this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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185
Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry (www.pcmag.com)
submitted 16 hours ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
164 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The Apple MacBook Neo's $599 starting price is a "shock" to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.

Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. "In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product," he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.

Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop's 8GB of "unified memory," or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can't upgrade it.

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[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:

  • You don’t have to configure swap on macOS, while on Linux you can get into a situation where e.g. at install time you set up some default 2 GB swap but then it’s not enough and you don’t know that’s a thing that can be changed.
  • You don’t have to configure compression for RAM or swap on macOS; on Linux you often have to know you can set up zram/zswap if you want it. Compression can make a huge difference for users that switch between memory heavy applications as long as they don’t literally switch every 5 seconds.
  • On macOS, applications generally use the same frameworks e.g. for UI (because there is not much choice), and they can be loaded once and shared between all of them. Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time, and then you have stuff like snap on top that comes with its own copies of even basic system libraries. Containers also do this. As a Linux user you can avoid library bloat to some extent but “normal” users are not aware of it in the first place.
[–] RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Dynamic swap and zswap aren't really the same as efficient ram usage it's just good ways to mitigate when you run out. But when your using actual swap it's in my experience more noticable on OSX than Linux, which at least for me remains responsive until you're using a lot of swap.

Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time

Maybe Arch & Flatpak users hit this, but avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for and avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for. Although the ability to restore apps after closing them is pretty sweet and built in to OSX in a way that lets me safely kill apps to reduce the memory I'm using.

I think the main reason my Linux setup consumes less memory is probably because I used Kate for most file editing instead of vscode, which is probably an unfair advantage to Linux.

[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Dynamic swap and zswap aren't really the same as efficient ram usage it's just good ways to mitigate when you run out.

I disagree. If the OS automatically identifies unneeded pages and compresses them or swaps them out, it’s certainly using the physical memory more efficiently than if it wasn’t doing these things.

avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for

But they can’t if the applications they want to ship don’t all use the same version. E.g. Ubuntu ships GTK 2, 3, and 4. Arch even still ships GTK 1 in addition to these three.

avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for

What happens is you run KDE but then you still want to run Firefox so you still need GTK.