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0 pointskeyle15d ago0 comments

Note that 8GB of ram on a Mac plays out a lot more different than 8GB on a PC.

I work professionally on a Macbook Air 16GB now and I have quite a few docker images and services running bare metal, + browser, vscode etc. on top. Not a problem until I start loading up some LLMs.

The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.

If anything, I'm much more bound by the CPU limitations and the eco-cores than the memory.

On a PC, I wouldn't think about less than 32GB for a dev pc.

If I had a fulltime gig programming C, I'd even say I could work on this A14 8GB device. Why not? It's as powerful as a 10 year old powerful machine; probably. Or in that ballpark.

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Rohansi14d ago

> The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.

I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).

Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.

Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.

pjmlp15d ago

PC work just fine with 16 GB, that is coping with Apple limitations.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255765423?sortBy=rank

Why on Earth do I need a 32 GB PC?!?

Turbo C also worked just fine with 640 KB in MS-DOS, but then again MS-DOS wasn't full of Electron crap.

foldr14d ago

There are lots of reviews on YouTube of people demoing the performance of the Neo in typical non-power-user usage scenarios (multiple apps, lots of browser tabs, etc.) It works perfectly fine for typical consumer usage.

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