I have this exact build of MacBook Air and in day to day use browsing the web, doing some light coding, and connecting to Kubernetes clusters hosted in the cloud, I don't really notice. There is definitely some disk swapping occurring but you don't really notice it in small amounts due to how fast the SSDs are.
Would I recommend the 8GB of RAM to someone who wants to use it as their primary development machine or for heavy photo editing, absolutely not. Would I say it's OK for casual use, yes.
Do I think Apple is being stingy considering their incremental cost for an extra 4GB or 8GB of RAM in the base model would be tiny, yes.
I bought my gf an M3 pro with 8gb ram and text input in the browser is often slow as hell (Google Docs, Facebook Messenger, etc.). Takes a moment before a character appears after typing it. I've never owned a Mac myself so I believed Apple's marketing speak about 8gb being the 16gb on their platform (not to mention that the 16gb upgrade is ridiculously expensive) but boy are they wrong. Maybe in native applications their memory magic works but definitely not in a browser. She does some light React dev and it's been fine for that though (but not mind-blowing).
Yeah it sucks. I use an M1 8GB for work because at work we're not allowed to order CTO models :( We have to order through a reseller that refused to do this. It's very tough to work with (though I'm sure part of the reason is Microsoft's incompetence, their apps perform very poorly and a lot of them are electron crap now).
Apple saying the "our 8GB is equivalent to 16GB" is something they've always done. Even in the PowerPC days they were selling the "megaherz myth" as if their megahertzes were better than intel's.
Of course when they moved to intel Macs received a huge performance boost...
I have sadly to use one M1 with 8gb and it is really painful.
I think that a normal user will feel the bad effect of the low ram amount but will not really realize where the problem is coming from.
Switching from one app to another is painfully slow. It might take 1, 2 or more seconds to go from one app to another in my opinion.
The os is really greedily evicting app memory once you switch to another window. And reload it when you come back.
I even have the personal hypothesis that Apple is keeping as-is the ergonomically awful Dock because of that. As it is difficult to switch between multiple windows of a single app, you can't easily realize how show you pass from a window to another. Like a magic trick.
> I have sadly to use one M1 with 8gb and it is really painful.
I've been using an 8GB M1 for a couple of years, including for development with C#, Go, Python, and Rails. I've had triple-figures of browser tabs open, Office 2019 Mac, Affinity Designer, and more all running at once. And never in all those years have I experienced sluggishness or slowdown either in-app or during switching.
I don't doubt your experience, this is simply to say that not all observed behaviours can be assumed to be generally applicable.
that's crazy to me. I was given a 32GB MBP for work and found it to constantly eat all of the ram and slow down to the point of being useless and require restarts every few days. It took considerable active management to keep more than 4GB free. I upgraded to a higher ram machine now and all of my challenges went away.
My main workflows are python dev and data analysis, some CAD modeling with fusion, and inevitably keeping too many chrome tabs open. Still, with what seemed normal to me, 32 GB didn't cut it, but reading these discussions is crazy making since I seem to be the only one.
The real problem is that the default option is the one with mass distribution and if you want it on sale or discounted or on release day, it’s the one you are probably going to end up with that most users have. It’s not only the way you get soaked on the upgrade but the way most users have these low specced devices.
I thought this as well and bought my wife the 8GB model, thinking it would be enough for her casual use. With nothing open but Chrome or Safari (dozens of tabs, sure) it will lock up and sometimes even hard restart. 8GB is just not enough for anyone anymore.
Either there’s something much bigger running or the hardware is defective. I used an 8GB M1 with VSC, Podman, Slack, etc. for a few years during the pandemic and it was fine. Chrome is a notorious memory hog but even then it was okay so I’d review the installed extensions if it’s that high.
I'd strongly consider returning the machine. This is very far from my normal experience with an 8GB M1 over several years (as a developer as well as a casual user).
There's never a 'point' buying Apple regardless of light/heavy use. You buy Apple if you think it's the best OS/hardware combo, you don't if you prefer otherwise.
Even light use will benefit from long battery life, nice screens, and quality construction, and a low cost windows machine will not have that. You can get a good windows machine with comparable hardware, but then it's not low cost anymore.
If someone's primary use case is heavy media editing, I wouldn't recommend an Air in the first place. It has its uses for casual people and coders who primarily work in the cloud, but let's not pretend that it is a high end business level laptop.
I use a 2023 MacBook Air with 24GB memory, and I can’t tell the difference to a MacBook Pro.
Integrated memory on Apple Silicon has made the trade-offs much simpler to understand because there’s no separate GPU and VRAM to think about. The performance difference between Air and Pro models is so small, it’s irrelevant for practically anything.
I have used both. Air and Pro. For working remotely in the cloud on ML, nothing beats the Air. For nearly everything that runs locally and goes above light coding (e.g. modern web dev with endless node modules), the Pro is significantly better.
