Everyone has a MacBook Neo take, so here's mine.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
@xgranade do you mean 8 GB or *more*?
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@xgranade do you mean 8 GB or *more*?
@SnoopJ No, meaning that application vendors are just fine shipping things that completely fail at the low end of tech specs.
Sorry for not being clear about that.
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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.
@xgranade my counter hot take is that it’s Apple saying “well may as well get money out of people who want nothing more than a browser to talk to chatbots through” but my brain is pretty cooked on ai paranoid takes
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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.
@xgranade Apple ʜᴀꜱ built a platform⸺one can build complex functionality on top of SwiftUI for a really low net cost in RAM usage (because SwiftUI is all shared code). It’s just not a cross-platform platform. That’s not their problem, though.
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@SnoopJ No, meaning that application vendors are just fine shipping things that completely fail at the low end of tech specs.
Sorry for not being clear about that.
@xgranade ah, my mistake, I had your point backwards I think
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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.
Anyway, I still don't like Apple, I still think that *on the whole* they're net negative for computing, and severely so. But I try to also be intellectually honest and hold ~~nuanced views~~.
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@xgranade ah, my mistake, I had your point backwards I think
@SnoopJ No worries, I didn't express it as well as I could or should have!
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@xgranade my counter hot take is that it’s Apple saying “well may as well get money out of people who want nothing more than a browser to talk to chatbots through” but my brain is pretty cooked on ai paranoid takes
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@xgranade Apple ʜᴀꜱ built a platform⸺one can build complex functionality on top of SwiftUI for a really low net cost in RAM usage (because SwiftUI is all shared code). It’s just not a cross-platform platform. That’s not their problem, though.
@joXn Yeah, it's why I pluralized vendors. Electron sucks, but I can at least target it as a platform much easier than I can target the platforms tied to macOS. Individual vendors may have their own platforms, but as you note, Apple has no interest in making theirs cross-platform platforms.
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@SnoopJ No worries, I didn't express it as well as I could or should have!
@xgranade @SnoopJ yeah it's like a question of emphasis. just over-explaining for any passerby since this whole exchange is confusing
not "when PCs ship with 8GB *or less* of RAM…"
but "when *PCs* ship with 8GB or less of RAM…"
i.e. some random commodity vendor ships an 8GB machine, all the apps break on it, nobody cares, caveat emptor
whereas when *apple* builds a product with 8GB of RAM that is going to move 100 million units, app devs have to actually pay attention
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@xgranade @SnoopJ yeah it's like a question of emphasis. just over-explaining for any passerby since this whole exchange is confusing
not "when PCs ship with 8GB *or less* of RAM…"
but "when *PCs* ship with 8GB or less of RAM…"
i.e. some random commodity vendor ships an 8GB machine, all the apps break on it, nobody cares, caveat emptor
whereas when *apple* builds a product with 8GB of RAM that is going to move 100 million units, app devs have to actually pay attention
@xgranade @SnoopJ I actually think there's a nuance that may emerge later: these machines *do* have swap configured, and that internal storage isn't *too* bad in terms of speed, which means there's still an angle for app devs to not care where their app chugs along but is absolutely murdering the write cycles on the poor user's storage, shortening the device lifetime by years
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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.
@xgranade it's still absurd to me that this industry has found a way to make *8GB* of ram a 'modest limit'.
Part of that is just... I'm old and remember having a whole... 128MB of ram on my first computer (after we upgraded the ram).
but also just... I have a few old comps with 512MB-1GB that run fine still under slackware or debian (not "light" distros)
.... as long as you don't open a modern browser without a bunch of blockers of various things. -
@joXn Yeah, it's why I pluralized vendors. Electron sucks, but I can at least target it as a platform much easier than I can target the platforms tied to macOS. Individual vendors may have their own platforms, but as you note, Apple has no interest in making theirs cross-platform platforms.
@xgranade I _kind of_ like the Diet Electron approach of something like Dioxus, but with Dioxus I think the AI slop exposure risk factor is super-high, making the nominative similarity to “dioxin” bitterly apt.
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@xgranade @SnoopJ I actually think there's a nuance that may emerge later: these machines *do* have swap configured, and that internal storage isn't *too* bad in terms of speed, which means there's still an angle for app devs to not care where their app chugs along but is absolutely murdering the write cycles on the poor user's storage, shortening the device lifetime by years
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@xgranade it's still absurd to me that this industry has found a way to make *8GB* of ram a 'modest limit'.
Part of that is just... I'm old and remember having a whole... 128MB of ram on my first computer (after we upgraded the ram).
but also just... I have a few old comps with 512MB-1GB that run fine still under slackware or debian (not "light" distros)
.... as long as you don't open a modern browser without a bunch of blockers of various things.@miss_rodent Very much agreed.
