From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong (I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need). I’m inches away from buying a couple of these for my kids.
I have an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. It’s a great computer, but even on days where I’m doing fuck all but using the web I can pressure that memory easily. I also have a tendency to never reboot until that becomes the fastest way to fix whatever performance bottlenecks I’m running into.
I’m not saying you can’t get away with 8GB of RAM. You can, but I won’t recommend a Mac with only 8GB of RAM to anybody for a few reasons: 1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time. 2) they’ll spend $600 and even if RAM isn’t as much of a bottleneck for them today, with modern web developers and modern web browsers, it will be much sooner rather than later. And everything is a web app now.
For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way nor should it last less than 7 years and still be a kickass experience. Ideally it should last longer. The Neo is great for what it is, but the RAM is the deal killer for me.
macOS will pop up a window that says the system has run out of application memory, asking you to quit applications. I have a friend with, I believe a base M3 Air, who runs into this constantly with nothing but Firefox open.
(Been trying to get them to switch to Safari, but they prefer the Firefox name. I don't think there's anything wrong with Firefox other than it being less native.)
Does Safari use less RAM because it shares some parts with the rest of the OS? (e.g. in the same way Edge probably uses a bit less because half of its components are already idling on the OS)
You could say that. WebKit is in the dyld shared cache, so all of Safari's subprocesses share the same copy of it (and JavaScriptCore, etc.) in memory. But I would say it's more efficient because it integrates better with the platform's QoS primitives. I'm not sure what Firefox does in that regard, other than stuff from other platforms that don't have QoS (such as the throttling of JavaScript APIs like timers). Safari seems better at prioritizing the tabs you have open and backgrounding everything else, letting things go to swap, killing resource hogs, etc.
I have an M2 Air 24GB/1TB that has been such a beast that I haven't touched my 16" Pro in months. I have four browsers running, with a ton of tabs in Brave (daily driver) and I'm sitting at 21/24GB utilization with all sorts of apps running (granted, Docker is not at the moment, but it still doesn't make it sweat). I had ~8 pro laptops in a row going back to the late 2000s, but Apple Silicon has changed how I work. A future 14" OLED that was similarly light might turn my head, but if I had to replace it today I'd just buy another M5 Air with at least this much RAM. [FYI I never installed Chrome after M1 came out. Brave has been rock-solid for over a half-decade now.]
24GB is definitely solid. 16GB is like my minimum recommended for any kind of Mac, but if you can go for more you should go for more. I think 24GB should last a good long while though.
16GB, depending on your use, can be constraining and, sometimes, you need to get creative with complex processes. My colleagues complain about developing with several containers running peripheral services. In similar situations we asked the services teams to provide mocks that answered the same APIs without needing a large memory footprint.
> “1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time”
> “For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way”
In the article, Gruber normally uses a 64GB Mac, expected the 8GB RAM to be a problem and was surprised to find that it wasn’t, and judged the Neo as not being a bad experience in any way.
Gruber has also had it for a week at most by the time he published his review. It’s enough time to run some tests, not enough time to properly review what it will be like to actually live with it. I like the guy, but I also understand the limitations of how he reviews products.
8GB can be limiting on an iPad Pro, which runs a generally more memory efficient branch of Apple’s XNU-based system software and it’s not difficult to get it into a state where it is constantly paging out an app you had in front of you two minute ago if anything you’re doing involves the web at all. A Mac will just swap at that point, but swapping is also slow.
You could get away with 8GB 5 years ago and you still can do it now, but Macs are expected to last longer than that, and starting now with 8GB might become limiting 5 years from now. Here we retire them at about 10 years, or when the last OS they can run is EOL’ed.
Not to be devils's advocate here, but I'd suspect Apple is aiming for a smaller retirement window for this kind of product.
It's basically a Laptop engineered in the iPhone/iPad space of the company, it's only natural for Apple to target a shorter lifecycle.
8GB RAM is maybe the best way to achieve that, many of the MacBook Neo buyers of today will be very compelled to upgrade to a newer (or higher-tier) model in ~3 years from now...
