alt Hacker NewsI'm glad the air now comes standard with 16GB of RAM and 512GB disk space.
It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps.
Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 series) should have a much longer useful life and avoid disk/storage aging as rapidly from the constant swapping.
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This is also just the direction that AI is taking us, even for people who wouldn't describe themselves as traditional developers.
Setting aside on-device LLMs, one needs RAM and disk space just for the multiple isolated Claude Cowork etc. VMs that will increasingly become part of people's everyday lives.
And when it's easier than ever to create an Electron app, everything's going to have an Electron app, with all the RAM/disk overhead that entails. And of course, nobody's asking their agents "optimize the resource usage of the app I made last week" - they're moving on to the next feature or project.
I suppose the demoscene will always be there, for those of us who increasingly need a refuge from ram-flation.
Lets be real, the fact that the Air is good for developers is.. honestly, great.
But these devices are meant for home users.
Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience.
The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.
I have an M3 8gb air and it' mostly fine, unless I have a node server running or similar. Otherwise it's not very different to my M4 16gb iMac
I've no idea what the storage is on either of them, I've never looked. The days of needing storage are behind me, personally
I'm excited about this. The previous generation base model 15" Air was good enough for our company to make it the default computer for everyone. Previously we were giving out base model MBP's. And they're $1000 cheaper.
Today, the MBP is just way too powerful for anything other than specific use cases that need it.
I have a 16GB/512GB Air M1 (2020) because I knew I would need the extra space but this really makes me happy. A new Air, higher headroom, M5, is awesome. It’s not a MBP but it’s good enough for 95% of the daily stuff. If you aren’t running local agents this would be amazing.
Even with the $100 price bump, I think this is a win. 16/512 is a very nice base spec on Mac.
Where does it stop? Of course having a bit more room does not hurt, but my view is that if 256GB was not enough for you, 512GB wouldn't be either.
To me it's mostly about learning to mange RAM and storage space on your machine. A lot of stuff does not need to be hoarded on the machine. Move infrequently accessed data to an external drive. Be ruthless about purging stuff you no longer really need. Refuse to run apps that consume tens of GBs of RAM on a whim (looking at you Firefox, I've been impressed with how efficient and stable the Helium browser has been for me). If you are a developer, engineer for efficient use of RAM and storage.
Like I said, 16gb RAM and 512GB storage minimum is nice, but if the fundamental issues that contribute to massive and wasteful use of resources on our machines are not addressed, nothing will be enough.