I assume the logic is that you can now sell the TV for less than competitors, which would surely bring customers. Seems pretty straightforward and inline with how the whole TV broadcast industry has subsidized content with ads for decades.
They're a customer already if they're opening the home screen and they probably already mounted it on their wall so fuck them. Show them ads. Also turn on the microphone in the background (what my Hisense tv does).
TVs are now a commodity that competes almost solely on price. You can walk into most big box stores in North America and buy a TV that will display at a higher resolution than your eyes are physically capable of processing at the distance of the average living room, have a screen bigger than the average person's wingspan, and it'll cost well under $500. If you don't keep the price low you're going to lose sales. Since you're not making cash on the front-end, you make it by selling the ad space.
Everyone who could want a TV more-or-less has one. You either cut quality so they have to buy 'em more often, or you monetize what's already there. They're probably doing both, but this is an example of the latter.
Interesting consideration, 'mandates' and all. Definitely in camp 'toss the output', here. I think I'll see 'morality' leaving when $EMPLOYER fires 'professional discretion'... forcing usage and, ultimately, debasing the position.
edit: Peer said it well, IMO. The consequences aren't really yours. Also: something, something, Goodhart's Law.
It might be because of me being relatively new to the Apple ecosystem (I got my first developer Mac in 2020), but to this day I have no idea what is it that it's SO bad about Tahoe.
Not much IMO has changed. I set reduced transparency anyway and that removed the main issues. Some of the corners are overly rounded but that seems pretty minor.
On the other hand, I'm glad people are making a lot of noise about it because it would be nice if Apple could spend a couple of OS cycles on the basics of improved UX.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
That's good info thanks and you are right I didn't take that into account. I do however think that 8GB may be basically usable now but I'd like to see students able to use these machines for a decent length of time and to be able to become digital creators using them. I get it won't edit video or do 3d modelling the same way a Macbook Pro can but it needs to do enough to get students interested.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.
In the workplace, it does not matter as it’s not your device anyway (or buy something powerful if it’s a consultancy). For most utilitarian uses, you only have to endure a few.
But I would expect you have more choice if it’s a personal computer, including paying the additional cost in memory and performance if the final choice is bloated software.
This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
“If you see anybody [building electron apps] in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere!” - a reasonable person, probably
How anyone could think their chat app or text editor should be able to bring a 32GB 8-core machine to a crawl is beyond me. I can have about 200 browser tabs open, but one discord chat open in the background and I’m stuttering. It’s offensive.
> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.
That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.
The performance gap between Apple’s flash and a typical aftermarket NVMe drive in a Windows laptop is more attributable to controller design and integration than to trace length.
Apple can get away with less RAM because their flash storage is fast enough to make swapping barely noticeable. In contrast, most Windows machines incur a significant performance penalty when swapping.
If by basic you mean running a simple Python script then sure; but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter.
> but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter
I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.
On the other hand, Apple pushes Xcode & iPhone development quite heavily to students (and not say Python or JS), so it’s definitely something they care about.
There can be different cohorts of students. If a student is at the point where they can start exploring iOS development they can perhaps have a swing at it with this machine. In reality, they'll have been using this machine, know enough about the limitations, and be thinking of upgrading.
Kids already are well aware of iPhone upgrades. Parents will get them this machine. They'll get going and soon enough be badgering their parents for an upgrade to a more competent machine. That is all by design while being an affordance for people who can only get in at the cheap end.
Atleast on Linux, I have been able to do almost everything in 8gb without any concern but I have the macbook air which has 16 gb and this can also do everything pretty much.
So IMO in 8GB most types of coding is possible actually.
But regarding Xcode+Iphone simulator, I am not sure if that's possible tho. It's possible to run android simulator on Linux 8 GB with waydroid while being pretty smooth. So theoretically could be possible but I am not familiar with building with Xcode/Iphone simulator.
The relationship between coding ability and memory requirement is nonlinear, right? Just a short Python code and an ide? Probably fine. Some complex ide with all sorts of agentic stuff? Need more ram. True enlightenment? Vim even with some unnecessary extensions will run on megabytes.
I've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.
I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.
Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.
> Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine
Even as a main machine for most people. Heck I could probably even get away with it. I have my work laptop that's technically my "main" machine as I spend 8+ hours a day on it, and it's sufficiently beefy.
I hardly do much on a personal computer (not counting my gaming desktop), this neo would be more than enough for my non-work needs.
Granted, I don't currently have a need for it as I have my own MBA and an iPad pro, but if I had neither this would definitely be a no brainer and I could confidently recommend this over pretty much any off-the-shelf budget windows laptop to anyone who asks me "What laptop should I buy?"
My 2010 Macbook Pro with 8GB works still. Not a daily driver anymore, but Word, Excel, Lightroom, Garageband, MainStage etc work just fine. Youtube videos up to 1080p play without stuttering in Floorp. It's not quick, but it is useable.
I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.
Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…
But I rarely use Windows. I used to like it but for me XP was so ugly and bloated I switched to Linux and OS X full-time. I've never looked back.
I just play occasionally to keep my skills vaguely current. Sometimes I need to work with it.
Windows 11 is awful. Bloated, full of ads and nags, forcibly keeps your stuff in the crappy MS cloud drive for which there's no Linux GUI client.
You can't even put the taskbar on the left edge where it belongs.
Worse than Vista or Win ME or even Win 8.x.
I moved all my emergency Windows partitions to Win10 IoT LTSC. Quite unbloated, proper local accounts, no Store, no Onedrive, no Modern apps at all. It's what Win10 should have been.
I moved all my LAN machines to IoT LTSC 2021 a year ago. Though I don’t regret it, be aware that update delay limits are the same as other Windows OS versions; that useful things like WSL2 will need installing from the app store to get the systemd version, and you’ll need to install the Windows app store from an enthusiast repo on Github; that Windows major version number is a fair way behind, affecting max Docker dated releases and same for many other frameworks; etc. It’s not that I meet a new limit every day, but certainly every few weeks.
I almost never use Windows, and I don't want things like WSL or Docker anyway. I mainly keep it around for things like upgrading firmware, occasionally flashing new ROMs onto phones, stuff like that.
I tried the MyWhoosh virtual-cycling app on one of my boxes.
(I just Googled that link -- it might not be the right one. MyWhoosh is only available on the Store. It refused to run on my elderly GPU anyway, though.)
reply