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MacBook Neo

apple.com

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https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/

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List of differences from the MacBook Air:

* Only supports 8 GB of unified memory

* No MagSafe

* One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s

* No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.

* “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air

* Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color

* No True Tone

* 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage

* No camera notch

* Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air

* Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods

* Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air

* The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones

* No keyboard backlighting

* Touch ID not included on base model

* Trackpad does not support Force Touch

* Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7

* No fast charging

* The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma...

Price difference?

* $500 = base model (250 GB SSD) (education)

* $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education)

* $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education)

While they are at it, they could bring back the $250 iPad Mini.

I can't quite figure out why the Mini became a luxury item ten years ago, leaving the kid's cheap tablet to Android.

* The smaller devices don't have enough demand to have multiple versions.

* Just because it's smaller doesn't magically reduce the price by 30% (currently iPad is $350).

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

That’s been the case for 5+ years :)

I thought they changed from glowing Apple to reflective Apple

I think they mean not reflective like current models, not that it isn't illuminated like the MacBooks of yore

I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it matte, but just a different matte from the rest of the case? I kind of want to see it in person. It looks very tasteful.

> Powered by A18 Pro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18

So this is basically running on a phone CPU

I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.

But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.

The A18 Pro performs about on par with an M4 in terms of single threaded performance, and a little better than M1 in terms of multi threaded performance.

The MacBook Neo has one of the fastest processors on the market for single threaded tasks, which is what has the most impact on how "fast" a processor feels for day to day usage.

Netbooks had processors that were glacially slow.

I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.

People thinking I mentioned my (somewhat) disappointment about the CPU because it is also used in Phones, but actually what I meant is that I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.

But I don't really see doing that for the A18, personally; even though I don't doubt its a good chip!

I suspect Asahi Linux would appreciate work to support A18 Macs as well!

> I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.

The reputation problem was kind of baked in. Vista launched the same year netbooks did, and even though Vista was a disaster, "runs the latest Windows" is the smell test normal people use for whether something is a real computer.

Netbooks didn't pass.

The storage situation made Windows users miserable anyway. The SSD models had 4-8GiB of flash, and XP alone ate well over half before you'd done anything. So people bought the HDD variant instead, more space, sure, but spinning at 4,200rpm, which wasn't even the slow-but-acceptable 5,400 of a normal laptop drive. Then pile the standard bloatware on top of that.

Bear in mind, people chose the HDD version because it ran Vista: the thing that made it a "real" computer. The SSD variant, the one that actually worked, got ignored for exactly that reason.

Run Linux on the SSD variants though, and the thing was actually great.

    > I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.

Why don't you buy a used M1 from eBay? You can probably get one for less than 500 USD.

That’s pretty impressive

I used a first-gen eeepc with Linux in college. I didn't have any problems with speed for normal use, though I ssh'd into servers for anything more intensive than running a browser.

The A18Pro is a very powerful CPU, besting even the M1 in single-core performance (about even in multicore). Saying its just a "phone CPU" is disingenuous.

I do wish they used the A19 Pro which has better hardware based memory security.

They likely based this on the fab node with the best capacity to price ratio.

Funny that they put A19 pro in the new Studio Display XDR.

The product will stay in the market far longer. Good call on their part.

Of course it’s an iPhone chip, which is why it’s got just 8 gigs of RAM. I think it’s the same exact SoC that went into the 16 Pro Max.

There were some M-series chips with 8 gigs, iirc. There was a whole debate going on about that on the net when they were released. Not the M5 though, as it seems.

I think the M2 was the last one they made with 8 gigs of memory.

It's M3.

This suggests someone may be able to install MacOS on an iPhone with some modification.

It's not the first Mac that has an iPhone/iPad chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

And yes, absolutely. All you need is a bootchain exploit. However unlike in the old jailbreaking days when people found and publicized them for fun, these days they are worth millions. Apple will pay you $500k for sandbox escape into the kernel. If you nail the bootchain, it'll be in the millions. From Apple. And god knows how much such a thing would go for in the black market.

If so, it's a binned version with fewer working cores.

I think I'd put a phone CPU running netbook-like costing $599 still in the "overpriced premium brand" bucket myself.

(Not sure if that's really an apt description though, but then I was out as soon as I read they're neutering one of the usb-c speeds.)

So long as you can use the slow port for charging, I think it’s an entirely tolerable trade-off. Remember, this is a machine for people with low technical requirements. It’s not a machine for someone who needs lots of high speed ports.

It just means the phone is massively overpowered :)

Do you know if the A series processor supports virtualization?

The A-series has supported virtualization since long before the M-series existed. iOS disables it in early boot, though.

On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?

A lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249309

The hardware support was there for a while. Given that this runs macOS, i would guess (no insider knowledge) that it would work just fine and not be disabled like it is in iOS (by policy, not by technical reasons)

You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)

Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.

Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open

Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."

I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.

In macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files"

I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.

In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.

How do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.

I mean at that point (13 GB memory used), the "Swap used" is at several hundred megabytes.

And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow.

The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p

When you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about.

On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.

You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.

In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)

> I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new

Wait what? How did you manage that?

OpenClaw found some sweet deal? /s

MacBook Air M1 was released six years ago. That’s pretty expensive for such an old machine!

They hold value very well. Still a perfectly good machine today and probably a better deal than the neo if you find one in good condition

don't thinkpads from the similar time go for the same amount of money? seems like an alright price for a machine of that vintage, although thinkpad is obviously superior here since it would always be able to run linux or windows (well that one is not guaranteed) without much, if any, trouble

Yes, the person you are replying to has explained that.

The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.

The old mental model doesn't fit how any OS manages RAM. Every OS plays all sorts of fun guessing games about caching, predicting what resources your program will actually need etc. The OS does a lot of work to ensure that everything just hums along as best as possible.

What are you slicing?

What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?

I'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed.

> I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine.

Most cool. Is it an M1?

Not the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP.

Same. I've been programming in Go on an M1 for years and perf is spectacular.

Early 2020 i3 macbook air

There's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms.

I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.

i think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue.

the keywords here are "depending on the workload".

edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.

Indeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?"

because memory access performance is not O(1) but depends on the size of what's in memory (https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html). Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.

Memory access performance depends on the _maximum size of memory you need to address_. You can clearly see it in the graph of that article where L1, L2, L3 and RAM are no longer enough to fit the linked list. However while the working set fits in them the performance scales much better. So as long as you give priority to the working set, you can fill the rest of the biggest memory with whatever you want without affecting performance.

why is it not O(1)? It has to service within a deadline time, so it is still constant.

I am not following, isn't this just a graph that shows that how fast operations happen is largely dependent on the odds that it is in cache at various levels (CPU/Ram/Disk)?

The memory operation itself is O(1), around 100 ns, where at a certain point we are doing full ram fetches each time because the odds of it being in CPU cache are low?

Typically O notation is an upper bound, and it holds well there.

That said, due to cache hits, the lower bound is much lower than that.

You see similar performance degradation if you iterate in a double sided array the in the wrong index first.

O notation is technically meaningless for systems with bounded resources. That said, yes the performance is depending on the probability of cache hits, notably also the TLB. For large amounts of memory used and random access patterns, assuming logarithmic costs for memory access tends to model reality better.

> Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.

This is an incorrect conclusion to make from the link you posted in the context of this discussion. That post is a very long-winded way of saying that the average speed of addressing N elements depends on N and the size of the caches, which isn't news to anyone. Key word: addressing.

RAM is always storing something, it’s just sometimes zeros or garbage. Nothing in how DRAM timings work is sensitive to what bits are encoded in each cell.

Huh? There is nothing called "empty memory". There is always something being stored in the memory, the important thing is whether you care about that specific bits or not.

And no, the articles you linked is about caching, not RAM access. Hardware-wise, it doesn't matter what you have in the cells, access latency is the same. There is gonna be some degradation with #read/write cycles, but that is besides the point.

The author of that post effectively re-defines "memory"/"RAM" as "data", and uses that to say "accessing data in the limit scales to N x sqrt(N) as N increases". Which, like, yeah? Duh, I can't fit 200PB of data into the physical RAM of my computer and the more data I have to access the slower it'll be to access any part of it without working harder at other abstraction layers to bring the time taken down. That's true. It's also unrelated to what people are talking about when they say "memory access is O(1)". When people say "memory access is O(1)" they are talking about cases where their data fits in memory (RAM).

Their experimental results would in fact be a flat line IF they could disable all the CPU caches, even though performance would be slow.

do you also say that about hdd space? about money in the bank?

> about money in the bank?

Yes, generally. That's the entire idea behind the stock market.

It’s counterintuitive but I learned this best by playing RTS games. If you don’t spend money your opponent can outdo you on the map by simply spending their money. But the principle extends, everything you have doing nothing (buildings units etc) is losing. The most efficient process is to have all your resources working for you at all times.

> It’s counterintuitive but I learned this best by playing RTS games. If you don’t spend money your opponent can outdo you on the map by simply spending their money.

OK, hear me out over here:

We are not in an RTS.

Edit: in real-world settings lacking redundancy tends to make systems incredibly fragile, in a way that just rarely matters in an RTS. Which we are _not in_.

Agreed. Real life is not an RTS. Optimizing computer or business resources - kind of like one.

If you don't have savings to spend for a potential change of tactics, larger players, groups or players with different strategies can easily overtake you as your perfectly efficient economy collapses.

Going to also echo the comment that this isn't an RTS

> this isn't an RTS

Yep. RTS is a context where the principles are more true.

In real life you aren’t in a 1-1 matchup with competitive success criteria.

It's why I wake up at 3am to make sure my agents aren't waiting on me :D

Why he wouldn't say it about HDD space? You buy HDD to keep them empty?

And as for the money analogy, what's the idea there, that memory grows interest? Or that it's better to put your money in the bank and leave it there, as opposed to buy assets or stocks, and of course, pay for food, rent, and stuff you enjoy?

Money analogy could better be put as one of:

1. Store your money in a 0% interest account—leave RAM totally unused—or put it in an account that actually generates some interest—fill the RAM with something, anything that might be useful.

2. Store your money buried in your backyard or put it in a bank account? If you want to actually use your money, it's already loaded into the bank.

Imperfect analogies because money is fungible. In either case though, money getting spent day-to-day (e.g. the memory being used by running programs) is separate.

Then why do you have any hard drive space available at this moment?

Isn't it obvious?

Because wanting to utilize something as much as you can to get your money's worth, and wanting to fully exhaust it as a resource are two different things.

HDD is for storage. RAM is for speed?

Why do you even need RAM when you could run everything from your HDD with much cheaper cost/MB.

It's the same in all three cases: using HDD space, money and RAM for good purposes (disk cache) is useful, wasting it (Electron) is bad.

(Weird side question: are you by any chance the Jason Farnon who wrote IBFT?)

> do you also say that about hdd space?

For slightly different reasons. My game drive is using about 900 GB out of 953 GB usable space - because while I have a fast connection, it's nicer to just have stuff available.

Same for some projects where we need to interface with cloud APIs to fetch data - even though the services are available and we could pull some of the data on demand, sometimes it's nicer to just have a 10 TB drive and to pull larger datasets (like satellite imagery) locally, just so that if you need to do something with it in a few weeks, you won't have to wait for an hour.

Because OoM errors are oh so fun.

Caches are automatically released by the OS when demand for memory increases.

You eventually run out of caches to evict.

At that point you can still fall back onto swap on NVME.

Doesn’t Apple use pretty damn quick NVME? I wonder how much of a performance drop it actually is. Certainly not as bad as running a swap file on a 5400 rpm HDD…

Isn't that NVME also very expensive to replace because it's tied to hardware identifiers? If you keep swapping all the time, surely NVME would be the first part to fail

This was heavily debated in the 11.4 timeframe because there was risk that this version of the OS could excessively wear NVME.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/04/apple-resolves-m1...

The issue was subsequently resolved but the consensus was with modern wear leveling this isn't so much a thing.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with the original drive. I use it heavily for development practically every day and just dumped the SMART data.

Model Number: APPLE SSD AP1024R

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

Available Spare: 100%

Available Spare Threshold: 99%

As always, YMMV

That is completely irrelevant to this discussion about using the RAM you’ve paid for.

I write algorithms that operate on predictable amounts of data. It's very easy to work out the maximum amount of things we need to have and then allocate it all in fixed size arrays. If you allocate all your memory at startup you can never OOM at runtime. Some containers need over 100GB but like the parent comment said we've already bought the RAM.

I write algorithms that operate on less predictable amounts of data.

If you operate over all of your data every time it's a lot more predictable ;)

The data I operate on come in from the outside world, I can't operate on all of it because most of it doesn't exist yet. I can't process an event that hasn't happened yet

How often are ooms caused by lack of ram rather than programming?

> How often are ooms caused by lack of ram rather than programming?

You're right, but in a production deployment, that extra ram might mean the difference between a close call that you patch the next day and an all hands emergency to call in devops and engineers together during peak usage.

source: been there

we're still talking about the MacBook, right?

> we're still talking about the MacBook, right?

na, this is just PTSD talking

I don't think MacOS OoMs as Linux

(and to be honest the way Linux does acts on OoMs are quite debatable)

macOS can OOM, ish.

If you don't have any more disk space for swap, or memory pressure gets too high, you get the "You've ran out of application memory" dialog box with a list of applications you can force quit, and macOS leaves it up to the user on what to kill instead of the system choosing automatically.

"Uneaten food" <CHOMP CHOMP> "is wasted food." <CHOMP CHOMP>

It also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.

Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.

I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?

> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners

This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised.

Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.

The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly.

8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.

Gruber said something[0] that parallels your point, and emphasizes the target audience for this Mac:

> If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want.

Apple has made extensive tradeoffs to make this price point, but they all seem to be reasonable tradeoffs for casual users.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

Perhaps because it's enough for a lot of things. I only came up against the 8GB limit when I ran a LLM locally using Ollama. It worked but wasn't workable.

8GB isn't ideal though and 16GB would've expanded its capacity to do more things. But soon as I want to do more things I shuffle over to my PC with it's dedicated GPU and 32GB o ram

I'm guessing Apple cuts capability to the lower end so as not to hurt sales of the higher end. Usage profile is often dependent on context. There are enough non-power users (when mobile) like me that 8GB isn't ideal but it's enough. And if it wasn't enough we could've paid more for the 16GB, but I personally decided it wasn't worth the ridiculous Apple ram price premium.

So these are my reasons for saying 8GB is enough. I'm also using an M1 MacBook Air, so the puniest of the lineup. Next laptop I'm considering is possibly a think pad with linux so I'm no macOS fanboi.

Because 8GB is literally enough? There are multiple 8GB Macs in this house and they are fine. I wouldn't use them for development work but they're completely competent at the basics.

What's basics? Of course one can always overbuy hardware compared to the tasks but we are discussing some usage more fitting to the laptop form factor. I would argue that for a laptop a basics is at least some kind of office white collar work or similar. And so it is most likely that at least 2-3 of the Electron monstrosities would be used, an office package or something along the lines, multiple loaded tabs in a browser a few of which will be memory leaking enterprise crap, a few communication apps etc. Nothing really outlandish, only handful of apps, but because they are all fat, they will eat the 3Gb margin super fast and start caching.

The storage is fast enough to not be too much of an issue, and the basics would be mostly a web browser, a lot of things can be done with only it, and if you need to do more than web browser, text editors, you probably should want more than the Neo in the first place

Tons of 8GB users out there who are happy. I'm on 16GB and its definitely enough for a power user - and running multiple coding environments, Docker, IDE's. MacOS is really good with caching.

After several days of usage, Activity Monitor will usually shows that "WindowServer" is using 6 GB of RAM.

Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If your machine isn't reporting memory pressure and/or the user isn't experiencing pageouts, then the machine is well-suited to the user's workload.

I'd rather my ram go to my page cache, not have bloated apps hoarding it.

But I thought Electron was the future?

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Uptime of 13 days. My WindowServer is at 441Mb. ??? (32Gb RAM M2Max MBPro)

Probably a badly behaved app. Run `IOAccelMemory` to check.

I remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch just precaching commonly used programs to give better application startup times.

Ha, wasn't it windows vista that allowed you to plug an SD card to use for swap space/fake ram?

SpeedBoost was supported by vista through windows 10, and although windows 11 regognises a speed boost USB, I do not know it it uses it. When I put windows 11 on two i5 8gb machines and plugged in two speed boost drives, it did not swap a lot to them, whereas in windows 7, under memory load it would use them, at least until I found ChacheMem v2.1 it would manage memory much better than windows ever could.

Windows back to window 2.1 386 supported swapdisks, i.e fake ram.

Tbf when Big Sur was released, it was leaking like crazy. It was a daily ritual for me to kill Dock and Finder after they've eaten all my RAM.

I found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.

I have heard this before and am curious what kind of sites you open in the tabs?

I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).

It was my son’s laptop , he’s in high school. General Google Classroom / Google Docs / Gmail / web research stuff. He’s not technical at all. I bought him the 8GB machine thinking it would be fine, but it became a big problem for him.

I do think part of the problem was number of tabs open. It was a little better when I taught him how to manage tabs and I also turned up all the memory saving features in chrome.

But even with all of that, it would still slow down with what looked like a pretty minimal workload.

I spent a few hours with him on it, but he still had these kinds of issues.

It just seems like it requires a decent level of sophistication to work with a small RAM budget if you’re using Google software.

No you don't work just fine with all that or you aren't doing much.

Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.

Just rust plugin in vs code uses 3gb of ram.

Add a browser, and you are already over 8GB.

> Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast.

Just how quickly do you think the SSDs will die? Because there are a lot of 8GB M1 machines out there that have been getting daily use for five years, mostly with 256GB or 512GB storage configs. When do you expect them to fail?

Depends of the usage. I just know that with 48GB I have a few TB or tens of TB written within a couple of hours when playing with homomorphic search.

So you're predicting that 8GB machines will fail prematurely based on extrapolation from an extreme niche use case that doesn't remotely fit on those machines?

Using an M2 8GB Mac Mini, I only ever ran into problems when trying generative fill in Photoshop. There I get insufficient memory errors if the selection is too large.

[flagged]

Linux does this too. It uses 100% of your ram always, using free memory as cache.

Actually figuring out free RAM is kind of confusing.

> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip

i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):

    | device                      | cpu                                             | single core score | multi core score |
    |:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
    | iPhone 16 Pro Max           | Apple A18 Pro                                   |              3428 |             8531 |
    | iPhone 16 Pro               | Apple A18 Pro                                   |              3445 |             8624 |
    | MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) |              3708 |            14698 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores)  |              3696 |            14729 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) |              3696 |            14729 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) |              4228 |            17464 |

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

Put the M1 in your comparison - I think the A18 Pro compares favorably to it and it's a good baseline for people who bought in on Apple Silicon early and are still using it.

    | device                      | cpu                               | single core | multi core |
    |:----------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
    | iPhone 16 Pro Max           | Apple A18 Pro                     |        3428 |       8531 |
    | iPhone 16 Pro               | Apple A18 Pro                     |        3445 |       8624 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2021) | Apple M1 Pro @ 3.2 GHz (10 cores) |        2385 |      12345 |
    | MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores) |        3696 |      14729 |
    | MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores) |        4228 |      17464 |

The single core performance difference is wild. Far more than I expected.

My ageing M1 Pro still has better multicore performance than these new laptops. But far worse single core performance. For most users this would be a large upgrade. Well, if you can get by with 8gb of RAM.

My M1 Pro MacBook Pro is only just now occasionally feeling a little slow and showing me a beach ball occasionally but I’m being super picky due to new machine FOMO and it is the best laptop I’ve had by a country mile.

Still, I can’t justify an upgrade to myself!!

Surprising single core numbers notwithstanding !

My M1 macbook pro still handles everything I throw at it beautifully. I'd love an excuse to upgrade, but there's no reason to do yet. At least not for me.

I'm going to wait a few more years. The M1 is too good. So is my iphone 12. There's just nothing wrong with my phone other than the lightning port.

I have some clip-on USB-C to Lightning adapters that work really well for charging and Carplay. The connection got flaky at one point, but cleaning the port with some iFixit tools fixed that right up.

Clinging to my iPhone 13 Mini until it's natural death.

That's an M1 Pro chip. Looking at the base MacBook Pro / Air models with the base M1 chip, the multi-core score is about the same, and those laptops are also still going strong:

    device                          | cpu                               | single core | multi core |
    |:------------------------------|:----------------------------------|------------:|-----------:|
     MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2020)| Apple M1 @ 3.2 GHz (8 cores)      |        2323 |       8186

Do we think the iPhone 16 with A18 Pro chips are going to be the same as the A18 in the laptop though?

When you are not confined to a iPhone body, you have a bit more flexibility in thermals, heat and power consumption.

Would there be any chance the A18 Pro in a Macbook clocks higher? or maybe clocks higher for longer?

Thats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications.

Depends on which metric do you look, right? :)

Honestly, I don’t know which one to look at and was purposefully hand wavy. I just knew they were looking at the stone one…

> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.

Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.

> Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.

if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)

I'm using a (fairly crappy) HP laptop with 16 gig, running Linux.

I find that the combination of FireFox and Visual Studio gets to the point where it fills up to the point where things get killed (with swap filled as well).

Mate system monitor hilariously reports code using 71MB and firefox-bin using 1.1GB because it has a tree view that doesn't show the usage of collapsed nodes beneath it.

Using smem shows each using multi GB and at my current level I've got 6GB of cache to eat up before it kills code again. Ordering by size Ghostty is the first thing that is not firefox or code at 78MB total. (and about 1GB of non-cache kernel use) . So essentially it's only those two apps that are the problem. Can Macs get by simply because Safari is better with RAM?

> running Linux

Problem exists between user and hardware. Applied the Firefox salt over the wound doesn't help either. It's a discussion about Macs btw.

Mac is good at managing low memory conditions. Linux is not. When I was on Linux, if I hit 16gb ram used the entire system would freeze for minutes. I would have to go in TTY2 to kill something to get it responsive again.

If you're concerned about the amount of RAM, this isn't the laptop for you. Grandma doesn't need 16GB to browse Facebook and look at family photos.

I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.

If your "market pressure" worked we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.

This is a Mac Chromebook. You use it for cloud stuff and every now and then you can run a real application in a pinch.

You can also develop locally which is significant.

Modern pcs use the ram given to them. Its not like a fixed quantity it requires.

  > macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup

My Debian (KDE) uses just under 1GB on startup. If one is not using animations and things syncing in the background and daemons monitoring file system changes and whatnot, can the stock MacOS memory usage be reduced?

What, in fact, is it doing? I'm of the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.

For $300 more the base MacBook Air is a significantly better machine than the Neo.

It's $500 more. Basically double the price.

> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

Well for starters MacOS version is currently 26.3 (Tahoe).

Apple ecosystem, if you are not using RAM then it is wasted RAM. So it always optimise to use as much as possible.

The main point however is you are not the target audience. Apple realised that the majority of users don't do anything beyond the power of what the phone supplies. That who this is intended for.

Right now with "green" memory pressure and not so many Safari+FF tabs open, I see 16GB physical, 13.41 used, 2.68 cached, 2.32 swap, 6.57 app, 2.52 wired, 3.89 compressed. Why is there swap used when I have free memory?

I don't know, long ago gave up on understanding this fully. Memory pressure is the only good signal. Or just how slow the Mac feels.

> Why is there swap used when I have free memory?

That data may have been evicted during a previous moment of higher memory pressure. If it hasn't been needed since, leaving it in swap probably makes more sense than preemptively paging in data that's known to be cold.

Yeah you're right. But now I'm wondering if it preferred writing to swap over evicting the cache at that time... can make sense if the cache is being hit more than the pages it's swapping out.

13GB app usage is also odd. I feel like running the same thing with half the RAM wouldn't really result in like 5GB of swap.

The limited ram is planned obselescence. It leads to massively increased swap usage and will wear out your non-replaceable ssd to make you get a new machine. In theory

And of course the screen: 13.0-inch vs 13.6

Weight is the same incidentally.

I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)

I'll keep adding to the list:

* Only one external display

* No haptic trackpad

No force touch doesn't necessarily mean no haptics. I would assume Apple didn't go backwards to a physically clicking touchpad.

Bad news. It's physical trackpad. https://youtu.be/mBkYho_4CSg?t=226

I can't go back, now that I've discovered the joys of "tap to click". But I doubt most new Mac users would notice.

A physical trackpad can also do 'tap to click'.

Really? Terrific.

I really dislike "tap to click" for some reason. I like the feedback of actually pressing it.

The only one of those choices I disagree with is no Touch ID in the base spec. Otherwise, good corners to cut to get to the cheap price point.

Since it's just $100 to get 250 -> 500 GB and Touch ID, I think it's okay.

It means people who need the cheapest computer can get it, and people who want to upgrade pay a small amount and get all the upgrades in a package without jumping up to the MacBook Air, etc. for much more.

I think different people will have one feature they feel should have been kept (other than the ram which is universal). For me not so much the Touch ID but the backlit keyboard.

Agree on the Touch ID. Love that feature for passwords etc.

Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well

I would say "No keyboard backlighting" is a true show-stopper for a huge portion of the target audience (students).

Learned touch typing just fine on a non-backlit keyboard. What would you feel would be the issue?

Can't see the keys in a dark classroom or bedroom.

https://xkcd.com/333/

...the skill of touch typing is that you don't need to look at the keyboard.

And the keys are still labeled...

My experience with students (outside of engineering) is that the most common show stopper for MacBooks is price. They’re not nit picking about keyboard backlighting.

Most people have no problem using a keyboard in the dark or with light from the screen.

Backlit keyboards are a nice-to-have, not a showstopper.

I would say the vast, vast majority of people are completely unable to use a non-lit keyboard in the dark.

The F and J keys still have bumps, to be able to locate them and position your hands correctly on the keyboard without looking.

I bet there are some paranoid people out there who will love that no touch-ID means no way for law enforcement to compel you to unlock the device.

You could just not set it up don't add your finger.

Yeah; but then the police will compel you to put your finger on the button + get pissed when it doesn't work.

https://xkcd.com/538/

In the United States, anything they beat out of you could be considered legally inadmissible evidence, and thrown out by the court.

(Whether or not that's a limit on law enforcement behavior depends on their particular aims.)

I want to see the person buying the Neo and pairing it with a new Studio Display.

A potential example that comes to mind would be you have a Studio Display in your house that you use for remote work with a beefy MacBook Pro, and then maybe a family member has a MacBook Neo that they’d like to plug into a monitor occasionally.

Tbh if you have a studio display you are probably used to most things not working with it. I get that it's apple, but the lack of a HDMI or Displayport input on the monitor is insane.

Just like no floppy on the iMac was insane.

When there is a better way, why would you spend money and effort supporting the old outdated way?

It's easier to justify removing stuff when it's very bulky and expensive. But a single HDMI port on the back of a desktop monitor would take up relatively no expense and space. HDMI has a fairly long life left yet, so much that even Apple backtracked on removing it from the macbooks. Which is far less of a problem since you can get a usb c to hdmi adapter but the other way is significantly harder.

Additional ports would complicate the user experience. The Studio Display has no buttons on it, but if you added additional inputs, you would also need to add a button for input switching at least. And potentially other buttons for brightness and volume settings.

It may not sound like a big deal, but I have an LG monitor that uses a remote for input switching and volume controls, and a BenQ monitor that uses buttons, and both provide a noticeably jankier experience.

The Studio Display provides a very clean user experience when paired with a Mac. You plug it in, it turns on, and all other functions (volume, brightness, colors, camera, etc) are controlled via MacOS. Personally I'm happy for Apple to optimize for that experience, at the cost of not working with non-Apple devices.

Sure, having two inputs does require some ui to switch inputs. That said, you could get the same user experience by simply only plugging one device in to a monitor even if it has multiple inputs.

If it was possible to use adapters, this problem would be much reduced, but as it is, it's pretty much impossible to plug in a desktop or game console in to the Apple monitors. And at least for me, having a joystick on the back of the screen for input switching is less problematic than a monitor which only works on some of my devices.

DisplayPort supposedly can work via an 8K@60Hz DisplayPort 1.4 to USB C cable.

HDMI is inferior. No power delivery, non reversible connector just to start.

If you want old connectors , why not put a scusi port on that thing!

There is Displayport support. Over USB-C. If you need an adapter you can get one.

As far as I could tell, there is no passive adapter that converts Displayport to usb-c, you can only go the other way. The only way to use a non usb-c device is to use a capture card to capture the HDMI/Displayport signal and retransmit it over usb.

There are two ways to carry video signals over type-c: DisplayPort alt mode, and Thunderbolt. DP Alt mode can work in either direction with a passive adapter or cable: a monitor with a Type-C DP input can be driven by a graphics card with a regular DP output connector, because it's all DisplayPort signalling either way.

Thunderbolt encapsulates the DisplayPort data in Thunderbolt packets, so both endpoints of the link need to be full-featured Thunderbolt devices.

I wouldn't let a family member use my desk to plug into my Studio Display. What if they mess with my chair settings?

Even better, pairing it with a Vision Pro as your monitor.

It won't drive a 5K monitor, 4K is the maximum.

I wonder if Apple should introduce a cheaper 24" 4K monitor to pair it with.

The new Studio Displays have more powerful chips than the Neo.

> No keyboard backlighting

When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?

2010. https://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/12/backlit-keyboard-to-ret...

like Neo from the Martix, it has only one interface port of real use.

Like Neo from the matrix, the other port is still useful for mice, printers, DACs, arduino projects, and little USB powered fans.

Man, that's just gross!

Can’t believe anyone this is targeted at is going to plug in a mouse in 2026.

I’d wager that the great majority of Neos won’t ever be connected to anything on the regular (aside from a charger).

> * No MagSafe

For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk.

But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare.

In case you didn't already know or haven't considered it, you can find right-angle usb-c MagSafe adaptors that basically allow the charging cable to disconnect from the device like MagSafe.

Most of these devices are a fire hazard. And in an environment where kids are needing magsafe, is probably the most dangerous for fire safety.

*edit

https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...

oh, probably not enough contact pressure. resistance is inversely proportional to contact pressure after all.

I am now nerd sniped on the surface physics of connectors. Thanks!

So true. Regarding those magnetic USB connectors: not just a fire hazard but also a tendency to eventually burn out whatever is on the other end of them IME.

Maybe ok for giving power if you are careful I think, I never had any fires, knock on wood.

But it's a bummer to zap/kill the data-functionality of USB ports on nice stuff just because a non-spec connector was used in between the two things being connected, for convenience.

So I don't trust them except for conveniently connecting power to low-cost devices. Whether Neo fits that... I doubt but YMMV.

Any you could recommend that are safe?

"No keyboard backlighting" is a show-stopper. Nuts.

It just looks slightly nicer. Touch typists don’t look at the keyboard anyways. And if you care enough about looks, you’ll want RGB lighting.

Plenty of people work in dark or dim places, like school classrooms, where backlighting is great and RGB lighting is useless.

That you seem to think everyone shares your needs and goals makes you a far less effective participant in these kinds of discussions. Maybe think for a bit before asserting what people who care about backlighting need it for and don't.

Aren't classrooms usually well lit?

No. And multi-resident dorm rooms much less so.

Very small percentage of students (the primary audience) are touch typists.

You're not the audience, obviously.

It's a show-stopper for the main audience: students.

It's pretty cool to see this machine come out. The Macbook Air is still my sweet spot though, I use a Thunderbolt audio interface, and need more RAM.

Great for a student or casual user though for sure.

I forgot about force touch as a feature until I read this comment.

> No camera notch

I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar?

The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple.

Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better.

The free rectangle area is a 16:10 screen, the space around the notch is a freebie.

Feels very negative! It costs 50% less than the air, in a time when everyone else’s prices are going up.

The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.

I don't think that was the intent. If anything, 90%+ of these features here feel nice-to-have, and I bet OP agrees (or is neutrally sharing the comp).

Feels negative because the positive of the cheaper price (it's half the price) is magically not listed

it reads like a 2026 version of CmdrTaco's famous iPod review, honestly

Fantastic post, thank you. Answered pretty much every question i had. This is why I love hacker news.

The Red Delicious of Macs.

Except nobody wants Red Delicious.

> * “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air

for pretty much half the price, though.

i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ laptop.

as somebody that has used both windows (at work), mac os (at work) and linux (at work and at home) the macbook neo could be an absolute steal of a laptop.

> * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

oh yeah, first world problems /s

— ...We believe that the customers will like it despite all that. We plan to market it as MacBook Nerfed.
— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.

— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?

Why didn't you list the number 1 difference, the price.

"1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage"

That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.

A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=

The biggest drawback is no Thunderbolt. The biggest sell for Macs right now is the ability to daisy chain them with the new RDMA update. A used M1 Mac Mini is more valuable than this.

That's an extremely niche use case and not even a remotely selling point for probably 99% of buyers, much less the "biggest" one.

I'm losing my mind. This is a BUDGET, entry-level laptop, and you're complaining about the lack of Thunderbolt daisy chaining?!

Listen I bought six Retina displays, I don't also have money for a new Mac. Of course I'm going to complain about the lack of Thunderbolt daisy chaining after my frivolous expenses come home to roost.

You get what a budget product is right?

The Neo is basically the mac flavor of an iPad meant for schoolchildren. It's a Chromebook competitor, not meant for whatever kooky AI shit you're doing at home.

>No camera notch

Well, I see this as a very positive thing.

Yeah, it's funny how it's better than the other MacBooks in a way.

Instead, the screen has big bezel.

Being limited to 8gb of ram is genuinely the only thing on that list I care about (no backlight and no fast charging are teetering on the edge of me caring, but they aren't worth multiple hundreds of dollars) - Apple silicone is so fast now that (at least for my purposes) the performance segmentation between price points is basically meaningless.

A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard, it feels insulting not to get it. I cannot believe this is one of the ways they decided to cheap out.

I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.

> A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard

Useless LEDs that burn battery budget.

The thing everyone seems to be missing is this isn't a laptop for you or me. It is to compete with Chromebooks in the educational market, and to have a SKU to sell in developing countries.

Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man.

As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home).

A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.

14 seconds? Lights are expensive when to comes to batteries.

"everyone wants"? I am not even sure I understand the utility. Typing in the dark? For, idk, living in a cave?

>> fantastic thing everyone wants

I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me.

(On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)

Why do you need to see your keyboard?

Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire.

Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.

You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed.

The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.

I don't have a habit of sitting in the dark.

Also I don't understand what would be hard about your challenge. My hands automatically move to the home row, feel the key bumps and I instantly know where every key is. I never need to look at my keyboard. Not to mention having to move my eyes down from the displays would be annoying.

I mean people like backlight keyboards. So if it fits your use case great. Still makes sense to not include in a base model. I actually actively avoid keyboards with any lightning.

Congratulations on your keyboard superiority. I was just explaining why mere mortals like myself like backlight.

The fact that one in ten million people is annoyed by one of the softest lights ever invented by mankind is not a good reason to not include said feature in a product my guy.

Most people don’t have the touch typing skill and do not care to learn it. It literally matters zero per cent if they would benefit from learning that.

Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks.

Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget.

I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.

> I wouldn’t even care about the 8GB of ram if I could just add some myself.

I think that’s pretty unreasonable when they’re using an iPhone SoC to keep it cheap because they have massive volume. It was only ever available in 8GB and never designed for user upgradable memory because it’s for a phone.

It’s basically a web browser machine, that’s fine.

It's an A18 Pro cpu with a 60Hz retina display. So it's basically a iPhone 16 Pro with a larger display and physical keyboard.

and there's nothing wrong with that.

wish they enable the actual iphone 16 with a full-fledged OS that we can plug into an external monitor.. I think samsung tried it but didn't get mass appeal. Apple could do that IMO - would have even avoided launching neo as students own a device in the form of phone or tab anyway..

And a different SSD and different charging and different heatsinks…

My only real issue with this design is as far as I can tell there is no markings on exterior explaining which USB-C port is "the good one" - an important point given one port is dramatically slower than the other.

I suspect many users will probably accidentally plug stuff like external SSDs into the slow port without realizing. It's maybe too much to hope for at this price point, but would have been nice for a machine with only two ports to be able to offer the same spec USB on both ports.

My instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port - it's closest to the corner - but in doing so you use up the "good" USB-3 port leaving you with only USB2. It's not a huge deal, but charging in the other port to free up the USB3 one feels slightly weird to me. I suspect most users will charge off the USB3 port given its location.

Reading the spec sheet, it also looks like DisplayPort is only supported over the USB3 port too - again there appears no way to know just by looking at the ports. This has never been a problem on any of the Apple Silicon 2-port MacBook Airs, as those have always had the same specs on both ports and could drive a display over DisplayPort from either.

> ...instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port...it's closest to the corner...charging in the other port...feels slightly weird...I suspect most users will...

Ah, but, as I recall some vintage of 2016-2018 Macbook Pro users will remember that using the "backmost, corner" USB-C port for charging could cause the MBP to overheat and fans to sound like a helicopter.

Thus, the (admittedly probably vanishingly tiny minority of) MBP veterans with "back charging USB port PTSD" who learned to use the foremost USB port for charging, will know full well to stay away from using that backmost USB port, if all they need is power!

My guess is that if you plug a fast medium on the slow USB port the OS will give you a pop up letting you know. I have seen something similar in windows 11.

That's true for displays, at least. I don't know about external storage.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

You don't have a problem with no keyboard backlighting?

Reading the list of QoL they scrapped I guess Jobs was right all along that to hit a base level of features Apple just needs a certain price point.

not the person you're replying to but that's the first feature I disable on any new computer

Genuinely asking: if you are touch typing, do you really need keyboard backlighting?

I do. I touch type, but I still like being able to see the letters that I am pressing.

The typing part is easy. Honestly the backlighting is mainly useful for a few situations:

1. Hitting an FKey or the keys like brightness that use the Fkeys. 2. Locating the Fn key on PC laptops (honestly even on the Mac I forget that it's in the corner) 3. tapping a keyboard shortcut like `,` or `c` while watching YouTube

Yes. Especially if I'm typing 'y-o-u-t-u-b-e-.-c-o-m' with one hand while laying in bed at night.

From Daring Fireball:

It was, I am reliably informed by Apple product marketing folks, a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC.

But yes, even just two dots above the USB3 and two dots above the USB2 wouldn't be rude.

> a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC.

I wonder if they plan far enough out that this was part of the A18 Pro

> even just two dots above the USB3 and two dots above the USB2 wouldn't be rude.

But then they'd look the same! :-P You're reminding me of the old story about the leprechaun, commanded not to tamper with a marker over the location of his buried gold, nor to move the gold, instead filled the entire forest with identical markers.

In fairness, it still sounds better than the 1st gen touchbar macs.

Those ran the CPU at 10% normal speed if you charged with the wrong USB port.

The 8GB max DRAM thing is a brutal limitation though.

100% agree. The mac mini was offered with 8GB for some time as well, and when my dad needed a new desktop, I thought that would be a good option. It was basically unusable. Even when you only have a few finder windows and a few (less than 5) tabs in safari open, you can feel the swap slowing down the system; just opening a folder or a new tab is noticeably slow, opening safari itself takes multiple seconds, and with just that basic usage you can run into the out-of-memory dialogue, something I had never seen before in macOS.

I have no idea how apple can believe that the neo won't damage their brand reputation. They must have optimized something to make 8GB viable.

Center stage is dumb anyway

No one has commented on the charger this thing comes with: It’s 20W! The sort of thing you’d plug a phone or iPad into, which seems crazy. I kind of wonder whether you could charge it with the built-in USB ports that are in newer wall sockets.

It basically is an iPhone or iPad, but with a keyboard. It’s really only the display that’s gonna consume significantly more power than its iPhone/iPad equivalent.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, and it occurred to me that even the display is probably pretty efficient since it’s not that much bigger than, say, a large iPad pro. It’s just wild to me how little power this thing uses.

The large iPad Pros have the advantage of using OLED displays rather than an LCD. Give the iPad screen an automatic power advantage because all of the light generated by the screen is emitted at the user, unlike an LCD where a substantial chunk of the LCD backlight is absorbed by the LCD layer.

At that point, why even include the charger? That would massively cut shipping weight like it did for the phone, and everyone already has a phone charger. I guess maybe they were worried some people would use a ultra cheap charger that can't even handle 20W reliably, but every OEM Android charger should have been fine with that for years, right?

I think this is part of why they don’t include chargers in the EU version of the Neo. If you have a charger from basically any time in the last ten years you’ll be fine with that.

That’s part of the EU USB-C regulation. You must offer a version of the laptop without a charger (unbundling) in order to reduce e-waste. Apple adheres to this by only shipping the MacBook without a charger.

It's wild, my Xiaomi phone charger came with 120W two years ago already, Apple seems so behind in comparison.

> I kind of wonder whether you could charge it with the built-in USB ports that are in newer wall sockets.

Yes. There are 30W versions available for sure. I bought one to install in my kitchen, but the hole in the quartz was slightly too small to slide in the box, and I am too lazy to try to carve out enough space in the quartz myself, so I just returned it.

> One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s

This is one of the things I never really expected Apple to do, since they've somehow managed to avoid the confusing black/blue colouring of USB-A ports, giving every laptop they've ever produced since 2012 USB 3.0 ports.

Seems like they're buying into hardware enshittification too (macOS and iOS 26 being software monstrosities with liquid glAss).

Confusing? Seems pretty straightforward, more so than the USB-C system of no indication at all. If you're lucky, you'll get a label.

> No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays

Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.

No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...

What about the old Studio Display?

Honestly I stopped caring once I saw the max output is 4k/60 regardless of what you connect - the output is going to look bad with scaling on anything with 5k or 6k resolution, which is all of the recent standalone displays from Apple. It's certainly not going to be an experience worth the price tag of the displays.

"One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s"

Why? Did they stock-piled USB 2.0 controllers and now need to get it off their inventory or something?

Costs. gotta remember this thing is based on iPhone hardware...which doesnt have more than 1 usb port normally.

