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$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 :)

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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

$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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.

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.

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.

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.

What’s wrong with your M1 air?

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.

nah 8gb of ram is laughable

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.

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