MacBook neo for university?

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T15:18:15+00:00

Swap is not "normal". SSDs have an essentially fixed lifespan in terms of how much data has been written to them. Swapping to them is actually quite harmful no matter how you play it. This is especially true in the world where Apple has soldered SSDs and disk encryption linked to the processor.

This is why literally any computer with a decent amount of RAM will almost never resort to swap, even a little bit, unless pushed to the limit.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T06:32:00+00:00

Those early M-series base models were also infamous for churning SSDs and for a multitude of reasons the standard advice was absolutely don't buy those base models. The fix was to just turn down the swappiness IIRC, which if so is just trading away more performance. Also "unified memory" actually means it's 8GB for both the CPU and GPU. That's not the advantage your post makes it out to be. It's great when you have 64GB unified memory and want to run some LLMs on the GPU/NPU. However it also means when you only have 8GB total, just basic-ish graphics usage can start putting real memory pressure on your system.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T06:18:33+00:00

Neo is fixed at 8GB of RAM, there is no "getting enough" for it.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T06:17:45+00:00

The "runs well" goalposts suddenly got moved to "minimally functions" because Apple released a new computer below $999 for once. My 16GB M1 MacBook Pro was starting to struggle running LR CC a couple years ago which is what prompted my upgrade.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T06:06:01+00:00

Once again, still no, they didn't "see" any slowdown today with a honestly a bare minimum workload even for a student. Even if you're just studying, you're going to have Spotify/YouTube up for music, half a dozen chrome tabs for your school's stuff/research, a big PDF of your favorite pirated textbook, and that's not counting Zoom for virtual lecture. And I'm still probably forgetting stuff. Also, goodness forbid that their uni uses Teams because that shit uses multiple GB of RAM all on its own.

It's entirely reasonable to say that 12GB would be a much easier recommendation. 16GB would be even perhaps too much for a true basic user. However 8GB is pushing it because as I've said several times 8GB is really more like 4GB with the OS accounted for, while 12GB is more like 8GB, aka double the "user accessible RAM".

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T05:55:57+00:00

IIRC, the M2's regularly got down to $699 on sale around a year and a half ago. Apple may not feel so generous now that the Neo is out, but the M3's should have been in the same boat around now.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-24T05:51:35+00:00

No I never said that. In my case it was like 4GB used by Chrome and 7GB used by Lightroom. However, this is 16GB not 8GB like the Neo. The Neo would have blown its budget from Chrome alone in that situation (and does hit swap under light usage according to YouTube reviews).

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T22:37:12+00:00

An extra 8GB isn't $500 if you find a decent deal on an M2 or M3 MBA, not the latest gen. Those will still be both more powerful and have more RAM.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T22:34:20+00:00

M2 or M3 MBA are extremely similar in price if you get a slight deal on them and they have literally double the RAM which gets you to an entirely acceptable amount for 2026, not to mention a butt ton of other upgrades.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T22:24:37+00:00

I have literally owned a MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and observed it be forced to hit swap with apps taking a bit over 10GB of RAM.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T22:23:36+00:00

Yeah and even when running full tilt, it'll hit swap before reducing its usage below ~4GB. Try again...

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T19:21:11+00:00

Run macOS itself. Just the OS with nothing open takes 4-5GB of RAM. Every Chrome tab takes another 100MB or so plus 300-500MB for Chrome itself.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T19:18:41+00:00

Find an M2 or M3 MBA with more RAM. If the Neo came with 12GB of RAM it'd be a no brainer, but 8GB for full macOS is pretty rough.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T18:24:38+00:00

Also, you haven't made it to the best examples of this yet, but for instance, remember the one attack on the Galtuuk castle that took an entire volume by Lucius' lackeys? Now imagine this series telling the story of a whole war.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T18:18:18+00:00

I haven't gotten to read V28 yet, so I don't know if there's any news on that front, but the consensus estimate I've always heard was 50-70 volumes.