More like stockpiled a phone SoC with limited I/O

You can use 16Gb of ram on an 8Gb machine, anything more than that it will start creaking and have out of memory errors on applications.

fyi: "Gb" implies gigabit, used in network and RAM where 8 bits = 1 byte is not guaranteed. "GB" implies gigabyte.

Looks like a bunch of great trade-offs to give value to customers in this economy.

I would not buy an Apple laptop regardless, but they at least addressed one of my major complaints:

No camera notch

Praise the...market?!

Has anyone tried to use a laptop at night? It’s pretty hard without lit keys. Maybe this one has some super reflective letters so that the screen lights them up.

Just turn on a light?

Skilled computer usage includes learning to type without looking at the keyboard

I have light fixtures at home.

So no real issue at all for the target group

* Max storage is 512GB instead of 4TB.

I currently have 1TB and I'm pretty happy with it, but I've had 256GB and 512GB in the past and I was not happy with those. This might be the only reason I would not consider this laptop.

The last point made me chuckle, good catch :D

> No camera notch

This is a positive though.

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

The light has stopped shining at Apple for a bit now

I think parent means reflective. In the videos it looks like just a slightly different color. On the other MacBooks it is polished metal.

No keyboard backlighting is itself a dealbreaker for me.

Is Force Touch the thing that makes Macbook trackpad better than basically every other laptop trackpad? Because if so, that is actually "the" deal breaker.

They were great long before Force touch.

I'm interested in seeing how these changes affect the supply chain of components. I would figure it would be cheaper to just use the existing components with all features, instead of making a different one with 1 or 2 parts less. Maybe this is just how good manufacturers are now?

My current note taking machine is an M1 MacBook Air. If something happened to it, honestly, this seems like a really meaningful alternative - like for real work I'd still prefer a ThinkPad, but for being on the move and for having something to throw in my bad, the Neo would be great!

I used to have a Techbite Zin notebook that tbh had a really, really nice keyboard, but it was anemic when it came to literally anything else - and the 4 GB of RAM made even lightweight Linux distros struggle.

Still better than my Lenovo

Can’t expand it at all. Not for me.

also, less space than a Nomad. Lame.

This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts.

Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.

The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt...

This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.

I am in education and speak to others at the (US) national level on a near-daily basis. This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.

- Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit.

- The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.

- For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks. Yes, this is a numbers game. The goal is every student has a device.

- Schools using Chromebooks to log in. If you want reliable Google logins on macOS, you have an additional big spend up front, along with per-seat licensing costs.

- This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.

So what segment does it target in your opinion? The "surface" market is minuscule and compared to the edu market irrelevant, the "vendor lock in" angle with the google logins can easily change over night as it did with microsoft.

> So what segment does it target in your opinion?

- Low end consumer

- College students

- People who have a desktop computer, but want a cheap portable for on-the-go.

> The "surface" market is minuscule

Probably so, but then again, I see a lot of Surface devices out and about and they are fairly popular with non-teacher education staff. While they aren't competing with Chromebooks or Apple on volume, I'd bet they're doing well.

Even so I imagine your average person needing something for education would consider both. The Neo may cost more but from my past experience of Apple stuff they will likely be better made.

Certainly possible. But, in the US consider that Google and "one-to-one" Chromebooks are generally dominating and the curriculum more or less requires extensions and setting.

As an example, my kids try to do school work on one of the house Macs, but there's too many roadblocks so they just use their Chromebooks.

I used to buy my kids Chromebooks for school, but, since the pandemic, the school issues them, so I haven't bought any since.

> Apple stuff they will likely be better made

It depends on what you mean. Apple uses higher quality parts and is more sleek.

Chromebooks are more durable, take more abuse, are very repairable, and parts are cheap and plentiful. These are keys to schools. We're at a point where schools cycle out old models and either keep a bunch around, or strip parts from them, because some parts are interchangeable between generations.

Not every school is cash limited. Many schools have lots of money to invest in technology.

Some schools will gladly pay more.

Truth. I've seen some of them with carts full of MacBook Pros. But these schools are a small fraction of the overall population.

It should also be noted that Washington state schools are still generally heavily Microsoft and Windows, despite Google's dominance.

Similar to how MS helps their local schools, I think Apple does for schools in California.

I saw this today: https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1rk3t...

If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions

I don't think institutions will care much about the enhanced durability since they treat laptops as disposable units anyway. Apple can only complete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.

No, we really care about durability. The amount of damage is crazy. So many units are damaged that it would be cost-prohibitive to dispose and replace them.

The screenshot in that Reddit post more or less looks like ours. Schools generally repair these, if they have the technicians. And everyone is cannibalizing parts out of last generation models. It's like a Jawa shop.

> Apple can only compete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.

I've never seen, nor heard of Apple providing competitive prices, even in quantities of ~10,000 units. They haven't even gotten close and they've largely given up on the idea of Macs as a standard K12 school device. ~$250 iPads are still strong in low primary grades and special education, though.

Can confirm Apple gave up on education. If they really cared you'd be able to have multiple accounts/profiles on iPad, and that's still not a thing that exists.

I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.

Have you seen the classroom app? It allows for multiple profiles on an iPad. I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...

> you'd be able to have multiple accounts/profiles on iPad, and that's still not a thing that exists.

It does exist, it just requires the iPad to be managed via MDM, which most schools would have (and should implement if they don't have it). JamF, Mosyle, Business Essentials, InTune and probably any other MDM can put an iPad into shared iPad mode with multiple profiles.

I worked in my High Schools repair room in Junior year, and the Jawa shop is an apt description haha

Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition. It would take a restructuring of laptops within the school system to kids/families having a joint ownership over the laptop to stop them intentionally destroying them. Even then, there are complications like kids that will absolutely destroy anothers' for fun.

And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.

My kids have (insanely shitty) chromebooks from school and we are absolutely responsible for the cost if they break. We have to sign a release at the beginning of the year. Whether or not they’d be able to collect from the vast majority of families is a different question, granted. But the responsibility is there.

In practice, there's a huge difference in responsibility between buying and sending your kid with a laptop and signing a paper that says you're responsible if it breaks. I'd also guess it depends on where you go to school.

My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.

Who pays for the laptop when the school bully pours water on a kid's backpack? Or a kid has their bag in a seat and someone sits on it accidentally?

What happens when a kid's laptop is broken, regardless of the reason, and the family is unable to afford to repair it? Are we going to run into a similar situation that we had when kids couldn't pay for school lunch? Do teachers write "pay for a new laptop" in sharpie on the kid's arm for the parent?

A child's educational environment is a lot more chaotic, violent, and uncontrolled compared to an office environment. If you're issuing my child a $600 laptop and making me responsible for any damages, guess what's going to be kept at home in a secure location?

Making a child responsible for securing a laptop in an insecure environment isn't accountability, it's just a form of imprisonment.

1) bully or bullys insurance 2) whoever sat on it Alternatively: Apple care? :)

Does everyone pay for bully insurance or is it a tax on the bullied?

What happens when a backpack full of paper books is destroyed? When I was a kid, we were charged between $50-100 for a book that was written in or destroyed. I bet these days it would be $200 each. Yeah we were running around with $500-600 of books in our backpacks all the time.

Back in the day it was also our (kids/parents) responsibility to provide book covers. We always used paper grocery bags, but you could buy some that were purpose built.

> Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition.

Very often they aren't (the school devices are in-school resources that aren't given to the kids any more than their desks are) and anything the kids have out of school is bought by the parents (and even if they are given the computers by the school, usually the replacement costs is on the parents if there is damage). But, either way, grade school kids are, on average, irresponsible as a matter of cognitive development (its a big part of why children are treated differently than adults legally.)

> school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.

A school district that can be described as having a “penal system” is, ipso facto, dysfunctional.

Not just durability, but ergonomics. My kids have crappy screens, literally the worst trackpad I’ve ever used, and awful keys that hurt my hands minutes after typing (but I go all day on my personal computer).

If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).

I think my school solves this by telling the parents to buy ‘something’ for the kids, as long as it has a webbrowser and keyboard.

Our district had BYOD and just got rid of it this year. We used it because the teachers couldn’t manage keeping kids off games or YouTube on their Chromebooks during class. Even then, personal devices could not be used for state testing.

> Not just durability, but ergonomics.

Somehow while spending the most per capita of any nation on the planet, American schools are in a perpetual budget crunch. It's about getting internet access not whether the trackpad is good. You think a chromepad is crappy - have you ever tried to do something in Blackboard?

> If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care

They won't be. Pizza sauce is considered a vegetable.

An aside: Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves? I believe they shouldn't.

> Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves?

The more and less cynical explanations (and both play a role, IMO):

(1) Because individuals in those roles have closer relationships to the people that set the salaries than do individual teachers, and

(2) Because otherwise people with experience in education would continue as teachers and not seek roles as superintendents or other administrators (or seek the advanced degrees sought for those roles whose only financial payoff is greater competitiveness for those higher paying roles.)

> Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves?

A couple reasons:

1. Because usually, superintendents and the administration are responsible and accountable for a lot more moving parts than teachers are. Aside from the many kids each teacher teachers, which leads us to point #2.

2. There is a lot more supply of teachers than demand. If a teacher doesn't like their objectively meager pay, they can quit. There are 10 applicants lined up waiting to take their position.

> I believe they shouldn't.

This is generally handled at your city level. Organize your like-minded constituents to lobby the board?

Are you actually asking why management makes more money than workers?

Chromebooks don’t have a durability problem. I doubt the MacBook is any more durable, even with an all metal construction - if anything, that probably makes it worse at absorbing impact than nice soft bendy plastic.

This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.

Actually metal's pretty bendy when compared to plastic (most anyway...mmv based upon formula).

The metal construction is what prompted me to switch over to macbook pro's back in the day. The plastic dell laptops i used to use couldn't handle the abuse that it took during all of the travel i was doing at the time (cases kept cracking). I switched to a pro and was rewarded later with it surviving a 5 foot fall from a car rental counter. It bent part of the corner, but the screen was still in tact and it continued to work well enough to get me through the trip. I suspect the plastic alternative would have been toast.

Having kids today and seeing how rough they are with their toys, I'm not confident that a plastic laptop would survive them long.

Metal is technically more elastic than an elastic band. With a Young’s modulus of 69 GPa for aluminum versus just 2 GPa for ABS, metal has the "memory" to snap back from significant pressure. Plastic, true to its name, is far more likely to hit its limit and stay permanently deformed. (That’s why metal bars are used to provide “flexibility” to buildings. Concrete provides the strength)

That's a big if. Kids are little engines of chaos and destruction. The Neo might not be more durable, just more expensive.

I could see the Neo as a viable option for teenage students. The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards. Most students feared seeking a replacement device when theirs would break without having done anything wrong. A device with higher build quality and software longevity has the potential to save these institutions a reasonable sum of money in the long run.

Younger students on the other hand, Chromebooks remain the way to go. Most of the time, kids'll win in a race between their destructive tendencies and crappy hardware giving out.

> I could see the Neo as a viable option for teenage students.

100% agreed. My statements weren't meant to indicate the Neo wasn't viable. They were meant to state that the Neo isn't going to replace Chromebooks in schools (as far as being District-purchased).

> The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards.

Build quality has been steadily improving over the years. It's all still budget (target ~$290), but is more and more durable with each new generation.

While I was in high school, as a punishment for a fake "hacking" prank [0], I had to spend half of my lunch breaks with the school IT guy for two weeks as he went around and fixed the damage students were doing to the school computers.

There wasn't actually THAT much going on and we mostly just sat in his office and chatted, but when he did have to deal with something, it was absurd the vandalism that happened. One kid had unplugged a mouse and managed to jam the plug into the floppy drive. The IT guy was like "It takes talent to be this much of a piece of shit" as he had to disassemble the case to get it out.

When it comes to issuing laptops to public school students, I'm torn. On one hand, people need computer skills, but on the other, I just don't think many students can be trusted with a piece of equipment costing hundreds of dollars. Hell, how many people can't even own a personal cell phone without somehow shattering the screen in just a few months?

[0] I had created a two-page slide deck with a black background and white text, then filled both slides with the same text that made it look like a DOS prompt and that Windows had been deleted. It had a C:\> prompt, and on one slide, there was an underscore after the prompt. I then made the slide show auto-play and loop, making the underscore blink, which made it look like an actual prompt. Keep in mind, these were Macs. There was no "C" drive, and certainly no Windows. A teacher insisted I broke the computer, despite showing that pressing any key ended the show, took me to the Principal's office, who gave me my punishment. My first time talking to the IT guy, he was like "you did what now?" and I showed him, and he thought it was funny as hell. Honestly, my "punishment" ended up being pretty fun. That was all 25 years ago. I wish I remembered his name so I could look him up.

That's hilarious! I can only remember winnuke being a thing in the shared computer lab.

I’m old, so all our computers were in the library or lab. But, kids will be kids. We would stick paper clips into the sockets to see if we could trigger the breaker, among other idiotic things.

https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished

The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!

My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.

Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.

Chromebooks are the SaaS of hardware where the user is not the buyer. No one says “I would love to have a Chromebook at home” any more than they desire to run Salesforce at home.

A Chromebook at the same price point will get you similar if not better specs, 14" 16:10 FHD IPS display, convertible with touchscreen and pen input, backlit keyboard and 10h+ battery runtime.

How long do those chrome books last though?

I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.

Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.

Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.

Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.

Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.

Framework might be appealing as well. Being able to have parts on hand that can easily be swapped out sounds a lot better/easier than dealing Apple repair practices. The Framework Laptop 12[0] starts at $549 and has touchscreen/pen options. But that price goes up to $799 to have it pre-built with an OS on it, which schools would want, unless building your laptop and installing the OS is part of the curriculum. I wonder if having the kids do this would make them take better care of it, because they had a hand it making it?

[0] https://frame.work/laptop12

> Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer.

An iPhone Pro is 3 times more expensive than an average Android phone too. If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.

> If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.

The hardware lasts but they usually stop getting software updates after a few years, especially if they're not high-end models.

Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/02/apple-releases-ios-16-7...

Samsung's flagship Galaxy series get software support for 7 years. A, M, F mid-range and low end models get 6 years of software support. The worst case today for the most popular mid to low spec phones is twice the "a few years" you claim, which suggests you're out of touch with the changes in the industry over the last few years.

> The worst case today for the most popular mid to low spec phones is twice the "a few years" you claim, which suggests you're out of touch with the changes in the industry over the last few years.

Are you sure about that? Apparently nicer Android phones not getting updates for very long is real.

No Longer Receiving Updates

    Google Pixel [2], [3]

    | Phone         | Released |Updates Ended|
    |---------------|----------|-------------|
    | Pixel 3       | Oct 2018 | Oct 2021    |
    | Pixel 3 XL    | Oct 2018 | Oct 2021    |
    | Pixel 3a      | May 2019 | May 2022    |
    | Pixel 3a XL   | May 2019 | May 2022    |
    | Pixel 4       | Oct 2019 | Oct 2022    |
    | Pixel 4 XL    | Oct 2019 | Oct 2022    |
    | Pixel 4a      | Aug 2020 | Aug 2023    |
    | Pixel 4a (5G) | Nov 2020 | Nov 2023    |
    | Pixel 5       | Oct 2020 | Oct 2023    |
    | Pixel 5a      | Aug 2021 | Aug 2024    |

As of late 2024, the Pixel 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 5, and 5a series are all fully out of support. The Pixel 5 received Android 14 as its last OS update with a final security patch in October 2023, and the Pixel 5a concluded support in August 2024, also on Android 14.

    Samsung Galaxy [1], [4]

    | Phone                |Released  | Updates Ended|
    |----------------------|----------|--------------|
    | Galaxy S9            | Mar 2018 | ~2022        |
    | Galaxy S9+           | Mar 2018 | ~2022        |
    | Galaxy Note 9        | Aug 2018 | ~2022        |
    | Galaxy S10           | Mar 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy S10+          | Mar 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy S10e          | Mar 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy Note 10       | Aug 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy Note 10+      | Aug 2019 | ~2023        |
    | Galaxy S20           | Feb 2020 | Early 2025   |
    | Galaxy S20+          | Feb 2020 | Early 2025   |
    | Galaxy S20 Ultra     | Feb 2020 | Early 2025   |
    | Galaxy Note 20       | Aug 2020 | ~2024–2025   |
    | Galaxy Note 20 Ultra | Aug 2020 | ~2024–2025   |
    | Galaxy S20 FE        | Oct 2020 | Mid 2025     |
    | Galaxy Z Fold 2      | Sep 2020 | ~2024        |
    | Galaxy Z Flip        | Feb 2020 | ~2023        |

The Galaxy S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra received their final update in the form of the January 2025 security patch. After originally launching in 2020, Samsung had promised four years of software support for the S20 trio — three major OS upgrades (Android 10 to 13) and four years of security updates.

On Their Last Legs (Security Updates Only, No More OS Upgrades)

These are still receiving quarterly security patches but will drop off soon:

- Galaxy S21 / S21+ / S21 Ultra — Final OS was Android 15; now on quarterly security patches only

- Galaxy S21 FE — Will receive Android 16 as its final major upgrade via One UI 8, after which it moves to quarterly patches with no further OS updates

- Pixel 6 / Pixel 6 Pro — Now updated to a 5-year support window, with final updates expected in October 2026

- Pixel 6a — Supported until at least July 2027

---

The main takeaway: if you're on a Samsung S20-era or Pixel 5a-or-older device, you're fully unprotected. The Galaxy S21 series and Pixel 6/7 families still have some runway left, though they're winding down.

[1]: Samsung Ends Software Updates for These Galaxy Phones in 2025 — https://r2.community.samsung.com/t5/Tech-Talk/Samsung-Ends-S...

[2]: These Google Pixel Phones Will Not Get Android 16 — https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/google-pixel-phones-not-...

[3]: How long will my Google Pixel be supported? – https://9to5google.com/2024/12/10/how-long-will-my-google-pi...

[4]: Galaxy S20 series software updates run dry as Samsung ends support* – https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/samsung-galaxy/galaxy-...

> Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.

How usable is an 8-year-old iPhone as a primary phone though? I agree that having 8 years of support is a good thing, but at that point the hardware is so degraded that it's not suitable for its original purpose anymore. At that point I'd rather have android just so I can root it and install Linux. Then again, with improvements to phones slowing down in recent years, this is becoming increasingly untrue.

I have a $120 android for the last 3 years. Please tell me how excatly Iphone Pro can beat it.

Not having to make a Google login would be a big benefit to me. Google is getting their data early

Completely agree. I hate kids being stuck in a Google ecosystem. Apple’s classroom app is really good.

If the school is wealthy enough to provide free laptops, then you're right they're going to go for the cheapest option. But if the school expects the parents to provide laptops, then the parents are more likely to choose this.

somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).

The build quality of a $300 Chromebook is laughable.

Not to disagree too much with your assessment, one point stands out:

> The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.

We don't actually know this. It does at the level individual student purchasing themselves, but I'd imagine there is a substantial bulk discount for educational establishments. That is not a new trend for Apple, it dates back to the Apple II.

I do because we asked Apple about Neo pricing.

We do because this is historically the norm. Schools pay roughly the same as the "college student" pricing, aside from the occasional deals they toss us.

> This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.

I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.

There used to be FleetSmith which was a very simple Apple-only MDM system.

It was great, very simple to use but still had all the features you needed.

They were acquired by Apple who then promptly killed the product.

> This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.

Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.

I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.

Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.

Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.

It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".

>a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.

Citation? I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts. Heck, there's someone in this very discussion saying the same with actual prices paid in their comment showing real first hand experience and yet you come in here with a hand wavy unsupported claim that Apple gives breaks for bulk buys.

> I've read and heard others say this is the opposite of the truth, that Apple never gives bulk discounts.

When I worked in higher education at an Ivy Plus university for 14 years, we were able to get discounts. We also had a campus store where we sold and repaired Macs.

I understand that higher ed is quite different from K-12. It also seems like sales reps have much less leeway now than they used to. I have no doubt there's been multiple reorganizations, etc. and things could be completely different now.

It's not just discounts; even if you pay the normal education price, Apple could throw in some extras (software licenses, AppleCare, etc.) to sweeten the deal.

The better question is why on earth do school kids need computers, especially anything beyond a robust desktop PC that they use extremely sparingly? No one ever seems to be able to give a good answer as to why we do this to ourselves, especially elementary school kids other than parents/teachers/schools are some combination of overwhelmed, lazy, or just outright massively derelict.

It needs a touch screen for elementary schools kids. Fine for older kids.

We started using computers with keyboards in class in grade 2-3.

Current school laptops also have touchscreens for drawing and other activities. It’s a cheap feature.

Pen input is the one factor that forced one of my kids to a Windows laptop for school (a Surface Pro). It was a required feature for his school. Seeing how much he uses it for note taking, I get it. So yes, drawing is a key feature for schools.

Another school uses iPads with keyboards for the same purpose, so I'm not sure where the school market is for these. Maybe only older kids, but a lot of edu-tech is expecting some kind of touch/pen input.

It might be a fine laptop when you are on the move. I have an educational Lenovo for that purpose, but I would appreciate a Mac for that same use. When I need more power away from my desk I can use the MacBook Pro or my Lenovo T series (both a lot heavier than I’d like).

I just wish the Mac had 16GB of RAM but my tiny Lenovo has 8 and it’s been working OK so far - I haven’t even set up a proper swap partition and it’s running on zram.

wow. are elementary school kids using chromebooks? my kids is in pre-K this year. i dont know about the elementary school chromebook thing.

Yes, my kids all started using one in Kindergarten, although it took to 4th grade before my oldest started bringing home one every night.

They take standardized tests on it. Questions have a button to speak the question. Same with answers.

I'm not sure that's true given that Chromebooks can be had for one third the price.

It might be aimed at Chromebooks, but it’s also a low-end Surface killer.

The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.

At this point the Macbook Neo is in competition with Chromebooks, Microsoft and the third party market for older Macbook Airs with M1s

This is not competing against Chromebooks, which have very little reach outside of institutions. The Macbook Neo will likely have very widespread appeal for anyone looking for what used to be a netbook.

It could compete well in both. Looks like Apple has a product that competes with Chromebooks on price and competes with Surface on performance at the same time. At least close enough on both counts to create headaches for anyone trying to sell either.

The ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.

I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…

the surface laptop has an excellent screen (2880x1920 i believe), and the macbook neo is lower resolution than apple's made in years, however.

What about color quality? I've used high resolution laptops with shitty washed out colors, but one thing I've always appreciated about Apple's displays is their vibrance.

The Neo’s display is 219 pixels per inch, which is virtually the same as the Air’s 224 ppi.

Not true.

13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)

15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...

Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)

ahhh....good catch. i used the wrong name: i meant surface pro 13, which has the detachable keyboard. yeah, it's odd that the surface laptops are lower res.

too late to edit: i was thinking surface pro (the detachable keyboard) not surface laptop with attached keyboard and weirdly low res screens, compared to the surface pro series.

all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.

I don't know why the downvotes, maybe someone can chime in if there is more to surface laptop? because i am using one laptop, and much prefer to use windows on M4 macbook pro instead.

I assume you’re downvoted because Microsoft has to want that.

Who cares about Windows anymore?

Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices

Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases

many people do. i work for Microsoft and don't have option to use mac os

Well, last I checked most people don't work for MS so I reckon their experience might be a bit different

Google Docs might handle 50% of people who use Office, but I doubt if it handles 25% of Office use cases. Few use every feature of Office but someone uses every feature of Office and all those power user cases that are different can’t be handled by Google Docs. Or even Web Office.

I’m not sure that many people want Windows badly enough they would get an Apple device and remove the original OS so they could run Windows.

From my personal experience, Widows users in general don’t mind Windows, but, definitely, nobody I have ever met finds it more desirable than macOS.

The games industry remains a hotbed of people that vehemently hate Apple, even those that have never touched a Mac.

Part of it historically was a sort of Visual Studio induced Stockholm Syndrome, where for a long time if you were doing C++ work that was the only sane way to go.

There are some companies that even filter potential employees on this basis.

Apple leaves gamers alone, it does not even attempt to be a nontrivial gaming platform and makes no promises. Why would gamers and gamedevs hate it? It just doesn't exist in their market.

Its a computer. People are gonna try and play computer games on it.

Was Sony making their MIPS workstations when they introduced their MIPS-based PlayStation? Sounds like a nice distinction between work and play. ;-)

Curiously the Sega game Columns was licensed from the HP UX original.

From the noises that occur whenever you force a Windows loving gamedev to use a Mac the first major "problem" is mouse acceleration.

Which companies?

Sounds like a nice blacklist to have.

Don't have to remove anything. This used to be possible on Macs with bootcamp as they called it.

Bootcamp was a hedge when Apple was a lot less dominant than it is now.

When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, it wasn’t clear that was going to work. Being able to boot into Windows was sort of an insurance policy that’s no longer necessary.

It made migration from Windows to Mac easier. Now that Office can run in a browser and the Mac has first tier support for the desktop version, and a lot more of the usual software is delivered either as web applications or portable apps on top of a browser runtime, being able to boot Windows is a lot less relevant.

I believe you’re being downvoted because your logic is from 20+ years ago when Windows compatibility was important.

Also the era when companies were trying to “kill” each other’s devices is no longer a thing.

They all get the reality it’s a multi device world and they need to work within it.

wine already runs on Mac so really they would just need something like dxvk to have a package similar to proton

To be honest if Apple wanted to they could work with valve to make gaming on Mac a reality

To some degree it should already be possible with wine + dxvk + moltenvk

Oh man I'd pay premium for a sleek device like this that CAN'T run Windows or Mac OS. Just a mere thought of being able to run pure Linux on that sweet sweet apple silicon with full driver support makes my juices flowing.

There will never be an Apple Silicon device without the ability to run an Apple OS.

Just run MacOS.

I know and I'd rather just stop using modern tech than willingly go back to Apple or Microsoft software.

FYI: Apple added support for Linux containers to macOS Tahoe [1].

[1]: https://github.com/apple/container

> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only nerds use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.

I think macOS applications feel like they have mostly updated to use the native resolution, so arbitrary scaling works great now. My comparative experience with a new Windows laptop is how I remember macOS felt when they first made high density screens many years ago: lots of render bugs all over, and every program has to be re-opened when I plug in an external screen to be usable at the new resolution

Most macOS applications now support rendering at 1x and 2x. And arbitrary scaling is done by the OS not by apps.

That’s the ideal. Apps shouldn’t concern themselves with pixels. It’s the OSs job to know the hardware the machine uses.

This leads to visible moire patterns at non-integer scalings, though

We should probably have nicer scaling algorithms that account for Moirés. Also, when you see a Moiré, that’s because you are scaling a bitmap that has periodic dithering. These should be more rare now, and a good opportunity to replace them with vector images with periodic patterns that are tuned for physical dimensions rather than pixel count.

Not really, because Surface isn't what most folks buying PCs get.

And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.

Surface Laptop is 1099€ vs 699€ for the Macbook Neo in Germany.

Macbook Neo is also 219ppi vs Surface Laptop at 178ppi. We’ll see about performance, but i’d expect the macbook to be on par or better.

Except most Germans don't buy Surface Laptops, and there are much cheaper options with 8 GB, naturally they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.

It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.

And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.

> they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.

If your MacBook has a glowing apple, you might be running Snow Leopard. You need to upgrade like now.

Thankfully I don't own any, I rather have computers with replaceable parts, more environment friendly, thus not something I need to worry about.

what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly? The MacBook Neo is 60% from recycled materials and Apple offers free recycling for all their products.

How do you recycle your old parts?

> what computers are you buying that are more environmentally friendly?

Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.

The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.

Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.

20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.

15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.

10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.

nowadays macbook batteries aren't something i'd call "easy to replace" but it's not something a typical repair shop or meticulous individual wouldn't be able to do – most beater windows laptops don't have user-replacable batteries either fwiw

if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks

Thinkpads with replaceable components and PC desktops.

Being able to add RAM and replace storage with faster flash typically extend the useful life of a computer, even if the CPU is not replaceable as in desktops.

On my machines the limiting factor is not CPU, but memory and GPU speed. Low RAM and slow GPUs prevent me from running local AI models. These things will only get bigger over time. I wouldn’t expect a developer machine to still be useful 5 years from now with less than 16 or 32GB.

I miss the glowing apple on my white polycarbonate MacBook. What I don't miss is the shitty Intel GMA X3100 iGPU and Apple not releasing a 64 bit driver for it.

Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.

I miss the glowing logos too, but I guess this would force the screen to be ticker, which is a big no-no for Apple.

I think this April they should announce one with a beige shell, a rainbow logo, and a brown keyboard (with BELL on top of tge G) ;-).

The Apple logo is on the wrong side of the screen to be concerned about. Apple's OS and user experience is miles ahead of the competition and so are the displays they use.

Yes, this should convince people who cannot afford to pay for Apple brand to buy it.

The post that I commented on was arguing that what sets the Mac apart from other options with 8 GB RAM, and what makes them more expensive, is that they are seen as a status symbol. I made a point against that mentioning two areas in which Macs are truly superior.

What exactly is your point?

Indeed nothing beats the Tahoe experience.

I disagree about Apple's OS and UI, I prefer the user experience of Linux :)

With a distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything basically "just works", and you have much more freedom with how you setup your computer. Plus, while Apple is generally better about not bloaring their OS with bothersome corporate BS ("log into your Windows account! Sign up for OneDrive! AI in your email!") then Microsoft, they're not exactly perfect.

The Mac OS is the thing that keeps me away from those computers. I really don't like when a piece of software tries to treat me like I have some kind of brain injury and needs to "help" me at every point.

Are you saying this coming from Linux or Windows?

Linux

Have you ever actually used macOS? It doesn't sound like it.

I have a MBP and used it for years

To each their own. The OS is easily one of the most frustrating I’ve ever been required to use. It does some things very well, but many things absolutely infuriatingly.

Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.

"With 8GB". 8GB on Apple Silicon acts more like 16GB on a PC.

Depends on how many ChromeOS Platform apps you have running.

Glowing logo for Starbucks dig? What year is it?

2026

The surface laptop is a competitor to the MacBook Air, the cheaper Surface Laptop Go was the low cost attempt from MS.

Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.

"good laptops" yes. But I haven't seen a "great" one in a very long time. The Windows market is asleep at the wheel and a copilot button is not going to resuscitate it.

I think the Surface is as close to great as you can get. I'm not saying that I know the whole market of laptops, you probably know better. But the Surface is pretty good, which is weird because it seems like Microsoft isn't really focusing on it or even backing away from it.

I agree with the parent, that Macbooks are way ahead in terms of usability, polish and charm for a laptop. And the performance is outright stellar.

Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.

The Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise

It has an unusual keyboard. Function should come before form [1]. This unconventional design makes it harder for touch typists to locate keys by feel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.

Not if you move windows between screens with different scaling, or launch apps that don't support the scaling stuff out of the box, or launch apps via X11 forwarding in WSL.

All of this works much worse on macOS: Scaling sucks, as it's integer-upscaled rendering + fractional downscaling in a shader. Windows can't span screens either.

On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.

Works just fine. I do this every day in my setup. Yeah, it'll take a second to adjust but it works.

>Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world

Thinkpads.

Or in general any business laptop, like HP Elitebook or Dell Presicion.

But they are not cheap at all haha

If you want performace get a desktop!

> If you want performace get a desktop!

Or a MacBook, which is part OP's point. Apple is delivering quality at price points that Windows OEMs aren't (which is sort of the opposite of the phone world).

8gb of ram is not performance.

Never used an 8GB Mac I see.

Maybe I am in the minority but MacOS always feels so bloated and heavy to me.

Thinkpads are tanks, but most of the time you’d be perfectly well served by a BMW series 3.

Ts-series are nice and slim. X1 too.

Only P-series are workstations.

I meant for build quality.

I have a T series and it's neither slim nor light.

A decked out Mac mini is actually a beast for its size

The experience I have had with Thinkpads, both current-gen and old during my childhood, did not warm me up to the line. They are not particularly better in feel, thermals and screen quality against its cheaper alternatives including those from Lenovo themselves. The only good thing was its keyboard, but then most Lenovo laptops in general have good keyboards. Its popular acclaim is weird to me.

I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad

Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.

I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.

The Surface is garbage. My last work-issued one caught fire.

I've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.

I think the problem is that Microsoft's hardware quality is super inconsistent. We had a ton of employees using Surface laptops and tablets at my previous company, particularly sales and support. The company stopped buying them after a few years because the first year failure rate was almost 15%. However, the folks that had the good ones often kept them for 5 years or more.

woah, how did it catch on fire? I want to hear this.

Don't know. Plugged it in one morning, and it wasn't turning on. So I tried detaching it from its base because that had been a problem before, but it was dead, so you needed to find the little manual release thing that's inside one of the vents, which I didn't have a tool for, so I gave up on that. Then I turned to ask a coworker to try their charging cord (as mine had to be replaced once after it failed, and I assumed the same thing had happened again), and by the time I got back to my desk a small whisp of smoke was rising from the keyboard, which is strange, because to my understanding that's not where the computer bits are in that laptop.

So I unplugged it, at which point I noticed the smoke was increasing. So we doused it in CO2 (maybe N2, idk, some cheap gas we had lying around for the wetlab), pried the computer part off of the base, and then IT handled sending it back to M$.

I think the 2 laptops you mentioned are targeting different markets.

The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)

The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.

8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps

Is it hard for you to imagine that people who'll buy the Neo don't care about specs at all?

I mean, look at the colors!

Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.

> Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM.

They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"

Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.

My spouse bought a mac and asks me (mostly a linux user, and I'm happy to help) for support somewhat regularly (mostly recently, for a tahoe upgrade). It's not the golden unicorn people paint it to be. 8gb is insane in 2026.

It may not be a golden unicorn, but I find it is quite a lot better than providing support for the Windows laptops they used to buy from random department stores on rock-bottom sales... Nothing quite like a $200 PC laptop stocked with OEM bloatware

Until 1/3 of your hard drive space is taken up by weird cache stuff that MacOS doesn’t explain nor offer a straightforward way to clean up.

If it's cache it gets automatically deleted. If it doesn't get automatically deleted it's not a cache and is a bug.

I like my MB Pro but it has serious audio and external display issues. I've had to remove spotlight indexing to prevent obscure OOM issues. One time I woke up to open my laptop and find it's screen cracked for no apparent reason. Since I couldn't prove it wasn't my fault I was charged for the repair anyway and I'm grateful to myself that I had AC+ because I might have as well just bought another laptop if not. At the end of the day, it's still just a computer.

I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...

Or, she can keep the macbook air as it basically has the same specs as the neo. What is the point of buying the same laptop twice?

Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.

If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

I agree generally that on Mac you can 'get by' with 8gb and for the target audience on this, and how they'll likely use it - it's totally acceptable.

But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.

> 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026

I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.

Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?

And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.

Web pages are very complicated and there's no pressure on people to make less complicated ones, nor is there any way there could be pressure on them.

Images, complicated CSS, JavaScript ads, they can all use lots of memory!

It depends on how you define "serious work". Is it to get the best results possible, or is it to tax a computer as much as possible? Programmers would usually answer the latter, while users would answer the former.

That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.

Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.

Add much as I'd like to be more efficient, modern toolchains absolutely need these kinds of numbers for big projects. My 48GB system will OOM trying to link clang unless I'm extremely careful. The 64GB system is a bit more forgiving, but I still have to go for lunch while it's working.

Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?

Usually the problem then is more fundamental.

Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.

I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.

I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.

I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.

Rust has similar issues with memory usage during linking as C++.

I can use a build server when I want one, but that's not always appropriate. Local builds are useful.

If you're trying to link clang, this laptop is not for you. It's for people that would consider a chromebook for their use case.

>People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.

As always - it depends on the kind of ostensible "serious work" you do.

I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.

I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.

MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.

I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.

Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.

I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine

Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?

I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.

Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.

Is Slack that much worse of a memory hog than Discord? Aren’t they both built on electron?

Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.

You can make a pretty good electron app or one that kinda sucks. Slack is in the latter category.

VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.

Say what you will about Microsoft but the performance of VS Code is really good.

I’m freaking out the equivalent of mutt and irc require more than 8GB of RAM to run simultaneously.

What are modern operating systems and applications doing?

Gifs. I'm only half joking.

You can post images in Slack and use text formatting. Those are things that use memory.

Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

Slack is an Electron app.

> Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.

I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.

I used outlook on the browser when needed and slack was open most of the time

I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular

Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.

Not having to use outlook is a feature not a bug.

At this point I think few people really will care about that spec difference.

The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.

Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.

> The accumulated brand trust of Apple

This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).

You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.

The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

Fair enough, although I wouldn't call the vision pro a bad product necessarily, it's just too expensive for what it is.

Yes, you see them on the subway all the time

I bought mine for air travel, when I can strap it to my head for 12 hours and be in a completely different place. I can lie back in my lay-flat seat, so there’s no weight pulling my head down, and it’s an absolutely fantastic experience.

I fly sufficiently that this is well worth it. The fact that it doubles as a mobile computer in the hotel room is just icing on the cake.

So subway ? Maybe not, but don’t pretend they don’t have their own niche…

The VP by most accounts is best in class. It’s just too damn expensive. There’s also still an open question if people really want to strap goggles to their face.

>They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience.

"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

And despite antenna gate, the iPhone 4 was still the best smartphone of that year and leaps ahead of it's closest competition (the Galaxy S), and remained the #1 best selling smartphone at year after launch

You can only buy hardware that runs Apple software from Apple, but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have. Apple is and always has been a minority player in the overall smartphone market (and desktop/laptop as well).

Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was the single most purchased smartphone model in the US between 2010 and 2011 (during antenna gate that we are talking about).

Android has the majority share because "Android" is anything from a $100 piece of junk to a $1200 phone. If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.

Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.

If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

>Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the iPhone 4 was the single most purchased smartphone model in the US between 2010 and 2011

Are you trying to give Apple some kind of tech participation trophy? Because that's all you're doing.

>If you look at only the premium market, Apple holds ~70% market share.

Sure, Apple is a luxury brand, and so not many people can afford it. Nor should they be spending the ridiculous amount of money Apple normally charges.

>Despite antenna gate, it still sold plenty, which proves the point about brand trust that the thread was about.

Reality distortion field still in effect in 2026.

>If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

I don't care about brands as much as you seem to, that much I'm sure about. Your precious Apple could never do you wrong, we get it.

>If the brand equity wasn't there, the Galaxy S would have out sold the iPhone 4, but it didn't, it sold half as much.

Which means just *one* of the Android flagships - which are a much, much more segmentated market! - sold half as much as the iOS competitor.

> but Android mobile devices far outsell Apple devices and always have

"far outsell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The iPhone has a market share of 60% in the US [1]. The leading Android manufacturer Samsung has a market share of 22% in the US.

These numbers are from last year; the iPhone sold like hotcakes in the European 5, the US (of course), Australia, Mainland China and Japan [2].

BTW, the European 5 consists of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Apple by itself globally makes up about 43% of the revenue in the smartphone market [3].

Yes, devices running the Android operating system sell a lot of units; the majority of them are no-frills devices from manufacturers most people have never heard of. Which is fine—having a phone is better than not having one.

But don’t act like Android is some kind of juggernaut; these five markets represent 2.24 billion people and 60% of the world's GDP. Android isn’t the bestselling phone in any of these countries.

# Top Selling Models

    European 5
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 2    | Samsung Galaxy A55 |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 16          |
    | 5    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    
    US
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 15         |
    | 5    | iPhone 14         |
    
    Australia
    | Rank | Model             |
    |------|-------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max |
    | 2    | iPhone 16         |
    | 3    | iPhone 16 Pro     |
    | 4    | iPhone 12         |
    | 5    | Samsung Galaxy A35|
    
    Mainland China
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16 Pro Max  |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 16          |
    | 4    | Huawei Mate 60 Pro |
    | 5    | Huawei Mate 60     |
    
    Japan
    | Rank | Model              |
    |------|--------------------|
    | 1    | iPhone 16          |
    | 2    | iPhone 16 Pro      |
    | 3    | iPhone 15          |
    | 4    | iPhone 14          |
    | 5    | Google Pixel 8a    |

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united...

[2]: "iPhone 16 secures top-selling global smartphone model in competitive holiday period" — https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/technology/iphone-16-secu...

[3]: "iPhone rakes in 3 times the revenue of any rival" — https://www.cultofmac.com/news/iphone-rakes-in-3-times-the-r...

Cute that the Apple fanboys constantly want to make this about a brand, and not a platform, because the Apple platform is very low ranking in the larger world of Smartphones. So you will literally redefine the conversation just to give your favorite company a participation trophy award.

> want to make this about a brand, and not a platform, because the Apple platform is very low ranking in the larger world of Smartphones.

Let me get this straight: you believe the iPhone "is very low ranking in the larger world of Smartphones" even though it's the most popular and best selling smartphone in the five largest economies on the planet.

I posted the 5 top selling smartphones in the European 5, United States, Australia, Japan, and China—out of 25 models listed, 80% (20 out of 25) were iPhones.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. No matter what you believe, the number are the numbers:

- Apple’s iPhone marketshare in the US is 60% vs Samsung’s at 22%

- the iPhone alone brought in $209,586 billion in FY 2025 [1]

- if the iPhone were its own company, it would be #9 on the Fortune 500

- Apple's iPhone revenue is greater than the revenue of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and AMD combined.

[1]: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/...

The mental gymnastics you're doing is impressive!

>"Apple’s iPhone marketshare in the US is 60% vs Samsung’s at 22%"

Which iPhone, which Samsung?

And you're cherry-picking the US market only.

Worldwide, Apple's market share sucks. Oh, but I guess the rest of the world doesn't matter to you as long as the numbers make sense in your own head that Apple is somehow "winning".

Apple has never had and never will have the market share that others have - Windows and Android eclipse Apple's 15%-30%. Those are the numbers you're so desperate to avoid acknowledging.

It's a pretty pathetic display of fanboyism, and it's rather boring - this "conversation" is over.

> And you're cherry-picking the US market only.

They say reading is fundamental; you might want to practice to get your comprehension up.

I literally provided the top selling smartphones in China, Japan, Australia and a group of 5 countries in the European Union. The iPhone topped the sales charts in all of them.

