"

I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.

[–] ieGod@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

This is the computing equivalent to hoarding.

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 days ago

I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?

[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 days ago (4 children)

When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you're looking for when you have that many open?

[–] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 days ago

Tab search.

Tab groups.

Color coding.

I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.

[–] LeapSecond@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 days ago

Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar

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[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they've sat unused for awhile?

I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of...

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 days ago

When I have too many tabs, I press that blue button of the "one tab" extension.

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[–] gurty@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.

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[–] Matriks404@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure, but that's a bad excuse. 16 GB is a standard even in low end nowadays.

[–] BigTrout75@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I do agree that 8GB is low. But it does fair better on Macs than Windows. This reviewer is editing his 4k videos on one. https://youtu.be/pCRtNeAP1dQ

[–] hopesdead@startrek.website 14 points 3 days ago (10 children)

Many entry level MacBooks of the last decade have probably been 8 GB. I have a M1 MacBook Air and that is 8 GB. It is fine for me.

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[–] Anivia@feddit.org 6 points 2 days ago

The only time I ever use more than 8gb on my M4 Mac Mini is when I run a Win 11 VM through Parallels

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

in the Linux world, 8GB is fine

So I presume you're saying that the entire system shouldn't slow down when Firefox starts swapping?

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 8 points 3 days ago (4 children)

in the Linux world, 8GB is fine

Yeahhhhh no

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 12 points 3 days ago (10 children)
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[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Different people use computers for different things you know.

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[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 3 points 3 days ago

Been enough for me.

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[–] BladeFederation@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.

[–] bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

How so? I have a work Mac and it uses more ram in general despite both the Mac and my personal laptop both employing memory compression and caching.

[–] RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

What?

I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn't been my experience at all

[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:

  • You don’t have to configure swap on macOS, while on Linux you can get into a situation where e.g. at install time you set up some default 2 GB swap but then it’s not enough and you don’t know that’s a thing that can be changed.
  • You don’t have to configure compression for RAM or swap on macOS; on Linux you often have to know you can set up zram/zswap if you want it. Compression can make a huge difference for users that switch between memory heavy applications as long as they don’t literally switch every 5 seconds.
  • On macOS, applications generally use the same frameworks e.g. for UI (because there is not much choice), and they can be loaded once and shared between all of them. Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time, and then you have stuff like snap on top that comes with its own copies of even basic system libraries. Containers also do this. As a Linux user you can avoid library bloat to some extent but “normal” users are not aware of it in the first place.
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[–] BladeFederation@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier, if you have it to spare. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you're out of RAM you're out if RAM. It's less likely to happen at all on Linux though.

[–] RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

What compression algorithm? The osx kernel is largely open source so they aren't doing some secret compression, do they hardware offload it or something?

OSX enables zswap by default, but on a laptop that regular uses it, I'm not convinced it's a trade-off that's worth it, although swapping is different on OSX (IMO worse on modern desktops as it swaps whole apps) so I could be wrong.

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