We have bought 200+ macbook pro’s over the years, but when the M3 air came out we started rolling that out to everyone including developers and it has been a huge success. I would only recommend Pro’s for heavy media editing applications right now. We don’t do any AI/ML stuff yet so not sure how that will change the landscape.
I use an Air for ML. It's perfect if you work in the cloud. Locally it's too much hassle. Not just because of the limited power, but because of lack of support for MPS in recent kernels in modern frameworks.
I always thought the sums people were paying for MBAs was absolutely outrageous. In tech I feel like MBAs can actually work against you and can be perceived as a red flag. I knew someone a decade ago who paid I believe $120k to Duke Fuqua for a mostly online MBA that also required travel to multiple international destinations. This was a person in their late 20s.
An MBA is a prerequisite for many high level jobs. Management consulting partner, investment banking managing director are just a few. There are paths to those roles that don’t include an MBA, but they are rare.
The reason people pay is the math works out. Spending $120k to unlock career tracks that include roles that pay $500,000 or more is a pretty straightforward cost-benefit analysis.
My spouse did an MBA at a top school and 15 years out a very large chunk of the class are CEOs of large corporations, founders of private equity firms, etc.
The value is mostly in the signaling and network. Being able to get time with half a dozen CEOs simply because you went to the same school is invaluable.
It's also true that MBAs used to be quite a bit cheaper, even accounting for inflation, and that there were almost certainly fewer opportunities for people with "just" solid STEM chops to earn much beyond mid-level professional salaries.
I’ve done part of an MBA program. I’ve only hit pause because I couldn’t make the workload work with how demanding my job is at the moment. That does mean that beyond experiencing the program itself, I spent a fair bit of time looking at MBA program curricula. What I found was a pretty significant amount of study into areas that to me seem integral to actually running a business in reality. The sort of stuff that techies love to pretend doesn’t exist, or that they can just intuit with a combination of reading a few Wikipedia articles + their largely incorrectly self-identified transferable expertise.
I don’t know if my MBA program is particularly good. Whilst it’s run by a legitimate institution it’s certainly not a particularly prestigious one. I’d expect that it is in a lot of ways very middle-of-the-road.
One thing it has done is reaffirm my pre-existing vague suspicion that, whilst there are obviously no shortage of formulaic, uninspired, and largely street-dumb MBAs out there, a lot of the hate for those with an MBA that I see in communities like Hacker News is probably misdirected hatred toward the realities of business. Especially given how many people here have grown up in a zero-interest environment where they could bounce from place to place being paid very well to sit around in beanbag chairs thinking about engineering problems whilst the money fairies without fail backed truckload after truckload of cash up to their San Francisco office loading docks.
Battery preconditioning for DC fast charging is available on some CCS cars as well and is getting more common. Sometimes it's manually trigger-able and sometimes it's integrated into navigation.
Exercising NSOs generates taxable income on the difference between the exercise price and the Fair Market Value (FMV) as determined by the current 409A valuation.
Exercising ISOs does not generate taxable income nor immediate capital gains when the option is exercised, but you will generate capital gains in the future on the difference between the sold price and the strike price when you sell your exercised options. If you are higher income, which is common if you work for a startup on the product and engineering teams, the difference between the strike price and the FMV when exercising the option counts towards AMT calculations.
It's common to pay AMT when exercising ISOs but you do generate AMT credits that can be used in future tax years when your taxable income and capital gains are below the threshold for triggering AMT.
So, should I expect that a first hire likely has options and a founder started with stock? Is there any reason a founder wouldn't just start with a percentage of the company.
The vast majority of candidates below the VP level will not be successful in negotiating the exercise window. Certainly not a startup past the seed round.
Also this title is clickbait, no one forced this person to pay anything. Walking away from equity for free is always an option that some people take.
I have a 2018 Mac Mini driving two 4K displays with Display Port over USB-C cables. I previously was driving 2 x 24" 2K displays (same cables) and had no performance problems. Once I upgraded to the 4K displays I've observed very noticeable display draw performance issues. It's not enough for me to give up the 4K displays but I'm wondering if this is improved on the current M1 Mac mini?
I haven’t noticed any display lag on my end. But I don’t do latency sensitive things like gaming.
1 monitor (Dell P2715Q) is hooked up using DisplayPort. The other (LG 27” IPS 4K) is using HDMI 2.0. Both are running 4K retina at 60Hz without any issues.
I had so much trouble finding this out before I bought it which is why I am vocal about the fact that it works.
Thanks for the information! I am tempted to upgrade my 2018 when the next revision (M1X or M2?) Mac mini comes out to improve the display refresh rate issues.
Would I recommend the 8GB of RAM to someone who wants to use it as their primary development machine or for heavy photo editing, absolutely not. Would I say it's OK for casual use, yes.
Do I think Apple is being stingy considering their incremental cost for an extra 4GB or 8GB of RAM in the base model would be tiny, yes.