> Which iPhone, which Samsung?

All of them? The total of all the iPhone models sold in the US was about 3x the total of all the Samsung models sold here. That’s the 60% vs 22% difference I mentioned earlier.

> Those are the numbers you're so desperate to avoid acknowledging.

Nobody disputes Android’s 72% global market share vs Apple’s 27%. You can calm down now. ;-)

To simplify things for you, Android dominates in developing countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. For example, Android has 95%(!) of the market in India, which is ironic since iPhones for the US are made there now.

It goes without saying iPhone does much better in more affluent countries. So does Samsung.

> It's a pretty pathetic display of fanboyism, and it's rather boring - this "conversation" is over.

When someone isn’t doing so well in a debate, they resort to insults and name calling. Sad.

It’s not that your “opinions” are worth responding to on their merits—they’re not.

I’m writing for readers that might come across this thread and learn something they didn’t already know.

Sorry you wasted your time writing something that I won't read, but I told you, this conversation is over. You didn't "win" here, you only made yourself look like a pathetic, desperate fanboi.

Like I said, this ain’t about you.

Whether you read it or not is irrelevant.

That's pretty deluded, I can't frame it any other way.

> "You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs

> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.

Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.

Okay... how about, Apple put the charging port on a wireless mouse on the bottom of the mouse.

I could go on, and on...

As they say "past performance does not guarantee future results".

That version of the Magic Mouse is also over 10 years old…

Apple's "glass" UI update debacle should be evidence enough to quash any argument you could make. Their current performance leaves a lot to be desired, everyone hates "glass".

I like it. Debacle isn't the word you're looking for. "Some loud people on the internet don't like it and the user base has largely been ambivalent towards it. In reality, it's rough around the edges and needs some work."

Which makes for a great internet complaint, but I’ve owned that mouse for years and it’s never once been a thing I thought about in practice.

Apple certainly puts out experiences that leave much to be improved but to be pedantic the word 'subpar' implies below the 'par'. If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it.

Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

>If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it

That's clearly subjective. What you will accept from Apple is unacceptable to others as garbage, the same as you dismiss anything from Microsoft.

>Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.

And yet Apple just copied Windows Vista with their "glass" monstrosity that is universally hated and has been lambasted widely. Again, you may love that, but that would put you in the minority.

Obviously it's a subjective discussion but it's still a meaningful subjective discussion.

I was deeply into Microsoft products for a while. I got my start coding an indie game for the Xbox, I spent years using Windows Phone and developing an app for the platform, I interned at Microsoft twice and then later worked there as a software engineer for a period.

While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.

My opinion about Microsoft's product culture is not formed lightly.

I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand. It's not just marketing spin, it's real actionable decisions over decades that accrue to brand perception.

>While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.

You've described every company I've ever worked for. I guarantee that Apple does not work any differently.

>I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand.

You're wrong about this, as evidenced by their "glass" debacle. I mean you didn't respond to my comment about that at all, and it's so glaring obvious how bad and pointless "glass" was. Nobody wanted it, nobody needed it, and it made things objectively worse. That wasn't a display of product design acumen, it clearly exposed Apple's flaws in very public fashion.

In laptop keyboards, UI refactorings, or Siri?

Where is exactly the premium quality?

Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.

Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.

Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.

Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.

Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.

There is no room for imperfections when paying premium.

Where is the Apple from "I am a PC, I am a Mac"?

Evidently, and especially in comparison to Windows 11, alive and well. In rude health in fact.

I have the Lenovo X1 and I'm very happy with it, though obviously that's in a pretty different price category than the Yoga, Surface, or Macbook Neo.

On the other hand, more money doesn't always mean better computer. I had a Dell XPS 9570 at a previous gig that had a lot of issues: coil whine, bad camera placement, terrible thermals, etc.

> The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones.

Possibly, but I would wait for reviews to make that call. The hardware is slower than other MacBooks; memory may be slower, too, and other hardware may be slightly worse in quality.

“hardware is slower” single core is significantly faster than the M2 Ultra chip. And when you're browsing the web, single core is all that matters.

Doesn't the surface have a touch screen?

I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.

In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.

100%

All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.

A touch screen by itself doesn't noticably increase the weight of the screen. It's only when you put everything else up there that it becomes heavier.

I have a Yoga, I use the stylus more than I type.

Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.

I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen. The only time I touch the screen is when I take a screenshot using the Snipping Tool and want to circle something.

So you do use it.

Yes... barely. I wouldn't miss it if I didn't have it.

Microsoft's build quality is largely equivalent, but the press has already noticed that the value proposition at Microsoft is now lacking.

> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961

It really isn’t. The track pad on surface is terrible compared to Mac. The surface has some weird edges and other spots to get caught on. I’ve seen a few with serious damage from typical daily use. The surface I have is barely hanging together, the charger is extremely finicky and will stop charging randomly. It takes effort to get the charger to “sit” in the slot and make contact.

That said, my surface is pretty old so maybe some of these design flaws have been fixed.

But from my experience, the build quality of the MacBook is in a different league than the surface.

telling that this is flagged 1 minute into submission.

Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).

For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).

So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.

Dell Pro Max, I think the Latitude line disappeared. But I feel Lenovo is the last one too, the only brand I trust for a Windows or Linux machine these days. I like Apple hardware and have my reservations with macOS, but it is still better than Windows.

I can't think of another company on the PC side whose consumer line of hardware's build quality hasn't declined to the level of junk.

You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.

The camera on the Surface is nowhere near as good as on my M1 Macbook Air, either. That seems to be a weird blind spot on laptops in general, it's very obviously an afterthought on my personal Dell XPS as well.

> serious damage from typical daily use

Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...

Taking the laptop to the office and back home again daily. The hinge has gotten weak over time. The connection to take off the screen is very fragile, tapping the button to enable removal only works about half the time. Then, when re-attaching the screen sometimes it doesn't catch, or the keyboard connects but doesn't realize it is connected so the machine stays in tablet mode. The trackpad has gotten spongey and harder to click.

It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable. *Edit: This was covered under warranty, thankfully

This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.

I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.

IMO "build quality" is not the right term here. At least to me, "build quality" refers to how evenly examples are made and how close the real world examples adheres to manufacturing blueprints.

If finishes and gaps are tight, all around bodies and across examples, the build quality is GOOD. If every units looked slightly different and some were outright broken straight out of the box, then the build quality is BAD. Even if they were worthy of included in the MoMA collection.

Both Microsoft and Apple(or their paid Chinese outsources) are top notch. Every units looks the same and flats on the bodies are really flat. Industrial design and usability, like sharp corners and fugly aesthetics, are different issues entirely.

You're right. "Build Quality" isn't the right term.

Maybe "Overall Quality" or "Device Quality" would work better. The point is that my MBP has held up MUCH better over time than my Surface, which is barely able to charge at this point.

No; "Build Quality" is the right term.

Manufacturing tolerance is the term for "how close are they all to being the same shape?" Good tolerances are usually a prerequisite to good build quality, but not always.

For instance, cast iron pans can have poor tolerances (be off by fractions of inches), but, as long as they're not warped, and the metallurgy is solid, they could last centuries, and people would say they have good build quality.

On the other hand, a stainless steel pan that's volumetrically-perfect, but has faulty internal welds on the laminated bottom could fall apart after a few uses due to heat strain snapping the welds. That'd be terrible build quality.

You get free AI slop and mass-surveillance advertisements in your Start menu. Who would not like that!

Not just Microsoft. Dell and HP must be having emergency meetings right about now...

Their challenge is, how do we halve the price and yet deliver twice the quality? I think they are going to realize they can't. Some of them will leave the market.

Dell has 50% more market share than Apple and HP 2x Apple's market share in the PC space. I doubt they'll be exiting the market because Apple launched a cheap laptop with 8gb of ram and using USB 2.0 ports. Most corporations are still tied to Windows apps and the MS ecosystem in general.

> cheap laptop with 8gb of ram and using USB 2.0 ports.

A nitpick: there are two USB ports, one of them is a 10GB/s USB 3 port.

Both of which look identical with no obvious markings which is which. I'm sure this will generate no confusion amongst consumers who will have no issues whatsoever with this. /s

"you're plugging it wrong" will become the new version of the classic "You're holding it wrong"

Yes, the Mac Neo will tell you you’re plugging in to the wrong port!

And while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47255353

What are the odds the notification functionality was only tested to work with Apple's overpriced first party accessories like 79$ USB cables, and will have countless issues and edge cases with third party accessories?

The odds are probably pretty low.

The notification is hardware based; the manufacturer of a USB keyboard or mouse won’t matter.

If you plug a hard drive into the slow USB port, macOS will let you know.

There have been thousands of different USB devices plugged into Macs since they adopted it in 1998; I doubt there’s going to be problems now.

This is really well put.

It's interesting, for years I have been trying to make my iPad a nice, slim laptop I could bring with me everywhere for lighter/coding specific tasks. I've gone through several keyboards trying to make this work. It never has.

Now with this laptop, I can do exactly this, while being cheaper than what I've been attempting to do with an iPad.

I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).

Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.

Now, if only Asahi was more complete.

What are your use-cases for 128gb of RAM? I find it hard to imagine what you could be doing with that, so it must be interesting :)

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:

- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.

- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.

- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.

Yeah, I have a 64GB M1 Max and can run local models pretty well. I bought it on release and even now it never feels slow. I may upgrade just because I want to move to the 14” since I travel more now.

Running FatLTO on Chrome.

Unreal + blender + ide.

Fusion + blender + slicers.

Virt machines / docker + dev env

iOS Android web development

16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro

Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex

My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use

My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.

My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping

I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.

You mean all of that running all the time is 70gb?

I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.

Each line gets me over 50gb.

I'm assuming your not doing much in those apps.

Fusion is not free cad and is a hog.

So is kicad.

The language server for many things I work on sits at 28gb per copy.. I work for twitch, our code base is not small for the website. Moving all engineers to min spec 48gb.

I'll do stuff all day prototyping data analysis approaches that will fill ram with a pandas cross join.

I put my4 into thermal shutdown 2x in the last month and hard locked it due to swap use 3 times in the last month. I keep records so I can talk with IT about or dev machine specs. Apparently you can't run 30 concurrent yarn builds on a 3gb codebase... Who knew.

This isn't a works on my box competition I'm glad your workloads are that small, you can be a lot more efficient than me. I'm also lucky I bought all this ram before it became absurdly expensive.

It doesn't negate that I'm constantly over 64gb and that I'm super happy I have 128+ on my machines.

most people who are into graphics processing e.g video-games, 3d for films/entertainment industry etc need these "PRO-workstation" machines, or doing fluid mechanics

if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient

Unclear for a laptop, but for a workstation 1tb+ is what you want for any sort data science stuff.

Yeah, good luck with that at current RAM prices though. DDR5 RDIMMs are going for $20/gb+ right now which means 1tb is $20k, and that's with fairly conservative pricing too.

I've been looking at building a high memory workstation recently but the RAM prices are just prohibitive. Best option atm for 1tb+ seems to be to go back a couple gen and buy DDR4, you can get 1tb at under $5/gb right now. But obviously you're giving up some performance in the process.

Yupp, even before the ram shortage we were paying $60-$80k for 1u racks with 768 to 1.5tb ram and 48-128cores

> ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop

Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.

They built a reputation on that and silently replaced the plastic with crap abs. Thinkpads have been garbage since 2012. Not specs wise but build quality wise. Spec wise it’s always been a beefy machine.

Thinkpad build quality depends heavily on the model. The flagship T-series are still tough as nails, generally speaking

I have so many questions.

- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?

- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

Shh... we don't talk about those dark ages any more. Times were different.

> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

The hard part of beating someone to death with a z16 is lifting and swinging a z16; if you can manage that, though...

> - Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.

(Hey, Eric!)

We test these things in production.

The best laptop that I ever had was an Thinkpad T530 back in ~2012 - that chunky brick felt like it was made from recycled soviet tanks.

Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.

What about something like [1].

1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/

I might be a dinosaur but I just can't stand laptops that have touch screen...

I accidentally got a pair of ThinkPads that happened to have touch screens, and I absolutely love the touch screen, often it's easier than the touchpad or keyboard nub.

You might want to actually click the links and spent a couple of minutes before typing comments. This is not a laptop with a touch screen - it's a tablet with a kickstand and detachable keyboard.

That's just a broken, compromised Windows laptop. A true "master of nothing" device. Windows is a miserable tablet OS and a tablet that uses a kickstand makes it a pain to use in desktop mode.

Windows is a miserable OS, period. But these devices are rather well supported by Linux.

I, too, am a dinosaur, but touchscreens on removable screens/tablets are the way to go!

My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.

When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.

It's awesome!

Touchscreens can be disabled in software.

Maybe don't touch the screen eh ?

One thing Apple seems to do very well compared to other vendors is make all their hardware available in all markets on release. Companies like Dell, Asus, Lenovo, they have a confusingly large array of models, and they never release the best ones worldwide, or it takes so long to get to New Zealand that I already gave up and bought an Apple computer instead.

I am a longtime Windows user and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that the M4 I am forced to use for work runs the Rust compiler a good bit faster than the big fancy gaming PC I just got with a 9800X3D.

I'd wager that's more likely due to Windows than the hardware. Like sure the hardware does play a part in that but its not the whole story or even most of it.

My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.

Afaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night.

No, it’s not NTFS, it’s the file system filter architecture of the NT kernel.

I had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years.

Windows Defender is a file system filter which you cannot disable. You may have others (but they're fortunately rare, now).

All that said, you cannot disable the architecture, i.e. bypass the file system filter code.

You can with Dev Drives now apparently, which don't use NTFS and disable ALL the filter drivers (including the Defender one)

I stopped using Windows just as these were added so now I'm curious if there's any actual performance benefit to using the.

No, they don't disable the Windows Defender filter, they put it in async mode.

This guy gets it. Yes bingo. It's the VFS' filters/ACLs support afaik.

Just deleting 40,000 files from the node_modules of a modest Javascript project can thoroughly hammer NTFS.

I think part of that is Explorer, rather than NTFS. Try doing it from the console instead. rd /q /s <dir>.

It still takes a lot longer than Linux or Mac OS X.

NTFS is definitely slower to modify file system structures than ext4.

A big part of it is that NT has to check with the security manager service every time it does a file operation.

The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.

I don't know about ugly. Virtualization seems like a more elegant solution to the problem, as I see it. Though it also makes WSL pointless; I don't get why people use it instead of just using Hyper-V.

Honestly, just cause it's easier if you've never done any kind of container or virtual os stuff before. It comes out of the box with windows, it's like a 3 click install and it usually "just works". Most people just want to run Linux things and don't care too much about the rest of the process

That's most likely because windows indexes and scans files rustc produces. My linux machines demolish my iMac in rust compilation.

Intel iMac?

M4. To be fair I bought it as a pretty ssh terminal in living room into compute in another room.

Try adding your working directory to the exclusions for windows defender, or creating a Dev Drive instead in settings (will create a separate partition, or VHD using ReFS and exclude it from Windows defender). Should give it a bit of a boost.

Rust literally compiles ~4x faster on WSL than on the Windows command line, on the same hardware, so try that and see. Also set up the mold or wild linker as well as sccache, although sccache is OS agnostic so you can use it on macOS too. Make sure your code is on the WSL side not on /mnt/c which is the Windows side though, that will kill compilation speed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/CsEy9bLivK

That has not been my experience at all; I get pretty much the same times on the same machine on Linux and Windows. Something weird has happening to that person. Someone mentioned Defender, and that could certainly be it, as I have it totally disabled (forcibly, by deleting the executable).

At least 10 years ago, some IBM tools I was forced to use worked faster in a linux VM on Windows (through VirtualBox) than on Windows.

WSL is the best way to avoid all the Windows slowness as far as the VFS and the forking overhead.

WSL is fantastic - apart from the fact that you need to clear it intermittently via disk compression. I use it for work and it's great until you get something incredibly frustrating, like needing a pass-through for your hardware.

The one thing I can say with my macbook as someone who's switched from a decade of windows, is that stuff tends to just work, minus window swithcing.

This is why I stopped using Windows.

You shouldn't have to go through all these extra steps just to squeeze out the same performance you would get by just installing [Other OS].

At some point I realized I was spending hours at a time trying to 'fix' Windows and decided to give Mac a try right around the time that Apple Silicon came out. It was a night and day difference.

Gaming, especially multiplayer

CrossOver lets me play most single player games just fine on my M4 Pro, and personally I found multiplayer gaming taking too much of my time and emotional energy anyway.

CrossOver is alright but not always enough in terms of performance for many games compared to a Windows machine, especially one with a dedicated GPU.

Apple buries this info but the memory bandwidth on the M series is very high. Doubly and triply so for the Pro & Max variants which are insanely high.

Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.

They don't bury it. It's literally on the spec page these days. And LPCAMM2 falls somewhere between the base M and Pro CPUs while still being replaceable.

The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.

You’re running Windows unironically?

This shouldn't be surprising. macOS has a faster filesystem+VFS than Windows, and the single thread perf of the M4 beats most PC cpus. I'm not sure what linker rust uses, but the apple native ld64/ldPrime is also pretty fast as far as linkers go.

Windows is also slow enough at forking, that clang has "in-process CC1" mode because of it.

This is how opinions differ. IMO plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible, MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).

The metal is more "luxury", though.

> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot

This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon

I have an Air. Maybe active cooling prevents it from getting too hot. With the Air, the metal body is kind of the heatsink.

I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...

If the body was a heatsink, it would be extremely hot to the touch.

https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...

From your link:

Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink

Anyway, the author claims:

you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before.

Does toasty mean extremely hot?

The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle.

Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees?

You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could.

Everything’s a trade off.

In a Notebookcheck test, they got the bottom plate up to 43C, and top plate near the screen up to 45C: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-passively-cooled-M4-SoC-ma...

hence the Neo and the iPhone chip!

> MacBooks can be uncomfortable for lap usage if too hot).

My body is the heatsink

Also for males it is natural birth control. Can be a plus depending on your situation

YOU GUYS IT HAS A HEADPHONE JACK

Makes me wonder if this is an ADA requirement for education devices. (assistive listening devices)

Not even ADA - kids all get headphones to listen to education materials. Wired headphones are way, way easier to manage.

There’s also plenty of room for it which is why it continues to appear on all MacBooks.

It's almost as if they weren't lying when they said dropping it in the phone was a waterproofing measure. I guess people aren't dropping their laptops in pools all the time.

Don't all macbooks have one?

This isn't news, all MacBooks have one.

Plastic is better if done right. I do not know a single manufacturer today which does plastic right.

> plastic is better than aluminium. It is robust (if done right), lighter and doesn't have good thermal conductivity (which makes laptop usage possible

Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.

I'd go further and suggest that metal is a lousy substance for laptop enclosures.

I think the 14" and Air might get a little warmer, but I can't recall a time I've felt heat from my 16" M4 Pro, fan sound is rare. On my 13" Intel, it was comically easy to cook my balls and the fans were at max constantly

ASUS ROG G14 is as close as you're going to get on the x86 side of things or that new chonk of a surface with the Ryzen 395+ and 128gb of ram. both are like $2500+

I have the chonk. 10/10 would chonk again. I miss the 12" MacBook form factor for an email/web/dumb terminal machine, though. Would love something like that with great Linux support. Bonus points for cellular.

The HP Zbook G1A is what you wanted. It's Strix Halo with up to 128GB of unified RAM and built like a MBP.

> (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.

> I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.

~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal

Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.

The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.

My Sony Vaio Z from 2009 or 2010 looks at your Dell in contempt: 13.1" FullHD screen at 314mm x 210mm (we'll pretend the thickness does not matter ;)) and 1.36kg. Vaio TT was even smaller footprint.

But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.

The same is also true within the Macbook line. The 14" Pro is smaller and nearly 2lbs lighter than the first 13" unibodies. I have my 2009 college laptop on a shelf as a memento and it feels pretty chunky. This hasn't changed much in the M-series though, and the M5 is slightly heavier than the M1.

Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.

You do have 13" options, though 14" is much wider. If I was going for 13" workstation, I'd go for Asus ProArt PX13 with Ryzen AI Max 395 (if I got that right, there might be a plus somewhere) and 128GiB of RAM. They've got ROG Flow X13 with older hardware or Z13 with same hw as above, but that's a tablet computer instead.

At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.

Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).

Which Thinkpad do you have? Lenovo have introduced some lines with the name but diminished quality.

For a someone looking to switch from a M-series MacBook to a Thinkpad, which one would you recommend? Preferably not of a diminished quality, so I can daily-drive Ubuntu without missing Apple.

P1 comes to mind

Did you check what Framework offers?

> decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

Thinkpads don't show off their build materials like Apple does. I've had several over the years, variously made of magnesium alloy and carbon fibre.

Screen bending is not a great metric of 'decent build'. My Thinkpads have suffered people stepping on them, being dropped etc, and I think the lid flexibility is partly why it has survived all this time - they often use carbon fibre on the back of the screen.

>I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials

Maybe ROG Flow 13 ? It's more like hybrid laptop, and geared toward "gaming"(because it's usually the gamer market that demand high performance), but nothing prevents you to use it as business machine.

It's also top of the line asus laptop, so i expect decent build quality.

That Surface has 16GB RAM though.

> Your new MacBook Neo. Just the way you want it[sic]. 13-inch MacBook Neo in Indigo A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine Apple Intelligence Footnote ※

    8GB unified memory
    256GB SSD storage
    U.S. English Magic Keyboard with Lock Key
    20W USB‑C Power Adapter

    Two USB-C ports, 3.5 mm headphone jack
    Support for one external display

8 GB unified memory is brand-new e-waste today. macOS 26 makes it even worse.

I'm going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here until proven otherwise. I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience as it would cause a lot of reputational harm.

> I can't see them releasing something with a terrible user experience

I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!

I don't know what apps you run, but I'm typing this from an M2 Mac with 8 GB, running Tahoe. Performance is fine. It's always been fine.

> 8 GB unified memory is brand-new e-waste today. macOS 26 makes it even worse.

One reason Apple can get away with 8 GB of RAM is their SoC does realtime compression of data in RAM and they use high bandwidth memory; the A19 Pro RAM bandwidth is 60 GB/s. This enables them to treat the SSD like an L3 cache.

It's nearly 5 years since the M1 was released; I suspect Apple has gotten really good with their RAM > compression > SSD system since then.

I will take MKBHD's take on this[0]. Great as a higher-end 'chromebook' etc. Could be an upgrade for my Surface Go 3 but not as portable. Definitely more useful than a tablet.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBX5WH9b4M4

> This is a major challenge to Microsoft.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.

It definitely feels that way. Microsoft has made it clear they don't care about the consumer market anymore. Xbox is dying or already dead, they've done nothing with the game studios they acquired, Windows laptop OEMs still ship plastic 1080p crap targeted at general office workers.

They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.

And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.

Indeed they haven't, Microsoft is only one of the biggest publishers in the world, and regardless of XBox the console, Microsoft Games Studios is doing great.

Are you sure they're doing great? By what metric?

What have they produced recently? I found a few lists online and looked at Wikipedia, and their big hits are all > 10-15 years old (or sequels/re-releases). Many of those are decade-old acquisitions of franchises that were ancient at acquisition.

Revenue, or forward revenue? Their most recent quarterly games revenue was down 9% YoY. XBox console sales (leading indicator) are down 32%: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/xbox/microsofts-gam...

Market share? The top N companies from this list have $197B in annual revenue. MS Studios is toward the top of the list, but they only have 12% market share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...

Distribution and marketing? I wouldn't even know how to buy one of their games. I have a Linux gaming PC, a Mac, a switch, an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and a XBone. We spend a few hundred dollars a year on video games, but I haven't seen anything suggesting any MS studio products work on any of our hardware, or are available on any distribution channels that reach any of our devices. Maybe they're on iPad, iPhone or Android? I haven't checked because we don't use those for gaming.

I don't think we're that strange for having zero windows machines. It's down to ~ 30% of web browser market share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Windows is at ~ 95% of steam market share, so I guess that's one bright point for MS studios. However, many game developers release on Steam and console, so it doesn't imply that 95% of those other studios' customers could run a MS studio game.

Customer retention? The last time I plugged the XBone in, I spent 45 minutes screwing with bugs in the account password dialog, finally logged in, and then walked away. I unplugged it for good after the updates completed. In contrast, I spent less time than that installing Linux + Steam on my most recent PC. I guess they dropped support for XBox One at some point? I started having problems with it five years ago. I don't remember a big compatibility-break launch since I purchased it, so I'd expect it to be able to turn on + connect to their servers, or at least run the games it's already downloaded + installed.

I do own one MS game that still works: A copy of Minecraft. It took over 8 hours to figure out how to get it stop constantly asking my kids for my master MS account password. That did convince me to actually wipe all data from my Microsoft account, so I guess it was a win.

Doing great by the amount of game studios owned by Microsoft as a publisher, selling all over the place, especially after the ABK deal.

You focus too much on XBox when I haven't mentioned it at all.

Probably too late now but maybe they should have spun XBox and the game studios into a separate company.

Game studios are great, the problem is the multiple meanings of XBox.

There is XBox the console, XBox the online store for PC games, XBox the streaming platform, XBox the studios that are first party to the console.

Then there are the other studios acquired via Bathesda, ABK, or directly.

Finally all roots down under Microsot Gaming Studios as publisher.

Among the hardcore fans, they usually only see Xbox as the console.

With any luck, this new computer can usher in an era of folks not having to port anything to windows.

>That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable

That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.

You must be lucky. They have been well-documented. [1]

The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000098

Apple seemed to copy this one exactly as iCloud asks you the same all the time. Honestly these days Linux feels like the only sane platform as you can customize it properly.

I am a big fan of the command line, but running linux as my daily driver is like trying to daily a kit car -- it breaks all the time and i spend more time than i want fixing it. With macos, i get my beloved command line, nice hardware, and a reliable OS. Win win win.

> I am a big fan of the command line, but running linux as my daily driver is like trying to daily a kit car -- it breaks all the time and i spend more time than i want fixing it.

Linux powers the entire world. Billions if not tens of billions of devices. It doesn't "break all the time like a kit car". I switched my wife's desktop from Ubuntu to Debian about a year ago and I haven't heard a single complain. Not a single crash. She hardly reboots her computer. The thing is just rock solid and it needs to be: she works from home and she spends 8 hours+ on her (Linux) computer.

Fair. Last time I tried to daily Linux was 2016 with a crappy dell I had laying around, and I am pretty sure that I did not know what I was doing. I have been on Mac since 2012 and I tried windows in 2019 only to regret it, then went back to mac.

That is also far from my experience. I'm starting to think it's more about you than about the tech. I have 5 machines running Linux, and they never break (1 server and 4 VMs). I have 4 machines running Windows (3 physical, 1 VM), with zero problems for many years.

If you're in on AI though, instead of you having to fix it, you just ask Claude code to fix python or whatever shit.

In the Apple ecosystem, turning off iCloud's ability to send notifications is as simple as unchecking a box in settings.

Just as you can uncheck a box in settings to turn off Apple Intelligence.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't want Windows users to have the same level of control.

What a conveniently annoying default!

It helps to switch on your computer.

There are some decent-looking AMD + nvidia laptops from Razer. No idea if they run Linux well, or are reliable, but they seem to tick all the spec boxes. For instance, they have a higher resolution than the monitor I owned in 2001. (3200 × 1800 @ 120Hz minimum on their 14"); probably OK battery life if you don't use the discrete GPU.

From what I've seen of Win 11 in VMs, it doesn't seem compatible with the phrase "decent laptop".

Of course, they start at > $2000.

that really doesn't make sense to me. You need to have people use Windows in everyday life so that they don't need to be retrained when in the workforce for Windows to keep its stranglehold on the enterprise.

I agree. I read this and immediately thought to myself: The gloves are off.

The price point, the capability, the only thing stopping Apple at this point is the MDM stuff integrating it with other identity providers but its ahead of where it used to be.

The MDM stuff is there now, and platform SSO works pretty well, at least with Entra and Okta (the only two I have experience with). Both JamF and InTune support it, I'm sure all the other MDMs do as well.

The only time macs can be a bit of a headache is if you are still using all on-prem AD & group policy and trying to force them into that environment via joining the mac to AD.

Microsoft is forcing everyone onto Azure AD or whatever so that should fix that.

Last time I dealt with Apple MDM was integrating it with on-prem AD and it was a pain. I know it’s better now because last few “gigs” have used it and it’s been pretty seamless with Microsoft Authenticator for Teams. (Ugh!)

MSFT up 1.84% today..

Sometimes I wish I could just use any laptop and Remote Desktop into my gaming rig which is awesome. Then I can have whatever form factor laptop I want, but the problem is I think the latency still sucks (maybe not?) on stuff like Parsec even locally.

Nah locally is fine, if you have a good 6ghz coverage, but that means a hotspot in every second room

I don’t have WiFi 6E, just 6 (5ghz). If the input latency is imperceptible for productivity work, and the resolution matches my laptop resolution without pixelation, then why the heck am I not streaming my powerhouse main pc?

Weekend project.

The latency is acceptable. I host a remote gaming rig accessed through Parsec, the extra encoding/decoding latency is minimal. Distance has the largest effect, I found that over roughly 1,000 km my total latency is about 30 ms, perfectly playable for all but the most competitive FPS.

I'll just chime in to say that not everyone cares about the features you mentioned that much. Keyboard, touchpad, looks are the last things I think about when comparing laptops. Not to lessen your preferences, just to point out that there's a variety of viewpoints.

What features do matter to you?

Last time I was shopping for a laptop, I needed battery life, low glare, high screen brightness, rugedness was a plus. Cheapness is a good proxy for rugedness. Being able to upgrade/repair components is generally something I value highly too. Something that's made to be maintained, meaning opened, disassembled (and reassembled!), feels good to me.

What options do you see available on the market today that meet those needs? I agree that all of those are super nice to have

Used thinkpads and dell latitudes, battery and brightness aren't always what I'd like though. Frameworks and similar sound nice, but can't bring myself to pay the premium.

What features matter to you?

I have a framework and love it - repair-ability is exceptionally important to me, and I support it as often as I can.

That being said, I have a really specific use-case I have to fill right now: I travel all the time for work, and my work laptop already takes up a good amount of space, so I need something small and easy to use when I travel

I guess a lot hinges on what kind of work you need to do while travelling. I've been on tmux and vim for the longest time which works great over mosh, so almost any device worked for me, as long as I had an ok internet connection. Spent a summer working in a park, on an epaper tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. Good times.

To make a different point, a regular consumer does not care about tech specs. They want a laptop that can browse the web, stream Netflix, and maybe open a Word doc. They will be more sensitive to hardware problems in my opinion. A janky touchpad is going to be annoying no matter what computer task you're doing. A wobbly keyboard will be the same. To me an average consumer is more interested in the "feel" of the computer rather than what it can do.

> which means you have subtle display artifacts.

No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5

At 150% scaling, one logical pixel maps to 1.5 physical pixels. When a 1px grid line is drawn, the renderer cannot light exactly 1.5 pixels, so it distributes the color across adjacent pixels using anti-aliasing. Depending on where the line falls relative to device-pixel boundaries, one pixel may be fully colored and the next partially colored, or vice versa. This shifts the perceived center of the line slightly. In a repeating grid, these fractional shifts accumulate, making the gaps between lines appear uneven or "vibrating."

Chromium often avoids this by rendering 1px borders as hairlines that snap to a single device pixel, even when a CSS pixel corresponds to 1.5 device pixels at 150% scaling. This keeps lines crisp, but it also means the border remains about one device pixel thick, making it appear slightly thinner relative to the surrounding content.

For some people such artifacts are not noticeable for others they are.

I'm one of those people who are super sensitive to the issues you describe, and let me tell you this: Scaling value (like 150%) is just an integer number.

For the most part, non-ancient renderers (3D but also to a large degree 2D renderers), do not care about physical pixels, and when they do, they care the same amount no matter what the DPI is.

Raster data has a fixed number of pixels, but is generally not meant to be displayed at a specific DPI. There are some rare applications where that might be true, and those are designed to work with a specific display of a given size and number of pixels.

It's especially older applications (like from the 90s and 00s) that work in units of physical pixels, where lines are drawn at "1 pixel width" or something like that. That was ok in an age where targetted displays were all in the range of 70-100 DPI. But that's not true anymore, today the range is more like 100 to 250 or 300 DPI.

One way to "fix" these older applications to work with higher DPIs, is to just scale them up by 2 -- each pixel written by the app results in 2x2 pixels set on the HiDpi screen. Of course, a "200%" display i.e. a display with 192 DPI should be a good display to do exactly that, but you can just as well use a 160 DPI or a 220 DPI screen and do the same thing.

It's true that a modern OS run with a "scaling" setting of 150% generally scales up older applications using some heuristics. Important thing to notice here is that the old application never considered the DPI value itself. It's up to the OS (or a renderer) how it's doing scaling. It could do the 2x2 thing, or it could do the 1.5x thing but increase font sizes internally, to get sharp pixel-blitted fonts when it has control over typesetting. And yeah, some things can come out blurry if the app sends final raster data to the OS, and the OS just does the 1.5x blur thing. But remember, this is an unhappy situation just for old applications, and only where the OS receives raster data from the App, instead of drawing commands. Everything else is up to the OS (old apps) or the app itself (newer, DPI-aware apps).

For newer applications, e.g. on Windows, the scaling value influences nothing but the DPI value (e.g. 150% or 144 DPI) reported to the application, everything else is up to the app.

Sorry none of that makes any sense to me. Go to BestBuy where they have Surface laptops on display. Open the browser and go to a website where a grid with 1px horizontal lines are displayed. I immediately notice that the lines are disproportionately thin. You may not notice it and that's fine.

I've started out with a longer reply, but let's try and condense it a little: I concede you can still find this issue, especially on less than 4k displays, but it's becoming less and less of an issue, because of improving software. Where you see the issue, it's simply a software problem -- CSS or Chrome or the website/app should be fixed.

I don't see much of this issue anymore, on my 27" 4K screen, set to 175% scaling. It's logical that if you want to do arbitrary scaling or zooming, and want to keep all distance ratios perfectly intact, you will experience some ugliness from antialiasing (less and less noticeable as you go to ~4K and beyond). That will be so regardless of scaling, even when it's set to 100%.

So if it ought to look good, software simply needs to be written more flexibly! 1px in CSS doesn't mean 1 physical pixel but it is a (quite arbitrary) physical distance, defined as 1/96th of an inch. It's all up to the app and the software stack deciding line widths and how they will actually come out on a screen in terms of pixels lit. They should _respect_ the scaling setting (like 150%) but they also are in full control, in principle, to make it look good.

<hr> lines come out are perfectly fine on my screen (175% 4K) with Firefox and Chrome.

1.5px width lines will come out quite bad with 100% scaling, but will look perfect with 150% scaling obviously.

Notice that vector fonts generally look better if you have a reasonably high-dpi display. But on average, it doesn't matter if you test font sizes of 20pt or 21pt or 17pt or whatever. Why is that? Because font rasterizers already snap to pixels. They properly quantice geometric objects. They don't make arbitrary stubborn choices like "it must be exactly 1/96th of a virtual inch wide" but they are a little flexible to fight antialiasing.

And the more higher DPI monitors there are, the less software will be making stubborn choices.

Here are some links that explain the issue:

https://patrickbrosset.com/articles/2024-06-21-invasion-of-t...

https://flutterawesome.com/sharp-looking-flutter-application...

https://tanalin.com/en/articles/integer-scaling/

The Surface has 16GB of RAM vs 8GB on the Neo (Windows definitely eats RAM though so maybe that's par).

> I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible.

Can we talk about laptops that you can’t carry by the edge where your palm rests because it flexes the frame and registers it as a mouse down event …

For a casual computer at home, I'd get one. Everything I do is practically web based anyway.

I think you're undervaluing touchscreen capability, which even the cheapest laptops offer now. Kids and non-tech folks have come to expect it by default.

Now that Apple is attempting to compete in this space, they'll have to pitch these folks on what macOS without touch capability offers over Windows with touch capability.

Maybe it will still sell well enough, maybe people aren't that stuck on touchscreens.

PC to me is always best as a itx minitower form factor.

The LG Gram is incredible, 17 inch thin light and powerful. However it has one of the worst keyboards I've ever used.

What's wrong with the Thinkpad T series?

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

Strong disagree on this one - there are some great laptops available, they just aren't "macbook clones". I have an Asus Rog Strix that I love. Lenovo have great ones, Dell, even HP is back in the game somewhat.

I use a macbook professionally, but still don't like the keyboard very much. The display is good, but my Asus display is better. Aluminum is pretty, but I don't like the feel of it on my wrists.

If school is using anti-cheat exam, serious MDM software that only support Windows, would student still buy a Mac?

Apple says the magic keyboard is "much loved." Eh, I can't think of anyone I know who uses a MacBook who agrees with that, even the biggest Cupertino fanbois. It's a terrible typing experience for touch typers, as others have commented here.

Making MacBooks thinner and thinner creates diminishing returns when it comes to the keyboard. The "butterfly" design isn't very sturdy and on both my previous MacBook Pros several of the keys stopped working after a few years and had to be repaired.

If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)

While I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right.

We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.

Particularly when paying for more RAM means buying a completely new computer.

Even on an upgradable machine. We're looking at ~$400 for 32GB of DDR5, and the price is only going to keep going up. We're at a point now where Apple actually charges less for RAM upgrades than it costs to upgrade your own machine. Insane.

There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.

Joke's on you; Swift has no garbage collector.

if more apps were written in native swift we wouldn't be having any memory issues

It obvious does, with reference counting. Otherwise programs would just balloon in memory.

ARC isn’t a garbage collector.

It is if you're being pedantic.

Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.

and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.

I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.

It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.

Adobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff.

Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.

I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).

16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.

Could it be all the corporate-tracking software ? I used to have a M1 Pro macbook with 16gb ram when it's first released, and somehow it still feel slow when compiling.

Then try again on my friend personal M1 MB, it was night and day.

We're a small shop so nothing of that sort, it's more of larger Figma projects and modern web-apps being hogs.

Honestly, these days compiling feels like really lightweight work in terms of memory compared to so much else.

This is my use case, 4 ides. Chrome and docker, its a 14’ M1 Pro, it works nice, but im not installing tahoe any time soon xd

On Tahoe, I upgraded only recently (maybe they made fixes after the initial complaints). Haven't noticed any regressions except for the weird corners but those I'm already used to. Super fast.

Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.

Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.

I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.

> id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram.

How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.

That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).

It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.

Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.

I don't see too many students running Teams.

Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?

Clearly not Apple's.

Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.

Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.

> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors.

I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)

For governments and services governments delegate to third parties, being usable by low-end machines is extremely important.

I always have to point out government services should not be designed to be efficient, but fair and universal. After they are fair and universal, THEN you can make them efficient, just as long as you don’t break fairness and universality.

Make that 1 or 2gb of ram, a 32gb emmc drive and a single core 2 thread original Atom

Or a single-core Raspberry Pi with 512MB and an SDCard ;-)

Testing should be on such laptops. Development, especially in things like xcode or visual studio would be insane

That would force vendors to make Visual Studio and Xcode same ;-)

> Teams

You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.

Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.

It's probably not that bad if you ONLY use it for video calls and you've never used Slack before.

Still needs 2Gb of memory for a video call though.

8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.

I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.

Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.

While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.

Tons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.

My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)

> My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory

What are you doing that needs that much memory?

I have a 128GB M3 Max from my employer. Due to some IT oversight, I was able to use it for a few months without the corporate "security" crapware. Didn't even ever noticed this machine had a fan before the "security theatre" corporate rootkits were installed.

Meh. I do plenty of development on my 32GB work macbook pro and 8GB M2 air and never notice a difference.

Some people use computers to compute things. More memory is always useful.

VMs or huge builds can burn through that fast. Say 3 simultaneous Android emulators, or building Android itself

Pretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.

(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)

For mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.

egacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping

Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…

lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.

I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly

Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.

Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.

Docker overhead is practically nothing, so running 3 docker containers should be well within the "light development" bracket.

What the heck is going on here, something cannot be light and use 20gb of memory.

Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb of free memory.

I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.

What takes 20GB memory? I dev on a 2015 i5 and run multiple docker containers all day without issue.

Isn't docker overhead a full VM unless you're running Linux natively?

But is the system choking? Or, are you certain it would choke with half the RAM you have? It's a well know thing that OS will book majority of the RAM you have and that's actually not a problem at all.

if you had 64GB you'd be using some 59GB. I have a 128GB machine and it happily hits around 40GB of used memory in no time at all.

I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally

Then you're not the intended market for the MacBook Neo.

Totally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all

Yes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.

Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.

I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.

Development isn't hard on ram. Doing what Apple claims this device is designed for, spending lots of time in multiple browser tabs, is.

Less-so if you do it in Safari than using a non-Apple browser.

I've been using 8 GB on my M3 for years as a security engineer, doing pretty heavy development. I usually have like 15 Brave tabs open, several terminals, a game (PokeMMO) and a small DeepSeek model, lots of Claude Code instances running, Obsidian, and LadyBird, among other small things. I honestly have no idea what people do with all that RAM.

15 tabs? I manage multiple projects, one per window, and have about 15 to 30 tabs per window. So maybe 300 tabs.

Oh yeah well I run 500 VMs of Windows Vista each with an instance of DeepSeek botting Neopets stocks for me. I make more neopoints in a day than you'll make in USD in a year.

/s but I suppose I've developed a work flow that adapts to the RAM I've always had. I've seen people with zillions of tabs and I do wonder if it's really that much more productive than the occasional HTTP request to reopen one. I find leaving things open as a form of bookmarking clouds my mental space too much.

I do intend to have beastly RAM on my new desktop so who knows, maybe I'll be like you in a year.

To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.

Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)

I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.

When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.

> Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?

Court cases and the Feds proved they were intentionally slowing down old hardware and killing battery life ahead of new releases

Apple is people, my friend!

> But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.

I dream of a macOS installer in which you can decide the level of bloat, instead of then fighting against apple’s super user in your device (SIP) using scripts from generous Internet friends.

“Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”

Something like TinyOSX (or TinymacOS, which doesn't have the same ring to it) would be pretty awesome.

Apple has history of giving inferior device newer update because it's released later.

Like the ipad pro 10.5 does not support later ios version, while the less powerful but newer base ipad does.

So, there is chance the M1 MBA stop receiving update before the MB Neo

They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.

As a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM.

2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.

2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.

We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.

In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.

That's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives.

I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".

WhatsApp has a native Mac app

People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.

This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).

Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.

That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.

My Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.

I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)

It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.

Win 11 is actually way better at memory management than Windows 10. It's just more bloated.

I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.

Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.

But the Mac has a huge trick up its sleeve: it can run iOS and iPadOS apps. Meaning developers only have to make relatively minor adjustments to make it nice in the desktop and bin off the electron app on Mac.

Among the biggest offenders when it comes by my daily usage are Youtube and Facebook web sites. Both have iOS apps but did choose not to provide native Mac OS apps. I don't think MacBook Neo will make them to reconsider this policy.

“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”

That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.

The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.

That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.

macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.

I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.

With builds running on big build servers.

Where are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.

This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.

The worst memory hogs today are websites.

I love the new reduced resources Era. MS was clever in launching Xbox series S + X and demanding all published games run on the lower spec machine (similar to Xbox One-S specs).

Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.

It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.

Bye bye electron

I'm afraid it doesn't. People most everywhere in the world don't buy these overpriced machines. And you can get a new budget laptop with 16 GB of RAM for well under 200 USD.

However - I would love it if people developed software under the assumption they couldn't just splurge on RAM. And 8 GB is still much too much for that...

Curious where can I find new budget laptop with 16g under 200? N100 mini pc’s sold for 350 at Amazon.

I don't use Amazon (and am not in the US). But look for manufacturers like Xiaomi, Chuwi, Mechrevo, Teclast, or even less-prominent ones; here's one example:

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010041415903.html

There was this argument by someone the other day that Electron is so attractive, because native APIs are shit and too complex. On the other hand, all software, even simple stuff like messengers or app managers, seems so bloated thanks to Electron and similar frameworks. I like to think of these packaged webapps really as prototypes, and now start to imagine that agentic swarms can effectively translate them to native code, which would save resource both on the hardware and human-ware side.

This is such a better deal than I had growing up, Apple has to be taking a bath on these.

My high school required students to bring their own laptops to school when I started in 2010. Their shopping list suggested a MacBook Pro 13" with a case - I looked up "MacBook Pro price" for the first time in my life and just about walked into traffic. I didn't have a laptop to bring, I didn't want to bring the wrong kind of laptop and get double-screwed, so I bit the bullet and brought my car savings to the Apple store at the mall. A tremendously thoughtful sales rep told me "that's crazy, what school requires a MacBook Pro for 9th graders?", led me to the white unibody MacBooks on the side, and showed me that if I was buying it for school, I would get a discount on the laptop, a free inkjet printer (with ink!), and a free iPod Touch. This blew my mind. I thought it was a scam.

If I recall, that model of MacBook compared admirably against the same year's base model MacBook Pro 13 on a stat sheet but felt worse in hand. The MacBook Neo might actually bring up the rear on fit and finish at the expense of I/O and like, the questionable idea of running an A-series chip in a laptop running Tahoe and Chrome. I'm thrilled with this release.

Wow props to that sales rep. Not many would pass on the opportunity to sell something more expensive. I'm assuming they make some sort of (paltry) commission

I've had a similar experience with Apple Store employees many, many times: I walk in and vaguely describe what I want, and they steer me to the cheapest item they sell that could possibly meet my stated requirements.

I've also returned Apple products multiple times, once (recently) without the packaging, and once several days past the return window. They refunded me every time, no questions asked.

This makes me wonder if it's part of their training?

It is - you’re not trained to upsell, only to give the customer what they need to do what they want.

Can be a little annoying (an employee actively tried to downsell my partner, even though they knew what they wanted), but overall it’s a nice practice.

Yeah they always try and talk me out of battery replacements, saying it doesn’t need it because it’s on 81% durability rather than 80%.

I worked in AppleCare and even we support techs had incentives to sell products.

Incentives matter more than training.

That assumption would be wrong, and is why you get that kind of service from them. They may have targets of units sold but the real target is customer satisfaction and part of that is getting the customer into the right product so they're happy with it

Targets of units sold is a better metric than targets of total revenue, if a company is focused on customer satisfaction.

They are a highly NPS driven operation. It makes sense: if you keep NPS above a certain threshold each sale begets additional sales from other customers. They manage people and places to what customers say in NPS surveys but don’t allow tolerate soliciting ratings. It’s simple, thus scalable.

no commission

Does not mean no incentives.

Apple Store reps don't make commission.

My experience is that they are more focused on finding the right product for your needs. I've been there more than once where they happily downsell a customer.

I’ve found that experience fairly common at our Apple Store. They’ve talked me down.

At some point in the 2000s I was buying a laptop at an Apple retail store, and just before we processed the transaction the salesperson asked if I was a student.

"Umm, I kinda look like a student."

"Good enough for me!"

I got a student discount.

> I'm assuming they make some sort of (paltry) commission

I worked at an Apple Store in 2010. There was no commission. I was a sales person at the time.

A college student had a bad interaction with one of our sales people and asked a manager to be helped by a female employee. We had none available and I was asked to assist her because I wasn't aggressive.

An asshole pathological liar, who later got fired, had tried to upsell her for no reason. The MacBooks with Intel processors were plenty fast. A 13" MacBook Pro was more expensive and offered no benefits for her student needs. I don't remember the rest other than she bought the MacBook, which was what she wanted when she came in.

> This is such a better deal than I had growing up, Apple has to be taking a bath on these.

Apple doesn't sell anything where they're taking a bath; their margins have been high 30's to low 40's for many years. All of the technology in the Neo already existed; they didn't have to create anything new.

USB 2 in a type C form factor is pretty novel.

How so? Buy a newish keyboard it has USB 1.1 in type C form factor.

Apple has been doing that on their base spec iPhones for the last 3 years.

Not at all. All cheap Android phones have USB 2.

To me the price seems to be so uncharactaristically low for Apple during a time where hardware prices are rising across the board that this almost feels like an attempt to try and capture the desktop market. During a time where Microsoft is fumbling with Windows on every front, having a competitively priced Macbook even for budget-concious people seems like a smart move that will pay off even without direct high margins.

Capture the student market 100%. I’d buy one for my kids tomorrow. These machines are made with an iPhone chip so they’re going to be great at browsing the web and studying. I wouldn’t buy one for myself To do actual work on but for light users it’s the perfect device. Start them early and get them hooked in the ecosystem so they’re grow up and keep buying iPhones, Apple Watches, AirPods, and iPads.

You have to compare with the base iPad, which costs only about half of the Neo. The Neo adds a keyboard (but without Touch ID for the base model), a larger screen but without touch, a somewhat better but also binned SoC (which the next iPad refresh will very likely also get) and more storage. It seems roughly in line, relative to the price difference.

Interestingly it's cheaper than the iPad with the $250 magic keyboard.

It's more expensive if you want Touch ID, and on par ($350 + $250) if you don't. However, the $250 Magic Keyboard is heavily overpriced, the actual keyboard can't be more than $10-20.

> Apple has to be taking a bath on these.

Why? Lots of companies sell Windows Laptops for under $200 (a 1/3rd the price of this). Personally I'd expect Apple's costs to be lower. Plus, Apple gets services money (iCloud, AppleTV+, ...)

> My high school required students to bring their own laptops to school when I started in 2010. Their shopping list suggested

How could they make you buy your own laptops? What if you didn't have one? ... Was that a private school maybe?

Pretty common in Australia, public and private schools. If you can't afford it, some schools have loan laptops.

Apple Computer had a strong focus on the education market back in the day. I wonder if this is a play to re-enter that market.

Anecdotally, at universities now, it seems like across domains, iPads are increasingly popular as ways to take notes and study. I wonder what the business model is here given their similar use cases with the neo for the student.

For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors.

The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026.

The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have.

It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps")

People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!

So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.

Yes, it can -- to all questions.

This is wrong.

My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.

Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.

Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.

How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.

There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy.

30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.

It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.

No need to be obnoxious.

I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand.

I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive.

FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.

How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand

The Sidebery extension is the key, for me. Tabs are vertical, hierarchical, and searchable.

I also set the color of specific tabs (another Sidebery feature) that have some special returnability reason. I don't love the color options, nor the default ordering (would prefer the more traditional color spectrum order (red-blue or inverse) so that I could infer the tag/priority/etc from the color, but I only use a few colors and it's fine.

I don't have a problem with duplicates. If it's a page/app that I return to often, I know that and just jump to it. I'm sure I have some dupes hiding in there though. NBD.

I use tabs as temporary bookmarks. It's still a lot, sure, but it comes at no cost.

The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up.

It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count.

Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost.

Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.

I am "only" ranging around 800-2000 tabs and 95% of them are practically bookmarks that aren't hidden in some menu but visible in the same visual context as everything else, which feels more natural to me. They're not loaded in RAM anyway.

The brain is amazing at remembering the rough location where I have tabs of a specific site/topic, so I just switch to the right window and scroll for a few seconds. Only works with a vertical tab bar though. It's not the most optimal solution but the best that actually exists and works smoothly.

Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets.

As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...

As someone who used an M1 with 8GB and has hundreds of browser tabs I can assure you it is not enough and you'll have to restart the browser at least a few times per week to not make the whole system lag.

16GB is fine though, and makes a much larger difference in responsiveness than it looks on paper.

> Can it run multiple programs at the same time?

I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.

Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:

- PostgreSQL (server)

- TablePlus (db client)

- Docker

- Slack

- Chrome

- Safari

- Zed

- Claude native

- ChatGPT native

- Zoom

- Codex

- Numbers

- Calendar

- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)

With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).

I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.

Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while.

It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.

I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said:

  Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising?

I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.

> I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said: Having only 8 GB

Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.

Thanks, I can see the point being that a smaller subset of that would work on 8 GB, but I don't think you can really just divide by half? (Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS/unified GPU needs compared to the 16 GB model).

e.g. using hypothetical numbers: if base MacOS/typical GPU usage requires 4 GB, then the 8GB model would have 4GB available for running apps (but multiplied by memory compression/swap to fast SSD). Whereas the 16GB would have a much more comfortable 12 GB for multi-tasking in that scenario especially with the multiplier effect of compression/fast swap on top.

So it still feels like a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as far as what an 8 GB model could handle in real usage. I have a friend who does light dev work on an M1 Macbook Air so I don't think an average user would have issues on the Neo day to day, but using the 16 GB as a yardstick doesn't seem that useful.

> Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS

Sure, but, by the numbers I'm seeing, their much heavier load than mine would be waaaay into swap territory for them and is still doing just fine. That's really my point. That's why I think it's actually pretty reasonable to look at half their load and say "man, even half their load is a pretty heavy load for most people, so half their RAM will almost certainly be more than plenty for the target market".

Also, just for the info, my Activity Monitor says that the non-purgeable OS RAM (wired) usage is around 3GB on Tahoe 26.3.

Guess what? Both Windows 10+ and Linux have memory compression, too, yet 8 GB are good only for light usage unless you're willing to "destroy" the flash with intensive swapping.

I think it should be obvious that...

1) Different operating systems have different virtual memory usage patterns.

2) Different computer hardware has different performance profiles.

3) Apple is in the unique position of being able to control both.

4) People keep predicting that SSDs will die en masse from swap, and it keeps not happening.

5) Shrug emoji.

Sorry, I should have said that running that same stack on Windows/macOS Intel with 16GB resulted in tons of sluggishness in my experience. I would consider that a 32GB workload on Intel, so I was surprised that 16GB was enough for it.

To the major point of can it (Neo 8GB) run multiple programs at the same time, my experience would say it would have no issues doing so given what one can do in 16GB on lesser Mac hardware. (Maybe I am wrong and MacOS takes all 8GB for itself, but that seems far-fetched.)

They're giving an example of a very heavy workload on 16GB. It stands to easy reasoning that a casual consumer could be fine on 8GB.

> Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs

So either it has magic fairy dust, or more likely it swaps a lot, but thankfully today's flash is faster than yesterday's hard disk; though this intense usage will shorten its life. By the way I wonder if Apple will use cheap QLC for this.

macOS actually does the opposite; to avoid wearing down the drive it will hold 7-10gb of your most commonly used files in memory and release them when the memory gets allocated for something else. In theory you could get away with editing gigabytes of files and using dozens of apps without ever wearing down your drive at all.

> it will hold 7-10gb of your most commonly used files in memory

I would love to see how it does this on a system with only 8 GBs of RAM like this Neo :-)

Anyway Linux can also cache files in memory for some time if you tune it a bit.

I have an M1 with 8GB and M2 with 16GB, and they are not comparable. I once ran the M2 smoothly for over 250 days without reboot with a bunch of applications open the whole time (at some point it just force-rebooted, fair enough). On the other hand I regretted the 8GB on my M1 Mini every time I used it.

8GB is perfectly fine for light use, but I'd argue if that's enough then you don't need the power of an M1+ processor either. So 8GB in the Neo and 16GB by default in everything else sounds more sensible than what M1 started with.

This device is very much intentionally designed for light use.

Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.

You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.

This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!

Except sadly it is not using M.

My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.

's/in 1994/in 1984/', perhaps?

Yes. Thanks.

The M-series is just marketing. They're just the A-series with more cores and IO. Apple has one family of CPUs, but they give them different names.

They dont need to use an M series. The chip they are using isn't far off (spec wise) a base M4. It's single threaded performance is damn good.

I didn't realize that. I thought it was a different architecture - or different enough that the two couldn't run the same binaries. Are they indeed binary compatible?

Yes! It’s simply a naming convention.

You can run iOS apps on an Apple Silicon Mac if the developer doesn't explicitly prevent you.

Additionally Apple have been sticking M-series chips in iPads for a while now. They appear to be pretty much interchangeable.

Yeah theres very little difference at this point between the A and M lines, think of the M as just being the more powerful line, but that doesnt make the A line weak, not by any stretch. Both are completely binary compatible at this point.

The A18 Pro single core performance is on-par with the M4 (a smidge lower but barely anything in it), and outperforms the M3.

A18 Pro Geekbench on an iPhone: Single: 3539 Multi-core: 8772 Macbook Air M1 Geekbench: Single: 2347 Multi-core: 8342

Crazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad.

Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.

Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.

This. My daughter is a high-school junior, and she's been asking for a laptop going into her senior year/college. This is exactly who Apple is going after.

I convinced my parents to get me a 2017 MBP for college, yes it was overkill for the day-to-day classes, but I ended up getting into iOS app development and was so fortunate to have a beefier-system. However, for a liberal-arts student the MBN appears to be a sweet spot.

> it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad

Why would you want an iPad?

The Neo can run iPad apps and it's small enough that it can be used in most situations where you'd typically use a tablet (bed, couch, etc).

I used to use both...laptop for quick typing, and then the iPad for hand-written notes or annotation.

The OneNote app sync is quick enough that I could type lecture notes on the laptop, and then quickly switch to the same document on my iPad to sketch out a diagram. It was overkill for sure, but very useful

I mean at this point with the latest ones, an iPad Pro with it's keyboard/trackpad accessory and a pencil could probably manage both for you pretty damn well.

I just wish they'd let us run MacOS on iPads.

That's fair...actually totally slipped my mind that today this would be much more feasible to do on a single device.

iPads are pretty common in education for the drawing capabilities. You can take notes by typing for most things, but when you get diagram/math heavy, you just cannot beat the pencil. I think it's probably pretty poor value of the small ability you gain to cost, relative to other things you could do (I like paper/pencil personally) but I see the use case, if limited.

Have iPads really replaced paper in college? I haven’t been on campus in a decade so I wouldn’t know

I haven't been on campus in a few years but even then paper was basically absent on campus. A class where a professor wouldn't allow tablets or laptops to take notes would be an aberration and a PITA. I remember I had to write like a paper check once and I had to physically go buy a pen since neither I nor anyone around me had a regular writing utensil on hand.

The exception was when people were taking orgo or a diagram heavy class. For that semester not everyone would have a tablet and some people would have pens and pencils. Or writing classes that still required a handwritten essay for the final exam

Yes, iPads (at least at my university) are incredibly common. I would guess they’re at least on-par with paper. So many people swear by Goodnotes because you get all the benefits of handwriting your notes without giving up the niceties of search-ability, auto correct, etc.

I don’t know anyone who uses any other tablet besides an iPad, they’ve basically conquered the market.

A lot of lower division math and computer science courses now presuppose iPads or other digital pen devices for working through handouts during lecture. Printed handouts are often available at request, but not the expectation / default.

On the other hand, I've seen more professors — especially in the humanities, but also upper div CS — start banning devices in lecture partially or altogether. Complete distraction (scrolling Instagram, etc.) during lecture is extremely prevalent, and they keep citing noticeable improvements in engagement after banning devices. This also coincides with a shift back to less take-home assignments and more exam-style assessment since they want greater assurance people aren't completely offloading their cognition to LLMs.

Not necessarily replaced. Some classes still ban all electronic devices unless you have some medical accommodation, this was in response to people not listening while being on their phones, tablets, and laptops.

Not iPads specifically, but digital devices. I did a show of hands poll in a big university course a couple of weeks ago, and 70-80% of students are writing their maths notes on a digital device. iPad is most popular, but Surface and other Windows devices are also popular, quite a few use Android (as do I for my lectures), and a tiny number use ReMarkable or other e-paper. Many students bring both a tablet and laptop to class, and I see handwritten notes viewed on non-handwriting laptops pretty often while they're writing other things on a tablet.

> The Neo can run iPad apps

In theory yes, but in reality barely any developer (at least the mainstream ones) make their app available on MacOS, and nobody enjoys interacting with a touch-screen optimized app with mouse/trackpad

That's an odd choice (for said developers), given in most cases it's a matter of checking a box. The second half of your comment is a generalization though.

It makes it easier to pirate your app if you enable that checkbox. macOS attempts to disable iOS apps when SIP is disabled to prevent this but it's not difficult to bypass [1]. I don't necessarily agree with it but this probably does factor into their decision process.

[1] https://github.com/paradiseduo/appdecrypt

That couldn’t be the reason. 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of consumables from games. This came out in the Epic trial.

The rest of the most use apps are front end for services where the app is free. There are very very few one time app purchases on iOS where pirating would make sense

Piracy is not the only risk when someone grabs your app binary, but also cracked versions with ads removed, or subscription checks disabled.

They can already grab your binary by using third party tools or by using the Apple Configurator from what I’m seeing.

TIL: iPhone backups on computers stopped including full ipa’s back in 2017…

They're encrypted using FairPlay, so you need either a jailbroken iPhone or a "jailbroken" (SIP bypass while SIP is enabled) Mac to decrypt them. The former will stop being possible soon enough, the latter will likely remain possible for quite some time.

We got my son a Mac Mini when he was 6. I was surprised at how many kid games just didn't work with the Mac, or how many did work but didn't support an external microphone and camera. I guess since most young kids have iPads or Chromebooks there's no market.

I have spent most of my life in a lazy couch posture and a laptop and keyboard doesn’t fit that lifestyle choice. I need to make more apps for people with my lifestyle choice, like IPad IDEs for development.

iPad + voice, this seems like my new lifestyle choice and it looks like it’s going to work out too.

I think human beings need to move away from sitting at the typewriter like it’s 1930. We’re more than this.

> I need to make more apps for people with my lifestyle choice, like IPad IDEs for development.

blink code to codeserver

https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

Ty!

Laptop is way nicer for lazy couch work. I can sit there with it on my lap with my arms crossed and I don’t have to waste a hand just holding the damn thing up the entire time I use it. It is the ipad that is actually the nonlazy choice.

>Why would you want an iPad?

Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.

What's a computer?

when working?

yep

Only if you want to take notes with a pen and prefer digital over paper. For me that's terrible, but some kids swear by it. I think if I grew up on it, it'd be different.

Homework for things like algebra and later calculus definitely is interesting to do on an iPad, as the ratio of time spent thinking:writing is high while you're learning.

But pure notetaking where the thinking:writing ratio is very low? I'd much prefer to type than write on a screen.

That's a lot of money for a small amount of use cases, get a $70 Wacom.

the difference between writing on a screen and writing on an external tablet is hard to overstate...

A Huion Kamvas then, still way cheaper than an iPad.

A Huion Kamvas is pretty awkward to drag to class or a meeting. Even the smallest ones.

Not really, sure it is easier to find your cursor but that is not very hard using an external tablet, and you get much better ergonomics plus you can see what is under your hand.

Not really, it works just fine and you don't obscure the screen with your hand.

Again it doesn't bother me for certain ratios of time thinking:writing.

Like a hard sudoku puzzle is fine, you typically write one symbol every few minutes.

But for notetaking where its a symbol every second, yes to me its terrible.

also, they still sell paper notebooks )

If digital version is important, there are probably some scanning apps.

You'll look like a mega nerd if you pull that out in a classroom, assuming you even have the desk space. Not to mention the qol improvement of having your pen touch the screen you're drawing on.

A mega nerd for pulling out a 7 by 6 inch touchpad with a pen next to your laptop? They're not talking about a full fat Wacom tablet, and besides, it's really not that hard to write on a screen vs a tablet, in some cases even better because your hands don't cover parts of it up (I have both an iPad with a pencil and a Wacom).

Plus on macOS you can easily use note taking apps with the Wacom touchpad that then digitize the text to make it searchable.

Does the Wacom show the actual result of the writing, or do you need to look at the screen? This feels like a bad solution to needing an electronic notepad.

It's a touchpad, of course the result shows up on the laptop screen, and the user doesn't even look at the touchpad anymore, just as digital artists don't now. Honestly not sure why commenters here are acting like it's some huge deal to use a touchpad for note taking and that one has to get an iPad when there really is no need.

Wacom have been selling "pen displays" for years, at least since ~2013. You can buy a brand new one for $300.

As an iPad owner I would probably use it for taking handwritten notes if the handwriting recognition was reliable enough for text search. But it's not, and the search feature in Apple Notes is the absolute minimum to be called "search". It can only search from the beginning of words, so typing "oo" will never find "foo". Better apps exist but they all come with a subscription of some kind.

I am clearly not the target audience for the iPad. Being restricted to apps and what they allow you to do while asking for money at every corner is not my cup of tea.

As an engineering student I can’t imagine taking notes a by only typing. I was always drawing diagrams and 2d and 3d graphs etc . No way I can do that with keyboard and mouse fast enough for a college class

> Why would you want an iPad?

At this point, there are more people taking notes on an iPad + Apple Pencil than on physical notebooks in my lectures

good info

The iPad is vastly better for reading and highlighting (with Pencil) class materials.

Reading whole books on a laptop tends to produce a ton of neck strain.

Why would reading on a laptop produce neck strain? Just sit comfortably.

The laptop is better in many situations as the screen stands on its own.

When reading in bed I use a stand to hold my Kindle at the best position. I would need a much heavier stand to be able to do that with my iPad.

The way people use laptops, the screens are generally much lower than they should be for good ergonomics.

iPads/Kindles are better because they're smaller and lighter so you can position them with far greater flexibility.

People still hold the ipad at the exact same height against their lap. You mean to tell me they hold it like arm outstretched in front of them? So easy to position my laptop. Edge of couch with screen tilted up, done. On lap of course, done. On table, done. Resting on my back, with the laptop on my chest, done. These things weigh only like 2lbs now. It isn't like 2010 when the ipad came out and the macbook was a good 5-6 awkward lbs and smoking hot.

I don't know what to tell you. I change positions and move my iPad around a lot in ways that I can't do with my Macbook. Whether holding it up while in a recliner or airplane seat, resting it on my belly while in bed or on a couch... also it's in portrait mode which makes a huge difference too, so the top of the screen is higher.

It's smaller, it's lighter, it's by definition just way more flexible to use ergonomically. You can position it in lots of ways you can't position a larger 13" horizontal laptop.

An eink display is vastly better for reading though. I only use the iPad for reading PDFs because Kindles are too small for that.

That's why I'm rocking a Scribe. Do not really care much about note taking but my poor eyesight welcomes the bigger font size.

Agreed, I really prefer using my reMarkable 2. I see it less like an iPad and more like a bottomless pit of scratch paper and printouts that I can carry more conveniently than individual dead tree products. This is probably furthered by my not using their cloud subscription and using a USB cable or SSH to transfer files instead.

It's better for reading epubs/mobis.

iPads are better when you need to be constantly highlighting and making notes, like for school. And for PDF's you need to be panning and zooming.

Grad student here. The paper-reading experience on an iPad is vastly superior to a laptop, and I've got an aging iPad Gen 8 that doesn't have enough storage to upgrade. I run the Zotero iOS app and it's absolutely perfect for annotating papers and keeping my bibliography organized.

In undergrad my iPad was far and away my favorite note-taking device. Digital pen-and-"paper" beats laptop for 99% of note taking.

The pen. 95% of the way our son does assignments now.

He’s off to university in Fall ‘26, and I’m waffling between getting him an Air and keeping his current iPad, or getting a neo and new iPad. Probably go the former because of the long term cost effectiveness of the Air.

Many students nowadays may say "why would you need anything other than an iPad?" :-)

As a college student, I can't count how many people in my classes exclusively take notes and submit homework through iPads. It's an extremely popular option because you can handwrite notes that you can't type (e.g. following along with a proof)

iPad + the pencil got me all through my engineering degree without having to drag around notebooks or textbooks.

To this day it's the only Apple product I've ever owned, and it was worth every penny. I'm sure there are other good tablets for writing now, but at the time there was nothing else even close.

My wife traded in her Macbook for a laptop. I couldn't believe anybody could live without a proper desktop computer but she proved me wrong. Aced some pretty intense physiology classes just using an iPad + touch pen.

> Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life?

A Chromebook with 8Gb ram and stock ChromeOS gets 10 hours doing real work. And with real work I mean full local dev with containers, vscode, Vivado, and 100+ chrome tabs open. And even running small VMs from time to time.

Also since this is a A series processor it's not even clear if the MacBook Neo supports virtualization.

isn't there UTM for iOS? Although I heard it's pretty gnarly due to no JIT

Hm true, I wrote off Chrome OS altogether, does it provide enough customizability that MacOS/Linux does? You mention dev containers which is already way beyond my perception of its capabilities (and the general public, I think)

So basically, you install the Linux Dev VM with 5 clicks in the settings. You get a Debian VM with nested virtualization support and seamless Wayland, VirGL and USB passtrough.

I don't know MacOS, but comming from Linux customizability was mostly okay. Obviously there was also some getting used to. The desktop environment has decent window management and support for virtual desktops which I use heavily.

I think this also looks super compelling for people who want to ditch the Macbook Pro.

I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.

The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.

I still find it funny that for my personal setup I have a $700 Macbook Air but a $1500 iPhone Pro and it feels like it makes sense.

I managed to get through 3 years of college (in a humanities degree, granted) with a dinky used thinkpad running the latest ubuntu distro. Only needed it for note taking, pdf reading, and essay writing, and it got the job done for $50. There were only a few times I was screwed when it came to needing special software...

For a student, a Kompanio Ultra Chromebook is a far better deal. The faster processor and more RAM make it better for typical laptop use. The touchscreen makes it better for educational use. It's only $100 more than just the Neo by itself.

Honestly I think these will sell well in high schools.

Where I am, our primary schools require iPads, the kids want iPhones (and mabye tend to inherit their parents old phones), and now there's a lightweight laptop for high school cheaper and faster and better screen (and I'm hoping with a more robust build) than the slightly-more-expensive 13" windows laptops I've been buying them.

The parents will later buy them a macbook air or whatever when they go to college.

I think Apple could be onto a winner here, in terms of long-term MacOS uptake.

Apparently the two USB-C ports are different specs [1]

  - USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
  - USB 2.0 480 Mbps

Both support charging but only one supports higher speeds and DisplayPort (A18 Pro limitation, as Apple probably doesn't dedicate much silicon to USB I/O).

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...

Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)

I don't think this is intentional to cut cost. I simply think that the chip was primarily made for devices with one port (iPhone, iPad) and this is a bit of an afterthought.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a future product with 2x USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support on the next generation, A19 Pro or A20 Pro maybe, if the product has enough success.

This is going to be a primary complaint people have (even if it's not terribly important) - hopefully they have some circuitry that warns you if you're plugging something into the wrong port (e.g. a USB 3 device into USB 2 at slow speeds).

> This is going to be a primary complaint people have

No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.

I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...

I don't think people will have many complaints about this thing, but I do think this will be one of the primary (even though it's basically a non-complaint).

It will definitely be used to justify spending $300-1500 more for a better laptop.

What do you think Neo users are going to plug in where they’d actually notice the USB speed differences?

Monitors, mainly (as if you plug it in the "wrong" one it doesn't work).

Followed by the IT-nerd of the family always complaining to them.

Again, I think it's a minor nit realistically, but people are going to harp on it.

For monitors at least, if you plug in to the wrong port you will get a GUI prompt advising you to use the other one [1]:

> while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...

I hope they added (or will add) that feature to other Macs too, on mine I had to try out different ports and check the settings to find the one which can go beyond 60Hz.

The same things Macbook pro users plug in where they'd see the USB speed differences. Just because someone isn't as privileged as to be able to afford a MacBook Pro instead of a Neo doesn't mean they don't have the same dreams and desires.

Hey, it took courage to remove that headphone jack.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/

This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.

I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s

Low-end wired earbuds come in packages with dozens of units. I buy cheap earbuds because my kids love breaking them. Not everyone optimizes for the same thing. Analog remains the bees knees in certain settings.

Just a quick search on Amazon shows a two pack of USB C headphones for $10

Or 100 analog ones for $36.

So you are worried about saving money and consider $5 for a pair of headphones and you bought an iPhone????

No. Going back to what I initially responded to:

> I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s

I am saying that not all adoration of the analog headphone jack is baseless. And we shouldn't universally move on.

So your adoration of analog headphone jacks is you can buy a pair of crappy ones for less than a 50 cents each?

If you are that concerned about price, I’m sure you can get a $20 Tracphone from somewhere with an analog jack.

As soon as those headphones sound better than the analog alternatives, sure.

But they don't. And won't.

So USB headphones sound worse than analog ones? Does vinyl sound better to you to than CDs?

Why do they need to sound better? Also, in a lot of instances, they do sound better because they can offer powered functionality such as ANC. Can’t get that with a truly analog headphone. I’d never use analog headphones on a plane, for instance.

I can’t think of an instance where analog headphones would sound better than USB C headphones using the same hardware.

I am a huge 3.5mm jack defender and I am still upset at how Apple created a post-USB C world. But this is a common misconception.

USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).

You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.

With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.

I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.

The difference is you always can buy USB C headphones with a known good consistent DAC. A 3.5 inch headphone jack serves no purpose in the age of USB C - even my wife’s mixing board has USB C input that she can plug her iPhone into.

Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.

I think that is silly, I haven't used an SCSI port since I was a tiny child but I use a 3.5mm almost every day of my life.

And technology moves on either way. There is not a single high end phone that still comes with a 3.5 inch headphone jack in 2026. The number of people who care in 2026 is probably less than the number of people who want to run Linux on their phone.

Yes, but that's different than what we're saying. I think many more people want and use 3.5mm jacks than they do SCSI ports. The 3.5mm jack is excellent. We're in a thread about a new device released with this wonderful port.

Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.

We are in a thread on HN where you have people who complain about not having root access on your iPhone, want to run Linux on everything and bemoan the fact that most websites don’t work with JavaScript disabled.

This is as far from the mainstream as you can possibly get.

Come September it will have been a decade since Apple dropped the headphone port - the world has moved on

I would very much like root on my phone and most of the websites I use don't require JavaScript. Apple hasn't dropped the headphone port, they even announced a new product today called the Macbook Neo with one. There is even a thread on HN about it :)

You have a wee bit more space on a MacBook Neo than an iPhone.

Do an experiment. Jump in a pool with both your iPhone and your MacBook and see which one works when you get out.

Or I can just not do stupid shit and listen to hifi headphones released in the past 2-3 years, many of which have a 3.5mm jack (and adapters for larger, if plugging into dac/pre-amps).

Which you said aren't being made anymore. Which is factually untrue. The best bit is, they're still being made! And there's plenty of people who are still buying them!

Why? Because a $170 pair of closed-backs sounds infinitely better than the $550 Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra nonsense.

FiiO FT1 32Ω being a prime example, if you are looking for closed back suggestions :^)

No I said high end phones are no more coming with headphone jacks than they are coming with SCSI and VGA ports. I’m sure it would be convenient for you if the iPhone came with a right and left 1/4 inch audio jack.

Sennheiser HD 660S2

Audeze MM-100

Meze 109 Pro

Focal Hadenys

Focal Azurys

Sennheiser HD 505

HiFiMAN Arya Stealth

Audeze LCD-5

> There is not a single high end phone that still comes with a 3.5 inch headphone jack in 2026.

In my experience, USB-C ports are more fragile than 3.5mm audio jacks for repeated plugging in / unplugging cycles.

I've never had a USB-C port fail with many of them being plugged / unplugged multiple times a day for years. At most they fill with dust you have to fish out. Aux ports would often get in a state where you had to very carefully position the jack for it to work.

It's a mobile CPU. They did not modify it. Mobile devices run with a single USB port.

If they want to get these things into schools it would be insane to expect the schools to also supply everyone with AirPods or some other kind of wireless headphones.

This is the answer.

I've heard wired EarPods are great or a USB DAC is under $10. It's still easier to have the headphone jack though.

AirPods have too much latency for playing music. You want wired audio for running GarageBand or Logic Pro with a MIDI controller. They could have gone with a USB-C to audio adapter, but then you wouldn't be able to plug the MIDI controller and charge the computer.

... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.

> ... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.

This seems to be a recent phenomenon. A lot of electronic music production uses the Macintosh and Logic/Ableton workflow, to say nothing about how many of the best DSPs were Apple-exclusive until about a decade ago. I don't really think music production, at least in the EDM and hip-hop world, got popular on the PC until the rise of Fruity Loops and FL Studio, but that's available on the Mac now too.

> Well the costs had to be cut somewhere.

its investment into next generation of loyal apple users, they more likely be selling it at loss.

Nope, not Apple

Im surprised that they’re doing DP and not thunderbolt?

IIRC it's because the iPhone chip doesn't have thunderbolt

this new macbook does not have Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt would presumably make it much more expensive, the spec has a ton of USB features that go from “optional” to “required” to be able to go into TBT alt mode, like supporting active cables

Makes sense, the iphone has only one port after all. Interesting that it supported a second one though, or maybe that's the Pro revision designed for this use case?

The second port is likely necessary for USB hubs that rely on both ports. I had one for my M1 Air. I assume it'd still work with the 2 different speeds, but I'd be curious to try it.

I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.

Charging in and DisplayPort out on the same socket would mean an additional dongle or hub or something, so there's at least that reason for having both.

Couldn't one charge from the display connected to?

Not necessarily - you just need a display that has USB-C input and supports USB-PD.

Both ports support power delivery, so you can still be plugged in and use DisplayPort out.

> - USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support

I'd like to run the external display plus an external SSD at USB 3 speeds, so I'd be waiting for experience reports on whether the one port can handle both without constraining the filesystem transfer speeds.

Since it's just USB and not Thunderbolt, wouldn't it use DisplayPort Alt mode for the display leaving data transfer untouched?

The USB 2.0 should be the one on the back, so the charging cable does not interfere with me plugging and unplugging things from the good port.

Unless you use a dock, where you plug your things in the dock. Then you would want the "good" one to be the one of the back so it looks more clean and also have easier access to the slow port in the rare case you want to plug something there instead of the fast dock.

At least we should both be happy that it exists, no matter where it is placed! This is a big improvement over the macbook 12 with just one port. This was too low even when using a dock.

$599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID

$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch ID

Honestly pretty fantastic product and price.

This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)

My thoughts as well.

8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Fantastic value for money.

Honestly what I am (pleasantly) surprised by is the minijack.

> Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.

Users like you have money and Apple wants them buying a MacBook Air for that use case :)

Users like me have employers which every 3 years will send a new machine I can't decide.

The MacBook Air is the same weight and thinner, so for a mobile machine I think that still wins out.

The last gen MacBook Air (M4, 16GB, 256GB) was down to $749 with retailer discounts last year. Currently $759 on Apple's certified refurbished site.

> Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine

Even as a main machine for most people. Heck I could probably even get away with it. I have my work laptop that's technically my "main" machine as I spend 8+ hours a day on it, and it's sufficiently beefy.

I hardly do much on a personal computer (not counting my gaming desktop), this neo would be more than enough for my non-work needs.

Granted, I don't currently have a need for it as I have my own MBA and an iPad pro, but if I had neither this would definitely be a no brainer and I could confidently recommend this over pretty much any off-the-shelf budget windows laptop to anyone who asks me "What laptop should I buy?"

> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.

That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.

If by basic you mean running a simple Python script then sure; but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter.

> but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter

I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.

The specs definitely agree with you.

On the other hand, Apple pushes Xcode & iPhone development quite heavily to students (and not say Python or JS), so it’s definitely something they care about.

There can be different cohorts of students. If a student is at the point where they can start exploring iOS development they can perhaps have a swing at it with this machine. In reality, they'll have been using this machine, know enough about the limitations, and be thinking of upgrading.

Kids already are well aware of iPhone upgrades. Parents will get them this machine. They'll get going and soon enough be badgering their parents for an upgrade to a more competent machine. That is all by design while being an affordance for people who can only get in at the cheap end.

Atleast on Linux, I have been able to do almost everything in 8gb without any concern but I have the macbook air which has 16 gb and this can also do everything pretty much.

So IMO in 8GB most types of coding is possible actually.

But regarding Xcode+Iphone simulator, I am not sure if that's possible tho. It's possible to run android simulator on Linux 8 GB with waydroid while being pretty smooth. So theoretically could be possible but I am not familiar with building with Xcode/Iphone simulator.

The relationship between coding ability and memory requirement is nonlinear, right? Just a short Python code and an ide? Probably fine. Some complex ide with all sorts of agentic stuff? Need more ram. True enlightenment? Vim even with some unnecessary extensions will run on megabytes.

I do that on my 8GB M1 Air on Tahoe. It works fine?

I do and it doesn’t? Frequent waits/stutters just cmd-tabbing from Xcode to Simulator on fairly small projects.

The performance gap between Apple’s flash and a typical aftermarket NVMe drive in a Windows laptop is more attributable to controller design and integration than to trace length.

The comment was about RAM - what does NVMe have to do with RAM?

Apple can get away with less RAM because their flash storage is fast enough to make swapping barely noticeable. In contrast, most Windows machines incur a significant performance penalty when swapping.

i suspect the 256 gig model is going to have a single nand flash chip so it won't be thaaat fast

Depends what you're developing. You could build a pretty powerful webapp as long as you don't fall into 'i need my blog running in kubernetes' trap.

For a couple months I was on an 8gb m1 air, it was perfectly fine, even with docker containers. As long as i didn't launch teams....

This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.

That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.

> the electron people

“If you see anybody [building electron apps] in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere!” - a reasonable person, probably

How anyone could think their chat app or text editor should be able to bring a 32GB 8-core machine to a crawl is beyond me. I can have about 200 browser tabs open, but one discord chat open in the background and I’m stuttering. It’s offensive.

> Noone is going to develop on this after all.

Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.

most of us mere mortals are using bloated software :)

In the workplace, it does not matter as it’s not your device anyway (or buy something powerful if it’s a consultancy). For most utilitarian uses, you only have to endure a few.

But I would expect you have more choice if it’s a personal computer, including paying the additional cost in memory and performance if the final choice is bloated software.

you must be joking sir. those gonna be paperweight in 2 years. 16 is usable minimum for music making, grpahics and web browsing

My daily laptop is a 2017 MacBook Air with intel and 8GB. Web browsing, finance, and civilization 5.

These things will be running in 5-10 years.

My 2010 Macbook Pro with 8GB works still. Not a daily driver anymore, but Word, Excel, Lightroom, Garageband, MainStage etc work just fine. Youtube videos up to 1080p play without stuttering in Floorp. It's not quick, but it is useable.

I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.

Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…

I've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.

I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.

I still wish they would give back the 11" Air dimensions with Apple Silicon.

IMO that form factor was perfect for a small, low end laptop, it just needed a more power efficient chip, and a screen with smaller bezels.

That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!

It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!

A revival of the 12” MacBook would be amazing, but give it to me as a premium device - not an educational market positioning.

I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.

Exactly. This with an M5, OLED, today's keyboard/trackpad combo, 16GB/24GB RAM, 2-4TB of SSD and it would be an instant buy

They make something like that, but it costs a bit more.

They aren't making this as described

I still remember when the Air lineup was all about being small and light.

The MacBook Neo and the MacBook Air (at about the same weight) are 10% lighter than the original Air.

The 2008 MacBook Air was 1.5x lighter than the other 13" MacBooks in the line-up. Nowadays they are all about the same weight.

Like the little buff 12” PowerBook https://www.macworld.com/article/225194/ode-to-the-12-inch-p...

Somewhere on my list of projects is "Gut a 12" Powerbook and put the guts of a modern M series Macbook in it". The chassis is so spacious and the Macbook Air logic boards are so small, physics is not going to be a problem. Just hooking up screens, the keyboard and trackpad (using the original, natch), and ports. There's already a high-res display swap you can do in that chassis to get to 1400x1050.

Hmm now I want to see this done in a PowerBook 100 chassis with a Sharp Memory LCD screen.

How much did that 12” Retina MacBook cost? Small and light isn’t cheap.

I'm very sad this neo macbook thing isn't a replacement for my macbook retina in any way. I'm not really sure what I'll do to replace it; I'd been hoping this "phone chip based macbook" would be of the old retina form factor. But instead it's just a nerfed air. My kids have the macbook airs and my little 2017 retina is substantially dramatically smaller and more portable. At least until the battery dies.

That's basically what this is, no?

