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Comment by TheRoque | Hacker News Reader

13 inch screen though.. it's really small

And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say

I'm seeing a lot of "8GB ought to be enough for anybody" here over the last week....

I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.

I forgot about magical Mac memory.

Just keep it under one browser tab, bro.

It actually is magic Mac memory. No joke. 8GB on macOS is good enough for 80% of people.

Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific.

Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.

Swap on macOS is incredibly good. Not sure how Apple does it. Maybe hardware compression?

> Not sure how Apple does it.

They do it by prematurely wearing down the soldered SSD just in time for you to buy a new laptop.

As far as I know, there is no M1 8GB SSD wear down complaints in 2026.

There are - people are complaining about SSD health

Source? Is it SSDs breaking down or people are just looking at SSD usage and then get scared?

It's no different from NT in that respect. macOS is significantly worse at handling OOM events than NT (even NT4, for that matter).

I don’t see much “for anybody”, but I do see a lot of “for students / people who browse the web / word processing” which is still a pretty large set of people, and the Neo handles those workloads just fine

Literally two comments above mine in this discussion:

> The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.

I rest my case.

"students / web browsing / word processing" == typical people, but maybe that's my own biases

Steam report is a good thing to look at:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac

For Mac, 30% are at 8GB, 43% at 16GB.

Windows has nearly nobody below 16GB (27%) and the biggest is 32GB (58%)

13” is not really that small. It’s a screen size many people choose.

The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly. It seems pretty clearly a play for students who will eventually enter the business world with their personal laptop preferences.

> The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly.

This really is the key point.

The Neo is not a work laptop (At least, not for engineers). It's a low-end laptop designed to compete with Chromebooks.

I spent one year using an M1 8GB Macbook Air as a professional developer during covid. The A18 Pro flies around the M1. You can definitely use this as a dev - especially when we're just prompting AI nowadays.

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