If the Neo would have 16GB of RAM today, it would be harder to justify an upgrade in 3 years from now, when the common entry-tier for laptops is likely still at 16GB...
Over the years since the M1 has launched I’ve cycled through Firefox, Safari, Arc, Zen, Orion and Vivaldi. For the past year my primary browser has been Orion on one M1 Mac, and Firefox has been the main on another M1 work machine for the past 5 years with frequent dips into Chrome on that one, but I don’t leave it sitting in the background when I’m done with it either.
What actually kicked off my browser exploration on the personal was dissatisfaction with Safari’s performance, and 20 tabs or less was enough to make it drag at the time even with disciplined use. I don’t think it had any significant advantages over a Chromium-based browser that particular year except probably battery life but battery life has not been an issue for me these entire 5 years. RAM and swap are something I do end up monitoring more each year (and I’m not in Tahoe yet for either of them), but I’m planning to drive these into the ground before replacing them.
I particularly enjoyed (hated) "... is now the _least RAM browser_ ...".
Reminds me of a childhood friend of mine who always said "it looks very 3D" when he meant "the graphics are good". Pissed me off back then, and apparently still does.
Safari is the highest for 10 tabs but second-lowest for 20? This reads like AI slop, but even if it's not, it's definitely blogspam with no methodology.
in practice, I can have ~infinte tabs in Safari on my M1 MBP. I'll have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs open and I've never seen it stutter once.
It's actually enabling my worst tab-hoarding tendencies. In the Intel days I'd pay a performance price at some point and have to tend to my tabs, but now they just keep propagating....
Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well. I never felt RAM-limited. I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.
It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.
The M1 Air would have blown people’s minds in 2000. 128MB of RAM was luxurious at the time for a laptop. In 2003 I borrowed and bought several sticks for a presentation (senior thesis on 3D presentation software), and got to 1GB in my desktop and felt like I’d broken some law of physics.
Shortly after I had a TiBook (PowerBook G4) that was _only_ 1-inch thick! Compared to 1.75” Dells my coworkers had, it seemed like the future. DVD drive, modem, Ethernet, full sized DVI port, FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, optical audio in and out, gigantic display with a bezel that was unrivaled for years, even among Macs. What a beast!
(I know you meant 2020, but it’s fun to think about the air in 2000).
In the year 2000, a M1 MacBook Air would have been the world's fastest supercomputer (or second fastest if you had the base model with the 7-core GPU).
Impressive, of course; but not quite that impressive.
Only true if all you're running is matmul (supercomputer has general purpose CPUs so more flexible than M1 GPU) - also those flops are probably FP64 in supercomputer ratings and FP32 in M1.
As a smart man I knew used to say, supercomputers are about I/O not raw compute. Those have terabytes of RAM not 8GB.
Your question hits directly at latency vs. throughput distinction. Depends on which you mean by "fast."
Throughput-wise, the supercomputer is competitive because it has a lot of local RAM connected to lots of independent nodes, which, in aggregate, is comparable to modern laptop's RAM throughput (still much more than disk) with a caveat, that you can only leverage the supercomputer bandwidth if your workload is embarrassingly parallel running on all nodes[1]. Latency-wise, old RAM still beats NVMe by two or three orders of magnitude.
[1]: there's another advantage that supercomputer has which is lots more of local SRAM caches. If the workload is parallel and can benefit from cache locality, it blows away the modern microprocessor.
as someone who wasn't around for PowerPC mac times (I was alive but I didn't have internet and only knew apple for iPod and Apple II), did non artist people use FireWire for anything other than synchronizing their first generation iPods? Was it common to have a firewire external drive and were there any other devices that aren't cameras, film scanners or audio interfaces that utilized firewire?
There were FireWire HDDs too. Non-artist people also used FireWire for their DV camcorders for home videos. It wasn't really common because most PCs didn't have Firewire.
It was also used by the PS2 for local multiplayer between multiple consoles. Although Sony eventually removed that port.
I have a 2008 iMac with (I think) 16Gb of RAM which is used for just Firefox. I've been meaning to upgrade it to Linux but that generation didn't boot from USB, need to burn a CD.
