Faceman🇦🇺

the recent gen mac mini and the iphone “e” range was probably a bit of a warning that they were going to push their entry level equipment a bit harder… I think it’s good for the industry to have some actual competition and disruption in what used to be the mid-range price brackets.

bring back the decently made, adequately specced mid range, we’ve lost it somewhere along the line.

I know their plan is just to get more people into their ecosystem, people will buy this laptop, or have it given to them buy a school or even a business, then they’re stuck in the apple ecosystem and will be more likely to upgrade to their higher end models, buy their phones, cloud services etc.

wicked smart.

on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.

7.9gb of ram use.

it’s not that bad really, I mean it’s a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.

I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it’s been absolutely fine.

If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.

I honestly dont care about the 8gb of ram, that is plenty for the target audience given MacOS’s pretty good memory management, and optimisation of the first party apps the majority of users will use. I would have liked to see the base price be $499, but that would probably have needed something to be cut down to outside of apples standards, like the display or chassis quality.

I’m a little disappointed by the limited USB, its just one usb 3.0 (not 3.1 as far as I know) and one 2.0, I know that’s a limitation of the platform, there arent really any spare PCIE lanes on a phone SOC. They could have put in a USB Hub chip to get two USB 3.0 ports with shared bandwidth, but I suspect that was difficult to do with reliable video and power throughput and someone decided saving a dollar was more important. That’s plenty for your average user, but a pair of usb 3.1 would have been preferred of course.

However… how many average PC users even use USB now? maybe just a thumb drive very rarely or to use an external display. I’m surprised it even has a headphone jack and an SD reader honestly.

I’d suspect the next gen model to use the newer iPhone chip that should bump the memory up to 12gb and I think has a usb 3.1 controller, so they could break that out better.

I dont hate it. it’s filling in what used to be the mid range of laptops that has kinda died in the last 10 years and is full of spec bumped versions of bottom tier plastic garbage with awful screens and short battery life, and a couple of underspecced cut down versions of nicer metal case laptops that are just not very good either.

MacOS is significantly better than windows when using their first party apps, but many third party apps are ram hogs and things get forced to swap more often.

Swap isn’t terrible though, a lot of current gen mac hardware has very fast SSDs and very low latency controllers so it’s pretty transparent in normal use.

I think if you are on a website like this, this computer isn’t for you, but it is for a lot of people who use nothing but a web browser with one tab open 90% of the time.

the newer A series chips have 12GB of ram, so that bodes well for the next generation of the neo.

8gb is plenty for your average non-technical user, and macos is pretty good at memory and process management and swap as long as you are using mostly first party apps, which the average non-tech savvy user will, likely just the default browser and maybe the built in office suite… that’s pretty much it.

its really a case of If you ask whether 8gb is enough… you probably arent the target for this machine.

My main dashboard is on a little 480x480 LCD android wallpanel, so I have a template that uses a grid of buttons which can perform actions themselves or navigate to and from other pages with other functions. every page uses some variation of that template, usually 9 buttons but it can be more or fewer as needed, or nesting grids within larger grids in some cases.

This main panel is in my “theatre” aka the spare bedroom I claimed for a media room, so most of the control is based around triggering actions and flows mostly orchestrated by NodeRed but a few functions are direct to HA for simpler functions. there are other pages that bring up controls for other rooms and my original plan was to put one of these panels in every room but I never really got there… one day.

I use the wallpanel addon to run screensavers, but the LCD panels also have a sensor that turns the screen off until you put your hand near it, then it wakes up to the screensaver with the weather and any warnings until you tap the screen to bring up the main page.

main page:

example source selection grid, still working on making this neater or less ugly, maybe more nested pages based on user or type or simply culling sources never uses in this particular room, though most of the time you walk up to the panel and hit movie mode on the main page, then any other switching is accessible from the remote itself.

I need a lot of selections because just this room has multiple local devices, some on the TV, some on the receiver, then some on the main HDMI matrix for the whole house, then there are a couple of IP feeds and other devices. switching and sequencing all of those steps on each device is done in Nodered, that also sends a ping to the smart remote to set it to the right mode for what is chosen and it all stays in sync if the source is changed from the remote, since it is all orchestrated in nodered… sources like the TV and Sat tuners I am working on a round robin style selection for those so you just tap it and it goes to whichever one is free or warns you if it is being used in another room, but 90% of the time only one of those is being used at any one time so that would work OK. that way I can get them down to one button.

I also have a simple phone dashboard with climate controls, sensors, status etc. that can also bring up these control panels if needed but I mostly use the dashboard on the touch panel.