Everyone has a MacBook Neo take, so here's mine.
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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.
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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
@xgranade @SnoopJ maybe app devs respond to the incentive and don't want users to see multi-second pauses in their UIs, but, I think there is a possibility that if this starts happening, Apple has a potential future lever: ship an OS feature that gives app store apps a swap quota. start trashing the internal SSD by being profligate with RAM use, and you get crashed by the OS or paused with a "this app dev sucks" modal until the user quits some other stuff
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@cthos @xgranade @SnoopJ when they did it with those models I just thought it was kinda negligent and *strongly* advised most customers (except those whose usage I knew would be unusually light) to avoid those spec levels even though they looked cheap. The neo's aggressive market segmentation actually makes me _way_ more confident that we will see mitigations and incentives that address that problem more broadly
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@miss_rodent Very much agreed.
@xgranade when I was first learning to program, 8GB might as well have been infinite RAM.
(says the squirrel who started with C & asm, and then moved to gameboy asm... and various other old consoles/comps, I def spent a lot of time in contexts where managing memory use is mandatory.
I imagine that's not super common nowadays.) -
@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.
@joXn Tauri is another interesting one along those lines... I think there can be some interesting examples of shipping web view components along with an application, but there has to be some way of making sure that the whole UI isn't running in a full-fledged browser.
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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. -
@xgranade when I was first learning to program, 8GB might as well have been infinite RAM.
(says the squirrel who started with C & asm, and then moved to gameboy asm... and various other old consoles/comps, I def spent a lot of time in contexts where managing memory use is mandatory.
I imagine that's not super common nowadays.)@miss_rodent Yeah, absolutely. I do think it's good to get a bit away from such tiny amounts of RAM that manually managing all of it is mandatory, and modern displays definitely push higher RAM requirements all the way up the stack, but we never should have landed at 8 GB being moderate.
Hell, even late 90s early aughts JVM applications managed similar latencies to what we have now, but on systems with ~128 MB of RAM. I don't want to go back to the JVM, not by a long shot, but still.
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