MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

Re:MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and t... by wvh on Thursday May 14, 2026 @06:58AM (#48133676)

I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.

I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.

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Re:MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and t... by feisty0630 on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:09AM (#48133767)

It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised.

I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day.

For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.

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Re:MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and t... by criddell on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:02AM (#48133705)

Buy one and try it. Apple returns are hassle free in my experience.

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Re:MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and t... by a96 on Saturday May 16, 2026 @04:08AM (#48157953)

Essentially anything is lighter than a web browser.

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