It's a 13" and is ~2.5x as heavy.

No it isn't. It's 1.08kg vs 1.23kg, or 13% heavier.

And indeed it's 13 inch but the dimensions are quite similar, there is a 0.8% difference in width (with the 11 inch being wider surprisingly, due to the bezels) and a 7% difference in height (11 inch being shorter). At its thickest point the 11 inch is. 33% thicker. In terms of volume the 13 inch isn't any bigger.

Just look up the specs.

13" is not 11" As someone who used their 11" for years, it was a workhorse. A slow workhorse, but I still yearn for that size.

I was thinking yesterday while reading the Thinkpad repairability story that I would pay an unreasonable amount for basically this laptop in the chassis of an X220, with a 7 row keyboard and Mac touchpad.

I had the 11” dual core i7 and I wouldn’t even call it slow (for its time). Loved that little machine and I keep longing for that form factor but with modern specs.

I think the bezels are so much smaller that this may be almost exactly the size of the old 11" MBA.

Those measurements are screen area. The old 11” had bezels that were almost an inch wide on each side. The actual laptop dimensions are almost exactly the same.

The 11" MacBook Air was also not 11". It was 11.6".

The footprint of the Air was 11.8" x 7.56". The Neo is 11.71" x 8.12". If you liked the size of that one, you'll like this.

This is a 13" 16:9 screen. A little smaller than the current 13.6" 16:10 MacBook Air in display size but not really any more portable. Weight is the same as the 13.6" MacBook Air.

Don't think it's 16:9, just lower PPI than the air -- Neo: 2408x1506, Air: 2560x1664.

Yep, you're right.

Yes. I think Air is a better buy if you are going to have a "laptop". I wish it was lot lighter if I am losing features against MacBook Air.

Yes, this is spiritually more of a successor to the old plastic MacBook or iBook lines. Not a successor to the premium ultra-portable 12" MacBook.

That seems like a product they could also potentially revive with Apple Silicon.

That would cannibalize their ipad lineup

The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.

They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.

They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.

Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm

  - Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
  - Width: 30 vs 29.75
  - Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
  - Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23

11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.

But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).

Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.

What are the weight measurements? kg?

Yes, that's in kg

I'm a bit too lazy to look it up, but this is surprising to me. I still have an 11-inch, and it has a huge bezel around it, but it still feels way, way smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.

If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.

You answered your own question, its the bezel. They've gotten _much_ thinner since the 11 inch MBAs were a thing. Remember screen size is measured in diagonals, so even a 5mm reduction of bezel size both horizontally and vertically gains you a little over 7mm in screen size without a physical size increase. to gain 2 inches in screen size (50.8 mm) you'd only need to eliminate 0.74 inches (roughly) from all 4 sides. I don't know the exact measurements of the bezels on those older devices but I can tell you my M4 Air is less than half an inch on all sides.

EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.

> If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air

It's two things that explain the optics vs reality are surprising.

One is bezels, they're quite large on the 11 inch.

Two is rounding, the 11 inch actually undersells things as it's 11.6 inches, the Neo is exactly 13 inch. So it's not 2 inches but 'just' 1.4 inches bigger, and with its thick bezels it bridges that 1.4 inch gap mostly.

While the 13 inch MBA is actually 13.6 inches.

In other words, the MBA has a 5% bigger screen than the Neo, despite being marketed both as '13 inch macbooks'.

5% doesn't sound like much, but it's the diagonal, meaning the height/width also scale by 5%, and the surface area therefore scales by 1.05^2 i.e. the screen of the '13' inch MBA is actually more like 10% bigger than the 13 inch Neo.

Yup. The MBA11 is probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's my daily driver. I have 4 of those now, running MacOS and Linux Mint.

I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.

8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.

Not true, but good riddance if it was.

I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.

No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB

Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.

I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.

This is the cheapest MacBook available new - you are already compromising. Do you expect an economy car to outrun a Porsche?

I have an 8GB M2 as my primary laptop and I never experience noticeable lag on it, despite doing work on it a normal person would never do.

It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.

$499 for education which a lot of target group would qualify.

A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!

I think it might be 2020 when the M1 was released since I remember i had bought a mac book in 2019 and it was still intel

It was Christmas gift. so maybe 2020... not super positive about this

November 2020

$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.

I doubt schools will be getting this much cheaper. This is already a really aggressively priced product.

These are probably gonna have a decent resell value. Macbook products have a very higher resell value compared to say chromebooks/normal laptops.

I can imagine schools buying them for their students and then taking them after the semester is over and then giving to next but also reselling it at a very nice value if they might want the next line of product at a decent price.

Also this not only applies to school but normal people who buy the Macbook Neo too

My understanding is that students are very hard on school provided laptops, I don’t think many of them that have been in use for a year will be in good resale condition.

My mother is a teacher and the idea there is that if students break/damage the school provided (tablets in that case), the students have to pay the fine.

And even after that, yes, children are absolutely hard on their tablets I agree but they operate and the resale value of those could be decent aside from a very few IMO. There is a way to create a culture of preservation or atleast steer things that way but yeah I agree it can be hard.

Only the smallest or independent schools are bellying up to the Apple Store to buy 250 laptops on educational discounts; almost all of them go through companies that handle the details; and it can be structured as a lease or a purchase, depending on where they want to allocate capital and expense.

They famously don't. Betting and guessing doesn't work well here. Best to ask the question instead of make the assertion.

M1 came out Nov 2020.

I have one of those, it's perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn't a lot, but I've never run into issues with it not being enough.

The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.

> Apple cares more about AI than I do.

I’m not sure they do. They love their AI chip, but that might be where the live ends.

> I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1

This is the A18 Pro, specifically, which should have a faster GPU than the M1?

$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.

nah 8gb of ram is laughable

The price is fantastic but 8GB RAM feels like going backwards again, but oh well, ram shortage and beggars can't be chosers

1: Education market 2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products

Apple has always ignored cannibalism because they would rather cannibalize their own products than have someone else do it.

I do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that.

Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.

The A18 Pro chip has 8B of ram and no option to change it.

It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.

That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.

It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.

I really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e

Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.

Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.

The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.

This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.

Lol, that'll never happen. And it's still 2x a Chromebook, while being far more fragile because Apple doesn't believe in plastic. If this is ever bought by a school, it'll be bought for teachers, or maybe in a very rich district.

Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.

*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.

RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.

RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...

My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.

But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.

Yeah I think there are a couple of advantages of a Macbook versus a Dell mobile workstation. it is definitely lighter and more pleasant got general use. I'm only concerned that modern apps usually take amount of RAMs that are close to or north of 500MB, so if you have say a word processor plus 10+ Chrome tabs you quickly run out of RAMs (I tend to have way more on my personal gig but I'm a developer). But maybe swapping is not a big issue on the Mac as both comments said.

Chrome’s kind of a hog. I wouldn’t think twice about having Pages and dozens of Safari tabs open side by side on an iPad. I’m confident this could zoom through the same workload.

Swapping isn't a big issue on the apple silicon macs, the storage is generally fast enough.

I had an M1 Air w/ 8GB when it first came out, and although I haven't used Tahoe on it, it handled anything I threw at it no problem while swapping. Tons of Chrome tabs, mail, music, terminal, VSCode all open without so much as a hiccup. macOS also has really good memory compression compared to Windows.

Trying to do the same on an 8GB Windows machine would be an effort in frustration.

I do wish it had 12GB, but AFAIK Apple didn't make an A18 Pro with 12GB. I suspect if they refresh it in a couple years with the A19 Pro, it'll have 12GB of RAM.

I feel like the 8GB limit is partially market segmentation. If they had a 12GB or 16GB model, everyone would buy that instead of the Air/Pro and they would lose money

Apple has never cared anout that. They would rather be the one to sell you a laptop than someone else. The issue is this was made to hit a price point many thought they couldn’t make. Doing so required some compromises.

Apple cares a lot about that. Their pricing structure across all models in any particular vertical are precisely engineered to keep you effortlessly moving up notches on the pricing ladder into higher margin models by selectively omitting/upselling specific choices.

For the Neo, it's:

  + $100 -> $699 Macbook Neo (well, I probably want Touch ID like my iPad...) 
  + $100 + $400 -> $1099 M5 Macbook Air (8 GB feels a little tight, but this new Air has 16GB plus a better CPU...)

For iPhones, currently the 120Hz vs 60 Hz "ProMotion" being locked to higher models, better camera sensors, Face ID etc. iPads also with screen variations, Pencil variants, Face ID, etc. The matrix of available options always have "holes" in the lower models that force you to bundle something you don't care as much about to get a specific missing feature/option at a higher price.

Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.

The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.

Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.

I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.

12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.

300*500 kids is 150k and the difference between a school choosing chromebooks again. This is priced against the $450 Chromebook.

Agreed.

This is really nice for schools.

I really want this to work for me too, just because of those colors, but the RAM is really the only issue. Oh well, at least this forces every other budget laptop to compete harder.

From someone in this thread with actual experience:

>Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit. >For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks.

and an aluminum case may last 30% longer than plastic.

This is a 600 buck machine. "Just $300-350 more" is a 50% price hike!

That's true, but I just know a bunch of people looking at this will have that lingering thought at the back of their minds on how that extra 50% gets you just enough little improvements across the board to make them second guess.

Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.

There is no sense getting anything but these sorts of Macs, or the maxed-out top of the line ones even considering the hilarious prices. Either get the entry level or go hard.

I've done both with success: am still riding a maxed out M1 Ultra Mac Studio which hasn't lost a step, no matter what I ask it to do. For a daily driver that doesn't try to do the most extreme things (think: able to edit your 6K videos but not scrub them, and media storage space can't live on the actual machine but only on some outboard storage) the base models of these will be a breath of fresh air. This is of course assuming the liquid-glassification of the OS doesn't ramp up, rendering the system unusable to actual Mac users.

Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.

Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.

As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.

Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.

Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.

The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.

> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID

Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.

My experience with the Apple Watch is that Touch ID is faster to unlock my Mac. The “unlocking with Apple Watch…” thing takes too much time and by the time it would have completed my finger already reached the Touch ID and unlocked it.

Depends if you can win the race between it unlocking with the Apple Watch and you typing in your password.

Between touch and watch for machine login and 1Password everywhere else, it is a rare day that I actually type in a password. On those rare occasions, I feel some gratitude to be forced to type it so that I don't forget it entirely.

Yes, Touch ID is faster to unlock in a desktop context. Watch auth works fast enough to unlock a Macbook by the time I open it in order to place a finger on Touch ID. Ymmv, this is me on reasonably updated and stock Air M1 and Pro M3 units.

Apple Watch costs half this thing, but then again maybe there's a large percentage of phone/watch only users.

It's nice to be able to authenticate sudo via biometric id with the help of Pam, or unlock your password manager like bitwarden.

I don't think an apple watch would help there?

Wait, one can wire up sudo to touch ID? I don't know how I never learned that before

Yeap, it's possible starting from Sonoma: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/11/quick-tip-enable-touch-id...

It's been possible since Big Sur at least, the method for enabling it just changed woth Sonoma

> I don't think an apple watch would help there?

You can authorize via Apple Watch everything you can authorize via Touch ID. You get the notification on the Watch, and you need to press the button twice to auth.

I don't remember if it works every time, or only when MacBook is closed and connected to external display/keyboard.

I've got this functionality in linux with the framework laptop, and it really isn't much faster than typing in a password.

It can be, if your typing is impaired.

either you have killer typing speed or your password isnt long enough or your fingerprint scanner is slow

What’s wrong with your M1 air?

How much of that 256GB is eaten by the factory install of MacOS?

What's the CPU performance like compared to an M1?

CPU performance is about equal to the M1 multicore and a bit better single core.

I believe the single core performance of the a18 pro is a 50% boost, but the multi core performance is about the same as the m1. I'm sure you're already taking the ram limitations into account for longevity.

Yeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.

I would say that the look and feel of M1 MacBook Air is better, and you aren't getting an upgrade in performance department either, so is it really an "upgrade"?

Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren't getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.

"Education customers can purchase it for $499."

That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!

That's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.

The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.

No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still

It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.

They were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence.

8 GB M1 MacBook Air does support Apple Intelligence.

Yes it does. I was clarifying what the commenter was saying; not making his statement myself.

akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.

correct, I thought he meant that the Neo does not support it, since his M1 Macbook does support Apple Intelligence but perhaps he's not aware of that or hasn't updated yet.

You are correct i indeed thought that you need at least 16 GB to support Apple Intelligence and I thought Neo doesn’t support it.

I stand corrected.

> The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable

C'mon, man.

I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.

Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop.

Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.

Honestly 128MB might be too much...

It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?

Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.

> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.

Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."

If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.

Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.

That's good info thanks and you are right I didn't take that into account. I do however think that 8GB may be basically usable now but I'd like to see students able to use these machines for a decent length of time and to be able to become digital creators using them. I get it won't edit video or do 3d modelling the same way a Macbook Pro can but it needs to do enough to get students interested.

I'll get one for my mom who uses facebook and pinterest and the occasional recipe website. I'm sure it'll be enough power for the average user.

This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.

My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.

The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.

I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.

I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.

I used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers.

Maybe you should try a MacOS device.

I already have, that's why I don't use them lol

Bruh if 32GB of RAM feels insufficient your computer is broken.

Lol it is a T480, so maybe there's some truth to that ;)

It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.

> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone

I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.

Why not? They’re the same core OS.

Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.

They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.

Isn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway?

Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.

People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.

They added iOS-esque stuff a long time ago in Lion/Mavericks like “App Nap” and “automatic termination” so it kinda has this, but it’s inconsistent.

macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.

Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.

iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.

Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.

This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.

Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.

For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.

Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.

ChromeOS and macos aren't close to the same.

8GB will run chat, web browsing and word processors just fine.

Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.

For people browsing HN or following any tech YouTube channel, 8GB is barely usable. But for anyone else, 8GB is still ‘okay’.

I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.

Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.

> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.

Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers

Apparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...

A very old article, and if you follow any of their links, they are sold out. So it's not so apparent after all

I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.

Is it a better deal? A18 Pro seems to be somewhat more capable than an M1.

Maybe but It has worse screen, worse battery and worse connectivity.

Noted, but I’d still pick the better CPU.

Walmart shows new as currently out of stock, they only have restored.

What part(s) of the "full experience" are missing in this machine?

Smaller screen with less colors(sRGB instead of P3), shorter battery life(16 instead of 18), USB-3 and USB-2 Type-C ports instead of thunderbolt.

A used m1 air isn't going to have that battery life anyway...

This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used/older models.

For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.

For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.

On the refurb market, you can get a Macbook Air at the 16-512 configuration for only a few hundred more, which is a better value.

But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.

I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.

If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.

> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.

Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.

There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.

There are schools where close to 100% of the kids are qualified low income.

And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.

It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.

Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.

I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.

It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.

This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.

I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.

The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.

I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.

I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.

There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.

Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.

I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).

After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.

> and to never do anything that other people than the owner want

Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.

There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.

The purpose of an OS is to run applications. Windows and MacOS have the applications people want or need to run.

Other OSes can run the browser, which runs many of the applications you want.

So? Acer also makes Chromebooks.

The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.

Yeah, but K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

true, which is why chromebooks are almost ubiquitous in k-12, at least in the US. a mac, even for only $500, is still ~2x the price and lacks the management tools that Google Classroom provides

> K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.

Interesting pricing differential. Seems in your country, that IdeaPad is significantly cheaper than the price in the US. But for your Macbook Neo, it's the other way around.

Wonder why that is.

No idea. Maybe Lenovo includes purchasing power in the price calculation for some reason, such as making more money in the U.S. while gaining market share here in Czechia, where purchasing power is lower. Apple may be able to afford not to do that.

In my area, an Acer Chromebook Spin 514 has a faster processor, more RAM, and a touchscreen and costs only $100 more. With those specs, it's much better for productivity, development, and games, so it's well worth the price. It has better Android integration than the MacBook has iOS integration and even runs Android apps natively itself. The same people who didn't know that Acer sold this before will still not know they sell it now. The people who knew Acer sold that device before will continue buying it.

Looks like it's aimed squarely at students.

Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.

They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.

Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.

My kids' district gives them iPads in middle school (5th through 8th) and MacBook Airs in high school.

My local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through high school.

Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.

Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.

A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."

It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.

My old Highschool, as well as many other schools I've seen since, mandate Chromebooks.

I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.

This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.

> the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.

I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...

This is true, but I was on the School's IT in HS and they were much easier to repair.

Things like the keyboard caps were a constant pain point, but they were durable little devices and 30 minutes as all it took to fix the worst of issues.

We would just hang on to the Chromebooks whenever they had a fault that made them inoperable, and when a new one came in with a problem, like missing keyboard caps or a broken webcam, we'd just part out one of the Chromebooks from the graveyard.

I imagine that would be significantly more difficult with an iPad, even just opening them up is much harder, and there's not a whole lot you can do to fix them.

Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)

apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)

Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.

My son went to college with his Mac. But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software. So we had to get him a PC as well.

Everything, as I understand it, is moving to the Web. Google Docs, Canvas…

Yeah.

I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?

It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.

Looks like Quartus still doesn't support macOS.

What software being taught in colleges today (outside of highly specialised niches) requires Windows?

Stats software is cross-platform or open-source.

Art programs are cross-platform or open-source.

Office suites are cross-platform or browser-based.

Unless you're specifically trying to learn Windows development, dev tools are cross-platform and open source.

15 years ago, what you describe was probably quite common. Today, it's almost completely disappeared.

When I was in college the exam nanny software required Windows, and not in a VM. (I had a Windows desktop at home, so I just remoted into that to take exams.) This was a few years ago but much less than 15.

Also most "professional" CAD software is Windows-only, which is going to affect a big chunk of engineering majors.

Kid probably realised his friends all had windows machines that could serve double duty as a gaming machine and wanted some of that action.

That's crazy, must be a specific field? The overwhelming majority of college degrees don't require Windows.

You can nowadays do fine with macOS or Linux in most college degrees I've seen, since nowadays there are decent open source alternatives for the most prolific software that's on the level of popularity that it will be used in teaching.

However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.

Student at a US Uni here. They still do very much own the space for both tablets and laptops, especially in CS

CompSci grad in the US as well, it is genuinely a sea of either Macs or ThinkPads with $INSERT_FAV_LINUX_DISTRO here, and even then 66% of that are Macs.

call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?

Yea if you can find one for $500 new on sale.

Maybe a slightly used one as well.

But I think these are very tempting for brand new.

doesn't need to be new, but maybe the m1s wont last another 4 years for college so maybe it makes sense...

in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).

Walmart sells a brand new M1 Air for ~$650 and refurbished for ~$500

I'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...

A refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in 'fair' condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck. How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?

Doesn't that M1 Air have a much, much slower CPU?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256032

M1 Air single core is 2347 and multicore is 8342. Plus, the A18 pro chip in the Neo will likely perform better with the improved thermal environment.

Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.

I've bought several touchscreen Chromebooks for that price.

Growing up in the 90s all my elementary school computers were Macs. They seemed to get more Windows as I got older. Not sure the current state.

Would be great deal in 5 years to buy those post-lease if Asahi/others Linux catch up.

My kids school has been giving every kid in the upper school an m1 macbook air and they have to replace a LOT of them. Everything they do is in the cloud (Google classroom, docs etc) so they don't need powerful machines. The school was considering moving to chromebooks but I can see them choosing this instead just to keep their current provisioning workflows etc.

For those wondering: Geekbench CPU single/multi and GPU Metal scores.

- M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377

- M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712

- A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288

So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster in single core speed.

A18 Pro is generations ahead of M1 and M2 on single thread if these scores are true. Are you saying we had this incredibly overpowered silicon shipped on millions of Instagram machines?

I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.

Yea the iphone chips are hilariously overpowered for what most people use them for

It's even worse, the os is too restricted for doing anything more.

But even better, is they actually leverage the performance per watt improvements to shrink the battery and maintain the price.

Mobile devices, to give you good battery life, operate in a “race to sleep” mode. Good performance is necessary not to compute a lot of things, but to finish your computation quickly and shut down the power hungry processors. So do not worry, the performance is not being left on the table. It is there so that your phone lasts throughout the day.

Single thread performance is 50% faster, which is more important for most ordinary tasks.

A series chips also use a slightly different instruction set with memory tagging and pointer authentication. IIUC it's Armv9, which the M series chips don't support.

8GB RAM was actually pretty workable for lightweight work… until they shipped Tahoe. Now macOS is just a slog doing even the most basic things unless you’re at 16GB. Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.

But hey the colors are cute.

I'm typing this on an 8gb MacBook and Tahoe. it's mostly fine

You must not be doing much else then.

My M1 8GB Air did great before Tahoe; even medium complexity Xcode projects ran fine on it with other apps running. Since I made the mistake of upgrading it to Tahoe, it’s too painful to work in those projects.

It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.

AI is so good these days I am using the laptop for quick changes more often, as I just push every change. I rarely need to fiddle. The general experience of using my desktop and laptop are converging.

Let me ensure I understand you.

Running a node.js server on Tahoe makes your macbook sluggish and you feel like Tahoe is fine performance wise?

May I reminded you that 10 years ago people also ran chrome and node js webservers and this was not a problem in any way with 8GB of ram.

That's very interesting to hear. I didn't know that.

I developed Node.js applications 10 years ago on a 2009 MacBook Pro with 5GB of RAM, and it was only a little tight on memory. 8GB _should_ be enough for moderate complexity development, but everything has become more and more memory-hungry with time.

> It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.

May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.

Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?

What are you doing in your node server? That shouldn't take up a ton of RAM.

Yeah it sounds like you’re the target audience for 16GB of RAM.

If you even know what XCode is you're not the target audience for 8GB

And who exactly is the target audience for a regression?

How did you type this from the lock screen?

It used to feel way better, that's the issue.

Tahoe is a massive regression in my personal experience (16GB here). So many random bugs and menu bar pop-up slowdowns (how is the system menu bar this unresponsive?).

Spotlight has gotten so bad, I can literally count the time it takes between typing the app name and the result showing up in the dropdown. Ended up switching Spotlight to Tuna.

Oh my god, yes. Spotlight on Tahoe is a joke. Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal? You’d think those would be in an always available cache guaranteed to always show up instantly? So many questions.

> Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal?

I've experienced this too, even after giving spotlight multiple shots months apart. For your sanity, I say just stop using spotlight. Don't let Apple steal your valuable waking hours with their crap QA.

what to use instead to launch apps and find stuff?

Tuna (https://tunaformac.com), like I mentioned earlier. Made by a really creative solo dev, minimal, and not as complex as raycast.

It's a night and day difference compared to the pile of garbage Spotlight.

Tuna looks super cool

But I'm sure there is some explanation but when I launched an app using tuna I got a standard macOS security notification "Tuna.app was prevented from modifying apps on your Mac"

Why a simple launcher needs "App Management" permission ?

I’ve had issues like that in the past, had to clear the cache for the spotlight index or something like that. Fixed it right away. Not sure if you’re facing the same issue.

I ended up downgrading to Sequoia. Day and night difference! My air m2 16GB is snappy again!

And settings app does actually work!

For some reason Alfred is also a *lot* slower on Tahoe. I can often wait a whole second after pressing the shortcut before the bar appears whereas on Sequoia it was instant.

I wonder if there's actually something else with your OS. Have you tried wiping it, and starting again by clean?

Yes, it's the Windows solution. But I haven't experienced this at all.

Exactly. 8 GB still seems plenty for lightweight work, even under Tahoe.

For general browsing and webapps and writing papers and watching Netflix and whatever, this is great.

Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.

> dead on arrival for anyone doing real work

Honestly, we’re not the target market for this. I’m pretty sure at this price point though, it will sell like hotcakes. Once people get slightly into the ecosystem, it’s usually a big win for Apple since their stickiness ( from my experience of people around me) is undeniable once you get one product

People doing real work have money to spend and Apple wants them buying Airs/Pros.

If only we could get fun colors for those…

“real work” != “development”.

Why would anyone doing “real work” want this?

If you’re doing “real work” then 16gb won’t be sufficient, either. My “real work” machine has 96 and I sometimes wish it had more.

This is not for "serious work". It's for users who spend most of their time in a browser and/or using lightweight apps.

It's perfectly adequate for most office work: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, web browsing / research. The vast majority of users are not doing software development and never will.

This is the reason why I am not going to Tahoe. I have heard its very buggy at times and resource intensive.

And I am quite happy with Sonama.

Frankly... I see no difference on my M1 air. Maybe Jetbrains IDEs are not resource intensive enough ?

It would be sensible/wonderful for Apple to release a deliberately lighter version of MacOS for these laptops; but their intransigence and (e.g.) willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back year after year suggests they won’t.

> willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back

Sheesh - in iPadOS you’ve got multitasking, multitouch, full windowing support, external input and monitors, and a ridiculously accurate pen. If that’s holding back, what exactly are you looking for?

I’d still argue a device that size works better with just split screen than the new windowing, but other than the walled garden approach it does pretty much everything today that us techies have been whining about.

The ability to install any software would be nice…

> what exactly are you looking for?

File management that doesn't suck, incl. better handling of external drives.

I'm seeing a ton of comments like that one about how apple is holding ipados back but am I going crazy or wasn't the big story of iPad is last year how many updates it got to make it more of a desktop replacement? Like half the features you mentioned were added last year plus a calculator app right? There was specifically a whole iPad os refresh that was well received as finally massively boosting iPad pro capabilities? Like, very recently?

> Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.

Ditto for iOS 26. They need some Snow Leopard action, for real.

Please use the correct names, despite whatever apple says.

It's Mac OS Vista. This is the proper name for this abomination Apple calls Tahoe.

Is it possible to install an older version of the OS in these new machines?

A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.

It's $600, unless you're a school.

EDIT: With education discount, in Canada, it's good price: $679 for base, $849 for Touch ID + 512 SSD.

$799 in Canada for the base model & $999 for the one with touchID & 512 GB ssd.

Looks like both models only come with 8gb ram.

Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.

I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).

Or a student, or a teacher. Individuals get edu pricing too...

In the United States (population of 340 million):

* 86 million (27%) are under 21 and most of those are students. * Those people have parents, assume 2 parents per 2 children = 86 million parents (27%)

That means 55% of the US population is eligible for the cheaper rate before you even account for people getting secondary degrees, educators, and yes - the schools themselves.

Or a student, or a family member of a student.

Also these days Apple actually allows sales and discounts at retailers. I bet this will be on sale for $499 at Amazon or BestBuy before the end of the year.

You can't kill Chromebook with hardware. Apple needs software if they want more share of that market.

What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.

You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.

MacOS is well supported by most MDM providers today and iCloud makes it trivial to reprovision the local state on a new device.

https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/workspace-for-education/e...

this, basically

Google account login

Can you say more about what software? (I'm sure the Neo runs Chrome perfectly fine)

Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.

When deployed as a managed device, the OS updates overnight while there's no active user session.

I wonder why no enterprise where I've worked is aware of this fact, including technically sophisticated ones from Dropbox to Goldman Sachs. When I asked my favorite LLM whether Jamf Pro—which I should stress does not come in the box with MacOS—is capable of this level of zero-touch OS updates, it responded affirmatively then spent 95% of the rest of the response telling me about well-known workarounds for when such updates hang.

Because a technically-sophisticated enterprise generally wouldn't pick Jamf unless they were an exclusive Apple house - they'd consider something like VMware's Workspace One (now Omnissa) that works across windows, mac, and linux.

And no need to ask an LLM - we can read the doc and notice there are 6 different deployment methods that work (out of the box) for the built-in MacOS MDM, several of which allow transparent, mandatory updates to user environments without requiring user interaction.

https://docs.omnissa.com/bundle/macOS-Device-ManagementVSaaS...

https://chromeos.google/products/device-management/

That's exactly why they will kill Chromebook. Better software ecosystem.

That's great if they intend to, but it would be more convincing if there was any sign of them working on the software at all.

Depends what you consider luxury feeling. It's so stripped down.

Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:

TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.

Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.

It is still miles ahead of plastic garbage other vendors sell.

People miss that point. An entry level Windows laptop is an upper and complete garbage. You get the ick within seconds of using it. This thing will sell like crazy. No longer is Apple an expensive brand!

You are comparing it to other Apple laptops but you should be comparing with its competition at a $600 price point. The aluminum enclosure, touchpad, battery life, display, and performance are all best in class (or near enough) at this price point.

> Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.

In September I picked up a laptop for $575.

Its specs are 15.6" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores, 16 threads) CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, Radeon 680M iGPU that can allocate 8 GB of GPU memory, 1 TB SSD with a backlight keyboard. Weighs about 3.5 pounds and has (5) USB ports plus HDMI port. It comes with a 2 year warranty as well.

Running Arch Linux on it with niri and it's really nice for what it is.

There are decent laptops out there at affordable prices.

What’s it made of? How’s the touchpad feel?

It's metal "A-shell", I got mine in black. It also comes in blue or rose gold.

I'm not a huge touchpad fan, but it's very usable. It doesn't misclick.

When picking it, you can choose up to 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD. It was $50 more for 2 TB instead of 1 TB.

The only problem is it seems to be out of stock. It's a Nimo N155. Amazon resellers are also marking it up like crazy compared to its official listed price.

You literally just compared a laptop running arch to a mac. You’re not the target audience lmao

The laptop ships with Windows 11 but its parts are compatible with Linux too.

That is an important note though, the price includes a valid Windows 11 license.

That wasn’t the point. You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac. There’s always some other computer you can buy, but most people will just buy the Mac

> You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac

I do software development, video + image editing, writing and gaming. My requirements are it runs well, I can depend on it and I don't mind if it has a fan.

I only replied because the OP's comment made it seem like it's difficult to find a good laptop in the $600 range. If macOS is optional you can get quite decent specs.

arch :D I loled. the people who run macs don't want Linux.

Absolutely. Cheaper Chromebooks are terrible machines. Those screens should be illegal and probably causes a lot of eye strain and headaches. Same with a lot of the sub $800 PC laptops. The colors aren't even... colors. The trackpad? Yuck. Everything else falls apart right outside of the warranty period of just 90 days or 1 year. Oh and good luck spending the first day just uninstalling/formatting everything from scratch and getting the vendor specific features to work again.

For people who have always wanted an Apple laptop, this is it. The niceties are not necessary, and perfect little things to cut out to bring the price down for the masses.

The iPhone Halo effect will bring in the first time buyers in droves. Windoze is inherently uncool among the younger Insta demographics.

Also, the Neo is the ultimate iPhone accessory, for this crowd. Who cares if the ram size is 8GB and Tahoe is a certifiable dog, that the vast majority neckbeards here are fretting about here. The Neo is not aimed at you. For Safari, Apple Mail, Photos and iApps, and ocassional Claude/ChatGPT usage, this is plenty good

It's ironic that one of the product shots includes a child using a $599 laptop while wearing $549 headphones.

The ideal kind of Apple customers, https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Mac-Leander-Kahney/dp/1593271220...

lots of people now have a $1000 phone and no computer at all.

Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...

IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!

When Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 he said it was running OSX but what that actually means is anybody's guess. iOS is closer to macOS in functionality today than the iPhone's first OS.

I personally liked iOS and macOS being separate things because making a desktop OS also work on a touchscreen has wider implications than it sounds. That's why these days everything in Windows is blown up like Fisher Price software and way bigger than necessary for a mouse cursor. Seems like that's the direction Apple is headed in anyway with Tahoe.

What he meant was that it was running the non-user touching parts of OS X. It was possible to SSH to an original iPhone and install gcc and compile applications. It was sort of like OS X in a kiosk mode.

Only if jailbroken with openssh installed, right? The old default "alpine" ssh login

macOS has been running on A series chips since the beginning of the transition to Apple Silicon. The original developer Macs had an "A12Z" CPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

TIL, very cool!

It's a shame it isn't the A19 series with MIE.

Yep this is the biggest news. We’re one step closer to a DeX like experience for iPhone. If Apple did that they would stomp the entire Windows laptop AND desktop market.

The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!

It's been able to run on A series chips for a while. I don't think that's what's preventing MacOS on iPad. It's that the OS is not optimized for touch in any way. Too many small things to click. It's just not the kind of half-baked experience Apple would put their name behind. Likely the same reason why you haven't seen a touchscreen on a Mac.

There have also been iPads running on M series chips for years now.

The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.

You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.

Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.

There isn't any good technical reason why an iPad couldn't run macOS. The differences between the A and M series chips is mostly about the kinds of IO the SOC provides. The iPads already use M series chips anyway.

Pretty sure this is a marketing limitation more than a technical one.

Press release touts "built with the environment mind", but is silent on repairability.

Also this week: Lenovo's new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability showing that even popular modules of mainstream manufacturers can build with repairability in mind.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/115827/new-thinkpads-score-perfe...

Apple I imagine is still soldering their storage and memory to the motherboard.

I expect the customer of this product is not worried about repairability: to them, it's just an iPad with a keyboard. You're also citing 3x higher costs, so they're really not comparable.

The lack of upgradability is directly what provides a lot of benefits that I expect the average consumer vastly prefers: better performance with soldered memory and better battery life. It's not just to shaft you on prices (though that's definitely a big factor).

Apple's idea of that is to shred old stuff and reuse the material.

> Apple I imagine is still soldering their storage and memory to the motherboard.

Memory would be in the SoC no?

It’s stacked package-on-package for the a18 pro.

Non-Socketed memory and storage is more of an upgrade friendly feature rather than a repairability feature. They don’t often fail. And most people do not attempt to upgrade their devices anyway, especially the type of people who are not power users, and are buying low end devices. For most people, upgrades are no longer a purchasing consideration, and they will buy the laptop that’s five dollars cheaper and has more attractive packaging.

And no, Apple is not soldering memory to the main board on most of their computers these days. All of the M series computers have the memory on package with the CPU, because there are latency issues with putting it any further away. The A18 Pro that this laptop uses is package-on-package, the DRAM is directly on top of the SoC.

There are no socketed standards for LPDDR anyway.

Yeah, but what happens when you drop your laptop on the ground and it breaks? Good look recovering data without having to pay a recovery firm a $1000.

Personally, I restore my Time Machine back up. I’m sure some people might restore their files from iCloud or elsewhere.

It’s a pretty bad idea to keep valuable documents on a mobile device. You can’t recover the data from socketed storage if it’s lost or stolen.

Socketed RAM is fine, but what do you mean by storage doesn’t fail often? It’s usually the first part that fails on any computer.

Not since we got rid of spinning rust. Most common failures are batteries, and the parts of the computer subject to direct abuse by the user: keyboard, connectors, the display, etc.

My Macbook M1 which I use extensively since 2021:

Data Units Read : 1267900331 (649.16 TB)

Data Units Written : 904681650 (463.20 TB)

power_cycles : 667

power_on_hours : 9611

and yet it's still only:

available_spare : 100%

available_spare_threshold : 99%

percentage_used : 16%

I don't expect it to fail anytime soon.

On my M1 Air I have: Percentage Used: 4% Data Units Read: 564,731,366 [289 TB] Data Units Written: 182,194,700 [93.2 TB] and I thought I was using it extensively haha.

You're out of date; Apple is soldering the memory to the CPU directly. I mean are you complaining that you can't swap your L2 cache or replace the math coprocessor? The history of computing is one of the CPU absorbing every single discrete component over time. Apple is at a point where the CPU has to absorb the RAM to maintain their performance lead. I'm happy I get a super fast computer.

And the battery or SSD?

Well the battery is usually glued, but Apple has started using this weird glue that releases if you give it a specific electric charge. It's replaceable but it's a complicated affair. I expect the Neo's battery to be glued on the chassis.

The SSD is difficult to replace because Apple uses storage chips with no controller; the SSD controller is in their CPU. So you can't put in any M.2 in there even if you wanted. Some small companies have managed to offer upgrade parts for the Mac Mini, which has socketed storage chips.

As time marches on and PC manufacturers stay still, Apple manages to simplify its logic boards by reducing the number of connectors and parts, lowering the price to make a computer. Apple, which has never really offered anything below 1000$, has entered a new market with a bang.

I expect a computer in 20 years to look like the system-on-a-chip that Apple makes for its watches. I don't know why people are adamant that we need more controllers and chips on our machines, not less.

That's the tradeoff with making something small and light. I don't have a big problem with it.

that ifixit article is an AI slop puff piece.

Thinkpads have good repairability, few people would debate that. They are not perfect and the ifixit "review" itself acknowledges that the wifi antenna is soldered, hence not repairable.

Do internal WiFi antennas fail often?

How’s screen, keyboard and cooling in those? Still garbage matrix with flimsy keyboard and jet loud cooling system?

No reviews out yet.

I like the keyboard on my gen1 T14, did it change later on?

What MacBooks are you referring to? I haven't heard a fan running on a MacBook for over half a decade, and they replaced the butterfly keyboards several generations ago...

> Still

2020 called, you're going to want to stock up on toilet paper.

I mean durability is as or more important than repairability and apple products have a reputation for lasting a long time and holding their value. And getting software support etc. In general I think tech nerds underestimate how much people value durability over repairability and how hard it can be to sell repairability. Ive found that "this product is repairable" can be interpreted by people im trying to convince to buy a framework as "this product will need to be repaired and it's going to be your problem." On the other hand Apple's reputation for durability means that buying a used MacBook to save money is a serious and popular option which is by far the most environmentally friendly option compared to any new device, however repairable. The repairability <-> sustainability relationship isn't as straightforward as people suggest in the real world imo

My 2c: I meet people all the time using the same Macbooks for 5+ years. While I'm attracted to modularity, SoCs have undeniable advantages (I'm assuming other commenters will cover this). I bought the fanless MB Air because I imagine this thing could probably go for a decade without any repair, outside the battery. I'd say this longevity is worthy of praise.

For contrast, I used a Surface Book throughout college and within weeks of the warranty expiring I ran into serious issues with the battery, then the charging port, display backlight, fan. I loved it to death so I kept it on life support and changed my usage patterns until I gave up on it. And yes, my next device was a used Thinkpad, and I was able to fix most issues I ran into. But I'd

I am NOT a fan of the measures Apple takes to monopolize the maintenance and repair of their devices.

I’m still using my M1 MacBook from 6 years ago. My company keeps emailing me to upgrade to the newest one but everything works perfectly fine and the performance is more than adequate for dev work.

Compared to pre-Apple silicon I was getting company exemptions to upgrade before I was technically allowed.

M series Macs are just amazing devices.

If you stop the video you can see the 8 screws on the bottom of the Neo. I'm hoping that means there's some level of repairability at least from a battery perspective. I'm looking forward to some teardowns when it's in peoples hands.

One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...

Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.

And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.

Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?

–––

edit: just to clarify, currently Apple's lineup includes the "What's a computer?" iPad – $349+, iPad Mini - $500+, iPad Pro – $999+ and iPad Air – $599+.

These come with a pencil and a magic keyboard. Also some of them are more powerful than the A18 Macbook Neo.

Then there's the Macbook Neo - $600+, 13" Macbook Air - $1,099+, 15" Macbook Air – $1,299+, 14" Macbook Pro – $1,699+, 16" Macbook Pro - $2,699+.

Who are all of these things for? Why does the iPad Air exist with the magic keyboard alongside the Macbook Neo? That's the same keyboard attached to a less powerful processor and a touchless display for a spitting-distance price.

I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)

> Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy!

Depending on their budget and needs, a Neo, Air, or Pro.

When Steve came back Apple was months from bankruptcy; their product lineup was full of duds.

Today Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and every product line is ruthlessly optimized/scrutinized to maximize their revenue/supply chain use/suss out consumer needs for the next cycle.

There isn’t a world where Apple has a $4T market cap and where their product offering fits in a neat 2x2.

MacBook Air - mid range mid price, good quality, basically as functional as the Pro now. The price of the Neo is very compelling if they want it for light duty work though. And obviously high end is high end but those people know who they are

Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.

However, with the recent Macbook Neo. I actually went ahead and recommended Neo. Especially to a friend of mine whose going into college soon and has asked me what they should buy.

Now the 8gb can be concern to some but not to many IMO. And I am also feeling just a bit optimistic that Apple will realize that the largest criticism of this product can be that it doesn't have 16GB otherwise even more people can buy so in the future, I expect 16 GB to be possible too (When Ram bubble finally bursts)

Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?

Well first I would ask them what they are planning to use the Macbook for.

Then I would make the recommendation. There is Macbook Neo for basic stuff. Macbook Air for regular stuff and Macbook Pro for gangsta stuff.

It seems there is still good differentiation between the Macbook lines.

I guess I'm just an OG to Apple. Macbook pro every damn time.

$1700 is a lot for most people, and they don't have their entire jobs on it.

My friend in high school got a beefy Power Mac G5 just because his parents could afford it. All he did with it was write essays and browse online.

Ah. Well, I'm a software developer. Better hardware = smoother work experience (generally speaking)

Until today if they had less than around $800 to spend my answer would be "Don't buy a new MacBook from Apple" because there isn't one that cheap. Maybe look for a used or refurbished M1-M2 model.

Today it's the MacBook Neo unless you have a higher budget and want a nicer screen and more power. Then it's the MacBook Air, unless you do serious photography, video, audio, or development work then it's a MacBook Pro.

It's still a pretty simple, linear progression up the line.

Steve Jobs presided over an era where they were selling:

- A white plastic 13" MacBook

- An aluminum 13" MacBook

- 13", 15", and 17" Macbook Pro

- A high end 13" MacBook Air that thermally throttled and was more expensive than most of their other laptops

I'm now a 15'' Air user after always being pro. I notice no difference in performance but enjoy the lighter form factor and damn does it run cool compared to the pro.

Replacing my iPhone was a nothing burger of choice, on paper the iPhone 15 pro was the best feature set for value vs buying a new iPhone 17, but Apple know that so don't sell the older models directly when the new models come out.

There's really limited impactful innovation when you get into the details.

Yah I think this actually competes with used Airs and older MBPs.

People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.

Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.

With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.

Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.

I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.

> If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP

I professionally edit tens of thousands of very large RAW photos, edit 4K video all day long, write, web and very light dev work.

All that on a used M1 air. Still the fastest computer I’ve ever used.

