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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

"and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400"

Pardon?

You have a point. They're not similar. OTOH, people do compare them. I think Apple realizes this and the Macbook Neo is a brilliant move.

It doesn't cost $1000 to get into the MacBook experience anymore, so drastically more people will be buying them for their kids and more families will have MacOS as their default.

In the long run, I think we'll see more iPad-only families. The home computer is practically non-existent outside gaming niches or work-issued machines. We've had $700-800 Macbook Air models on sale for years now, same for the Mac Mini - little has changed. As cutesy as the shared computer ideal is, I see most people gravitating towards their phones and away from general purpose computing.

The problem is work is done mostly on computers though. Will it evolve to be all on tablets? It's possible, but will make workers slower

I thought the tablet space is pretty much dead? I don't see many on the shelves at the local hardware store (which I walk by mostly of curiosity). It seems all laptops, with a sizeable share of foldable - and even these are way more present than tablets. So no, I think the tablet train has long left (exception being the standing workers in some areas).

One reason I stopped buying a new iPad was because the hardware is great but the software prevents multiple users. Not all families can afford or would like to have one phone per person as well as one tablet per person. IMO, Apple is losing money by crippling the iPad.

It would be a brilliant move if it wasn't castrated with 8 GB, even my netbook from 2009 got upgraded to 16 GB during its lifetime, which ended in 2024.

A netbook from 2009, already had the capability to get RAM sticks up to 16 GB in total, go figure!

Is it a side effect of spiking ram prices and trying to meet their momentary price point?

It is a hard limit of using a phone SOC, it has what it has.

the A18 has a hard limit of 8GB of addressable memory, iirc

And they needed it.

An 8gb macbook air is sufficient for browsing, writing, and viewing. These machines are aimed at low end users / high school / cheap college machines.

Outside US those demographics will be buying cheaper PC laptops under 500 euro, with higher RAM.

Open a couple of Electron crap apps, and the 8 GB are gone.

But 8 GB on a Mac is way different (in a positive way) from 16 GB on a different OS. On Windows 11, I can’t even imagine anything lower than 32 GB being a decent experience.

Given the quality of macOS memory allocator that is whishful thinking.

My Windows 11 machines have 16 GB and work just fine.

It's kinda not. Windows has virtual memory compression by-default, and even most Linux distros provide zram as an install-time option.

I got the lowest of the low MacBooks on a black friday deal years ago for my wife that only had 8GB, thinking the same way. "It'll be fine for her needs." It was more than fine. It was good. Got myself one a month later. I don't know why but RAM is different on macOS.

Self suggestion I would say,

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

It is not hard to find radar issues on the matter.

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