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by justonceokay 77 days ago
The quibbling about ram is strange only because Apple is much better positioned to utilize ram since they are vertically integrated. I produce music and occasionally compile Haskell on my 2016 MacBook with an i3 and 8gigs of ram. So I’m in the 99th percentile power user and a 10 year old machine works great. I bet the new Mac would be even better.

It doesn’t have 8gigs of ram to cheat the consumer. It’s because this company can do 10000 hours of user testing to see what people need to do their normal people things.
1 comments
p_ing 77 days ago
No, they're not "better positioned" to utilize memory.

NT has a far better VMM than macOS does and handles OOM significantly better than macOS (and Linux, for that matter).

Look no further than the various Mac subreddits for applications such as TextEdit, Calculator, Safari, and other first and third party applications leaking like a sieve to the point of OOM for multiple versions of macOS at this point.

Not to mention, Macs are sharing that precious memory with the CPU; on those 8GiB machines, leaving 7.5GiB or less (depending on what you're doing) for the kernel to use for non-graphics services.

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delusional 77 days ago
> NT has a far better VMM than macOS does and handles OOM significantly better than macOS (and Linux, for that matter).

That's one of my great frustrations with Windows. NT is a fine kernel. The userspace on top of that is fucking terrible though.

When people compare "operating systems" they're not comparing the kernel. They're at the most technical comparing the userspace tools shipped with that kernel, and at their most general the "ethos" of the developers that build the ecosystem. The terrible experience on windows of every programing having an installer that pokes around god knows where in the registry is just as much an experience of the Windows operating system as piping curl into bash is on Linux.

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DaiPlusPlus 76 days ago
> NT has a far better VMM than macOS does and handles OOM significantly better than macOS (and Linux, for that matter).

All of them handle OOM the same way: paging to disk with subsequent thrashing. How can any OS be better than any other in that respect?

If your computing experience leaves much to be desired it’s more-often-than-not the fault of the fact more and more applications are eschewing (admittedly neglected) efficient native platforms and using Electron/WebViews.

…looking at you, Balena Etcher. No-one needs a 200MB front-end for `dd`.

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