The pro is so insanely powerful there really are only devs (and maybe only ai devs) who need it.

MBP has some other advantages too- better display, better speakers/mic, more ports, driving more external displays. But yeah the MBA with an M1 chip is incredibly powerful and an awesome computer.

When Jobs took over Apple he didn’t have a device in a quarter of the world’s pocket.

Agree, there is a watered down product vision

I feel like the Mac lineup is still coherent especially compared to basically every other laptop manufacturer. The iPad lineup I don't know.

> if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?

Easy!:

Poor: Neo

Middle class: good spec Air

Rich: MBP

I think Steve would have approved of the Neo. The 96/97 lineup was a mess so if a customer asked what to buy you wouldn't know. Now it's fairly simple - Nano for budget users and school, Air for general public, Pro for pros.

1m vid of Jobs on the product line https://youtu.be/VkVs4ZqWgN8

As a Master's student, I didn't have money to afford a MacBook. So, I begrudgingly bought a Dell Vostro 13" at the time. Pretty much all of my friends just got the Dell/Sony/HP laptops and it's not like those laptops were powerful either. They were just pretty much entry level for a price tag of $600-$750. I got mine for $750. This was back in 2009. I had to remove the selection of a Webcam. These companies would pull shit like this, making basic things like a webcam, an add-on. I hated it. IDK what the price tag of a non-Apple laptop is now-a-days and IDK if they still do what they did then, including everything as an add-on, but, I'm so glad Apple released this. This'll be a blessing for students and generally folks who want a high quality laptop without bargaining over which basic add-on to pick, which seemed ridiculous then and feels the same even now.

2009 Me would've LOVED this! I'm so glad Apple released this.

Back in 2013/14 Guillermo Rauch (CEO Vercel) shared a brilliant insight -- develop software on a weak machine and optimize it to work well on it so that when it's used on a powerful machine, it's going to fly. This'll force macOS developers to consider these resource constraints.

According to the USA CPI inflation calculator, that $750 would have been $1,137.05 today. That's striking, but also incredible how much computers have progressed at the same time.

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

The cheapest new laptop you can buy from HP right now has 4 GB of RAM, a 64GB eMMC drive, and an N100. It's $200-300 depending where you look. And somehow this pitiful thing is running Windows 11.

I know it's half the price of the Neo, but it feels like way less than half the computer. I don't like Apple, I won't be buying this, and I won't be recommending it to anyone. But damn, Apple.

$599 and available in a range of colors. My bet is this is going to be a hit with high schoolers and college students everywhere.

Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby

Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook / education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.

I was wondering if they were somewhat intentionally trying to harken back to those original iMacs and iBooks. The first thing I thought when I opened the page for these was that the colors were really giving me that vibe.

I wish they had the green from the iMac lineup. I like that color a lot. Still this is a nice device at an excellent price.

I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.

As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.

However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.

The problem with competing against Chromebooks is that Chromebooks + GSuite and Google’s managed offerings for schools.

My kids' school uses iPads with GSuite. It seems like a common config.

With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.

Chromebooks are much more secure for enterprise and education.

macOS is awful to manage on an enterprise and education level. This will always be Apple’s achilles heel in truly breaking into this market. Admins will push back.

Google has Security down to a science. ChromeOS has little to no malware. Google is constantly reporting malware and exploits to Apple so they can patch active vulns.

At my last company the support staff for the Macs was one fifth the size of that supporting the PCs (almost the same quantities of Macs and PCs)

I’m not sure about that. Physical build quality on chromebooks is poor. My kids school switched off because the kids were always breaking them.

iPads a Macs stand up to much more abuse by students.

MacOS has very little malware even though users have more access to do things.

All google data is used to train AI and advertise. I’d like to not have that near my kids. Would rather have Apple’s “make money off hardware” from a data privacy standpoint.

I never talked about build quality. There are in fact nice quality ChromeOS devices, it’s just arguably never worth the added expense.

The argument with Chromebooks is you can usually buy 4 of them at the cost of a single Mac.

My point is device management and security. This is what enterprise and education cares about and scopes around.

macOS is not nearly as robust or secure to manage as ChromeOS, and Windows flys above both with almost every single feature being manageable at a domain level.

Also your AI point is moot. Enterprise and Education have much different terms than consumers.

You think Apple is letting Google, Slack, and Zoom use their internal company data for training?

There is no Chromebook with the same build quality as a Mac at a comparable price. Thomas try for $1000 MacBooks and even more so for $600.

This is an important feature as kids are rough on machines.

Security on Macs is good and I’m not sure why you think management is so hard as it’s not the same as windows, but still easy enough to manage a few hundred or thousand for a school system.

My school, my college, and my current enterprise (Fortune 500, etc.) environment all manage it just fine.

The counter however is that lots of schools are on 365, which doesn’t work so well on a Chromebook but works great on a mac.

its quite common for schools to issue windows laptops to staff (who use MS 365) and chromebooks to students (who use Google Classroom). The windows laptops also have no problem with google classroom of course.

Apple absolutely needs a management layer, both for school and for family. Apple family controls are sorely broken.

Our work macs are tied into microsoft’s intune thingy, pretty sure that’s enough for most orgs.

Not that i’m a fan of it, but meh it exists.

That’s not free. Apples Apple ID management is atrocious. How do you password reset an ID you own?

They need to move to having the students ID under both their parents and the school, detachable from the school when a kid moves.

The devices need to be enrolled to the org and then act as thin clients so any kid can log onto any laptop, not have the laptop locked down to a specific kid.

Apple Parental controls are either controllable on the kids device or one parents device but not both at the same time and definitely not two parents at the same time. Whose bright idea was it not to allow two parents to see and manage a kids settings from their own devices, at the same time. That’s a lot of the world that doesn’t appear to anticipate two parents wanting to manage a kid from separate accounts, but Apple should know better.

The Neo is definitely a response to Chromebooks. Apple bet on the iPad for the education market and lost that bet for obvious reasons. This was already obvious 10 years ago when I was working in edtech.

They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that?

My last tablet was a Nexus 7, so I wouldn’t know ;)

But on a more serious note yes, I agree with you. Tablets - absolutely great for the use cases you mentioned, for everything else I want a proper keyboard, etc.

>They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that

Every construction admin, supervisor, field inspection guy, etc. has a top of the line iPad Pro, in an Otterbox, with a kind of sling that helps you hold it with one hand, and an Apple Pencil, and they spend all day in Plangrid.

This setup has completely eaten the entire market.

And tons of artists spend their day with Procreate but those are still quite niche use cases.

Construction and illustration are hardly niche industries

Construction is not a niche industry although I would argue otherwise about illustration.

Anyway my previous point was not about those being niche industries but niche use cases as far as iPad users.

Just to clarify, my point was that the construction usage is not niche.

But anyway if you continue along your path of reasoning and discount all use cases one by one you end up with no product at all… or maybe a photo/video player and messaging device. But as proven by the construction and many other use cases the iPad is more than that.

I know this is a heavily tech circle.

however for the common person out there, unless they're buying for status -- this will meet most of their needs

office workers, hospital workers, stay-at-home parents - who just wanna fill forms occasionally, write emails, browse the web - design a few posters on canva for a funeral, special event etc

so yeah to those people they don't give a shit about M-series, as long it has enough memory and can do what they want without freezing.

well done to apple

I’m still on an M1 Air for my personal laptop and probably will be for another couple years. It doesn’t feel “slow” and I feel no urge to start browsing newer models.

My understanding is this laptop matches or exceeds the M1 Air’s performance, so it should be pretty damn nice for most people.

My M1 was the biggest upgrade of many years, I got one from an old job and returned it when I left, it was possibly the most "fast" feeling computer since going from Win98 to 2000. I ended up buying one for my personal computer, I only replaced it when I cracked the screen as it wasn't a huge amount more to simply get a new one. Now typing on my M4 air.

Counterpoint; Apple was already selling ~$600-700 Macs with the M1 MBA. If you weren't already in the market for one of those laptops, there is pretty much a 0% chance that these pared-back models will appeal to you.

Many people WERE in those markets, but this is a better fit because it is a modern chip. It's hard to recommend a 6 year old computer because the concern about support length is higher.

Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.

Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.

I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.

Really great to see.

This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.

This is for people who want the cheapest MacBook possible, with the edu discount it's only 499$.

You drop it being silly, cool that's only 500$.

Uhm but you do realize that $500 is actually a lot of money for people that aren't living in SF and hop between startups every second tuesday, right?

There is no "only". It's $500.

When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.

That is a correct statement, but "whoopsie, dropped it, but no biggie, it's just $500" is not.

It can be a decent sized purchase if you were buying it outright, but $500 is just not a lot of money in America for the vast majority of citizens.

Though I agree with you completely regarding the "oops I dropped it".

Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.

Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?

The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.

My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.

Neither.

I would like the bubble that is this website's "community" to pop, crash down back to earth and see them struggle living like normal people again.

I could use a laugh today, do you have a link to the leica comment? It wasn't that one review of the Fuji X Half, was it?

It was definitely the Fuji X Half review.

https://arslan.io/2025/06/14/fujifilm-x-half-is-it-the-perfe...

And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.

Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.

I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...

The thing is you could use it for 6 to 8 years if all your doing is editing documents and other tasks like that. No one is buying this to play games on or code massive AI powered applications, it's literally the "Well I need a computer sometimes may as well get the one that matches my phone"

> This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.

Why not? I would.

what are you talking about? my wife still uses an M1 macbook air with 8GB ram and loves it. Literally zero desire to upgrade. I noticed her mac _sometimes_ needs to page memory to disk, but she doesn’t even notice because of the SSD and the M1 chip is crazy fast for most tasks.

Don’t see why the same can’t be true for this machine…

That’s fine. But Apple has an upgrade path for most people. They’re probably selling this with a very low margin.

You start with a 500$ Neo, and after 2 or 3 years trade it in for an Air or Pro. That’s where they make real money.

8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.

I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.

Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.

I’ve used a computer with 4 gigs for the last 15 years and it still does emails, recipes, and YouTube. I.e. 100% of my computer needs.

What's so special about this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?

I'm not sure. I think it does swap more aggressively. I think the disk is also just really fast and has a higher speed connection to memory.

Qualitatively I'm running way more things in the background than I could on Linux and Windows machines with double the RAM, with far fewer hiccups.

I haven't tried a modern Surface or other high-end Windows laptop so maybe their swapping is comparable, but given the shocked reactions of non-Mac users at 8 GB of memory, I don't think so.

All of that is a yes, plus compressed memory is a big component of macOS.

It's mostly for people who need to edit some documents, a few photos here and there and other things like that. 8GB of RAM is going to be enough for the average user.

it is quite forward thinking, but for Apple, they are thinking you will need to upgrade.

Assuming nothing really bad comes out of the reviews, this looks like the best computer for like 99% of users. I really can't imagine buying some plastic-fantastic Acer unit when this is on the market.

I think 90% of people will be fine with just an iPad. Some will need a small bump for laptop OS but not necessarily the specs which is where the Neo comes in, then the Air is for medium workflows and Pro is for if you do anything long running and intensive. It's quite a good ladder actually small steps that just add what each tier needs.

From the marketing it’s obvious that this is built for students, so I doubt they intend for the useful life to be greater than 3-4 years.

So in Australia this is $749 after education discounts.

I looked at OfficeWorks and I found some really cheap Chromebooks at the $300-500 level.

I picked two $500 Chromebooks:

- HP 14" Chromebook N200 8/128GB with usb-c + usb-a (quad-core).

- Lenovo IdeaPad 3i 15.6" Chromebook Laptop 8/128GB Celeron.

Looks like both are 1080p displays.

First at simple tech spec glance they're below the entry level Neo except they both have larger displays, but obviously as Neo costs $250 more.

But the question then is what do you get for that $250 more. I think once you take into consideration the finish, keyboard, webcam/mic, speakers, display, and even Apple's support which can be sometimes pretty decent, you're looking at a pretty strong contender.

The problem I expect though is that people tend not to be educated consumers and don't look into the other aspects outside of specs or cost, so Apple is really selling on branding, word of mouth, and probably through their salespeople at the stores. But also, if we start seeing these one the shelves of JB-Hifi, Officeworks, etc. (for US your local Best Buy and Walmart I guess), then it could penetrate the market well.

Assuming the Neo embodies Apple's signature quality and reliability, I hope it does well for first time laptop users / early education market.

I think branding and reputation basically encapsulates all the build quality and support and stuff you mentioned. Non-technical consumers will see this, decide that it's probably better than a Chromebook, and be right.

There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.

Just not having a Celeron level chip is worth the difference...

Windows update on a Celeron chip makes it 100% utilisation with full boost.

I would actually rather but an Android phone than a laptop with a Celeron chip for the same price.

Thankfully you don't have that problem with ChromeOS.

Resale value. You practically have to pay someone to take an open box chromebook. The secondary market for apple products lasts longer than apple’s software support.

Assuming the Neo is broadly available, which it very likely will be, the price will likely continue to come down. The used market will be strong on Neos. It's never really going to compete for the ultra-budget conscious market but that isn't Apple's playbook. It will compete VERY well for people that want the upmarket appeal of a Mac product which I think has enormous appeal. Probably the main thing this will do for the chromebook and low end windows market is they will go even cheaper to make the price jump for the Mac as noticeable as possible.

Yeah, just rub in the fact that an A series chip is capable of running a real OS.

I don’t ever wanna hear a word about how my iPad Pro isn’t good enough to run macOS, so that’s why Apple won’t let me have a Terminal.app on it.

Apple isn't good enough at software design to make macOS work on touch screens. Plus, they don't want to compete with themselves. Why sell an iPad running macOS when they can sell you a Macbook and an iPad instead?

Because now, at this price, there’s not a situation where I’d buy an iPad Pro over this. Although it’s marketed as a “pro”, device, a keyboard plus professional apps minus a touch screen is more pro than the same device minus keyboard minus apps plus touch screen.

Not same form factor + MacBooks don’t have cellular

Not having a modem is another artificial limitation.

Yes, but a limitation nonetheless.

And there’s not a situation where I’d buy this over an iPad Pro.

why wouldn't it be? I'm running real OSs on ancient TI ARM chips that are probably 50 times slower.

I also see myself going for one of these instead of an iPad once my current one goes unsupported, just to have a real OS.

In case anyone else is wondering -

Neo:

  Height: 0.50 inch (1.27 cm)
  Width: 11.71 inches (29.75 cm)
  Depth: 8.12 inches (20.64 cm)
  Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)

Air:

  Height: 0.44 inch (1.13 cm)
  Width: 11.97 inches (30.41 cm)
  Depth: 8.46 inches (21.5 cm)
  Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)

Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.

Nah it's on there.

It feels like they did everything they could so that the cheap MacBook with an iPhone CPU would not be lighter than the 1.5x more expensive MacBook with Apple Silicon

So really this appears to be a replacement for the M1 MacBook Air that they were still selling at Walmart.

But now more colorful and official.

I’m pretty interested in benchmarks. We haven’t had a phone chip and a desktop chip running the same OS so we could compare them better with benchmarks since the original Apple Silicon dev kits.

Also it’s $499 to start for students, which is impressive.

But the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me. Having that is such a huge improvement over having to type passwords constantly.

> But the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me.

But that's the point. If you're super price conscious and a student, it's only $499! Typing a password is not a big deal compared to $100 for some people.

But if you want convenience, it's $599. Which helps subsidize the $499 price.

Product differentiation like this is what enables the cheaper price to begin with.

I'd probably go for a $50 Yubikey over a $100 Touch ID upgrade.

Honestly, I don't see it. Are you gonna stay at home with yubikey plugged in? On your couch, in your bed, etc.? It's a matter of months, if not weeks, before you break it? And also need to remember to remove, because otherwise what's the point?

Used to own Yubikey before fingerprint scanners were a thing. I don't see the appeal now, to be honest. I considered it now that I use Asahi on my M1 with no support for TouchID, but still just type in the password because I couldn't be bothered with Yubikey.

Or I'm missing something?

You're missing that the Yubikey Nano exists. You just leave it in the port. You don't need to remove it - you have to physically touch it to activate it in the same way that you'd have to touch the Touch ID sensor.

Same way? That thing isn't biometric, how is this protecting me in the same way? That's just ridiculous. Yubikey Nano is a "thing you have", TouchID is a "thing you are".

I swear you must be trolling here.

Well, okay, you can select two specific words to fuel your apparent outrage if you'd like, but if you actually read the entire sentence, you'll see that there is some critical context that you're missing: "you have to physically touch it to activate it in the same way that you'd have to touch the Touch ID sensor."

I did not claim that it was the same security scheme or that it's biometric or anything like that. I did claim that you have to physically touch it to activate it.

Edit to add:

re 'Yubikey Nano is a "thing you have", TouchID is a "thing you are".', I would argue that your finger is in fact a thing you have. The loss of a finger might change a little of who you are depending on the circumstances that led to you losing said finger, but these both fall into "thing you have" territory for me. I don't think it's wise to consider Touch ID much more than that, personally.

What the other person is trying to explain to you is that your Yubikey solution fails the following scenario: you leave your laptop at school.

With TouchID, nobody can unlock it. With a Yubikey in the USB-C port, anyone could unlock it.

That's why macOS Yubikey login integration requires you to type in a PIN on the lock screen. At which point it's no different from typing in a password.

Not equivalent to TouchID at all.

Dude, "thing you have" and "thing you are" are things that are already defined in context of authorization and MFA. You can't "argue" that just because it fits your narrative.

EOT here.

Don't get me wrong it's a fantastic product and great price point, but the only thing it makes me think of is the complete failure of iPadOS. Ultra portable MacBook with is A18 with 8G of ram is infinitely more useful to me (for non-pen input) than full M4/M5 chip with more ram that's completely wasted due to needless OS restrictions.

You're right. This is actually an implicit admission of the failure of the iPad for general purpose computing.

Which everyone on HN already says, but Apple seems to have its own idea what the iPad is for.

Does Apple make a profit of iPad Pro and Air, do you think? Is it a "failure"?

Their mere existance screams "our iPads are a gazillion times better and more powerful than Android tablets". Remember, they NEED to have such a reputation to charge luxury product prices (for tablets and otherwise).

Think about market segmentation. iPad and Neo are for students and everyday/coffee-table computing. iPad Pro, MacBook Pro with M5 Max, Mac Studio, Studio Display, Watch Ultra etc are chasing a completely different market (niche power users and vanity purchases).

Good point. I will think about this -- it's a very different product perspective than usage intent.

Your “failure” is billions of dollars to them.

I can totally see many, many students and parents use that machine for daily tasks. Yes, base specs are pretty low: 8Gb RAM, 256 Gb drive - but the price tag is also low in the Apple world. I assume the trackpad will be excellent and the promise that the battery lasts all day is probably true (all day = 6-7h max). Good move from Apple, for once.

It looks like a perfect replacement for my 2011 MBP. I always figured I’d get a Chromebook when it croaked but this is a viable contender

A 2011 MBP is likely a better a general purpose PC, those early models had some great engineering. Wait for the reviews and benchmarks but the M1/M2 based MBPs are still great daily drivers.

Those old 2011 machines aren't really getting macOS security updates anymore, and compatible apps are dropping; I wouldn't recommend using anything but Linux on them. And even with a non-15-year-old battery, you'll be lucky to get half the battery life of Apple Silicon with a 2nd gen Core i5 CPU.

2011 is 15 years ago -- MacOs will not support that device, so it is a real security risk to use online.

This new offering seems comparable to the price of a refurbished M1/M2.

> the trackpad will be excellent

Nope. It is mechanical.

What do you mean, "mechanical"?

A mechanical trackpad is like an unpowered treadmill iirc. Sometimes they ship with a gimbal mount so you can scroll more than one direction.

This explicitly says "Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control and support for gestures", so at most it's the clicking action that is mechanical (rather than the click being faked with haptic feedback, as it is on the current models)

Their mechanical trackpads were excellent too. It's only their keyboard which they messed entirely up.

The mechanical trackpad of my 2007 Macbook (the first unibody) is still better than any PC trackpad I've ever used.

I thought Apple's RAM architecture/speed lets more than 8 GB be addressed, effectively letting it have 50-100% more operating capacity?

Doesn't stop it from shitting the bed when you try to run anything like Fusion or Docker

Fair but it’s probably not the thought to buy an 8GB laptop for docker in 2026 when we’ve known about it for a long time.

There was a post recently about apples built in virtualizer that might be useful.

Before fusion or docker I’d probably try something like UTM on a MacBook neo.

If you’re after a light terminal remote access to the house power (a Mac mini somewhere etc) is probably easier.

I was really hoping the Neo would be a replacement for the 12” MacBook retina - it’s only 2 lbs and the best form factor I’ve ever carried for travel. It’s the only device I’d be in line for tomorrow, and until then we can pretend to use MacBook airs or MacBook pros.

I also know many professionals who have a work computer and just want a personal device for occasional things like personal web browsing/shopping/occasionally watching videos -- things that would be inappropriate on a work computer and inelegant on a phone. These people already basically use their phone for everything -- many of them have never upgraded from their college laptop, which is now obsolete. They'd value a well-built (design, feel, screen) computer but have no performance needs.

This is a real return to form for Apple. It's fun, pricing feels spot on for this market segment, the continued success of early M1 machines I think proves the spec limitations will not be a real world issue. This is excellent market segmentation on their part and I think many people will love this device.

Geekbench CPU single/multi and GPU Metal scores.

- M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377

- M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712

- A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288

So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster single core speed.

For daily use the single core speed is the most important. Web browsing, UI render, etc., is still single threaded mostly.

Single core is close to M4, even.

I’m using a used M1 air as my daily for editing tens of thousands of photos, tons of 4K video editing, web and light dev work.

It’s still the fastest computer I’ve ever used. (No Tahoe for me)

Looks pretty cool. I feel they got some features right for their target demographics:

- 2 fun colors + 2 regular

- The Magic Keyboard looks like it has a decent amount of travel and should hold up well

- Headphone port, recognizing that wired headphones are way more durable in a classroom setting

- Decent price and display, though I wonder about performance w/ Tahoe

I don't currently have a modern macOS machine, so a basic machine like this could be useful to have around even though I daily drive Linux now. Maybe it'll get Asahi support!

I wonder, if Asahi get's ported to this, would that potentially open the door for Asahi on an A18 powered iPhone? Or are those secure-booted too hard?

iPhones would require an exploit.

A bootloader exploit at that, and we haven't had one of those in years.

iPhones have a locked bootloader. Unless a really solid exploit is found (unlikely) this won’t happen.

How is it Apple can make a whole laptop cheaper than the phones they sell? Phones are costing more while laptops are going down in price.

Because this is probably using a bunch of old parts that didn't get sold and are very cheap now (the a18 from last year's iPhones, etc).

It also probably doesn't have a ~60% margin.

If they plan to sell any volume, they can't rely on leftovers.

Unless the "leftovers" in question are "leverover capacity on the previous process node that doesn't have pricing competition, so Apple's able to continue to demand all of the supply at their desired price point"

What counts as "meaningful volume" is probably very different for laptops than for smartphones.

Maybe it's cheaper to make something that doesn't have be small as an iphone.

First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.

For starters, no royalties to pay Qualcomm.

Don't the new iPhones have Apple's own modem in them?

I recalled reading that Apple still has to pay Qualcomm some amount for 5G related stuff, but I can’t find an authoritative source to link.

You're confusing the sales price with the manufacturing cost. They will continue to set whatever prices people will pay because it's a walled garden and there's no other company building Apple (MacOS) compatible laptops.

It's possible that they are selling it close to cost to get more young people into the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem. If you can translate each one of these into a "Pro" device sale down the line then it's a win for Apple.

probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it's not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.

Good question... I wonder if the 5G chipset adds significantly to the price? IP licensing?

Besides the phone CPU, they’re using less apple custom silicon: MediaTek wifi/bluetooth, no cellular modem, generic 1080p camera.

The MacBook Neo starts at the same price as the new iPhone 17e!

I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.

Interesting. In Canada the 17e starts at $899, and the Neo starts at $799.

First, sorry for my U.S.-centric comment!

And yes, that's fascinating. Are carrier subsidies in Canada higher or something?

There are bunch of expensive components in a phone that aren't in this. The modem and camera system come to mind.

To name a few components:

- Older chip (and with fewer thermal constraints)

- Only one camera (and much cheaper)

- Less RAM than 17pro and Air

- No cell modem, FaceID, ProMotion, MagSafe, etc.

Much bigger screen, keyboard, big battery, lots of copper and aluminum, extra USB port, touchpad, a charger.

Those are really basic parts that are really cheap to make with current tech at least.

Which of the parts you mentioned are by definition more expensive? A modem? FaceID is 10 y/o now btw. You're just speculating and selling this as facts. Meanwhile actual material like aluminum, copper, lithium and others are genuinely expensive and the difference in weight of the precious metals and alloys used is obvious.

Phones contain 3+ cameras, OLED displays, FaceID, wireless charging, and cellular modems. Plus there is a price to be paid for the latest and greatest in miniaturization, machining, and packaging.

Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.

$100 AUD less than the base iPhone 17e here

This has nothing to do with part price. They sell for what people pay. And this new neo is for putting scale, but 8gb means you get hooked and then "climb the ladder"

because all those prices are artificial, Apple is charging what they think they can get away with and also betting on making more money in the long run with subscriptions to iCloud and their other services.

The same way that Apple can sell a low end iPad with cellular for $479 that has a larger screen and larger battery. If the iPhone wasn’t heavily subsidized and/or available on installment plans, Apple would have to lower prices.

On the other hand, the iPhone is water proof, made of sturdier materials to survive falls, has cellular, and the high end ones have more memory

This sounds great, but it pains me that I can't dual-boot my iPhone 15 Pro as a lightweight Mac. Would be great with an HDMI connector & BT keyboard/mouse.

I can't see Apple doing anything that'd make the iPhone not a usable phone while it's being used as a Mac. But I bet they could have macOS components running alongside iOS, in a VM/container of some sort. Would be very cool.

(Honestly I can't see Apple doing that either though since it'd cannibalize their other product lines. But c'mon, Apple!)

Run a Linux VM (basically no performance impact) and you have a killer quality Linux laptop. Sure it’s not the same as a dedicated Linux system but with these specs you’re going to do lighter work away from your desk anyway.

Or perhaps this will be the perfect machine for the Asahi team to focus on…lots of demand at this price point, and a lean Linux install would make this machine fly.

It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.

I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.

A terminal isn’t enough for everything, especially developers. I use lots of windows at the same time and plenty of non-terminal applications.

When forced to use macOS, a Linux VM provides a very convenient experience.

As well, if you run an aarch64 VM with virtualization there is essentially no lag. It runs great. I have an Alpine Linux one on my M2 Macbook Pro.

Good to hear. What hypervisor are you using (UTM, VMWare, Parallels)?

I use UTM, it's simple and seems light. I can share my source directory with the VM so I can edit using macos pycharm, and test the containers in the VM.

What really caught me out was I downloaded an x64 image once (there was no arm64 image) and it somehow just ran anyway in the arm64 VM. That may have been some qemu magic?

I love the macos/virtualised linux dev workflow, but is isn't better than plain linux. I'm just still not convinced GUI stuff works on linux as well as it does on macos and macbook hardware is so nice (if you're not paying for it).

with 8 GB of RAM?

A Chromebook with 8gb ram and stock ChromeOS runs the Linux Dev VM perfectly fine while having 100+ chrome tabs open.

Why would you spin up a linux vm for development when you are already running a unix os?

Containers.

Linux is quite different from macOS in many ways. They are both distantly inspired by "unix" (and Apple has managed to convince someone to let them use the trademark, so they really "are" unix, legally at least), but the similarity ends there.

They didn't convince anybody of anything. They poured an enormous amount of technical work [1] into making it compliant with the Single Unix Specification [2].

> The standard specifies programming interfaces for the C language, a command-line shell, and user commands.

What else would be necessary to call it such?

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#macO...

> What else would be necessary to call it such?

Unix was a specific piece of software from a specific era. The experience of using it was very much unlike macOS for most users. Making it a "specification" was a later ret-con.

If someday Microsoft goes out of business and whoever acquires the trademarks makes a "Windows Specification", that you can meet and be legally considered Windows despite sharing zero code with the original, I would also think that was silly.

At most it makes sense to say that macOS has a sufficient set of features to emulate Unix, not that it is actually Unix.

Unix or not, aarch64-darwin is not the most heavily-populated target triplet.

Since this is a A series processor it's not clear if the MacBook Neo supports virtualization though.

I guess that means no Cowork. (edit: assuming that there is no virtualization support)

I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series.

Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.

I think they very intentionally assume folks are not running VMs or doing much more than "every day" tasks. Given the pre-packaged E-Waste sold at most retailers for a similar price (or more) I think this is a really fantastic market move by Apple. This is doubly true as I read weirder and weirder things that Microsoft is doing with respect to Windows 12 and, well, in general.

I think this may well be what Apple is thinking! I've only ever purchased an Apple laptop, that was refurbished, because of the, what I consider, too high pricing for their lineup of really nice laptops. (I'm not bad mouthing Apple, I'm just cheap.) IMO, if Win 12 is as bad as what some are thinking, a lot of people will switch to Apple who may be afraid of Linux. (I'm referring to folks like me who normally use a computer for the normal stuff and some semi-lite gaming.)

The Neo pricing is usually my ceiling price for a Windows laptop, so I'll be watching the reviews and HN to see I if want to purchase one. Very exciting!

I agree with all your points. This was not me complaining, it was just an observation.

I am actually really excited for a Apple laptop for once, since it is kind the perfect replacement for my Chromebook Duet 3 that I was looking for.

It’s $599. The target audience for this won’t need more. Anyone who knows what a VM is is not the target audience.

I used an M1 Air with 8GB as my main software development machine for a year during Covid. It was fine.

To be clear, I am not complaining. I am well aware that the target demographic is students and casual users. It is just an observation.

However, the price argument doesn't make sense. I bought a EUR300 laptop for my wife 3 years ago that has a Intel Core i3 N305 CPU (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231805/...), and that CPU, like any modern CPU from Intel, has virtualization instructions.

Heck, my Chromebook Duet with a Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, that compared to this A18 Pro chip is laughable underpowered, also has virtualization instructions (this is why Crostini, the Linux virtual environment for ChromeOS, works).

The target user doesn't read hacker news. The target user is typing up papers for their history class. This absolutely kills the lower end of the market. I do not know why anyone who needs Safari and MS Office would buy anything else.

Can the Macbook Neo run Rosetta 2?

Are the instructions missing, or does iOS just not run the hypervisor?

I suppose we'll find out pretty soon, supporting virtualization would be important if they wanted to sell these to CS students that need eg. Docker.

So my observation comes from the fact that UTM webpage: https://getutm.app/faq/#what-are-the-limitations.

Now this webpage may be out-of-date, so take my claims with a grain of salt.

It looks like a good value if you can get by with 8 GB of RAM. This is a market niche that will sell, but it doesn’t replace the Air. The Air has 16GB standard and can be ordered with up to 32. I’m also curious about the benchmarks between the A18 Pro and the M5, although for a lot of people that’s going to be less important than the RAM.

Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.

8gb was standard not that long ago and was just fine for most people.

I'm still working on an 8GB M1 Pro. It's just about ok. VS Code plus podman plus Teams plus Slack plus Firefox and it hits the limits; usually Slack is the thing to get killed.

I’m on a 16GB M1 Pro. Slack, Zoom, then browser tabs for Jira, PagerDuty, GMail, Confluence, and a Google doc and it’s swapping like mad. It’s that fast SSD and the integrated memory, so it swaps quickly. Swapping is still swapping though.

It’s great if you run max two “web apps” at a time. More, and it’s heading into “may be a problem” territory.

I’ve seen a Gmail tab eat 2.5Gb of memory all on its own… just sitting there. And you need some headroom for content and file caching and such to keep things feeling snappy.

cache uses whatever you have

im sure that gmail tab is just casually caching gigabytes of email, just in case the user opens it.

8GB RAM, no apparent upgrade option. Regardless, these will be insanely popular. Apple has finally made a play for the budget laptop market.

Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.

The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.

I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.

>M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18.

MacBook Neo is A18 Pro and if you look at benchmarks, the A18 Pro single core performance is 50% faster than the M1...

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8650702

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

There's a nice graph in this Six Colors article:

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-introduces-colorful...

Single Core performance: the A18 Pro is faster than an M3!

Multi Core performance: The A18 Pro is essentially the same as an M1.

This balance seems right for the target market of a $599 laptop.

That’s great, maybe someone will finally start optimizing their shitware.

I completely understand that as a cheap one, it has to be worse than macbook air in some aspect to make the product line work. However I'm genuinely curious why it's thicker and no lighter than the Macbook Air, while at the same time has shorter battery life, less ports, no keyboard light, and a smaller chip? Do they put dead weight inside it or something?

Product Positioning...

Apple is doing everything they can to ensure it doesn't appear as a premium product.

A decade ago, they had the 12" MacBook (not Air, just "MacBook") it it felt super premium because it was lighter and smaller than any Air/Pro ... and used by executives (because it targeted that use case).

By having this product:

- called "Neo"

- thicker

- as heavy

- limiting RAM

And marketing this towards kids and lower grades, they are avoiding any mistaking this product as premium.

Yeah that’s totally reasonable. I’m just curious about how do they make a thicker and heavier laptop with less capabilities… do they intentionally make the case thicker or something?

Neo will at least help in ensuring that macOS doesn’t become too heavy for a few years.

...hopefully.

That assumes Apple dev teams use one in their test suites.

One downside to the 11" Air when it was still sold is so much software that would be slightly broken on the vertically-constrained display.

Exactly, this is good news, it'll force them to keep 8gb in mind. It essentially restarts the clock on 8GB machines for the next five to seven years.

compatable with polishing cloth https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2029206219802722595?s=46

Apple is second to none in supporting legacy products.

Is there any world where them running MacOS on an A chip ultimately translates to just connecting an iPhone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse (all apple-branded, naturally :-) and running it in 'MacOS mode'?

Obviously just so many reasons why this won't happen. Or would happen on iPad first. But dare we dream?

I hope too, maybe with iPad Pros first: A new hybrid binary for apps that allows you to seamlessly switch between MacOS mode when connected to peripherals and iOS when not, apps just render in a different place, but maintain state.

I'd be totally happy with both modes being completely independent. Cloud-synced files could take care of shared state for a lot of usecases. I mainly just want this for the portability aspect with the phone.

There are some practical issues with having to make sure you have the screen and keyboard access (in practice the all-in-one of a laptop is pretty handy - though I guess you could still have this form factor in a much lighter shell minus the compute) but for a lot of cases like home <-> office this would be the dream, just carry your computer in your pocket.

Something worth thinking about, even if you're also carrying a laptop-style shell with you too... this means only buying RAM for one device rather than two. Laptop shell doesn't need RAM of its own.

The RAM shortage is only starting to hit but I think this could potentially start to be more appealing if it lasts too long and gets too bad.

Imagine putting on some glasses for virtual display and iPhone going into desktop mode...

That'd be the dream

"Apple Pi"

very nice

I would love this. Don't see it happening though unless it turns out that people really love the Android desktop mode. (Which, maybe, if/when it becomes basically their ChromeOS replacement.)

The hardware looks fine, but Apple's software vision is so confusing.

MacBook Neo is cheaper and weaker than a MacBook Air, yet shares the same price and single-app mindset as an iPad. It uses a phone chip similar to an iPad Pro, but gets multi-user support and a keyboard.

I struggle to run Tahoe on my 16GB M2 Air and somewhat I have to believe running it on a 8GB phone chip is gonna be alright, which if true have me thinking what exactly is the role of iPadOS anyway.

Ultimately, it feels like iPadOS and Tahoe are on a crash course for a middle ground that nobody asked for.

I'm (unfortunately) running Tahoe on my M1 macbook pro and don't notice it to be slower than Sequoia. Where is your slowdown?

I'm dislike Tahoe as much as anyone else but performance isn't the problem for me.

>It uses a phone chip similar to an iPad Pro

You're mixed up here. The iPad Pro has used the same M series processors as MacBooks since April 2021.

Mom is getting a new laptop

Outside of college students, I think this also unlocks the Mac to rest of the world. Now $599 allows most of the world to buy/lock into the Apple ecosystem. 8 GB is the only issue I have but everything else is such a good compromise for the price.

This is exactly what's needed to get general users off of Windows.

Anecdotal, but whenever my friends/family are looking for a basic laptop I almost always suggest a Lenovo for the price/performance/quality they're looking for in the $400-600 range, even though I myself would never get anything besides a MBP.

I would recommend this to them instead every single time. The build quality of macs are unmatched and now in everyone's price range.

The way Tahoe is headed, this is also exactly what's needed to get general users off macOS too.

This, coupled with the nightmare fuel that Windows has become as of 2026, means no one sane should buy a Windows computer. It's more expensive, more intrusive, and Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.

> Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.

Apple customers forgot about the golden trophy real quick, huh? https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...

You’ve lost me. How does a tech ceo giving a trinket to the current president indicate any kind of respect or lack thereof towards its users?

Reminds me of when every college kid had those plastic Macbooks. Quite a smart product.

What does "Liquid Retina" mean? Is it 120 Hz or not? Hate these meaningless marketing names.

It’s 60Hz. “Pro Motion” is Apple speak for 120Hz, which as of right now, is only reserved for the MacBook Pro machines.

Didn't we agree that calling your product "new" is poor planning? Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(3rd_generation)

Or will they keep doing this with "neu", "nouveau", "nuevo" etc?

> Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?

Probably when they update it, if they decide to keep the product line going.

It's a product category name at least, not a release name, so the next release can be Neo 2

I honestly don't think "neo" invokes thoughts of "new" to most people (despite the Greek etymology, of which I'm well aware).

It's a subtle distinction, but I think the general connotation is more like "hyper-modern" or "reinvention/reinterpretation."

People won't see "MacBook Neo" and think "oh there's just a new MacBook."

I will be waiting for the MacBook Trinity.

I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?

If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.

Pro = Business/serious = Boring colors.

I know, but that doesn't mean there aren't people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone/Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.

I used to only want black/silver "base" colors for resale reasons but that has fallen far on my needs for a laptop since I keep/repurpose them or cycle them through friends/family instead of reselling in most cases now.

Wrap?

IMO rarely looks as good as the base metal. I still use them for a few things, still but they rarely look as good as the tinted metal.

I wonder if this means a Mac Nano with an A-series chip is on the table now. Essentially a beefed up Apple TV that runs macOS.

I’m curious what the use case for that would be. Where would someone opt for that over a Mac mini? They’re already pretty cheap ($500 on sale)

Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...

Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.

IMO it’s not that big of a feature. People touch type.

I mean, they could turn on a lamp no?

Funny; for me, a backlit keyboard is one of the most unnecessary features I can think of. Even for those who can't touch type, the keyboard is just inches away from the bright screen which sort of illuminates them.

This is perfect for folks looking to buy a brand new laptop.

For the rest of us, happy with gently used 2nd hand devices, the original M1 MacBook Air and the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro are a *much* better deal for the same price, pretty much across the board, especially the Pro: bigger, brighter, 120Hz screen, beefy specs, ports.

That citrus colour, tho...

An iPhone in a laptop body to be an Apple "Chromebook", I can only imagine this will be pretty popular.

The 2015~2017 MacBook (I own one and love it) was a similar thing, but with a passively-cooled Intel chip. With Apple Silicon this will be amazing.

Looks like the best display you can get in laptops at this price: 2408x1506 resolution, 500 nits, antireflective coating (!). And bonus points for no silly notch.

8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.

I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that.

The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going to confuse a lot of people. One of Apple's perks in terms of connectivity has been that you can basically assume all USB-C ports do everything. It also seems like they didn't include an SD card reader, like they used to. That's going to make the 256GiB rather cramped, I feel.

Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.

> macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me.

Without context on total memory available, this is a meaningless metric. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

That's used RAM, it doesn't include things like caches.

Even with macOS deep into swap space during development (about 6-8GB of swap), macOS internals will happily keep 2GiB of memory reserved for window management and spotlight.

Apple's fast SSD is the only reason this laptop doesn't get bogged down under load, and with it being irreplaceable I wonder how long the disk last being used like this.

Obviously you're not going to use Apple's new netbook to do heavy development, but I don't expect the base model to remain usable for long with only 8GB. I don't exactly get the impression macOS has gotten lighter to run over the years.

> Free RAM is wasted RAM.

Very bad truism that's not even compatible with the first half of your post.

Since Apple Intelligence is terrible and behind, I'm sure its gonna be just fine.

As I see my kids bring home Chromebooks from school, it has made me recently nostalgic for the Apple of the 90s in terms of their presence in education. Using my Science teacher's Performa to play Sim Ant after we finished our assignments, (or Oregon Trail before that on the lab of Apple IIs) – not to mention HyperCard, etc.

Anyway, updating my priors a bit with this Neo laptop. This feels like it could maybe spark some renewed excitement over Apple as a student / classroom device. If nothing else, the price makes it more of an option.

I’m confused. The iOS device line gradually shifts towards the M chips. Why does Apple make a laptop with the A chips? Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?

Why is that confusing? The A chip is cheaper, hence is goes into their cheaper laptop. The more expensive laptops get the more expensive M chips.

I don't think the M line is more energy efficient (at equivalent performance), just more performant overall and with more advanced features (more maximum display outputs, more maximum USB interfaces, more maximum memory channels, etc).

> The iOS device line gradually shifts towards the M chips

No it doesn't - no iOS device has ever shipped with an M series chip...

> Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?

Yes to A, no to B.

Also, you're completely leaving out scale and cost. Apple has already made (ok, had TSMC make) hundreds of millions of A18 chips, so throwing an A18 pro in their least expensive laptop ever makes a lot of sense.

Yes, the iPad Air and Pro all come with M chips.

You said iOS, which means iPhones. iPads are ipadOS.

I'd be glad to try one (either blue or piss colored). If it really comes at 600€. Though it would already be 100€ too much unless it gets liberated to run linux at some point.

