The MacBook Neo
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if the trackpad is not-awful, keyboard doesn’t suck, and display isn’t a 300nits POS unusable even in a bright room.
You want the same performance as a MacBook Air without one of these fatal flaws? You’ll hand to spend $1500+ anyway so you save nothing. Then the OS is full of ads and pre-installed garbage “gaming-optimization-tool” or driver tools taking up 99% of a single core while being riddled with security holes.
Nowadays it’s solid advice. The current Mac line-up is a step ahead of the competition. App compatibility is hardly an issue anymore with the exception of some very niche software.
They impose obsessive control over their walled garden, constant pressure to use Apple ecosystem products, and they are staunchly opposed to interoperability regardless of it being an obviously anti-consumer tactical moat.
Buying a Mac in spite of such anti-consumer behavior reminds me of voting for a bad person because you like their policies.
These days, you're lucky if you get to pick from "Bad", "Very Bad", and "Worst".
(BTW, does Mr. Bad look like he'll competently implement and honestly administer his policies? 'Cause without those, "good" policies ain't worth squat):
You don’t even need an Apple account to use one. Unlike Windows.
Yes, there's a fee to get access to the App Store, but almost nobody on the Mac uses the App Store... the fee is mainly for putting stuff on iOS (and likely watchOS, tvOS).
The fee also gets you the absolute latest Xcode, but go back one version, and it's entirely free.
On Mac, you can install brew, and use it to install gcc, clang, qemu, whatever utilities you want.
You used to need the developer fee to put stuff on your iOS device at all, but these days you can put stuff on your personal devices without a fee, but the binary expires in a week... enough to learn and debug, but not ideal for a personal tool. That's about the only annoyance where the fee comes up... long term deployment to iOS.
This sounds like dystopian cyberpunk written in the 80s
For distributing your program without the fee, you'll probably moan about the hoops that people have to jump through to run your stuff: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40616/mac - and I can't say I love this myself, but people can run your stuff, and no fee necessary.
(I've got a couple of (somewhat niche) FOSS things for macOS, and I build the releases using GitHub Actions with whatever default stuff the thing uses, then make up DMGs that people can download from the GitHub releases page. I added a bit in the documentation about visiting the security dialog if you're blocked - and that seems to have been sufficient.)
Is it better to
(1) vote for a bad person whose policies you believe are correct
or
(2) vote for a good person whose policies you believe are wrong?
I'd pick (1) every time. (Sure, I'd love a good person whose policies are right...)
And I would be very much in the Apple Camp for personal laptops, if Gaming was in any way shape or reasonable. Thats the only downside of apple. They tried to fix this before but that really did not work out.
But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.
fusion360 is supported.
Currently looking at the top 20 Steam games [0] for today, excluding non-games like Wallpaper Engine. 8 out of 20 work on Mac natively. Out of the remaining 12, 3 of them work with Crossover, so that makes it 11 out of 20. Almost all of the remaining 9 are competitive FPS games that don't work due to their kernel-level anticheat, almost all of which AFAIK won't work on Linux for the same reason.
I had Cyberpunk 2077 running on a M1 Macbook Air almost two years before the MacPort came at a very playable 30fps (900p Medium settings). Although I did have to use thermal pads to heatsink it to my metal laptop stand and added a slow spinning fan for good measure.
It's not perfect, but I've also spent a lot of time only buying games with no road blocks to running on Mac/Linux.
> Additionally, you can’t count on the basic being correct. It takes a hour of research to know if ...
Truer words were never spoken!
I gave up on PCs years ago because of this very reason. The irony is that it is well known from psychology that giving consumers too many choices is actually counter-productive. Most people do not have the time nor the knowledge to research and configure their "perfect" PC. They just know their usecase and want the best for their money.
I had hoped Microsoft Surface series would become the standard in the Windows world (i still have a 1st gen model) but they don't seem to read the market.
This, so much this! I run Asahi on M1 Air but wanted to upgrade to something with fuller Linux support. After trying Thinkpad T14s, trackpad quality has rosen to my attention, something I never thought about before. Turns out glass, haptic trackpads are still only available in probably about a dozen laptops on the market and it's not easy to actually know which ones are these!
Apple had solved the issue around 2012 and still PC manufacturer refuse to spend on trackpad quality.
The MacBook Neo is a return to physical clicking, but they're using some sort of new mechanism which allows clicking anywhere.
Yeah, that works great on the bus. It's one more thing to tote around to meetings, but hey, at least I didn't have to buy a MacBook!
Or I could just buy a Mac and not have to resort to hacks to get a decent trackpad.
In any case, my response was to cromka's comment and our shared dissatisfaction with Asahi.
That is the main difference to me. I hate crappy trackpads but the ones on my 2 thinkpads are good enough for the nomad/mobile use. That doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer the one on a Mac but I wouldn't want to suffer a hostile, OS and lack of repairability just to get a better trackpad.
