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Comment by theopsimist | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

> * 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 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.

> 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.

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.)

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…

* 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.

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.

> 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.

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

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

So no real issue at all for the target group

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

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?

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

No camera notch

Praise the...market?!

> 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...

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.

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

Still better than my Lenovo

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.

"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

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

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).

"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.

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

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

> 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.

The Red Delicious of Macs.

Except nobody wants Red Delicious.

No keyboard backlighting is itself a dealbreaker for me.

The last point made me chuckle, good catch :D

Can’t expand it at all. Not for me.

Center stage is dumb anyway

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).

— ...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"?

also, less space than a Nomad. Lame.

> * “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

> 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.

"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.

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.

> 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 :)

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