@glyph made the point that the Neo is an implicit promise from Apple that macOS will run just fine on 8 GB of memory for the next 8 years.

But I think it goes farther than that: Apple made a reference device for application developers. They've never been shy about enforcing requirements on developers, and this is an interesting positive side to that: developers now have a huge incentive to make applications that fit within modest memory limits.

Put differently: this is the Electron killer, for better or worse, and not in the way that Apple killed Flash.

When PCs ship with 8 GB or less of RAM, application companies don't give a fuck, and so we get a proliferation of Electron and Electron-like platforms that consume gigantic amounts of RAM. That won't fly on something like the Neo.

It was never sustainable to keep acting like there'd always be more RAM, some Moore's Law style kind of truism. AI vendors have forced the issue by engineering an artificial components shortage.

Apple has, to my outsider view as a non-Mac user, thrown down the gauntlet and said that developers *will* stop munching RAM, or else.

Maybe that's not fair, maybe developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of OS vendors' failure to build platforms. But users shouldn't bear it either.

@darby3 @xgranade it can edit 4k video. Imo, the problem is companies not caring about quality or performance. The embarrassing thing is most electron apps are just displaying text. Something that some times feels worse than on my pentium 75mhz pc with 8mb of ram.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1rqv5sd/i_tried_editing_4k_video_on_the_599_macbook_neo/