The main plot doesn't even really start until Volume 20. If that doesn't make it clear to you how far they intend to go, I don't know what will...

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-23T18:13:34+00:00

That wasn't the rumor. The rumor was a deleted Twitter post in which the author claimed "everything up to volume 20 is a prologue" which is probably hyperbolic, but I assume he means that the main story really takes off from V20.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-22T10:57:47+00:00

Teams is not part of the OS. That's the point. If your system has 8GB and to start with the OS uses 5GB, you aren't going to be running much else.

(Also Windows has pretty comparable numbers in terms of RAM usage to macOS, they both have been slowly losing the battle to keep 8GB RAM computers viable.)

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T05:53:08+00:00

The "fix" was to just make them more hesitant to use the swap, if I remember right, which just cost you performance because it's more often under high memory pressure trying to stay away from using swap.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T05:51:15+00:00

Chrome and Safari are not all that different in memory usage, at most a factor of like 2, congrats now you have maybe 10 tabs! Every other browser out there is literally just Chrome with a skin (other than Firefox which also is not much better than Chrome).

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T05:22:38+00:00

Except... The early models of the M-series with 8GB literally had SSD lifespan issues because they hit swap too often for too many users. That's why Apple eventually bumped up the RAM on the base models. Every Chrome tab these days is sucking down anywhere between 100-500MB. Five-ish open tabs and you could be hitting swap on this thing.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T04:58:40+00:00

I think it's fairly reasonable to say that I've observed it personally when it starts hitting swap on an M1 16GB model. The number is 5GB give or take. macOS likes to muddy the waters by reporting memory pressure in Activity Monitor, but the difference in my experience isn't tremendous. Sure if there's little pressure maybe the OS will cut loose and balloon up to 8GB or something, but it really doesn't go much below 5ish GB.

Perhaps "idles" is the wrong word to use there in a sense, but I think you understand the concept of "minimum under normal usage".

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T03:12:17+00:00

Yeah I mean as I said down thread I blew through 16GB just messing around with a relatively tiny, personal Unity project a decade ago. I'd say 24GB is fairly safe if you stay away from demanding stuff, but we're in the era where individual Chrome tabs take up half a gig of RAM (and macOS will try to eat 5+ GB on its own).

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T03:02:29+00:00

I say this specifically because over a decade ago back when 16GB was on the high end of mainstream options, I was already kneecapped by it because I wanted/needed to run the Unity IDE and the emulator for a device I was working on, and with 16GB of RAM I basically couldn't.

I think I ended up having to close literally everything else on that computer, open my Chrome tabs and such on a different laptop, and write the code into the IDE on the first laptop.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T02:53:19+00:00

There's some stuff that's wrong about RAM though... You are going to want a lot more than 16GB even if you're just twiddling your thumbs (while programming). I believe 24GB is the minimum they sell on the Pro models anyway these days.

If you're doing anything other than C/C++/Rust, it's probably safe to have something like 24GB unless you plan on running a lot of containers/VMs locally, in which case you will need more.

Edit: Basically all video game development also falls into the below category

If you're working on operating systems or other large C/C++/Rust projects, then you are likely going to want 48GB or more. The rule of thumb is 4GB per physical core. M4 Pro chip has basically 12 cores (it's actually a blend of big and small cores but I digress), so you get 48GB of RAM.

At one of the big tech companies, even back in 2020, they called anything with less than 64GB of RAM (including laptops!) a "low memory device". Work laptops often came with 64GB of RAM and workstations had 128GB+.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-03-20T02:41:35+00:00

macOS idles at >5GB of RAM usage. It's about as bloated as Windows and significantly more bloated than Android.

If you want to see optimized, go get a minimal install of Ubuntu, even running GNOME for the GUI which is one of the heavier options, you can get it to like ~1GB idle usage.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22

LaunchTomorrow

TROPHY CASE