[dangus]

Can you go into more specific details about these observations you made? Which people were they?

Do you have any benchmarks that show this “faster than a PC with double the RAM” claim?

Because when I saw real world tests on the Neo versus the Acer Aspire AI 14, the Acer machine was faster at video playback in Adobe Premiere (as an example) due to the lack of memory pressure.

I can tell you at work we have a mixed environment and the Windows users and Mac users don’t seem to have any difference in difficulty doing things like showing their work in presentations. Our company metrics show zero difference in employee productivity based on what operating system they use (I’m a manager and can see these things).

[carlosjobim]

Well, just about everyone I know who uses Windows machines. The most common problem is that the laptop starts downloading and installing Windows updates as soon as it boots up. This hogs all of the CPU and all of the internet bandwidth. And there's no way for non-technical users to understand what's going on. They just say "Well, my computer is slow because it's old. Better go and buy a new one soon, what has the most RAM per dollar spent?" Because their techie friends told them that this is the only thing which matters on a computer.

Or there's a ton of pop-ups of every kind when they're using the machine. Most people just click the biggest button on any popup appearing, without even looking at what it says.

And these are people who work professionally with their computers, but they're not sysadmins or operating system experts.

I don't doubt what you say about Adobe Premiere playback speed. That might be an exception where more RAM does actually matter. But that's hardly a reason to dismiss the 8GB Macbooks. They are great for most users and most professional users.