partial_accumen

Fair enough. Although Asus sells at least one laptop with 8 GB of soldered RAM, too.

Granted, it’s “only” a Chromebook, but still.

Chromebooks with low RAM are fine for many use cases. I’ve got a chromebook with only 4GB of RAM and its perfectly fine for web browsing or watching streaming which is the only things I use it for.

Soldered RAM is almost always a bad thing, no matter the size. Maybe when it’s the most the mainboard can support it’s not too bad but even then you’re out of luck if it ends up dying.

I used to think that too, but then I realized that the way I use computers (and it sounds like you do too) is to keep a unit a long time, take care of it, and use it to its limits (and perhaps beyond). There are millions of users that don’t do what we do. They may be young kids that end up breaking the unit before 2 years pass. They may be a fashionista that has to change out their unit when the new fall color comes out (so they may not even own it a year). They may be an older person that only uses it to check facebook to keep up with their kids.

In all of these cases soldered RAM is just fine because the user will never reach the point they need to upgrade it. What they get in return for this is cost savings and likely a smaller (thinner?) unit, that is probably a bit more structurally sound (because it doesn’t have to have a door or clips to have the RAM sockets accessible.

For users like you and me, soldered RAM is a bad thing. For most common users they don’t care. They don’t even know what soldered RAM is.

I daily drive my personal Macbook air M2 running Asahi (only booted into OSX twice in the time I’ve owned it). I really like the experience of Linux (Fedora) on Apple hardware.

However, its still got some growing pains before most folks would be happy with it as their primary. One of those limitations abslutely applies to the Neo. Asahi Linux on 8GB of RAM is VERY cramped. I’ve got 24GB of RAM and even I run into limitations sometimes. The other issue is the current maturity level of power management. Asahi does not have full use of the low standby power states. This means that even with “sleep” your battery will exhaust itself in less than a day if its not plugged in. The alternative is to power down the unit entirely, which works fine to save the battery, but means having to open all your applications back up when you power it back up. Since Mac hardware doesn’t use ACPI, hibernation is also not available, which would also be a fine way to address this.

None of this is criticism agianst the Asahi team. They’ve done AMAZING things so far and what exists today is fully usable to me. Improvements also come early and often. The team is amazing!

However, Macbook Neo probably won’t be a good use case for Asahi Linux for the forseeable future.

EEEs were amazing! Not because of their performance or specs, but because they were a fully working compute for dirt cheap at only $199! Remember, these were released 5 years before the first Raspberry Pi. The original model of EEE with its 7" screen 512MB RAM and 4GB of slow SSD storage were plenty of compute for small tasks or portable applications. The cheapest fully functional laptop you could buy at retail those days would still cost you $800-$900 for a pretty horrible machine.

Linux was part of the secret sauce that made them successful because it meant they didn’t have to pay for an OEM Windows XP license.

Yes, because Asus laptops all have non-soldered RAM…

I think what that poster was communicating is that shipping a laptop with 8GB of RAM would be okay if it was socketed (allowing for an upgrade by the user) or if the shipped unit with soldered RAM was greater than 8GB (16GB?, 32GB?,64GB? soldered).

This article is insane and proves me more that AI is product for rich people. Most of developers won’t see $100k per year paycheck in their lifetime.

These days an annual salary of $100k is at the very low end for most IT jobs in the USA (beyond the junior level). Even in my MCOL area $125k-$200k is more common.

You burn 16 tokens and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in tech debt.

It’s worth noting that this is talking about plug in solar, so would be at standard mains voltage.

Thats fair.

At least in the UK, they tend to run 3 phase to a road, but only a single phase goes into a given house. You need to get a special hook up to get 3 phase to a domestic premise, and they don’t like doing it.

TIL about the UK electrical system. Thanks!

I’m at the edge of my knowledge but that sounds like it matches the USA system (for the number of phases).

You also use 120VAC which makes the current overload issue a lot worse.

Voltage inside of residences is 120v AC, but its 240v thats delivered to each house. I think a bigger difference is that in the USA that 240v AC is single phase where I believe (Germany included) many nations in the EU are 3 phase.

The USA does have 3 phase power for most commercial applications though.

If power generation becomes so cheap that it can’t sustain the company then don’t rely on that for revenue.

I’m not aware of anywhere power generation is that cheap yet. That may be a problem for the future when commercial fusion is viable, but thats likely a lifetime away.

I’d rather pay a flat rate for the infrastructure and operating costs than a fluctuating generation charge.

I think everyone would, but the cost for generation is always fluctuating because the variation in the market for the fuels that generate electricity, supply, and demand of electricity on the market. If its a flat rate, and that rate is below the cost of generating the electricity, who pays?

I loved in the story of that episode that the TV execs learned that blipverts could kill their audience, and briefly switched back to adverts, but when sales fell they went back to blipverts knowing the danger because it was more profitable. The writers of that show nailed a corporate dystopian future.

Our own hope was our protagonist Edison Carter “live and direct from Network 23”…who was also part of the giant corporate machine.

If anyone remembers the cyberpunk 80s TV show Max Headroom, then they know that TV was everywhere all the time in that universe. There was a scene in one episode where the police enter a suspect’s home and discover that she had an off switch on her TV. The cops react in shock to the fact, and one of them says “She’ll get twenty years for that.”

This universe also had “blipverts” which were a type of ad (advert…advertisement) that directly accessed your brain’s motivation to get you to buy something. The only problem was that blipverts also had a high chance of killing the people that watched it.

This was a TV show from almost 40 years ago now and it looks like these would be the things that are coming in the next few years from now.

Oops, my mistake

Apology accepted. Have a great day!

Read my prior post, I specifically SAID it was a model number.

You’re embarrassing yourself with your pedantry. You said 80486 didn’t exist. It did. Seriously, quit while you’re behind here.

Such a confident answer! And so incorrect too!

Honestly, we know where the root of this problem came from. Back in the 1990s Intel broke with convention of using ever increasing numeric model numbers

• 8086
• 8088
• 80186
• 80286
• 80386
• 80486
• Pentium …wait, what?! Not 80586? Nope.

Intel didn’t like that other CPU manufacturers of x86 CPUs (AMD, Cyrix, IBM) could use the same numbering scheme. So Intel created “Pentium” because it could be copyrighted/trademarked so other companies couldn’t use it.

That’s my bad for not remembering AMD’s fucking atrocious nonstandard mobile chip naming schemes.

Atrocious compared to Intel? The first CPU with the name Core i7 was released in 2008, but Intel is still releasing a CPU named Core i7 as recently as 2023. They both suck, but in different ways.

I’m not sure we can use the “Windows x86 vs Windows ARM” analog for this new unit from Apple. MacOS Tahoe is a native ARM OS on both the high end and now this low end unit. With Windows its a completely different CPU architecture.

Apple has to know this is going to cannibalize its low end (8GB/256GB SSD) Macbook Air line. So will Apple discontinue the low config Air or is there some other differentiator that still makes the low config Air compelling?

If its the full macOS, I don’t think we can say that. That’s what makes this so interesting as it is a first of its kind.

Now, if it performs like a dog compared to an equivalent spec M3 or M4 Macbook Air, then we probably could call it a glorified tablet.

Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.

Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi’s memory management wasn’t as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).

For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?

This was my first question. This laptop looks like a really strange bird from the hardware point of view. It runs OSX (Tahoe), but uses an iPhone/iPad CPU (not an M1 or M2 CPUs that Asahi runs on today).