On the software side of things, I find that Safari treats my laptop a lot better than Chrome. I get maybe 3x better battery life when running with a bunch of active tabs in Safari. Not sure what they're doing to throttle things, but it's pretty effective.

Safari (like most other Apple-developed apps) aggressively restricts processing in tabs or windows that aren't visible to the user. Apple calls it, adorably, App Nap: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

The annoying part is that App Nap also does this with plugged in desktops or even worse with servers that don't even have a monitor plugged in. At least it can be disabled systemwide.

Throttling background apps has its place on a desktop, too - leaving aside power efficiency, there are material performance gains to be made when the OS automatically prioritizes foreground tasks. I wouldn't want FCPX rendering impacted by a rogue banner ad on HowToAddLensFlare.co.cz, know what I mean?

I can see how it might be problematic in a headless environment, but for most people most of the time it's probably a useful feature.

Until some unknown stray process starts to eat 100% of your CPU and you just have no tools to find which tab it is. You can kill the process easily tho, but I'd rather fix problem at it's root.

"you're left with 12GB RAM and that is not very much"

omg

Outlook consumes 1.5GB RAM alone. Then Mattermost and Slack with each 1.5GB, whoops you're at 7.5 GB. Another 2GB for Photoshop, another GB for Cisco Jabber, Excel... then 50 open Chrome tabs and whoops, where has all the RAM gone?

For people working on 64GB+ workstations this is no problem but Apple only supports 32GB in the newest lineup of MBPs.

My currently open Outlook is holding onto 125 MB of RAM. I have at least 12 spreadsheets open in Excel for 112 MB.

IMHO you are wildly overestimating the RAM use of those programs, aside from the others, as they normally run (sure - I can get Excel over a GB running scripts or manipulating a large file).

Right now I'm sitting at:

- Slack 1.08GB

- Safari (11 tabs) 4.50GB

- Chrome (5 tabs) 2.17GB

- Outlook 1.13GB

These are ludicrous numbers and, frankly, the only reason why I need 16GB+ machines.

> sueddeutsche.de

German leather?