News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple unveils the new 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with th... by technothrasher on Monday March 04, 2024 @02:55PM (#39595181)
> you'll end up with a measly 8GB/256GB model which will only be useful for basic browsing.

I must be doing something wrong then. I've got one of those measly models and I do quite a bit more than just basic browsing without any problem. Video calls are the least of that, and they work fine.

Re:Apple unveils the new 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with th... by AnthonyMouse on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:08PM (#39596120)
Video calls require trivial amounts of memory and no real storage at all. Video editing, on the other hand, would pretty quickly fill up a 256GB drive. If you want to play with the fun new AI stuff, 8GB of RAM isn't enough.

Modern machines also have a nefarious failure mode. It used to be that you needed more memory to cache the hard drive, but SSDs are pretty fast and that doesn't matter as much anymore. So now you have the opposite problem -- if you're out of memory and start swapping you don't notice as much, because SSDs are pretty fast. Except that now you're silently wearing out your SSD. Which in the Macs, is soldered.

Re:Apple unveils the new 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with th... by sva_ on Monday March 04, 2024 @04:14PM (#39596205)
> I'll have you know, my 2023 $1300 laptop is capable of doing video calls

Weird flex