[NearAP]

I think the 2 laptops you mentioned are targeting different markets.

The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)

The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.

8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps

[kettlecorn]

At this point I think few people really will care about that spec difference.

The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.

Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.

[thewebguyd]

> The accumulated brand trust of Apple

This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).

You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.

[leptons]

>They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience.

"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

[thewebguyd]

And despite antenna gate, the iPhone 4 was still the best smartphone of that year and leaps ahead of it's closest competition (the Galaxy S), and remained the #1 best selling smartphone at year after launch

[leptons]

You can only buy hardware that runs Apple software from Apple, but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have. Apple is and always has been a minority player in the overall smartphone market (and desktop/laptop as well).

Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...

[thewebguyd]

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was the single most purchased smartphone model in the US between 2010 and 2011 (during antenna gate that we are talking about).

Android has the majority share because "Android" is anything from a $100 piece of junk to a $1200 phone. If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.

Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.

If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

[alwillis]

> but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have

"far outsell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The iPhone has a market share of 60% in the US [1]. The leading Android manufacturer Samsung has a market share of 22% in the US.

These numbers are from last year; the iPhone sold like hotcakes in the European 5, the US (of course), Australia, Mainland China and Japan [2].

BTW, the European 5 consists of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Apple by itself globally makes up about 43% of the revenue in the smartphone market [3].

Yes, devices running the Android operating system sell a lot of units; the majority of them are no-frills devices from manufacturers most people have never heard of. Which is fine—having a phone is better than not having one.

But don’t act like Android is some kind of juggernaut; these five markets represent 2.24 billion people and 60% of the world's GDP. Android isn’t the bestselling phone in any of these countries.

# Top Selling Models

    European 5
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 2    | Samsung Galaxy A55 |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 16          |
    | 5    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    
    US
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 15         |
    | 5    | iPhone 14         |
    
    Australia
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 12         |
    | 5    | Samsung Galaxy A35|
    
    Mainland China
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 16          |
    | 4    | Huawei Mate 60 Pro |
    | 5    | Huawei Mate 60     |
    
    Japan
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16          |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 14          |
    | 5    | Google Pixel 8a    |

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

[2]: "iPhone 16 secures top-selling global smartphone model in competitive holiday period" — https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/technology/iphone-16-secu...

[3]: "iPhone rakes in 3 times the revenue of any rival" — https://www.cultofmac.com/news/iphone-rakes-in-3-times-the-r...

[kettlecorn]

Apple certainly puts out experiences that leave much to be improved but to be pedantic the word 'subpar' implies below the 'par'. If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it.

Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

[leptons]

>If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it

That's clearly subjective. What you will accept from Apple is unacceptable to others as garbage, the same as you dismiss anything from Microsoft.

>Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

And yet Apple just copied Windows Vista with their "glass" monstrosity that is universally hated and has been lambasted widely. Again, you may love that, but that would put you in the minority.

[kettlecorn]

Obviously it's a subjective discussion but it's still a meaningful subjective discussion.

I was deeply into Microsoft products for a while. I got my start coding an indie game for the Xbox, I spent years using Windows Phone and developing an app for the platform, I interned at Microsoft twice and then later worked there as a software engineer for a period.

While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.

My opinion about Microsoft's product culture is not formed lightly.

I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand. It's not just marketing spin, it's real actionable decisions over decades that accrue to brand perception.

[alwillis]

> "You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.

[leptons]

Okay... how about, Apple put the charging port on a wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse.

I could go on, and on...

[matwood]

Which makes for a great internet complaint, but I’ve owned that mouse for years and it’s never once been a thing I thought about in practice.

[alwillis]

As they say "past performance does not guarantee future results".

That version of the Magic Mouse is also over 10 years old…

[1attice]

The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

[matwood]

The VP by most accounts is best in class. It’s just too damn expensive. There’s also still an open question if people really want to strap goggles to their face.

[thewebguyd]

Fair enough, although I wouldn't call the vision pro a bad product necessarily, it's just too expensive for what it is.

