MacBook Neo hands-on: Apple build quality at a substantially lower price

The Neo won't be for everyone, but Apple has managed to preserve a premium feel.

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I imagine the A18pro performs better than it does on a phone, at least for longer periods, simply because of better heat dissipation and thermal headroom.

 

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Yeah, I was thinking the 8 GB RAM might be fine if you’re just using Safari, but god help you if you’re trying to use Chrome or Firefox with a bunch of extensions.

Edit: I was curious was my normal browser RAM usage looked like, so here's one data point. On my 14" M3 Pro w/ 18 GB RAM, I have 3 Firefox windows open, 12 total tabs, 2 separate profiles, a handful of extensions between the profiles. The about:memory page for each profile adds up to about 4200 MB of resident memory total.

With a handful of other apps open, Activity Monitor says 15.5 GB of the 18 GB memory is used. (This surprised me!) And those aren't exactly compute-intensive apps either - we're talking things like iMessage, Photos, Discord. (A couple hundred MB of usage does come from a 2nd user which is logged into this laptop but doesn't have any apps open.)

I don’t expect you to know this, but Macs pretty much use most of their available RAM all the time. Apps can hold on to way more than they need, for example internal caching of thumbnails, and the OS can call on apps to purge unnecessary memory when needed. It’s a step beyond just “use any free RAM for page cache” which is a standard strategy for making the most of your RAM.

NSCache is one example of how app developers can claim more memory to boost their app performance but give it back when others need it.