My fear is that it's going to be made useless in no time with software updates, or that it has some important limitation (like i can't use XCode command line tools)... But i wanted to replace my old mid 2012 for a couple of years and i decided the next laptop would be either ARM or RiscV (browsing, writing text, scripting, light programming)

The M2 air supports asahi Linux and used ones can be had for 600ish

The Neo runs on the same chip as iPad so fat chance unlocking the bootloader

> asahi

i'm holding my breath for armbian

> fat chance unlocking the bootloader

yeah, i know

Well that will be an interesting question. Apple deliberately helped Asahi (and similar) along on the Apple Silicon Macs, perhaps this is running a MacBook bootloader as well.

For NL €699 and €799 (512Gb) at apple store. Will likely only be closer to 600 at big stores that do discounts.

It's like the Netbook is back, but done well. This is really exciting, I have to admit. Superb execution of hardware of course, but the secret sauce is the OS. Can't wait to try one.

Looks like they're using some new variant of branding font for this. Inspect Element shows it as SF Pro Display, but it's actually just being masked over with an image

https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-neo/a/images/overview/welcom...

Also, why not just MacBook? Wasn't that historically the base-level laptop name?

Because it's a new base MacBook? so MacBook Neo.

They don't call the base model 'iPad Neo.' They just call it iPad (https://www.apple.com/ipad-11/). It's the same market segment and even uses the exact same color palette.

They also just established that 'e' is the designator for budget model (https://www.apple.com/iphone-17e/) so best guess is they thought 'MacBook e' looked strange so instead it's 'nEo'. And don't forget the 2004 eMac.

Cause kids will be happier with a Neo.

I'm sure these will sell very well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the M1. I'm sure Asahi linux folks are really excited about an extra chip set to support.

It's strange that the low-end machines get positioned as "every day task" devices when the biggest ram hogs by far are browsers and websites.

cute netbook, I appreciate the no notch design

Too bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.

I just looked over the specs [1] and it's pretty good for the price. My only quibble is that there's only one USB3 port and that's also the charging port. So if you want to use an external display, you need some form of dock to also charge it. The other USB port is only USB2 so you can't use that as an external display connector.

I'll be interested to see a true comparison with the M5 Macbook Air. I don't think we have any direct comparisons between an M chip and the A18 Pro. The A18 Pro is used in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, not even the 17. I found this spec comparison [2]. Not sure if it's accurate.

It seems like this is an iPHone 16 Pro in laptop form because the iPhone also has 8GB of RAM.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/specs/

[2]: https://erickimphotography.com/apple-m5-vs-a18-pro-comprehen...

8 GB of RAM and an ARM chip, it is almost as if they took the specs from the Raspberry PI and built a laptop around it.

Joking aside, this is too anemic for today for serious work, but I guess at today's RAM prices this is going to be setting a trend. My decade+ old Lenovo W540 has four times that and I sometimes wished it had more. But for a school laptop it is acceptable I guess.

It's still almost three pounds....

Whatever they did with the 11" macbook air was magical. It doesn't seem like they can pull it off twice.

This is a 13” screen.

If they made an 11” model, it would probably weigh less than the original.

With every new device Apple releases the split between iPadOS and macOS gets more awkward.

Makes no sense for a $1500 "Pro" iPad to have desktop-class RAM, storage, an M5 chip, and be stuck with a Fisher Price OS, while this one has the equivalent specs of last year's iPhone and gets the full power of macOS. Just unify the two already.

> just unify the two already

Yeah but some people buy both, and apple wants to keep it that way

This would be a great Asahi Linux target, but I know that group has a lot on their plate with the MacBooks pros already

Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.

The ipad pro with keyboard is $1300, more than 2x the price of the Neo. Definitely not the same product category.

Because this way they sell two for the price of two.

Who wants it? On my iPad I want an iPad OS, MacOS is not good for touch operation. MS tried merging two OS-es (surface) and see how it went.

On the one hand I feel like 8GB is low these days, but my iPhone 12 Pro only had 6GB of RAM, so maybe for light usage this is fine. I do feel like 16GB is the new "8GB" minimum of the 2010s. Especially on windows, 32GB feels like Windows just chews through it no problem.

Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.

Apple, please make a new 12" Macbook for those of us who travel and want the lightest weight possible. Less than 2 lbs, thinner than the Air, but without the compromises of the Neo. I'd pay more than the Air price for this. Or, make the Air lighter and thinner (to match the iPhone Air in approach?).

- 2.03 lb on the old 12" books

- 2.7 lb on the 13" neo and 13.6" air

does that 2/3 lb difference really matter in a ~10–15 lb backpack?

I wish more would be done on weight. The 12 inch Macbook was very lightweight, just 2 pounds. Today there's no Apple product that gets close to that: an iPad with the added accessories weighs more and it's still an iPad. The Macbook "Air" is not airy, this Macbook Neo weighs the same as an Air.

That machine's form factor was so great, it was just saddles with that awful hot-running Intel CPU. I was hoping this device would be essentially the MB12, finally with the right chip. I guess they were going for target price, not target weight.

How much did the 12” MacBook cost?

It was $999 back then. They could be made cheaper today. Those were Intel chips.

I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.

I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.

I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.

This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.

M4 air to Neo is a huge downgrade, what’s the motivation?

It's not a replacement, it's an addition. My Air is stationary and it doesn't leave my desk due to lots of cables plugged in and I want something that I can take with me around the house if I decide to chill elsewhere for a bit. I was looking at Windows laptops for a long time and it was either a Chromebook or £1k+ which I couldn't justify.

Anything for the price of the Neo that I could find was an ugly looking 15" piece of plastic from Asus or Lenovo (no offense, I love my Thinkpads).

However I do have to say again that I use an 8G M2 at work without any issues and I've had an M1 as a temp replacement for work recently again without any issues and they say A18 is equivalent to M1 in performance so I really don't see why this new Neo wouldn't be enough for a home/personal laptop. All my consumption is SaaS-based, I really don't need better spec. What I need is a lower price and familiarity that I appreciate and I think Apple nailed it here by offering both in a product.

i think a mac mini (m4, 16gb, $599) for the desk is what i’d buy in your situation but ofc i don’t know the specifics

Or wait for the M5 Mac Mini to come out instead.

A Chromebook with stock ChromeOS runs the Linux Dev VM just fine and you can do real work with it

> And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.

I would buy a used Macbook Pro for the same price, just because it is more powerful. I have bought used Macbook Pros for many years, and have never had any problem. Apple gear is durable, and I've never had any SSD issues or problems with dead pixels. The laptop I'm typing this on is a 2021 M1 Max, so 5 years old now, and I just did an SSD health check, it is 100% after 5 years of heavy use. It easily has 5 more years of life.

I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.

I'm a little skeptical about the Apple Intelligence capabilities, as others have mentioned. I can assume that it doesn't run on-device and sends it to Apple's servers for processing.

I just noticed that according to https://support.apple.com/121115, devices purchased in China don't support Apple Intelligence but it's odd that they explicitly mention a workaround where devices purchased outside of China support Apple Intelligence if the region isn't set to China.

Personally, I might not get this device because of the hard limit of 8GB unified memory. This is unacceptable in 2026 because there were iPhones with 8GB of RAM in 2023. The current generation of iPhones have 12GB of RAM available.

This seems like a great price to have an actual MacBook with you anywhere for things that don't require a lot of resources, like if you're running some tmux/Tailscale solution at home and just need to SSH into it to do work with [whatever terminal agent you're using].

Hey Folks: no notch! This is beautiful!

But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.

Edit: Not 16x9 as originally stated.

Yeah it comes with a compromise. Tbh, if it was an option I would sacrifice a tiny bit of my screen to not have the notch while keeping a uniform bezel.

I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.

I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.

Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.

Hip kids were doing bad type since Photoshop 3/illustrator* gave them the ability to do so. Apple boldly ignored their fanbase and did type right.

I don't want kids who think [incompetent] typography is hip designing my laptop, even if they use said laptop. Good type on Apple marketing says "don't worry, we hire boring people to do make your computer work". This looks like incompetence on the part of some designer IMO.

Also: if Apple wants the hip kids to know they are being marketed to, they just show a picture of a hip kid using their computer to do trashy type.

* I didn't mention any page layout programs on purpose.

Sorry man, I'm all with you but this is the world we live in, and there are too many fights to fight nowadays.

More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.

But the only issue in school is the rick kid's parent will get them Macbook Pro or even Macbook Air, and the poor kids will get Macbook Neo... I'm sure the kid will not feel great about having Neo while her friend have Pro version.

Apple: here's an affordable laptop. This comment: but the poor kids are going to feel inferior to the rich kids with this affordable laptop! Of course the poor kids are going to get cheaper & slower computers, cheaper clothes, etc. And they won't feel great about it because being poor isn't great.

But now they'll have more options! If they like Apple, they'll have a (likely pretty good) Apple laptop! It's great! I think a more affordable Mac is _good_ (at least better than no affordable Mac) and will make the poor kids happier.

It will be a nice step to the "Blue bubble" lifegoal for them.

Poor kid would definitely feel superior rocking shitty, plastic Windows tombstone that won’t survive for 2 hours without power supply.

Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.

I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)

Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.

I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.

I highly doubt Apple is currently paying market RAM prices. Their orders have been placed years ago.

Really want Apple to launch the Mac Mini version of this (yes, I really want an updated Apple TV)

Mac Mini is already the Mac Mini version of this. How much lower in price can it realistically get?

Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.

8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.

Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dec everywhere.

Where can you buy these reliably?

VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252

https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686

The refurb M4 Air are on Apple website.

Average user doesn't know to look at refurb, the M1 Air will slowly drift out of manufacturing due to component sourcing etc.

The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although it is possible that Apple decided against enabling it (to segment the market).

That is mistaken: the A18 Pro does not have MIE. (The A19 does.)

No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.

Macbook Nano will probably be supported with security updates for a lot longer.

Apple try to provide updates for a certain number of years after the model was originally released. The M1 Air was released many years ago now.

Actually Apple tries to provide updates for a certain number of years after final sale. It is Google that goes by initial release.

This is an absolutely solid buy I think. My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.

A return to 8GB laptops would be a good thing overall, so if this becomes a "target" for electron based apps, it would be a total game changer. The iPhone 17 has 8GB RAM, and honestly for the workloads we're doing it should be enough. I think there was a big jump when we jumped to 1080 screens on laptops about a decade ago (seriously...) but most of the resource usgae growth there has been needless since.

> My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.

So the only reason to discard a working laptop is because Apple decided to stop offering updated, and you buy Apple again? Why not buy anything else that is Linux friendly and you get software updates until the hardware dies?

Do yourself and the world a favor and buy this instead: https://frame.work/de/en/laptop12

> why not buy anything else that is Linux friendly and you get software updates

I don’t want to use Linux at home.

> do yourself and the world a favor and buy this instead:

It’s 50% more expensive when you add in the memory and the hard drive. It’s a 12 year old laptop being replaced - I care more about the ecosystem it fits into and the devices usability than I do about being able to replace the keyboard in a decade. (And framework haven’t even been around as long as I’ve had this laptop).

I think most are going to pass on this. I'm not sure Apple has ever figured out how to sell anything to the price conscious consumer since the iPod Shuffle.

As always, you can get a more performant laptop for the price. Price sensitive consumers have shown time and time again they will put up with all the little annoyances of a cheap laptop if it means more performance. I'm not saying those details Apple puts into their products aren't nice, but yeah this is barking up the wrong tree. For those people, any laptop purchase is going to be their one and only device that isn't their phone.

Those who absolutely need MacOS and have this budget will just get a Mac Mini.

They sell hundreds of millions of iPhones every year. The iPhone installed base is in the billions.

I think there are many users who will be interested in an inexpensive laptop that neatly integrates with their iPhone. Same as there were many users who were interested in Airpods and a Watch.

The low end iPad is $329 and usually found for $299

Desktops don’t sell any more.

Possibly dumb question: why not just get a previous generation MacBook Air for a similar price? Even a refurb one. I really don't understand who this is for, apart from children perhaps (but still just get a bloody MacBook Air)

For people, new to the Mac (which make up half of all Mac sales), who don't go hunting for refurbs or want to buy used gear, and where a $1099 price point is cost prohibitive.

Basically every regular computer user who shops at Amazon or Costco.

You can buy a brand new M1 Air at Walmart for $650.

Anyone think you'll actually be able to do anything on a Mac with only 8gb of RAM? I had a Macbook Pro before with 16gb of RAM and it was constantly running out of RAM and showing me the Force Quit Applications dialog. Constantly...

Wondering how it decided to show the force exit program dialog. I used to use 8g macbook for development. But instead warning on serious memory exhaustion, it just decided to lag and suicide with everything freezed (including the restart button).

I am using a M1 Mac Mini 8GB as a home server/desktop, and it works just fine. It can run games and a Minecraft server in the background while serving video and home automation, and I've never had anything force quit because of it. I agree with the people who are saying 8GB should be kept as a target spec for the low end. It's really only bloated software that has made it necessary to get so much RAM, and now that prices have gone up, if Apple forces developers to do more with less for a segment of their market, I'm all for it.

There are millions of people using 8GB or RAM with MacOS without issue right now. I would bet 80% of all MacBooks in use right now have 16GB or less of RAM.

People run million dollar businesses out of 8GB MacBooks.

I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP with 8Gb of RAM. That seemed like plenty when I bought it, and I did dev work in Xcode on the thing. Granted, it can only run Catalina, but it still gets the job done for what I use it for now. "Now" being web browser and running the Numbers/Pages/Keynote apps, which is about what anyone buying the Neo is going to do with it.

After 14 years of service, though, he'll get to retire soon, probably taking it easy running some version of Linux in his old age. Just as soon as that new M5 MBP (with 32Gb this time) shows up tomorrow.

Is A18 fully compatible with M series chips apps?

Came here to ask this - seems like the most important question.

As others have pointed out, the original Apple Silicon development kit used the A12Z chip.

I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.

I have an Air (M2) and I use it where I once owned a Pro. No fans sold it to me -- that's a quality feature, tired of them getting dirty over time. But I have the 15" model and essentially use it as a pro laptop.

This? This is an Air.

But the Air has become the Pro, the Pro has become the one you get for ports and super power and I don't know if many people even need it, and now 'Air' has lost its meaning (light, entry-level, portable) so they need a new name. So they name it, literally, neo: New.

Steve Jobs would weep. What happens in five years when it's not new any more?

The body, size, weight, shape of the Neo is almost exactly the same as the current Macbook Air. What are you talking about?

'What are you talking about' aside: exactly. What is the Neo, if not an Air? What is the Air, then? What is the product segmentation?

Once upon a time, there was the white MacBook. Maybe this is trying to be the new plain MacBook?

> What is the product segmentation?

RAM, CPU cores, GPU cores, for the most part.

Segmentation is about product fit. I think it’s amazing and an amazing price and I expect and hope it will be very successful. Yet I feel like this is where the Air used to be, but the Air has crept more towards Pro.

I don’t dislike it! Just, confused how three models all fit together.

My feel is the "feel" segmentation is like this:

MacBook Neo: for students (some primary school, probably more geared to post-secondary) and people who want a lightweight (form factor, price, performance) laptop that still feels premium.

MacBook Air: people who frequently move around, have an actual need performance but in a highly portable form factor.

MacBook Pro: professionals who highly prefer performance over ergonomics, basically a portable PC, as they likely keep it plugged in more than not, and it spends more time on a desk than being used as a laptop.

Basically the Pro is like a PC that also happens to have a screen and a keyboard and foldable, the Air is their laptop that intends to be a laptop, and the Neo is their Air on a budget.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I can see this.

I wish they'd had some name other than Neo ('new') because I think it won't age well. Even plain 'MacBook' might have been better. But, I get what you're saying re segmentation, I think you're right.

The Neo is for when budget is primary. The Air is for when weight and size are primary. The Pro is for when the others aren’t enough.

> Maybe this is trying to be the new plain MacBook?

Well yes, obviously!

So... have we now confirmed that the only thing preventing us from running macOS off our iPhones is a software limitation?

(I'm being facetious, if the hardware was open, someone would have already written a custom boot loader for this :P)

It's interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was

- No touchID on the base model

- 8GB of RAM

- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2

- No MagSafe.

But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.

The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs

You are totally right. Also, I think it's basically to avoid only one port to charge and use for connectivity.

Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.

8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.

The M1 Air didn’t have MagSafe, but yeah agreed

Instead of launching neo, Apple could have enabled something like Dex on their phones. This is still a welcome device if Apple has excess inventory of A18 lying around as this helps people get a laptop for cheaper.

No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.

And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.

Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.

The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.

Not sure about the "cheap shit" part, there are no other laptops with the build quality of MacBooks. It is as premium as it gets.

Software has gotten shittier tho, but I think it is an overall trend and not just Apple.

I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.

There goal has always been to provide a quality product for the majority, but many don’t know or forget that.

This proves macOS should/could just be an iOS app that you can run when docked. It has great suspend and resume, the phones/tables would just need more ram and storage. Maybe we'll see it in the future

yesterday I wrote in a group slack that today I would get to decide whether:

* i'm not buying any machine at all, or waiting for omarchy to support the new dell xps (32GB & 1TB = $1899)

* i'm buying the macbook neo at the top specs

* i'm buying the macbook air at the bottom specs

* i'm buying the macbook air with 32GB RAM & 1TB SSD (also $1899)

EDIT:

* adding an M5 Macbook (not Pro) with 24GB RAM & 1TB SSD also $1899

as someone who lives in claude code / opencode these days, the 8gb hurts but.. maybe, i dunno. they made this decision very painful. for me it could basically be a coffee shop opencode terminal that lets me access my apple iphone reminders, notes, etc.

but 8gb?

Apple's share price is down about 0.45% today. The market knew this was coming, so that doesn't say much. It will be interesting to see if this product helps their market share and also has good enough profit margin to affect Apple's profitability much. I expect it will sell a lot more units more than the previous cheapest Walmart M1 Air

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/04/apple-macbook-neo-budget-lap...

I find this a very exciting release. I was actually hoping we would somehow get macOS on mobile 'A' chips some day. And I think this is better than putting 'M' chips on an iPad.

My iPad with an 'M1' chip actually consumes more battery than much older iPads when both are locked and with the screen off. I ended up figuring it was probably because, in the 'M' chip, the lowest possible energy usage is way higher than the 'A' chip. So even small background wake-ups used more energy.

I'm still hoping one day we have an iPad with macOS.

Just from a pure investment standpoint, while people seem to think this will take on Microsoft PCs and Google's Chromebook, to me the bigger risk is that it is going to cannibalize Air sales. Just read the comments here and elsewhere online. Sure, some people say they need more RAM, etc...but the average consumer just uses their device as a browser.

Anyhow, I do hope this wakes Microsoft up. They seem to have abandoned their consumer base, which is quite annoying. I do enjoy Windows 11, despite the hate here, but Windows PCs have a lot of catching up to do.

Even if apple is losing money on these devices, they shouldn't care. Low cost laptops are the main reason why people buy Windows laptops instead of Macs. They need to get people into the Mac ecosystem.

If they wanted people in the Mac ecosystem, they could dominate the market tomorrow by enabling a DeX like experience for iPhone. This new laptop running on an out-of-date A series chip proves that it can be done.

iPhone’s are more expensive than this laptop anyways and Apple could upsell all the docks and accessories with sky high margins. It’s a mystery why they haven’t done this already.

Because no one would do it in the real world.

No one would use their phone for general purpose computing if given the chance? You're saying they would rather spend hundreds, thousands even on separate laptops/desktops even if it was possible to use their phone with a display to do the same thing? I disagree.

This is interesting. Our current family [1] Mac Pro is from 2015 and its time to replace it, but I'm loath to spend 1000 on a laptop

[1] computer to do personal things i don't want my employer to spy on

8GB of ram places it in competition with cheap chromebooks but nothing more

That's a bit... uninformed, there are and historically have been plenty of non-chromebook laptops with 8 GB of memory in that price bracket (HP, Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS, etc).

And now they're digital waste

One of the examples of devices which are e-waste from the time they were manufactured. But people won't listen. Soon there will be lots of complains of people that they can't run more than one app on it and that it's garbage. It's like macbook 12". It's funny that some people believe that 8GB of RAM will make software developers rethink their RAM consumption and that they will now optimize their apps because of it.

Eager to see the Xcode benchmark on this. Would expect it to be similar to the M1, but we shall see! I still use my M1 MBP for light mobile development work. Sure it's slow, but it certainly works. It's wild to think you can buy a new laptop that costs less than an iPhone and write apps for an iPhone.

What's fun about this machine is its constraints, and it sort of reminds me of one of my processors orchestrating our school's server cluster via nothing but an 11" MacBook Air back in the day.

In Canada this is the same price as something like this: https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/acer-aspire-14-ai-copil...

So not bad, maybe a tad underwhelming but for those in the Apple ecosystem it's a decent student computer.

Curious how the cell phone chip holds up to desktop-esque workloads.

I was really hoping for 11inch version, but I am just that weird.

So I guess they must have fully depreciated the gigantic fleet of CNC routers they use to cut the aluminum cases. Making a cheap laptop seems better than throwing them away.

> MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.

> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.

So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.

No magsafe seems like a bad idea given the target demographic.

Right? also, where's the thunderbolt ports? and it needs about another inch? maybe half inch on the screen. And really, 16gb is the new minimum. There's a whole bunch of acceleration and co processing features in the m series missing from the a series, so they really should put an m5 in there instead...

Seriously though. Every feature someone says is missing and should have been added would be another $100 on the cost. This is already likely a low margin product meant of someone who's only using a browser and maybe a few apps.

Honestly I am still wondering why tf they brought magsafe back. I thought Apple had turned the corner on proprietary connectors. I charge my M2 air with a usb-c cable.

It's less stress on a frequently used port. I've got an early M1 MacBook Air where the USB-C port I always used for charging is starting to get flaky, presumably because it's been used so much and because of the weight of the cord + dongle hanging off the side of the machine.

Replacement port for M1 Air can be bought for around $10 off Amazon and installation take like 10 minutes for total newbie like me. All you need is right screwdriver.

Just look for a2337 usb-c port replacement.

Two advantages for me: It's nice that you don't break the connector if you trip over the cable or put the laptop down on a soft surface, and it's nice being able to charge while still using both USB-C ports (although I guess 3x USB-C would also solve that).

I don't really see any downside to a proprietary connector if you also have the option to charge over USB-C as well.

MagSafe’s great because nobody in your house will run off with your cable to charge their phone or tablet or Switch controller or whatever.

Every time that happens buy two more cables. It will stop happening.

I wonder how people would feel about:

MagSafe + 2 USB C, all on the left

3 USB C, 2 on one side and 1 on the other

I don't care much about MagSafe, but it is sometimes annoying to have to plug everything on the left. If given the option, I might pick the extra USB (which could also be used for data/monitor/etc. when not being used for charging, of course.

I can't understand why they ever moved away from it.

Magsafe on laptops is so much better than any other option: zero force "insertion", convenient breakaway if tripped over causing no damage to either side. Magsafe is fantastic.

If only we could get a MagSafe data cable! I'd kill for a MagSafe equivalent of a thunderbolt dock

The day I tripped over the cord and smashed my netbook I suddenly appreciated MagSafe a lot more.

My wife does, too, but only because the dog ate the magsafe.

It's a big selling point for the slice of laptop buyers that are replacing a machine they just broke by tripping over the power cord.

I just never run a power cord where it can be tripped over.

They brought it back because it's a fantastic feature for clumsy people like me.

Says the person who has apparently never had a dog or a kid get tangled in the power cable and destroyed the port, or pulled the laptop off the table.

I charge my M2 air with a usb-c cable.

Soooo, continue to charge the M5 Air with a USB-C cable? What's your objection here?

Not if their goal is to make money on repairs/upgrades!

Kidding aside, I think this is one of their key differentiators from the MBA line. It's partly the MagSafe itself, and partly that you have an extra USB port open even when charging.

Looks super nice, but I don't regret getting the M1 Air for $599 at Walmart. No Touch ID in the base version is a bummer... otherwise it'd be perfect.

With 256GB SSD storage & 8GB RAM, the Macbook Neo's Price @ $599.00 is still a bit high, for my needs. I would be sold if it came with 512GB SSD & 16GB. Still, the higher storage class version @ $699 with Touch ID should at least make people think a bit longer when deciding to jump in and purchase or not. It's a step in the right direction, slowly moving it away from "Eye Candy," status in my view.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up being really popular with families. Parents with iPhones are (I’d imagine) far more likely to get their kids iPhones, and with Messages and FindMy I bet it’ll be the same here. Apple also has screen time and parental controls, so for parents wanting to get their kid a computer but worried about unrestricted Internet access, the MacBook Neo may be the most seamless option.

The base model at 256GB is either to advertise an artificially low price, or a deliberate move to ensure that most of these end up in e-waste within 18 months. Go ahead and explain to the target market of teens, college kids, and 'regular people' how to resolve the problem when their Photos library (or like 1-2 video projects if they are into content creation) fills the disk and the whole computer stops working correctly due to 'disk full'.

"Sure, just buy a paid iCloud plan"

Great. Of course, now you have to wait for it to download any photo you want to use. And you're stuck paying a monthly subscription (Yay, services revenue!). And the cloud is not any solution for the video people, at all. I've seen someone try to edit a video that's being stored in iCloud Drive and only cached locally with Apple magic... it wasn't pretty.

Apple's quest to kill off any understanding of the filesystem by doing everything inside hidden, conceptually-monolithic "libraries" means the only way to be happy on a Mac or iOS device is to buy way more internal storage than you think you'll ever need... at Apple's hilarious prices. Oh well, at least for a moment now their prices look similar to everyone else's that just tripled.

> Of course, now you have to wait for it to download any photo you want to use.

I don't think the use case for this laptop is content creation. Most people have no problem with Google Photos, which stores almost every photo in the cloud. Why would this be any different?

This is an iPad with a laptop-style human interface, isn't it?

Absolutely it is. And honestly, yes, the only person who will be able to use this device successfully and be happy is the person who would also consider, and (from a software perspective) be completely satisfied with the capabilities of, a Chromebook. Everything stored exclusively in cloud services, and preferably not the Apple ones, since iCloud Drive will just end up wasting more of their disk space.

I guess I'll agree that as a direct Chromebook replacement (And I mean literally, just download Chrome after first boot and ignore everything else on there besides maybe the Messages app), this can be a decent device.

A laptop is e-waste because someone filled up the HD? Odd take.

Written like an enthusiast who knows what the filesystem is. The target market of this laptop includes almost no one like you and me. This is for grandmas and teens, and even Gen Z, who is basically 30 now, never learned to use the filesystem, since they grew up using Google Docs and "apps" where all your data is just "in the app."

Apple makes it incredibly difficult to manage usage of the disk, for instance, they only offer you two choices for Photos: All photos locally, or "Optimize disk storage" - i.e. Apple Magic.

iMovie too uses a "Library" which is code for "Apple Magic." If you have a project in progress and want to move it to a USB disk because you need the space on your tiny SSD to download a single game, good luck actually getting that simple task done, because everything including your imported clips and your project files, is in a "Library."

Basic users have no idea how to handle these "libraries," and honestly, neither do I, beyond being able to forcibly move the entire library "bundle" to an external drive, which may as well mean deleting it, since this stuff expects to be left alone in-place.

I mean there are already lots of MacBooks out there with 256GB storage. They haven’t become e-waste because of some mythical inability of users to manage storage (which they already do just fine on phones with even less space).

Fantastic value proposition.

For most of the non-tech people in my life, I'd now recommend a base MacBook Neo + base iPhone 17 + AirPods Pro 3. Students may want to throw in a base iPad and an Apple Pencil. Splurge on the higher end versions if you like nice things, but that combo will pretty much cover the tech needs of most non-tech people.

Apple is crushing it with their entry products.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260302132101/https://www.newyo...

I don't this product has many audiences on HN. But I would definitely recommend it to anyone not doing much computing.

I wonder if this is a way for them to take a situation like the RAM shortage and spin it into a way to sell more products with little memory to mask the expensive price of memory by bundling it with the outer shell of the laptop rather than try to sell a few PRO laptops whose price is now very jacked up because of the expensive memory.

This device has been in the pipeline for a lot longer than our current RAM shortage, and it's A18 Pro SOC (with it's integrated 8GB or RAM) was probably taped out before ChatGPT was a thing...

Basic question: will this be able to run any app built for M chip? I suppose so because both a18 and the M chips are ARM?

Yes

All I want is a MacBook Pro with a funky color like citrus.

I always buy the new color option from Apple when getting a phone, it helps me keep my device generations apart. But Macs have been sadly boring in recent years. "Starlight" is barely different from silver... I loved the rose gold they had for the M1 Air, that was a great computer.

I've said for years now that if they make a purple one, I will instantly buy it.

This is an excellent addition to the lineup and changes the list of reasons for why the average person would go for a Windows laptop from “cost” to practically nothing, but from a consumer perspective, is there any reason to buy this over M1 MBA which can be purchased new for less than the education discounted version of the MB Neo?

The M1 MBA is no longer available new, and was only available new for that price in the US.

I think Apple has a winner on it's hand. This is perfect, for large number of people who don't do much on their laptop anyway. Even for me as a developer, I want something small and light that I can carry around and I can connect to my bigger machine from.

I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.

Macs were already much better value than other laptops in my opinion. I just wish it were easier to run Linux on them.

First thing I did was search the page for "touch" as in touch screen. Still no touch screen. I've gotten so used to a touch screen with my X1 yoga that every time I use my Mac for work I get pissed off at it because I can't touch it. Just simple things like scrolling or multiple check boxes etc

The finger prints would drive me crazy.

Anyone know how this would compare to an original M1 Air? Both in terms of performance and also capability. My primary use case for my air is web browsing and similar. But I do use other things at times. I know they're both arm processors, but are there things that ne can do an M1 that won't work on this?

They're pretty much equivalent.

They are not. The A18 Pro has much better single threaded performance (similar multi-core performance).

Unless you are going to build software projects, a difference in single-threaded performance is going to be much more noticeable.

a18 scores better than m1 in single thread benchmark and about the same in multi thread

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-16

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

This comparinson might not be fair, since we are talking about an iPhone and a Macbook. We need to wait for Neo's benchmarks. A lot of things can change from the phone factor to the laptop factor, from power supply, to thermals, to dedicated data lanes

Sure but it's very unlikely that it would perform worse in a laptop than in a phone, thermals are better, power supplies are beefier, batteries much larger, &c.

The A18 Pro is roughly 30% faster in single-thread, and about equal in multi-core performance compared to the M1. The iGPU is also superior, and for AI it has 38 TOPS vs 11 in the M1. The A18 Pro should also be a lot more power efficient.

Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

The A18 Pro has been around since September 2024, we have plenty of benchmarks.

Not on laptops no, we should expect much better numbers on a full fledged laptop

The only difference the laptop would make is slightly better cooling; although with the effort Apple puts into iPhone/iPad thermals, I doubt it'll be exceptionally better. At most, maybe a 2-4% increase in multicore, from being able to sustain burst frequencies longer before thermal throttling.

The laptop can also supply more power to the chip and might have better integrated data lanes. Throughput to cache might be faster too if the access to disk and RAM are faster, they could try a more aggressive CPU scaling governo, since the hardware can handle it. And the list goes on

Benchmarking is not only about raw processing power, we can easily prove this on chips that are not hardware bound, benchmarks can vary wildly between machines running Intels or AMDs. The hardware between a phone and a laptop are orders of magnitude different, even though the CPU is the same

Most of that doesn’t apply, the RAM is part of the SOC so the same as the phone, the SSD controller is part of the SOC so the same as the phone. This isn’t an old fashioned Intel system, this is a modern Apple Silicon system where everything is unified. The CPU, GPU, I/O and SSD controller are all in one SOC.

Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?

That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.

Because the motherboard is tiny and on the left?

plenty of laptops run cables internally to device ports.

So presumably the small headphone jack is on a daughter board which could just as easily carry a USB 2 signal.

I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.

edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port

they do it so that you'll buy a MacBook Pro

Ugh. Why is is so much more expensive in Denmark? Here it's DKK5499 for the 256 GB version. That's USD857.

With or without VAT? The USD price is without VAT.

The DKK5499 is with VAT. If I enter a San Francisco zip code, it still only comes out to about USD654.

Sales tax in the US is nowhere near 25% :)

Yup, Louisianna has the highest combined state and local sales tax rates on average of ~10% which is no where near the VAT standard which seems to be around 20% for most of Europe?

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/sales-tax-rates/

That's around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.

The US price doesn't include tax, Denmark price I assume does.

It's the 25% VAT. Pre VAT, it's ~$685.

With state sales tax of 8% where I live, the base would cost me $648.

So not a huge difference.

Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.

That's only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.

edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750

Taking the German price of 699 Eur and accounting for the extra VAT in Denmark (25%) vs Germany (19%) I get 853 USD which means you're basically in line with the price for Germany which I expect is close to the price for the rest of the EU +/- VAT.

So the higher price in Denmark looks like VAT + some extra costs for being in the EU market; import duties, corporate taxes, etc.

The Danish version has two years of warranty.

Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.

Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.

Vote for politicians who'll lower VAT from 25% (!!!) to the same about as we pay in sales tax (5-9% depending on locale, 0% in some states) -- see lower prices :)

Interesting how it runs on the A18. I wonder if this means they will try to unify macOS and iOS within this decade.

in a competitive market they would have been unified a long time ago. google has been making slow steps at doing this apple wont until google does

all of apple’s devices with displays down to the watch run OS X with a form factor appropriate UI layer on top. iphone and mac are more unified than google’s android/chromeos

Tahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.

Hasn’t that been the discussion since the laptops/desktops went arm?

Yeah but macOS has never been ran on a “A” series chip before which makes it all more so interesting.

The Developer Transition Kit (DTK) ran on the A12Z chip. I don't think this should be interpreted as a signal of iOS/macOS unification.

Technically, the Apple Developer Transition Kit Mac Mini from the Apple Silicon transition (just before the M1 release) ran on an A12Z.

It is a given on Windows land, Apple is the one that rather sells two for the price of two.

Haven't they? I can download iOS apps from the app store, sign them again with my own keys for MacOS, run them natively on my MacBook without any issues. Same binaries, same APIs. It all just works.

From what I've seen people have mostly been asking for Mac OS features on the iPad, not phone apps on the Mac.

The increased compatibility is great and kind of obvious given the switch to ARM, but if it went both ways then the M4 chip in iPads would be a lot less bored.

Why would that mean that, when iPads have had A series and M series chips for ages now?

I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.

Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.

Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.

The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.

The M-chip with that balance is the A-chip.

I think it's purely a pricing & supply chain thing. Certain iPads have M-series chips in them, now certain MacBooks have A-series chips in them.

Also, the chip used has no impact on the viability of merging macOS and iOS anyway.

Seeing as it's the A18, are there any concerns about third-party "desktop" software not running on this new platform?

no? it’s neck and neck with the M1 on benchmarks, plenty of people seem to still love their M1 airs

M1 evolved from the A cpu line.

I don't think they would; I'm sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.

Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.

Shipping macOS on iPads will near instantly vanish a very large cohort of their macbook users.

This is pitched as entry-level, but it works as N+1, as in: people have beaucoup computers, but they avoid carrying them around (risk loss/destroy). The computer absolutely needs to be a mac for keychain-linked services, etc. For those users, not having TouchID on the base model is a bummer.

Just yesterday, we were discussing starting to retire our fleet of 8GB Macbook Airs, because 8GB just isn't enough to run Tahoe and a few apps. Luckily, most of our Macbook Airs are 16GB to avoid this kind of obsolescence.

It looks like this MacBook Neo doesn't even have an option for 16GB, unfortunately.

Why is that unfortunate? They make MacBook Airs with 16GB for those that need more than 8GB.

I wonder if this can develop iOS apps.

For me an iPad with the Magic Keyboard case is already my personal laptop, and this device would be a downgrade in almost every way (ergonomics and specs).

The one thing I can’t do with my iPad that interests me, that’s got me thinking of buying a personal Mac, is develop software for iOS.

It’s going to be a real struggle with 8 GB of RAM. I have the M1 mini with 8 GB of RAM and even the simplest smallest app in X code is an absolute slog. I ended up having to manually disable some of the Apple Intelligence services to get the ram back just to get the canvas renderer working in Xcode. Literally some of the xcode services just failed in tutorial apps due to RAM shortages. Really bafflingly inefficient compared to Windows IDEs

Built for Apple Intelligence. 8GB of RAM. It will be a struggle but I have no doubt it will sell really well.

This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty

So Apple is finally "admitting" an iPad is not the right device for certain users/situations.

This would be pretty cool for my Grandparents. They don't need too much and I assume that in typical MacBook fashion this works rather smoothly. (Their current Laptop is old)

I still think 512 GB on Storage is realy too little for a PC device. There is phones with more Storage.

Usually, I’d agree that 512GB doesn’t feel like a lot. But honestly, for most people who’d be interested in this device, what are they really storing on it? Photos? Probably not—those already live on their phones and are usually backed up to Google Photos or iCloud. And these days, so much of what we do happens right in the browser anyway. Writing, editing, collaborating, it’s all handled through web apps. Of course, there will always be exceptions, but those folks probably wouldn’t be looking at the Neo in the first place.

However, having the option to go for higher of course is always appreciated. But maybe that's just apple trying to steer users that need more storage to look at their other products.

So the biggest difference I see with the new Air is that you get sRGB only in the display, with less brightness. Also it is has 8GiB of RAM, which shouldn’t be an issue for the intended use.

Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.

I got my mom an Asus Chromebook and she loves it. This would have been a nice contender at the time.

Woah. A burner laptop for travel? I might need to rethink what personal computing is for me soon. Mac Studio + Studio Display, plus a Neo/iPad might be the right combination instead of having to buy an expensive laptop which has hinges and can get stolen.

I want one for all my kids. I love it. I just wish it had more ram. Personally though this direction is good. I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'

> I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'

I think something like that is in the works, but you could leverage Claude or ChatGPT or a similar service, right?

Is the screen supposed to read MAC? The C is misshapen if it's supposed to be 3 bars per letter.

(Looks like a decent option, technology and price-wise, for parental and sibling light-browsing and email usage patterns but they normally get my seconds when I upgrade.)

This machine has me asking why much older hardware can't run newer versions of macOS. The answer of course is Apple needs to sell new machines, but the Neo may be proof that decade old Macs could run Tahoe as well as or better than the Neo.

I'm not sure this really makes sense. The single core performance for the iphone chip is leagues ahead of anything even a couple years old. They can likely increase clock speed of the iphone chip in a larger chassis so the performance isn't exactly 1:1 with the 16 pro, which was hardly a slacker. 8gb on apple silicon goes much further than 8gb would have on an intel chip, due to faster and on chip RAM and much faster storage to enable smoother use of swap.

I'd agree that an m1 chip can probably continue to run modern macOS for a very long time, and they will likely drop support for it much earlier than they would need to.

I totally agree on the M1 bit. I just think there are so many capable machines that are unnecessarily scraped when they could be working with up to date software. Sure, they can run modern Linux or windows, but doesn’t that mean they could probably run modern Mac OS in theory as well?

I understand that running for power users and running for my uncle aren’t the same.

> but the Neo may be proof that decades old macs could run Tahoe, and maybe as well or better than the Neo

The A18 Pro is going to out perform many "decades old" processors, which would you be referring to?

I wouldn't conflate "affordable" with "low-end" in terms of processing speed. Apple is able to get the price to this point because of decisions that the rest of the market did not make.

I think an old Mac Pro quad Xeon with 32gb of ram and an ssd of that era could do it. I agree that most cpus from 20 years ago could not. I understand that doing it and doing it well aren’t the same.

Anyone else find the naming odd? What’s the relevance of “Neo”?

It feels like one of the only Apple products where the name is completely divorced from its intended usage (or defining feature)

- Phone

- Watch

- Pro

- Studio

- Mini

- Vision

- Air

- Neo???

Neon, and also “fun for kids”.

Neo as in New, as in "our customers can't afford our products anymore so this represents a potential major pivot for this company if it works"

Neo as in New for a new market segment that we can now provide our quality products for.

It's an incredible value but a world of resource-hungry vibe-coded webapps and 8GB of RAM just does not feel compatible.

If you primarily use native Apple apps though this thing is awesome. $499 with student discount? This thing is going to do NUMBERS.

Well, why can’t my 17 Pro run macOS apps when connecting it to an external screen etc?

Because it's a different operating system?

$499 through Apple Edu: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-neo.

8GB of unified memory, the fine print says. Hardly enough to multitask with today's bloated software. Maybe products like this, and the ram price hike, may finally push developers to care more about their memory budget.

I’m guessing you don’t have a Mac? My 8GB Intel Mac has always been just fine.

What do you use it for?

Anyone else has this Apple shopping experience?

- look at the new "cheap" product/gadget

- look at better products

- choose a better product, configure it, add options

- don't buy anything, not even a PC or a tablet, maybe upgrade your old android phone

This thing loaded up with Parsec could maybe be a great small, cheap coding machine, for accessing a more powerful computer beyond.

iPads with neither an ability to run VSCode nor Parsec have been frustratingly useless for this category.

I doubt anyone learning to program would need to subscribe to a remote dev machine just to run hello world type programs. From 2020-2023 I used an 8GB Macbook Air M1 to develop a lot of relatively heavy software, containers in the background too, and it wasn't a bad experience.

I agree. My point though is that this extends the market of this device beyond the educational sector.

I have friends that have gone on extended vacation work trips and have lugged along a laptop purely to connect to a beefy workhorse PC at home.

Maybe this is a tweener category though in that that sort of person would simply bring along a Macbook Air they already own? I dunno.

I do remote support with my iPad using Horizon, Citrix and Jump to RDP with a VPN.

This is an iPad, with touch screen taken away and keyboard built in

Same chip (A series), same RAM (8gb), same screen size, probably the exact same camera.

iPad starts at $349 + $199 for Magic Keyboard folio.

$549 for essentially the same thing + a touchscreen.

I have an old 2020 M1 Macbook Air that is on its last legs because 8GB RAM isn't enough for regular use cases. If this had a 16GB RAM option I'd go for it, but alas.

