biggerbogboy

I haven’t read up a huge lot on the benchmarks of it, but from what I’ve heard I think that’s right.

On the ram front, I’ve heard it’s just a limitation of the a18 pro chipset, not Apple being stingy, as that chipset can only support up to 8gb of ram total.

Also, apparently the a18 pro is similar to the m1 in terms of performance, which the base m1 beat out the core i9 9880H, which was the processor of the most powerful MacBook Pro pre-Apple silicon, so the a18 pro would likely be able to do a lot more than light browsing and document editing, although the limiting factor is unfortunately the 8gb of ram that just can’t be expanded.

For the target audiences, people just buying a low cost laptop for browsing as well as students, it’s unlikely the common person wouldn’t go directly to Apple to get the newest product. There will definitely be some who opt to get older second hand tech instead, but the vast majority would rather get something they have assurance is brand new and in fully working condition.

Personally, if I needed a laptop, I’d weigh my options both in first party offerings as well as the second hand market, and I’d probably come to the conclusion to just buy two broken laptops and combine them, but it’s rare to find someone who’s willing to splice two computers together for university or high school they’re going to in a month or so, and even if it’s more common, it’s still rare to find someone willing to dive head first into the second hand market when they don’t know how to check for fake listings, horrible deals and genuine bargains, which is why most opt for buying directly from manufacturers or from consumer electronics stores.

I don’t get the complaining about the amount of ram, this is intended for students and other people with less demanding workflows. If it doesn’t fit your specific workflow, it’s fine, it’s just not for you, it’s just like people hating on Chromebooks because you can’t play ray traced cyberpunk on it or edit 4K video without stuttering.

There’s also the fact that macOS memory management is simplified due to having a singular memory pool between all processors, as well as the aggressive memory compression.

And those of you saying “8gb isn’t even enough for web browsing”, how? I’m using a decade old ex-school laptop on a daily basis, with 4gb of soldered DDR4 and a celeron n4100, I have I’d say around 30 tabs open at once and switch probably a couple hundred times in a period of around 5 hours, fully sustaining an interior design course with only a few very rare stutters.

There’s also the fact I’ve heard from many base model MacBook Air m1 users that it barely ever hitches, one of those is my sister, her workflow is heavy image editing, video editing and other design work, she has not had a single issue with it, and that’s with the bloated adobe suite.

And people misunderstand the reasons Apple solders their memory, sure it’s firstly to lock the consumer into a specific tier, but it’s also so their unified memory architecture can work as flawlessly as possible. You can’t add SODIMMs or LPCAMM modules to a MacBook, just like how you cant either with a strix halo APU just like Framework demonstrated, inconsistent signal integrity causes enough issues that it isn’t commercially viable.

Sure, I’d love Apple to make modular memory a thing for their Macs, but quite frankly, I doubt they can even achieve it without any compromises. There’s also the fact that I’d love if Apple could’ve put 16gb of unified memory into the MacBook neo with no raise in price, but realistically, the chipset design they chose, the a18 pro, only supports up to 8gb, and quite frankly they would never achieve a better price today while also designing it to handle a dozen memory tiers, as either they’d need to choose an M series chipset or design a dozen different types of A series packages with some future chipset that doesn’t exist right now, defeating the purpose of having a low price. The low price isn’t just due to the external design choices, it’s also because they chose to only build a single package, an 8gb a18 pro, which would reduce costs overall for the model as manufacturing can just scale, not increase in complexity.

I don’t mind if you downvote, it’s just a bunch of gripes I have with the overall reaction about this frankly pretty awesome new product offering, even if I don’t really like Apple a whole lot.

Both. Both is good.

That’s just MFA on steroids. My government account has less verification lol