All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.
I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.
I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM.
(Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
32GB is starting to feel like a minimum for a common workflow: Dockerized development + git worktree + Claude Code or equivalent for working on multiple branches at once.
Definitely brings our engineers' 24GB MBPs to their knees primarily b/c of the RAM chewed up by those multiple Docker instances.
Will 32GB also start looking paltry soon? It's hard to say. I want to say the realistic upper limit is 3-4 simultaneous worktrees for a given developer (at this point the developer becomes the bottleneck again?) but it's a wild guess that may be hilariously low.
Weird .. I easily run 40 docker containers on an 8GB MacBook just fine!
(Just posting this to show that you have to be very specific when talking about these kind of things. Yeah maybe you need 32GB because you run some large deployment 3 times. Others mayb be totally fine with less if they just develop a basic Python web app. Who knows. The devil is in the details. Omitting them makes the discussion ambiguous and just difficult.)
I've got an M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and it runs Ableton and Serato so well I don't actually need a Pro anymore, so Mac may have shot themselves in the foot there.
> I’m guessing it’s lingering PTSD from being stuck on underperforming systems with too little RAM that makes us buy much more RAM than we actually need
Mac devices have been able to get away with less RAM (and higher priced upgrades) for well over a decade. During the Intel era, they were the first ones to adopt SSDs as the default option while everyone else still installed spinning rust. That alone provides for way faster swap storage to conceal a relative "lack" of RAM.
And when they went for their own fully integrated stacks of soldered RAM and SSD? Then everything went off the rails - close proximity and no sockets means very low latency for both RAM and persistent storage on one side and on the other side it also allows for much higher bandwidth because of much cleaner signals - remember, even at "measly" hundreds of megahertz you're already in the territory requiring precise PCB design.
On top of that, macOS's scheduler seems to be much, much more efficient and outright better in constrained RAM (and CPU) settings to provide the feeling of "the system is still responding" than either Windows or Linux. The only setting where macOS goes into molasses is when you not just run out of RAM but of free disk space as well.
If the phrase "Java app" is in your vocabulary this laptop probably isn't for you. This is for the first-time laptop buyer or the basic needs non-enthusiast user or for a child. And honestly, I think Apple might make a killing here. Basic laptop users want to do no research and they want it to just work, and accessible marketing is Apple's core competency.
Depends on the course I think.
But 8Gb is more than enough to run a Java 'Hello World' GUI app or even something heavier. Students don't - as a rule - get to deal with millions of lines codebases.
Just tried out a simple Java Swing popup and it uses 6Mb of heap so that's allright then ;). (on my machine it will reserve 160Mb of memory for thread stacks, code caches, buffers and GC but that won't be a problem unless you use it)
In the 90s I also thought that was wasteful (my first PC had 32Mb). Nowadays with Electron apps taking up gigabytes it doesn't seem that bad anymore.
I don't doubt that 8GB is enough for most uses today. But is it closer to "more than enough" or "just barely enough"? Seems unlikely to be the former at a price point this low.
Five years from now, I have no doubt that the processor will still be fine for most uses, but I doubt that 8GB will be. Especially given that some of the most common memory hogs aren't under Apple's control (cough Chrome cough).
A $600 laptop bought new should absolutely still be useful in 5 years. It should be useful longer than 5 years. That people’s standards are so low is a condemnation of the modern computer market.
> "From all the reviews, those of us who are skeptical of 8GB of RAM are very much wrong"
Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow.
One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer)
Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!
My M2 has an IDE and a couple active Firefox tabs open and I'm sitting at 30GB RAM usage, with about 5GB more on swap. It's a 32GB machine and I'm constantly opening Activity Monitor to kill Firefox tabs whose memory usage just seems to grow unbounded over time.
Software shouldn't be written this way. I shouldn't have to disable mds-store because it likes to take up 2-3 cores at full throttle when I'm on 10% remaining battery. But it is, and 32GB isn't enough for me to even have a basic computing experience anymore, it seems.
