HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".
Moore's Law is coming to an end. The Macbook Neo says "why choose?"
Nobody needs a laptop with a 40 hour battery life. Nor does anybody needs 200 cpu threads and an AI coprocessor and 256Gb of RAM and 8Tb of SSD. So we're finally seeing the sweet spot in the phase diagram drift inexorably towards the corner labelled "cheap".
@Salty @cstross my experience is just comparing RAM sizes is misleading, just like comparing GHz etc.
They've highly optimized it - I'd say 8GB is enough for most "normal" use cases even though that sounds surprising. So, why pay the memory tax?
I think we've been marketed into believing we need lots of RAM (also indoctrinated into believing we do by history, edge use cases and the profligate nature of some OS environments).
I don't have a Neo. But, I have a MacBook Air M1 we got as freebie when Apple first released aarch64 Arm SoCs. That's the 8GB base spec.
I assumed it'd be a poor experience when I got it. But, it works absolutely fine with multiple browsers/tabs, libre office, untitled goose game, etc - all those things that probably constitute "normal" computer use. And that is a few generations ago.
Unsurprisingly it doesn't work fine for technical tasks like building large SW stacks or hosting VMs. But, that's a way smaller cohort's use case - outside Mastodon at least!
Charlie Stross
A stopped clock never boils
markn🚲