[1attice]

Yes, you see them on the subway all the time

[spacedcowboy]

I bought mine for air travel, when I can strap it to my head for 12 hours and be in a completely different place. I can lie back in my lay-flat seat, so there’s no weight pulling my head down, and it’s an absolutely fantastic experience.

I fly sufficiently that this is well worth it. The fact that it doubles as a mobile computer in the hotel room is just icing on the cake.

So subway ? Maybe not, but don’t pretend they don’t have their own niche…

[pjmlp]

In laptop keyboards, UI refactorings, or Siri?

Where is exactly the premium quality?

[kettlecorn]

Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.

Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.

Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.

Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.

Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.

[pjmlp]

There is no room for imperfections when paying premium.

Where is the Apple from "I am a PC, I am a Mac"?

[sbuk]

Evidently, and especially in comparison to Windows 11, alive and well. In rude health in fact.

[akdev1l]

MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.

I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.

Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.

I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine

[MrDrMcCoy]

Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

[deepthaw]

I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

[astrange]

You can post images in Slack and use text formatting. Those are things that use memory.

[abujazar]

Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

[astrange]

Slack is an Electron app.

[jshen]

Gifs. I'm only half joking.

[akdev1l]

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

[Kirby64]

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

[vunderba]

Is Slack that much worse of a memory hog than Discord? Aren’t they both built on electron?

[Kirby64]

Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.

[alwillis]

You can make a pretty good electron app or one that kinda sucks. Slack is in the latter category.

[vunderba]

VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.

[Schiendelman]

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

[MrDrMcCoy]

I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.

[briandear]

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

[Izikiel43]

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.

[carlosjobim]

Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.

[prmph]

Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.

If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

[garbageman]

I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.

But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.

[prmph]

> 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026

I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.

Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?

And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.

[astrange]

Web pages are very complicated and there's no pressure on people to make less complicated ones, nor is there any way there could be pressure on them.

Images, complicated CSS, JavaScript ads, they can all use lots of memory!

[carlosjobim]

It depends on how you define "serious work". Is it to get the best results possible, or is it to tax a computer as much as possible? Programmers would usually answer the latter, while users would answer the former.

That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.

Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.

[vunderba]

As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.

I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.

I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.

[AlotOfReading]

Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.

Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?

[jshen]

If you're trying to link clang, this laptop is not for you. It's for people that would consider a chromebook for their use case.

[prmph]

Usually the problem then is more fundamental.

Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.

I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.

I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.

I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.

[AlotOfReading]

Rust has similar issues with memory usage during linking as C++.

I can use a build server when I want one, but that's not always appropriate. Local builds are useful.

[restes]

>People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.

[Bluecobra]

I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...

[the_overseer]

Or, she can keep the macbook air as it basically has the same specs as the neo. What is the point of buying the same laptop twice?

[benterix]

> Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM.

They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"

[carlosjobim]

Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.

[abrouwers]

My spouse bought a mac and asks me (mostly a linux user, and I'm happy to help) for support somewhat regularly (mostly recently, for a tahoe upgrade). It's not the golden unicorn people paint it to be. 8gb is insane in 2026.

[swiftcoder]

It may not be a golden unicorn, but I find it is quite a lot better than providing support for the Windows laptops they used to buy from random department stores on rock-bottom sales... Nothing quite like a $200 PC laptop stocked with OEM bloatware

[deepthaw]

Until 1/3 of your hard drive space is taken up by weird cache stuff that MacOS doesn’t explain nor offer a straightforward way to clean up.

[astrange]

If it's cache it gets automatically deleted. If it doesn't get automatically deleted it's not a cache and is a bug.

[olnluis]

I like my MB Pro but it has serious audio and external display issues. I've had to remove spotlight indexing to prevent obscure OOM issues. One time I woke up to open my laptop and find it's screen cracked for no apparent reason. Since I couldn't prove it wasn't my fault I was charged for the repair anyway and I'm grateful to myself that I had AC+ because I might have as well just bought another laptop if not. At the end of the day, it's still just a computer.

[spiderfarmer]

Is it hard for you to imagine that people who'll buy the Neo don't care about specs at all?

I mean, look at the colors!