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Comment by no_op | Hacker News Reader

It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.

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> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone

I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.

macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.

Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.

Why not? They’re the same core OS.

Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.

Isn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway?

Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.

People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.

They added iOS-esque stuff a long time ago in Lion/Mavericks like “App Nap” and “automatic termination” so it kinda has this, but it’s inconsistent.

They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.

iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.

Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.

This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.

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