Apple

The m1s were wildly over engineered.

The performance the m1 pros put out was not quite mirrored in later models.

The m1 was a massive step up

yep the only reason i upgraded my m1 air was to get a 15" screen.

I have my dad's old 8gb M1 mini at home, being used as my Home Assistant machine. 4Gb of the RAM is allocated to UTM for running HAOS, while the other 4Gb is for macOS (Tahoe, annoyingly) to do with as it pleases, including running a modest LLM in Ollama so I can use speech commands. It works perfectly well.

The same setup under Asahi kept falling over, because only macOS seems to get access to a bunch of the shit that it needs to (presumably) swap memory to the SSD.

So yeah, I wouldn't be at all worried about 8Gb in the Neo. Not for its intended market, anyway.

That said, say a kid gets one to use at school, after a couple of years they're going to want to upgrade to something with more RAM, which is kinda what Apple are betting on, so they can sell more units. But yeah, as an entry level laptop, this Neo looks like a decent bet.

I've got a Celeron laptop with 12GB RAM & it uses it.

And no, I was interested in these Macbooks bcs Asahi might one day reverse-engineer the drivers. I don't have much interest in macOS or Windows.

MacOS is UNIX, but is not the best implementation of UNIX.

The UNIX tools it ships are extremely old. For example, it comes with GNU Screen, which I was using but was having same strange issues with. It turned out it uses a version from 2006... so I had to brew install a modern version.

And I'm personally not the biggest fan of MacOS. It's certainly better than Windows thanks to Apple mostly treating the user with basic respect (no ads), but the desktop/window manager is just super quirky. No other desktop, whether it be Windows or any desktop on Linux behaves quite like it. They tend to only adopt the nicer features while keeping a UX that feels closer to Windows. For example, MacOS quirky/unique in doing

• Requiring a click to activate a window (with no option to change this behavior)
• Fullscreening a window moves it to its own space
• Closing an app's window does not close the app itself for the majority of apps
  • Perhaps not the biggest deal if the goal is app startup speed for heavily used apps, but unnecessary for rarely used apps and clutters the dock)
  • Also can be quite annoying since it will drag you to the last space you used the app on
• Minimized windows show on dock as previews
  • Not that of an idea, but strange since you now have two ways to bring the app back: clicking on the app icon itself or the minimized preview

I have lots of problems with the GUI from a productivity standpoint. Its situational for many people. The problem with MacOS is, like windows, you have very few options to change it.

I would like to see a dock that does not dynamically asjust the position of icons. Fix the positions for muscle memory.

The app switching logic should be switching between windows not apps.

It needs proper tiling and snapping support.

The common UI elements forced on apps take up too much screen space.

Its not that any other OS is inheritly better, its that MacOS is more locked down in terms of the ability to adjust or improve it.

That's a big part of the problem though... it's Unix. The BSD-based underpinnings of Mac OS are just different enough to be a colossal pain in the arse for interoperability with GNU-based systems.

At a surface level things seem similar enough, but that people seem to think developing on Mac and deploying on Linux is this simple process really confuses me, because every time it's come up in my career nothing has ever worked properly. Every occasion a bunch of time wasted finding the one little difference that breaks on one platform (and I'm going to be blunt here; it was always on the Mac).

For my money too, the Mac UI features some of the most incomprehensible and borderline unpleasant design decisions. Window management is downright infuriating. File management feels barely functional. Apple's stubborn insistence in hiding the options they'd clearly prefer you didn't use (to make using it actually pleasant) in "accessibility" menus is baffling.

Some of this stuff harks back to last century. I hated the way things worked back then in Mac OS 6 on a Mac classic, and a lot of it they still haven't fixed.

Meh, 8GB is still a bit under. All I run on my Air is discord and Firefox, and it’s constantly choking on the lack of RAM. About once a week I have to force quit and then restore Firefox to get the system functional again.