The specs are similar to what Google Pixelbooks had in 2017, except for the CPU.

4 colors, 2 configurations. This is kind of awesome. I know it's targeted at the low(er) cost laptop market, but this could be a great travel machine instead of lugging a macbook pro around.

The Macbook 12 inch was a relatively better laptop than this. An "re"-launch of equivalent for today, really would have been something. This is half-baked compared to the innovation that was there.

I really don’t see how you came to that conclusion—that Mac was overpriced and underpowered, and only had the single usb-c port. Neo has better battery life, a better display, a more capable processor, and a much lower price (9 years later no less).

https://web.archive.org/web/20170612054339/https://www.apple...

I meant to convey if it was made to today's specifications...

The Macbook 12 inch was super thin, super light weight, was excellently designed (apart from the keyboard fault that I got a replacement for free for). That was a laptop that made the iPad redundant. Which is why it will never comeback.

I only had to buy a new mac because it allowing getting updates. It lasted me 7 years, I coded apps on it with xcode, and it ran the earlier versions of logic pro and final cut fine for small projects.

If they had put that engineering effort into the Neo, then that would have been something. The Neo is not a serious laptop, nor is it an iPad replacement; because most really cant and dont do serious work on a iPad. The iPad will still be an excellent internet browser and streaming screen.

The 12” MacBook was $1299. This is $599 for anyone and $499 for many.

> The Macbook 12 inch was a relatively better laptop

Which virtually nobody bought... Everyone loves an ultra-light ultra-compact laptop, then decide that one of the sacrifices required to make one is a deal-breaker and the company was dumb to not "just include X".

I guess it’s to be expected, but i’m sad there’s no 16gb RAM upgrade option. $699 for a brand new Mac is nice and 8gb will work for the netbook/student audience but i’d personally want a teensy bit more.

When I saw this I thought it was just similar to an iPad with a built-in keyboard. Anyway this is better. finally a mac that can compete with other lower-cost laptops while still offering high performance.

Interesting.

It's been a while since we've had excitement at the "cheap and cheerful" end of the spectrum.

Anyone remember the initial Eee PC... and the problems it created for MSFT during the Vista transition?

That mini pc trend was really something ! Thanks for the blast from the past.

oh man, I loved my little 10" netbook back in the day.

We are back to colors! https://appleclamshell.wordpress.com/color-guide/

Like the YouTuber said, if you are watching this then it might not be for you.

https://youtu.be/kBX5WH9b4M4

what a move by apple! these are going to sell like hotcakes. i can imagine this putting apple even further ahead if local llms really do take off sooner rather than later. a cheap mac like this brings a lot more people into the mac ecosystem, and once you’re in it’s pretty hard to leave given how seamless everything is. over time that likely pushes people to upgrade to more powerful macs when they want to run ai locally. yet another reminder of why hardware ends up being the real moat ;)

RIP any hope for an Apple alternative to Samsung Dex. An iPhone 16 pro running the same specs will never be able to run macOS. We already knew it but this made official

A phone you could just plug into a USB dockand it becomes your mac would be so cool

I am going to need a mac to perform some app build for ios sometimes. I was thinking to get a used mac mini for that. Would the neo be a cheaper, but still viable option?

With only 8 GB of RAM would this be usable even for web browsing?

It's macOS. Yes, absolutely positively more than enough for web browsing plus a whole lot more, simultaneously.

If you do serious development, you might need to think about it.

I do serious development with local applications on my 16GB M2, and my current usage about 6GB. It goes higher when I run LLMs or VMs, and of course Xcode. Aside from iOS dev, I do not use an IDE.

Besides the the lack of a magsafe which I find essential for a kids laptop, I think it is perfect from a kid in the age 10-15... Unless they want to game of course.

They just crushed the budget laptop market. Everyone but weirdo contrarians and maybe gamers will have a macbook. Apple stock is slightly down. What‘s going on?

So its fundamentally an iPad with a keyboard running macOS.

The hoops Apple will jump through to not let me install/dual-boot macOS on my iPad Pro.

It’s all the same damn hardware. Just let me install an OS that isn’t purposefully gimped!!

The A18 Pro single thread passmark score is 4k, that's up there with pretty premium desktop CPUs, very impressive if it can do it for any meaningful time.

that's it boys. apple will take over the ENTIRE market with this. they will be at schools everywhere. only reason to not get a macbook before was the price.

Feeling glad I got a 2nd hand air M1 (16gb+512gb) for ~400 GBP last October, rather than waiting out for this.

No idea how the processors compare, but that RAM isn't a good sign

the market segmentation is nice, it'll do well with the colors and all -- but the unified memory thing is the literal only reason to want to dip a toe in apple whatsoever; with these numbers id rather just spend ~300 on a Chuwi or equivalent white label 'ultrabook' with double the specs.

although it IS hillarious to read a group of enthusiasts in 2026 screaming "8GB IS FINE!" -- meanwhile people want more ram on their RPis..

For 800 euros, with 8 GB RAM, and a mobile GPU?!? No thanks.

599usd == 514eur

These start at 699€, at least here, VAT included.

I suggest to look into the actual store prices, instead of fly by comments.

I find it really fascinating that this is priced identically to an iPhone 17e. Speaks to it essentially being a big iPad with a keyboard attached running macOS.

In Canada they don't seem to be priced the same - Neo starts at $899, and 17e at $799.

This is an amazing move by Apple. Most excited I've been about an Apple product launch in a long time. Low cost, high quality, colorful laptops are back.

I imagine this will be popular in other countries too. Such an incredible product for the price. Does anyone have benchmarks comparing the A18 to an M1 say?

A18 is ahead of M1 single core, slightly behind in multi core on Geekbench

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16858435?baseli...

you’re essentially getting an m1 macbook air with a worse keyboard

a quality used m1 air on ebay is about $400 w 256gb storage https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1+macbook+air&_trksid=...

I can open iphone on my macbook? Wish I had it working on my macbook pro, because I was supposed to be able to do that a long time ago (I'm in EU).

Dont bother. Even when works iPhone mirroring is unreliable and buggy experience, often asks to unlock iPhone again and sync gets broken at random and you have to go over enabling it again even though phone was next to the Mac mini all the time.

One of the worst supported features Apple has shipped. Idea was good though.

Seriously. I mainly want to use iPhone mirroring for when my iPhone isn't sitting right next to me. It then nearly always asks me to unlock my iPhone first before I can use it....

8 GB is not enough...even the $699 model has only 8 GB.

8GB is all the target market needs.

Given how incredibly bloated OSX is now and that everything else is CEF, how can they possibly justify 8gb of ram? Even my ancient w7 box has 64gb

I agree that it's gone downhill, but have you been on a Windows 11 machine? It's just a cacophony of ads, jank, and slop. The computing equivalent of sitting on a lawn chair in Times Square

Mac manages memory significantly better than Windows. My 8 GB Air feels better at multitasking than my 20 GB Windows laptop.

Did anyone else notice how the wallpaper spells MAC?

I wouldn't want a MacBook that can't run a free operating system, but if Asahi gets there, I may buy one to replace an aging XPS.

Will it be true macOS or will they use this excuse of using an “iPhone chip” to lock down everything like they do on iPads/iPhones?

A18 Pro offers 44% better single thread performance and similar multi-thread performance as the M1 processor.

The Neo should offer similar if not better performace as the first round of entry level Macbook Pro/Mini/Airs that Apple launched in 2020 with the M1 chip.

Was this meant to respond to a different comment?

Seems responsive to me.

They don't have a "macOS Lite", and if these were running anything less than full macOS, you can be sure Apple would be positioning them as a new product (or part of the iPad line) rather than as a Mac.

And maybe, just maybe, that fact, once it becomes clear, will make at least a few of the people who assume that Apple desperately wants to lock down macOS realise that that's bullshit and always has been...

Seems like landfill fodder with the memory at 8gb.

There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.

I have one from the original rollout. I keep thinking about upgrading, but then I realize I'm just doing that because I want to buy something new, not because I need anything more powerful.

You are so wrong. macOS manages memory much more successfully than whatever you are used to.

I assume it's not Linux, because things are pretty good there too (aside from the poor behaviour when you reach OOM).

I guess it just depends where it goes. I've got about four windows machines with that much RAM and they are all getting Linux and second lives. Not sure if this will be possible with these.

How is this laptop cheaper than a basic iPhone???

It’s bigger.

How will the A chip fare for LLM-based use cases, compared the M series?

And will we have software compatibility issues because of A versus M issues?

I don't think LLM use cases are the target audience's chief concern here

Will it run linux?

Many governments and large companies issue burner laptops when traveling to the US or China. This is a perfect candidate for that

Tiny, silly, no good, minor, tedious complaint: can you visibly tell which port is USB 3 vs. USB 2 or do you have to just remember?

Looks like there isn't any indication in the photos.

I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.

It's interesting because the new studio display has 4 usb-c ports and 2 support thunderbolt, but they do indicate which ports are thunderbolt above the port.

https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/

Bit of a strange choice of name if I may say so!

Does it run Linux?

No.

a bit disturbed to see this upvoted as much on HN as I thought techy people shunned Apple products (like Stallman calling their ecosystem a "jail") but...

I can see there are a lot of Apple users here apparently. I have some old hardware I still make use of but couldn't see a case for anyone buying new stuff (overpriced, locked down, etc.)

That's a pretty slick video where the block of aluminum transforms into the finished MacBook in the presenter's hands.

Yikes, if I had known Apple was going to release a new budget laptop I would have gotten my mom this instead of a $1000 Air.

Isn’t the screen kinda small for parents to use?

What?

Their eye sight gets worse as they get older, that's why they like making fonts bigger on their phones and computers. The new mac is so small. I feel like it'd be uncomfortable for older people to use.

Oh. Good point. I put her Air and iPhone SE in big font. So far she's been OK. By the time her eyesight deteriorates that much she will probably be retired anyway and not really need a computer anymore.

This is an iphone 16pro chip. That's the phone I have and don't love it. I am not sure if this is a useful config.

This could be amazing for running Asahi Linux one day. Probably will be quite a while before Asahi works on it though.

Oh neat!

8 gig cap though? That seems strange... But, for a $600 Mac for the kids' homeschooling though, maybe I can forgive them.

I think this is a very niche product or a potential Chromebook competitor. This is good enough for students and kids.

Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?

That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.

It's probably cheaper to squish everything into one small PCB on one side of the machine.

Most people use a mouse on the right so having a wire where a mouse will be can be annoying.

Yeah, but most people will also be using Bluetooth pointing devices.

Maybe, but having wires coming out of the same side as the pointing device is annoying. For cost reasons you have to pick one side. So put it where it causes less issues.

That's the point. You don't want to be running your bluetooth mouse into whatever you plugged in on the right side.

That might be the reason, but the number of people that actually use a mouse these days is tiny.

Most people won’t be using a mouse with their MacBook.

So people like you spend more

I can't believe how fast the chip is. It is comparable to my top of the line gaming laptop from 6 years ago.

What's that slot on the side? Antenna?

Speaker grilles, one on each side. Shame it's not an SD card slot.

But it shows USB ports on the other side?

The left side has two USB-C, a headphone jack, and a speaker. The right side just has a speaker.

No Force Touch?! That's absolutely awful... That's probably the biggest UX difference in daily use...

For someone who wants a secondary (travel) laptop I don't like how needlessly thick and heavy this is.

I just want a colourful fun pro laptop :(

put a skin or case on ur favorite boring-colored pro laptop

first thing i thought when i saw the citrus version - give me that in a 16" M5 Pro machine!

Woah... a mobile processor and enormous bezels... definitely feels like Jobs would have never let this ship

wat? jobs shipped worse machines at twice the price with horrible thermally throttled intel cpus

The amount of compromises leave little to no wiggle room to ever recommend this device to anyone.

I guess PCs and chromebooks are over? Literally what normie would pay more for a worse experience now?

They finally installed a real Operating System on iPad hardware and attached a keyboard. Innovative!

Would definitely consider for my next laptop. What’s the best solution for “Mac Subsystem for Linux”?

https://brew.sh/

It's UNIX, just open Terminal.app

Sometimes that covers the need.

Most will at least want something like https://brew.sh/ to get you current versions of standard Linux utilities rather than the bundled ones and then maybe even set up a separate profile in your terminal of choice (iTerm2 is a great option as well) which defaults to using them so you don't break normal system usage which assumes the built in utilities.

Even then, if your use case requires using standard Docker images, assumes certain features of the kernel, or assumes common distro environments rather than just you wanting a posixy feeling terminal you'll still need to run a Linux VM in the background.

https://www.macports.org

8GB in 2026 sounds... tight. that with an A18, makes me wonder how its going to hold up in a year.

would be a very compelling little device for cash strapped schools but ... 16GB of ram heck even 12 would have been better.

Otherwise the limitations are fine. In fact this really has the chance to canabilize the iPad a bit though the iPad has a better screen and a faster chip...

I'd like to bring to your attention the 2026 irony of how much things now cost: this thing has nearly the same chip, way bigger display,a keyboard, extra USB port, a touchpad, lots of copper inside and aluminum outside, way bigger battery and yet it is same price as entry level iPhone with same RAM and storage. Go figure!

PS. Wonder why they didn't use A19 in this? Imagine they thought "yeah, that A18 will do for an entry-level laptop", but the entry-level iPhone 17e with A19 needed more kick? What for, our social media apps and mobile websites? This is soooo absurd!

That's one way of looking at it. How much do you think it costs to take a laptop system and shrink it down to iPhone-sized?

I don't know. How do you know the cost of shrinking it is higher than the cost of extra material I mentioned? Also higher cost of shipping? There's so many variables that I think it's safe to assume Apple has similar markup on both of these devices.

You have to be able to get enough of the things made, too. A19 and A18 Pro are made on different TSMC processes, and most likely it's easier to get production capacity on the older N3E process.

Yeah, that's fair point.

The A19 doesn't have USB 3, does it? I suspect Apple didn't want to release a laptop where its only I/O ports are 480Mbps USB 2.

It does. One prot is USB3, other is USB2. iPhone uses fast external storage for RAW video footage.

The iPhone 17 (with the A19) notoriously doesn't have USB 3 - only the iPhone 17 Pro (with the A19 Pro) does

And this here has A 18 Pro. Don't know what your point is.

EDIT. OHHH I get it now. A18 Pro in this vs A10 (non-Pro) in iPhone 17e. My bad and fair enough!

I was hoping they'll revamp the 12" MacBook. I liked a lot that design and form-factor.

This is a very smart move and I love it! Absolutely the best device I can get for my parents.

Nail in the coffin for ChromeOS (or aluminiumOS) if they 8GB RAM variants are sold > $500.

Maybe. When a decent Chromebook is £697 (https://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-chromebook-14m9610-laptop-m...) it doesn't make economic sense to get one.

This is great, to me this is a far better deal than buying an iPad with an extra keyboard.

Has MacBook chassis been locked for a while? When was the last exciting design change?

I was hoping for a sub 1kg laptop for travel. Might go for an iPad Air plus keyboard now.

I would first check the iPad + keyboard is actually lighter than the Macbook Air. As far as I know the keyboard weighs quite a bit, though coincidentally Apple's website doesn't specify the weight.

Wow! Over 600 grams for the 11” Air keyboard. That is almost as much as a mechanical keyboard. I had no idea the total combination would be near a MacBook in weight.

They're finally laying the silly "Macs cost too much" complaint to bed.

Its wild watching Apple change. They lost their luxury brand and have pivoted to general population.

Today, every unemployed teen and stay at home mom has a $40/mo iphone. It lost its status.

These are some final nails in the coffin. As an Apple stock holder, I might exit my position. They have no growth left, they are just another Blue Chip now..

They tricked you. $40/month over two years is still $960 - definitely still luxury.

You are living in pre-inflation mindset.

The US per capita GDP is 90k now. This means its 5% per year. Not really a luxury when people spend all day on their phones. Heck, you'd call walmart groceries a luxury because they are more expensive. Both are needed in 2026.

Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

The fact it stood for quality doesn't mean you can't keep offering quality at lower budget and lower spec levels, while still pushing high-budget and high-spec levels. In fact it seems very succesful in doing so and keeps capturing more of the market.

You could say there is limited growth in the hardware (total pie), and that there is are increasingly smaller shares of the market share pie left to conquer. And that's mostly true.

But Apple has built out its Services business, from $12b in 2012 to $110b last year. That $110b revenue is more than Tesla's revenue, and that has a market cap of $1.2 trillion. And unlike hardware, services (i.e. software) are extremely high-margin. It's estimated that $110b revenue constitutes something like $80b in gross margin, whereas Tesla's $100b revenue lead to <$17b in gross margin, and just 3.8b in net profit.

A push into budget offerings increases users and scales service revenue, a high-margin and fast growing business. Apple has been a tremendous success. I won't make predictions of the future but its push for affordable devices was a strategic win, to the contrary of your point.

>it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

I think their marketing pretends they are cutting edge, but I always found them behind. iOS was years behind Android in features. Macbooks don't even have Nvidia in them.

Apple is never 1st place in tech quality. At best they are 2nd place.

> Macbooks don't even have Nvidia in them.

lol!

Excellent! Was going to get a MacMini for my kids but I might just get this instead.

This seems like a competitor to the Chromebook more because of the 8GB hard limit.

What’s going on with Apple? Are they doing one-hardware-a-day week/month now?

ya they’ve been teasing a week of releases for a while

Whoever added the pause button on the image carousel on that page, I applaud you.

If anyone makes Linux running on this thing, it's a major gaming changer!

Just an upgraded version of iPad air with the magic keyword attached.

Whats "neo" about this compared to the last macbook they put out?

This is the first Mac to use an A-series (i.e. iPhone) processor, so it's a distinct class in their lineup.

For the same price, Walmart is selling the HP Omnibook 5. It has a better CPU, 16 GB RAM (double), and 1 TB SSD (double).

There's also another HP for $359 with 8 GB RAM & 1 TB SSD. For half the price of this MacBook Neo, it should offer comparable performance with double the storage.

I can near guarantee this will perform better than both, especially as the user adds more programs and the OS gains cruft

Wow $499 for students

It's like the crack dealer giving free samples to the young ones

That's only like a 100 dollar student discount right? Seems pretty standard

The edu discount is often $50 or $0 on the lower cost products. E.g. that new M4 iPad Air from earlier this week is also $599 but has a $50 discount on the us-edu store. It's pretty sweet they kept the neo at $100 discount even though edu is one of the primary markets for this.

~~Haven't yet seen anyone comment on the apparent lack of Apple Intelligence. Makes sense due to the low amount of memory but wonder how many people won't notice that until after they buy this laptop.~~

edit: somehow missed it has Apple Intelligence - whoops

They literally mention in the video that it contains Apple Intelligence.

Not sure how I missed that - was too fixated on tech specs. My bad.

no worries <3

I don’t even have to look at the specs to tell you : “insufficient ram”

I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they'll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.

No. 8gb is fine for normal use.

I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.

That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.

If you aren’t using an 8GB Mac than you can’t tell how it would do. My 8GB Intel Mac Mini is just fine.

A lot of people forget that programs will use whatever RAM they have available. 8GB will absolutely be find for the majority of actually casual computer users.

Oh dang. No 16GB option at all, I thought 8GB was just the base.

This could be useful as a remote-access device for something that has a decent amount of RAM, I suppose, but how can anyone do anything outside of light-duty work with 8GB? At some point a Pi + battery/screen case is legitimately better.

Why would anyone by the cheapest MacBook available for anything except light duty work?

8GB of RAM? In 2026?!!!

Xcode and some browser tabs are going make this slow AF.

My wife was just telling me she wanted an updated iBook...

Every Apple post for the past 2 decades has brought out of the woodwork experts with armchair analysis of price points, market segments, product positioning, and target demographics. It's so funny. X'D Carry on.

Can't seem to find what is the processor on this thing?

It has the A18 Pro, same as the iPhone 16 Pro (2024).

Still can't compete with a used ThinkPad from ebay.

How much extra is it to add DVI out and an ethernet port?

I would love to see the upselling this product triggers.

8gb ram is criminal. For $100 more Air is the one to buy.

I agree. Especially now, with the insane RAM prices.

That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.

how much money I have lost to this damn ladder

The newest entry-level Air is $1100, this is $600, or $500 difference. It's significant.

Apple released the M1 MBA for $999 and it was considered insane value, and it had 8GB of RAM as well.

I don't think it's criminal, sufficient for plenty of casual users. Of course not for everyone.

Where is a $699 Air available?

Anyone else thinking of using this as a homelab server?

This A18 processor, how does it compare to the M series?

Well, Apple decimating competitors with this offering.

To me it feels like Netbooks are back on the menu.

Interesting that it only comes with 8GB of RAM. My Macbook Pro on Tahoe uses around that just when booting up, before I start anything. I wonder if they have some memory optimisations planned?

8GB RAM is fine for these

topping out at 512GB storage is lame though

8 GB is plenty for the base of this use case but I'd still wish for a 16 GB upgrade option before I'd wish for a 1 TB upgrade option.

Can I virtualize Windows 7 and PostgreSQL in it?

Sounds like the Apple equivalent of a ChromeBook.

i didn't even know usbc2 ports were a thing

The USB-C ports are unbalanced. Should have one on the left and right, not side by side.

Unbalanced USB-C ports has become a common bad design in the laptop industry.

Commodity hubs, especially USB2, come with lots of ports; it's up to how many connectors you can reasonably fit on the chassis. But running a trace across the board for USB isn't a great sell. Getting a second board on the other side isn't a great sell, especially for budget computers like this one. So we end up with "unbalanced" ports.

Yup- if you put usb ports on both sides of the laptop you need a retimer chip as the traces are too long/suffer EMI. Which adds to BOM cost.

"Unbalanced" USB-C and USB-A ports on a laptop is a bad design. We should be calling out bad designs. HP, Lenovo, Asus, ACER, Dell, ... all contribute to this bad design. Apple even uses unbalanced USB-C ports on the MacBook Air.

This is why I choose the Framework laptop over the big names. Their design has balanced USB ports were it can be charged from the left or right. Balanced power USB ports improves user experience with using on a couch or in a bed. Plugging in two USB to NIC adapters allows the weight to be balanced while working on a lap or some other non-desk environment.

Balanced USB-C ports sold me and what I first look at when reviewing a laptop.

There are also USB-C 2 cables.

USB-C is the bane of my existence. Everything looks the same, but certain cables won't charge certain devices for seemingly no reason, and other cables won't transfer data, and there's no easy way (AFAIK) to tell the difference

> certain cables won't charge certain devices

not sure how you can make a cable that doesnt connect power from end to end. I can see if it doesnt charge as fast as others if it doesnt have the bits required for higher current support. and if a device requires >5V to charge, thats on the device not the cable.

> other cables won't transfer data

again, not sure you can make a cable that doesnt connect the USB2 pair from end to end. but if device doesnt use USB2 and requires something else without mentioning it then that again seems to be on the device not the cable.

It's probably a problem with my devices. I've never seen these problems with more expensive devices, but my cheap bluetooth speakers will only charge with certain cables.

I also have cheap cables that don't seem able to do data transfer. Guessing it's not actually following the USB-C spec.

Are your bluetooth speakers connected over a C-to-C cable or is there any legacy USB in the mix (type-A and/or microusb)? The reason I ask is legacy USB expected 5 volts to be supplied by default, whereas in type-C you have to specifically request any current. So some C-to-A / A-to-C adapters/cables include the resistors to request the current whereas others do not, leading to legacy USB devices not getting power through some adapters/cables.

USB c cables aren’t merely wires and connectors but have some electronics embedded on them.

FWIW the PS5 controller is super particular about what charger you use due to Sony being dumb, but the deciding factor there is the charger, not the cable.

Source is the eternal benevolent champion of usbc compliance testing, Benson Leung: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/tdduha/commen...

(and also my personal experience, but Benson explains why)

The first USB type C device was a usb 2.0 device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N1

Interested to see how 8gb of ram holds up here.

Would love to see an 11inch version of this.

This is an incredible price. Lucky students.

seems nice. I imagine the strategy here is going for expanding user base so Apple can sell more software services?

Sounds like not bad option

Is that plastic

Headphone jack!

I see a lot of young people on that page.

anybody else thinking of getting one just to have a mac in a fun color?

as someone who likes bold colors, the citrus is nice.

So, and iPad with an attached keyboard.

There it is! Very interesting offering. It's nice that it's running full mac os with "root access" (whatever that means on macs in current year) I was afraid they'd introduce some bastardised version of iPadOS for this device. This seems like the type of device I'd want my kids to use instead of an iPad or other touch & app based device and just let them figure things out like I did.

> Apple also pointed out that the MacBook Neo is Apple's lowest-carbon Mac. It features 60% recycled materials, more than any other Apple product. This includes 90% recycled aluminum and 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.

This is _incredibly_ cool.

Okay, then, this isn't for you.

8Gb. Fuck off no chance.

Not in a world of everyone shipping fat browsers with everything.

Edit: everything my kids use in their educational side is browser based or thick web apps. This is going to suck.

We shouldn't be here and 8Gb should be absolutely fine, but that is not the case.

Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.

Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.

As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.

You cna use of all Teams, Outlook and Slack from an actual browser if you want to.

The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.

I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.

They should all be native apps.

FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.

I still use my M1 Air with 8gb as well. I don't do my daily dayjob work on it, but it's more than fine for everything else I do.

> 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world.

Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.

Having used both... it's 100% true

It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.

The problem is when you start throwing half the modern tech stack crap on top which is built on standalone browser engines. They are NOT memory or CPU efficient compared to native apps. Really kills a nice machine dead.

Why would you think the cheapest MacBook available would be intended to use those applications? Apple makes MacBooks for people that need more RAM.

As if Windows or Linux don't have native applications like MS Word / Excel or LibreOffice Writer / Calc, Firefox, Chrome and so on.

My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.

This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn't great but 8 with apple's really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.

A laptop to watch movies and surf web

If you want your mind blown, think back that in 2015, 8GB RAM was considered a lot of RAM and people would regularly compile linux and freebsd kernels on such systems.

8GB RAM was not a lot in 2015. It was similar to 16gb today in terms of usability.

When I bought a MBA in 2014, 4GB was considered borderline insufficient, even for a casual user.

would it be crazy to use this as a more casual macbook alongside my mbp? it seems light, cheap, and fun.

Would this be an upgrade from an X270?

This laptop is almost perfect for me, nix the 8GB to be a little cheapskate in 2026, but given the RAMageddon and SSDageddon artifically caused by the solid state cartels lately from Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, WD, all of you pieces of shit who is part of this cartel...we have had to accept 8GB for the moment, but for future? At least 12G, because a lot of slop software are using electron to run.

I just want a small laptop or handheld device where I can use ssh and kubectl, maybe sometimes running VSCode to have remote access. The 13 inch form factor is a godsent. I missed my 11-inch MBA 10 years ago so much.

This is an ad.

There’s now a gaping 500 dollar hole in the lineup between this and the macbook air.

Would i get this over my (now half broken) H[inge]P[roblems] that I got for 600€ in 2016, and now run linux on, with 16GB of RAM? Hell no

Good for you. Not sure how your comment contribute to ... well, anything, but... Good for you!

Of course, I am sorry I have posted my opinion under opinion-gathering topic. I apologize sir. Won't happen again o7.

I have to say I wasn’t expecting this

Interesting that the headphone jack is on the left! Have there ever been any other MacBooks where this was the case (no pun intended)?

Hasn't this been the case for most Apple laptops?

Not my M2 MBA. Which ones are you thinking of?

Most MacBook Pros. Examples: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111955 https://support.apple.com/en-us/112586 https://support.apple.com/en-us/111946

Ah cool, my memory of laptop headphone jack placement doesn't go back that far. Anything before the butterfly keyboards is just a blur...

My M4 Max MBP has a headphone jack on the left.

Only 8gb RAM?

if this weighed 1.7 lbs, i’d buy it today. still waiting for a successor to the 12” macbook.

What on earth, at least they could have provided 16gb as base RAM. 8gb RAM in 2026 - what on earth were they thinking.

You would be shocked to learn that HP is able to sell plenty of $500 Chromebooks with 8GB of RAM.

Is this the end of chromebooks?

Chromebook’s are like $200

... with build quality to match. Apple outclasses everyone else when it comes to the build quality of their laptops.

I am quite happy with my Thinkpads, and their replaceable components.

Main customers for Chromebooks do not care avout build quality.

People, I get it, you love Apple, but get in touch with reality.

The problem with a $200 laptop is that you get a laptop that's worth $200.

But a lot of Chromebooks are bought by school districts so the end user doesn't have a choice

To some people that isn’t a problem.

Not only can you buy two and a half Chromebooks with this, they never had much uptake outside a few countries school system.

IMO the biggest sell for Chromebooks in the education market (which is where they shine) is the software. It's a locked down OS with a cloud login that means when you encounter the slightest hardware issue you can swap out for another device seamlessly. macOS doesn't have anything comparable to that.

8gb is (not) enough for anyone

Apple is giving incredibly powerful and lightweight laptops for ALMOST FREE! What a time to be alive!

> Built for Apple Intelligence.

With 8GB RAM?

After Tahoe and Apple Intelligence what's going to be left for actual applications to use?

Same as the iPhone 16, when they started using that marketing phrase.

Wow thats a really good deal

Ideal computer for our mom.

Does anyone know if Linux is viable on this? I want Apple hardware (or surface hardware) but despise osx. Saving a few hundred over a surface would be sweet.

Haters will say this is them competing with Chromebooks, real OGs know they just expanded TAM

RIP, IBM compatiable PC.

Apple's Chromebook.

Now that MacOS has been demonstrated to run on an A-Series chip, can we please finally get unlocked bootloaders to run MacOS on other iDevices?

So the new iBook. Great.

Does the BoM change account for all of the price drop? I suspect the price/cost thing is bogus here, and in fact, the functionality drop is deliberately designed to NOT predate their existing markets in laptops:

They priced it just low enough to be considered "cheap" and they removed enough parts to make people who use a MBP or MBA not to want to do this.

This is basically the most efficient way to work with agentic tools in my opinion.

Honestly, if you have a tonne of staff that only use Excel and Chrome... this is the laptop to buy.

I'd hate to jinx it, but I reckon this thing will dominate the market.

Good job Apple.

No magsafe, no deal

that's a wild price point for a mac, impressive

This thing is going to sell a lot.

8GB memory is pathetic. But that doesn't matter for most users yet.

In fact, it may not matter at all. If the hardware limitations push us to have several machines, a well-built entry laptop becomes a terminal (you won't run things in it, you'll connect to things). For that, 8GB might be enough.

Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.

I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.

Stating the obvious - because keeping them separate means Apple gets to double-dip on people buying more or less the same hardware twice.

I wonder if the bootloader will be locked down, I hope not.

Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?

They do allow you to run third party operating systems on Macs. For now.

Apple has never locked down the bootloader on a Mac-series product before.

(But they have never not locked down a product with an A-series CPU - hence my concern)

Uhh... you know when the Mac's were Intel they specifically made a tool for installing Windows on your Mac and shipped drivers for Windows.

Because they were basically OEM'd PCs with an Apple logo at one point, and used it as a selling point, but I don't think it was a particularly popular feature among the general userbase. I've personally seen more Hackintosh laptops than Macs running Windows.

Yes? This is a demonstrable fact?

Lay off the hater-ade for a second.

which AI features will I get in neo ?

>3.5 mm headphone jack

YES!

Look, I know everyone's freaking out about the MacBook Neo at $599. I get it. It's cheap, it's Apple, take my money. But honestly? If you spend like five minutes actually reading the specs, the MacBook Air is the obvious buy here. The Neo sounds sick until you look at what they actually shipped. It's running an A18 Pro. That's a phone chip. Not even an M-series. 8 gigs of RAM. One of the USB-C ports is USB 2.0, which, like... it's 2026, what are we doing. No MagSafe. No Thunderbolt, so forget plugging in a Studio Display. No backlit keyboard. No Force Touch. The base model doesn't even have Touch ID. Someone on 512pixels put together a list of everything they cut and it's honestly kind of depressing. Just cut after cut after cut. The Air at $1099 gets you the M5, 16 gigs of RAM, Thunderbolt 4, MagSafe, Wi-Fi 7, P3 display, backlit keyboard. The whole deal, no weird gotchas. Yeah it's 500 bucks more. But you're getting double the RAM, a way better chip, and you don't have to keep a mental list of stuff your laptop randomly can't do. The RAM thing is what really kills the Neo for me though. macOS eats like 5 gigs just sitting there doing nothing. Someone on HN said they're running VSCode, Xcode, Blender, and ChatGPT all at once on 8 gigs and sure, macOS is clever with swap and compression, but come on. You're redlining it from the jump with zero room to grow. And you can never upgrade it. 16 gigs on the Air means you're actually comfortable for years. This matters way more now because of the local AI stuff that's blowing up. OpenClaw just dropped, open-source AI agent that runs right on your Mac, handles your email, calendar, does actual useful stuff on its own. The LocalLLaMA crowd is going absolutely feral setting it up with Ollama, running local models for free. People are hitting 49 tokens per second, running 30B parameter models on their Macs. That kind of thing eats RAM for breakfast and really wants those M-series GPU cores and the Neural Engine. On 16 gigs with an M5? You're golden. On 8 gigs with a phone chip and a 5-core GPU? Yeah no. The move in 2026 isn't buying the cheapest Mac. It's buying the one that doesn't feel slow in two years. Grab a refurb M4 Air for like $900, or just pay full price for the M5. Either way you've got a machine that handles everything for the next five or six years easy. Browsing, dev work, local AI stuff, whatever. The Neo is gonna start choking the second you try anything beyond Safari and Netflix, and at that point just buy a Chromebook for 300 bucks. Apple built the Neo to hit a price tag. The Air is where the math actually works out. Spend the extra 500 now, forget about it for five years. Done.

And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much. Sure it's touchscreen but at end of the day If I am "keyboarding" it I am not "touching" it much.

> And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much

It's not about specs, it's about capability. You compare the Neo to the wrong iPad.

The base model iPad + keyboard folio match the MacBook Neo price, which seems to be intentional. iPadOS requires less resources to run but is functionally equivalent outside of being able to run arbitrary programs.

Which makes me wonder who the Neo is for. If someone wants to build software they should be paying more money. The average person is fine with an iPad, and it will even give them a touchscreen, the Neo won't.

* US price: $599 * UK price: £599

I don't like swearing on here, but fuck that.

The "real" USD-GBP exchange rate price should be £448. Apple are basically taking £150 extra on top for UK consumers.

Does the UK price include VAT? How much is VAT in the UK?

just let me run macos on ipad?

You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They've really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.

Finally, some good hardware announcements. It nails almost every common use case, with few flaws or exceptions.

* If we're talking "child's first laptop", this gives them a full-fat desktop OS with ample power to get into various mischief (experimenting with audio in Garageband, making videos in iMovie, writing stories in whatever text editor they fancy, presentations and spreadsheets for school, and the ability to install whatever they like with a quick reformat/refresh if things get borked). $599 isn't quite "disposable", but it is "accessible".

* For "parental computer", this also fits the bill. The extra $100 doubles storage and adds TouchID, enabling Apple Pay on-device. It's affordable, resilient, and manageable by remote support (i.e., us kids). 8GB of RAM is more than enough for common tasks for most folks, provided they work intentionally and not just stack tabs infinitely.

* As a Chromebook alternative, the results are a bit more mixed. Sure, durability seems higher at first blush, and the user experience is better, but as @runjake points out Chromebooks play a "numbers game" Apple won't compete on: rock-bottom pricing, disposability, replaceability, and integration with Google's (mostly free or heavily discounted) educational tooling. For schools that have the CapEx to move back to Apple's ecosystem (or are in it, but want to expand it), the Neo is compelling; for public school systems lacking disposable funds, it's a harder sell - though maybe moot, given the studies linking negative outcomes to early and forced technology adoption in schools.

* For businesses, meet your new "loaner laptop". Keeping a few of these on-hand with corporate profiles preloaded and MDM/DEP managing provisioning makes these the ideal daily replacement while a laptop is being serviced or forgotten at home. Keeping a half-dozen of these ready to go is half the cost of Macbook Airs or Pros waiting in the wings, and perfect for 90% of SaaS-reliant business use cases.

* Speaking of business, say hello to your new "contractor special". Cheap enough to not fret if they're lost or destroyed, but still managed by the same impeccable MDM/DEP tooling, and with enough headroom for most contractor work.

For every niche where you don't mind paying the premium for a better UX in hardware (software is a bit...questionable, at the moment) and don't need a monster of power, this thing fits the bill almost perfectly. That said, I do have some annoyances with the Gen1 that I'd like to see addressed in the next revision:

* Don't make MagSafe a premium feature. It saves cables, it saves ports, and it saves computers. It should be standard.

* I get that the USB ports are limited by the A18 Pro's onboard controllers, but stop silently making different USB ports. Either label them, make them identical, or drop the lower-spec ones entirely. USB-C at USB2 speeds and missing DP video is dumb, and it makes the user experience worse since the ports aren't labelled somehow.

* I know I'll never get it, but either hardware mute toggles to keep speakers from going off during class/meetings, or profiles that let IT mute/disable speakers entirely to force headphones.

Another nail in the coffin of iPad as a portable workstation. A18-powered $600 MacBook, but no MacOS-powered tablet.

If only there was an ~11inch one to replace the old 2012 model, possibly the most perfectly portable laptop created.

it's roughly the same physical size, just smaller bezels so bigger screen.

Others covered specs etc, but just came here to say the intro video is so much fun! I really enjoyed that.

Compared to other repairable and upgradable laptops, this one is utter waster of investment.

256gb and 8gb of ram, here we go again. Old gen macbook air seems a better deal, isn't it?

Cool hardware but wake me up when I can install Linux on it.

How come my iPhone can't just run MacOS at this point?

Cause Apple doesn't let it.

Now give me a damn tellow MacBook Pro please

yellow* :(

Come on! Put a cell modem in this thing!

Why? If you're outside of WiFi you're two clicks away from using your iPhone as a hotspot.

That's two more clicks than zero and one extra device that you need to bring. I get it, you'd never leave the house without your phone, but sometimes I don't want to have my phone and all of its notifications following me around. If I don't have my phone and I don't log into Instagram on my laptop, I don't get distracted by it. Being able to go further without having to be tethered to wifi is freeing, albeit for a rather specific digital slice of freeing.

Now give us a 17-inch laptop, please!

now the next macOS update being performance/bug fixed focused makes sense to me

Holy shit thats a good deal

Honestly a pretty interesting little thing but my god what a terrible name

Yet another trash!

very good product app man

How is this different from Macbook Air?

For a bit over half the price of the Air, you get the iPhone 16 Pro SoC (minus one GPU core, so somewhere between the 16 and 16 Pro, actually) in a laptop chassis that's all around a bit less premium than the Air.

256gb on a macbook should be illegal in 2026

Absolutely ridiculous that they still offer this while macOS + Apple Intelligence already take ~30 GB

So only 226GB left??!

Why?

If it's aimed for education, where does the need come from?

I use ~500 Gb on my laptop, but that is only because I have all my music on that thing. Doubt most students today have that need.

Because of course there's no magsafe.

Because it is a $599 ($499 for many) MacBook.

This laptop competes against M2/M3 MacBook Airs. Going to be hard to justify a Neo when the others are so much more powerful.

Where can I get a new M2/M3 MacBook Air for $599?

It's probably a hoax, unless it's used

Used, yeah

Yeah, I see your $599 price tag, Apple. I also remember the hype behind your Mac Mini that was a sub $500 computer. And, how long did that last? The answer is: not long.

The baseline mini costs $499, so it seems to be going strong.

1. Gawd damn, scrolling through that page full of all those bright colors with their saturation cranked up to 11, feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode. No other page from Apple is like that. wtf

2. Would a used older hand-me-down Macbook Air/Pro not be better performance/value than this iPhone board in a cheap laptop shell? There was a guy here saying he bought a used Macbook Air M1 16GB for 250 Euros.

> 2.

To an individual consumer perhaps, but schools need to buy hundreds at a time and the second-hand market isn't really great for that.

This is basically Apple taking a bite at the Chromebook market. Interested to see what reviewers have to say.

Definetly, my kids at different schools had iPad's and Chromebooks. The kid with the iPad was using an external keyboard most of the time iirc.

A used one probably has not-so-healthy battery and a bit worn keyboard. Maybe some scratches on the screen as well.

At this price, a new device seems very tempting over dealing with a used hardware which is always a bit of a lottery.

Performance-wise A18 would be plenty for casual stuff. IIRC it's faster than M1.

2. Apple would know best no? lol, this screams Cook. Too many iphone boards? Existing laptop tooling. Bam, revenue.

That doesn't make much sense. They do lean/JIT manufacturing, so it's unlikely that they have too many iPhone boards. Also, the tooling for a completely new alu unibody size for just selling a few iPhone boards does not make much sense.

This is very clearly targeted at Chromebooks in education, where the iPad is not doing too great:

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-apple-lost-the-k-12-educ...

I was making a joke. I might be uniquely knowledgeable about their manufacturing processes...

2: I'd say it's about the same, same RAM/SSD sizes, maybe an M1 chip is faster than A18 but limitations will come from running out of ram/disk Had an intern working with us, basically couldn't have an browser running together with Figma due to ram shortage making it slow down to a crawl.

> feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode.

This is by design, who do you think the target market for this Macbook is?

Reality distortion field at its fullest. I want one!

I swear to god they can transmit virtual ecstasy through their website, it's so incredibly impressive you want to buy one even if you don't need it. Everything is so perfectly presented, it has speakers! it has USB-C! WOW! No I am not being sarcastic, I am just expressing how joyful it feels watching marketing to its fullest. Just watch the videos.

Apple should be studied for centuries to come not for what they sold but for how they sold it. Pure genius. Beautiful up to every detail.

I agree.

This 3m49s "Hello, MacBook Neo" video is so insanely well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4

I love how they have gone back to actually showing off the stuff they are proud of. This is the most product-centric Apple ad I've seen in years.

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