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no_opyesterday at 2:43 PM2 repliesview on HN

It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.


Replies

jsheardyesterday at 2:51 PM

> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone

I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.

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ycombinator_accyesterday at 5:27 PM

iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.

Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.

This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.