At this point I think few people really will care about that spec difference.
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).
You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.
Apple certainly puts out experiences that leave much to be improved but to be pedantic the word 'subpar' implies below the 'par'. If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it.
Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
And despite antenna gate, the iPhone 4 was still the best smartphone of that year and leaps ahead of it's closest competition (the Galaxy S), and remained the #1 best selling smartphone at year after launch
You can only buy hardware that runs Apple software from Apple, but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have. Apple is and always has been a minority player in the overall smartphone market (and desktop/laptop as well).
Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:
Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was the single most purchased smartphone model in the US between 2010 and 2011 (during antenna gate that we are talking about).
Android has the majority share because "Android" is anything from a $100 piece of junk to a $1200 phone. If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.
Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.
If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.
Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.
Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.
Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.
Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.
Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.
MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.
I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.
Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.
I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine
Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.
Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.
Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.
VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.
> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.
I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.
Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.
Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.
If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.
But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.
> 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026
I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.
Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?
And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.
It depends on how you define "serious work". Is it to get the best results possible, or is it to tax a computer as much as possible? Programmers would usually answer the latter, while users would answer the former.
That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.
Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.
As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.
I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.
I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.
Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.
Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?
Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.
I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.
I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.
I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.
I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...
My spouse bought a mac and asks me (mostly a linux user, and I'm happy to help) for support somewhat regularly (mostly recently, for a tahoe upgrade). It's not the golden unicorn people paint it to be. 8gb is insane in 2026.
It may not be a golden unicorn, but I find it is quite a lot better than providing support for the Windows laptops they used to buy from random department stores on rock-bottom sales... Nothing quite like a $200 PC laptop stocked with OEM bloatware
I like my MB Pro but it has serious audio and external display issues.
I've had to remove spotlight indexing to prevent obscure OOM issues.
One time I woke up to open my laptop and find it's screen cracked for no apparent reason. Since I couldn't prove it wasn't my fault I was charged for the repair anyway and I'm grateful to myself that I had AC+ because I might have as well just bought another laptop if not.
At the end of the day, it's still just a computer.
I refused to use chatGPT until they created the public version that you could use without signing-up.
I later started using Gemini but I use it without signing in to try to ensure my privacy.
I recently came across this App [0] and I've been trying/using it. I end up going back to Gemini if what I need is quite complicated but it's not that common these days.
> it's written to please every customer under the sun
Disagree with this. In the places I’ve worked, I’ve lost count of the number of times we turned down feature requests with the explanation that - this isn’t common practice and seems to be unique to you.
I think you are one working at Unicorn. Most Enterprise software I've dealt with ends up with internal coding engine so it can be extended to do whatever the customer needs. Bonus points of getting to charge massive implementation consulting hours for all coders that come along during implementation.
I was in Enterprise software and even though I didn’t visit users, I dealt with them regularly eg through video calls or engaging with them via support forum if support escalates an issue.
And yes we were judged on how pleasant to use our software was. If we miss a feature or ship a feature that customers intensely dislike, best believe that we’ll get a torrent of negative feedback on our support channels
More than once, I was in a different country and tried logging into a workspace gmail account. Google flags it as a strange activity (fair enough) and needs to authenticate me. It asks me to enter the complete address for my recovery email (I do this), it sends me a code to use for sign in (I do this) but it still refuses to sign me and says it can't authenticate me. It says I need to sign in from a location that I've signed in from before.
So, for the period that I was out of the country, I couldn't access my email. This happened each time I'm in a new country. My only work around was to sign in to my email (on my laptop) before traveling and not sign out (for security reasons, I don't like to do this).
Something similar happened when I used a new laptop.
I just don't understand this. What then is the point of having recovery email and phone number if you won't use them?
There's a Gmail account I've lost forever because Google wouldn't let me in even after doing 5 factor authentication (password, phone number, code from SMS, backup email, code from email).
Heh, same for me. (albeit only three factors, but more weren't configured)
It was firstname.lastname@gmail.com that I lost, as I was mostly using my original account with a pseudonym for anything private (was a teen when Gmail started, so didn't think twice about using a cringe username back then).
I had configured the first/last name Mail to forward everything to the pseudonym email and didn't access it again for something like a year... Then I had to respond to someone and... Well, Google never let me access it again.
I eventually gave up on it entirely and switched to a custom novelty domain on fastmail, much much later. (A portmanteau of my last/first name
1) This also happens to non-workspace (regular) gmail accounts
2) I didn't change the policy on the workspace email when I signed up for it
The point is still - why ask me to authenticate via different methods and then reject them after I've correctly authenticated? If some policy is overriding these, then you shouldn't have asked me to authenticate via those methods in the first place.
Yes, there are times when processes/procedures are truly unique to a firm but it usually isn’t and the firm can ‘standardize’ their process so that it fits into the ERP flow.
These ERPs are usually shipped to handle common/different scenarios/usecases and clients simply have to configure them accordingly (configuration is totally different from trying to customize)
People love to blame Oracle or SAP for every botched rollout without actually looking at who is responsible.
If you used consultants for the implementation, how is a botched rollout the ERP vendors fault?
This article says …… The council initially customized Oracle but now plans to reimplement the software out-of-the-box, adopting standardized processes..….
The above tells you the issue isn’t from Oracle the ERP vendor.
….every ERP sales process includes an you can customize the edge cases…
This isn’t what you think.
First, large ERP vendors will repeat the mantra that you shouldn’t customize and that they don’t advise it. At best, implementation consultants will be the one talking about customizing.
Secondly, ERP sales process isn’t as simple as you think. Buying firm have a detailed and documented list of requirements and these are checked off as they’re being demoed. If customization is needed, that specific customization needs to be shown before that item requirement is checked off.
> has their own set of rules so most HR software doesn't bother calculating it -- you just figure it out manually and input it every year for every employee
Beg to disagree. This is the complexity that large ERP firms handle and why Oracle, SalesForce, etc are expensive to implement. They figure out the commonality (if any) and build for it. Then they add on features specific to countries they target and then they add the ability to configure for your own situation (to a certain level).
PeopleSoft did this for Payroll and workforce administration which is part of how they cornered the market for HCM.
Customizing ERPs is where consulting firms make money but the ERP vendors themselves advise against this because it becomes expensive maintaining the customizations as new versions of the software and more features are released.
The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)
The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.
8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps
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