Apple MacBook: Rumored low-cost laptop arriving next week with several possible downgrades

[Redaktion]

Apple's budget MacBook is now closer than ever, expected to arrive sometime next week. We have witnessed plenty of rumors and leaks regarding the same, and here is almost everything we know so far.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Rumored-low-cost-laptop-arriving-next-week-with-several-possible-downgrades.1238164.0.html

[GeorgeS]

Your article:
"A paltry 8 GB of RAM may have been enough in 2020, but it most definitely isn't now. Students, particularly, often have to keep multiple tabs open for research and other purposes, which will surely make the system struggle to some extent, if the rumors are true."

Is honestly COMICAL at best!! ROTFLAMO!!!!

Given GoogleAI claiming that the median webpage is <=3MB how exactly is the "8 GB of RAM" an issue? YOU must be thinking of WINDOW'S installs with included BLOATWARE!!

Later on you mention that the new model might ONLY have Apple M1 like performance however even for a 'entry level' device is HUGE PERFORMANCE (IE: Awesome!!) especially with MACOS!!

NBC's bias and lack of meaningful understanding of computer requirements are clearly showing here.

Typed on a 2013 era i5(2C/4T)/8GB/256GB Macbook-Pro 13".

(BTW: with >100 browser tabs open)

[Worgarthe]

GeorgeS said it all well already, but I'll give numbers about this comedy:

A paltry 8 GB of RAM may have been enough in 2020, but it most definitely isn't now. Students, particularly, often have to keep multiple tabs open for research and other purposes, which will surely make the system struggle to some extent, if the rumors are true.

The numbers are: https://imgur.com/a/o8nXOdK

So these are just top of my tabs (39 of them opened between private and normal mode) in Firefox on my 16 GB RAM X1 Carbon. Only two of them are around 1 GB.

Tab unloading exists for many years in Firefox (and literally in all other browsers): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox

Average SSD in modern lower-end Macs has RND4K (Q32T1) around 330 MB/s for both R/W (important for recently stored tabs) and SEQ around 4000 MB/s R and 2500 MB/s W (important for tabs stored and not accessed within at least 60 seconds, or more ofc).
 
Meaning that each 1 GB "heavy" (in)active tab removed from RAM and loaded onto SSD will take a whole of 4000/1000=0.250 ms to load once it's accessed again. 250 ms to load from the SSD. Very struggle, very wow, yeah. Not.
 
You can have 500 tabs opened equally with 8 GB and 128 GB RAM. A USER is a bottleneck because there is simply no way in hell that a person can react that fast to switch between hundreds of INACTIVE tabs that fast. A user, not the system.
 
So yes, 8 GB is insufficient for many purposes - but definitely not for browsing, lol. Do the numbers, and learn how browsers work. We are not in 2011 anymore where many opened tabs would freeze the system because of RAM at 100% usage.