I've dual run Macbooks and Thinkpads for a while and the Thinkpad trackpad really isn't that bad (the trackpoint getting randomly stuck in a non-neutral position is a common thing I've experienced though)
The nicest thing for the Macbook for me in practice (disclaimer: I don't do fancy things on the trackpad) is the size. It "feels" fancier but the thinkpad plastic works totally fine for me.
I think some Mac users overindex on the quality of like... $400 Acer laptops from 2008 or whatever as their metric for "cheap Windows laptop".
Software stuff is still garbage but lots of machines have just straightforwardly decent hardware. Apple hardware is _very very good_ but it's not like the bad old days of "I actually cannot use this trackpad" in windows land. As much
It's criminal that my now almost decade-old Pixelbook still has a better trackpad than 99% of PCs (including ones that cost way more money).
Didn't see them last year at computex and never found that Lenovo model again, not sure what happened with it, at the booth they said they had a partnership. I was hoping they'd link up with framework and make a module for them.
Don't forget, one is going to be the "Business" version and the other identical one is going to be the "Consumer" version. God help whoever buys a "business" category laptop for personal use. The world will come to an end!
> too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.
And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?"
I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.
I run both PC's and Mac devices in our house, we use what fills the job. Recommending PC laptops for family members feels like a total crapshoot though. Every time, I do all I can to find the right device for their needs and there are just so many trade-offs. Maybe I get all the right specs, ensure it doesn't thermal throttle, keyboard/trackpad are A-OK... but the webcam is trash. Ooof... now Mom is complaining about how no one can see her properly at bridge club call.
I brought up how the Neo might do to the PC industry what the Air did to Ultrabooks back in the day. The amount of hate I got on YouTube/Verge with copy-paste, "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" was expected, but also disappointing. There is clearly a market segment happy to continue to put up with the mess that Dell/Lenovo are selling (anything but a Mac).
Wild how tribal we are to our corporate computer overlords.
The era where something like Framework with its fully customizable, repairable, modular laptops becomes the standard can't come soon enough.
For the time being, I'll let Apple/PC continue to duke it out. Hope some competition helps in the long run. :shrug:
Yep.
I'm a long-time ThinkPad user, but I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from the ThinkPad E series or ThinkPad L series or ThinkPad X series, and their website certainly isn't going to tell me. I keep on buying T series because I'm honestly afraid of trying anything else.
To say nothing of Lenovo's non-ThinkPad laptop brands, including Ideapad, Legion, Yoga, ThinkBook (!), and LOQ.
I really don't know what laptop to recommend to a friend. One friend showed me specs for an Asus they found at Best Buy, and it looked okay, so I said "It's probably fine." Turns out it was shoddily made and overpriced: they had to sent it back not once but twice because the wifi and then the camera didn't work out of the box, then a few months later the hinge broke.
I am not a Mac fan, but it's easy to recommend them because you at least know they are universally well-built machines.
My personal rundown and how they get assigned:
E - Educational / Lower office personnel spec
L - Office personnel you hate spec, but don't offer the E because they might complain.
T - Give this to all the technicians because they can't take care of anything and it will survive typically.
P - Give this to the engineers who believe having an RTX gpu will actually help them so that they are happy, and to the CAD operators who actually need it.
X - Smaller/Ultrabooks before the term got started, now somewhat a blurry line because T series have gotten lighter/thinner. But the X1 Carbon sure is a great way to spend a ton of money for a light laptop when a T-series would suffice.
Personally I stick to older used X series (currently x250) because I just enjoy a small laptop and they are dirt cheap now.
The case is all thick ABS.
It weighs like 2.4 kg, and the weight is unbalanced.
The USB-C charge only works at 20V, nothing less.
While charging it overheats and spins up the fans.
It came with a TN screen with terrible viewing angles, that could not be used in a brightly lit room. I didn't use the laptop for two months while I waited for a replacement screen from aliexpress.
Keyboard is much thinner, the trackpoint drifts easily.
Camera quality is worse, somehow it cannot handle sun-lit scenes. Microphone and speakers are similar to the T14.
It stopped receiving firmware updates after two years.
It uses about 0.5 W while suspended, so its tiny 48 Wh battery typically doesn't last the weekend with the lid closed.
The motherboard has design issues, a missing protection diode in the headphone jack microphone input ended up frying the CPU due to a ground loop. Meanwhile the T14 has eaten the same ground loop and even a 48V passive PoE in an accident and dealt with it by rebooting. A T450 from 2015 is still running.
As much as I hate Apple, they really do have product names down to a science.
- E is for economy
- L is for loser
- T is for tank
- P is for power
- X is for executive
And it would seem they never learn either. I saw the same comments when the M1 Air came out, then they quickly shut up when people were pushing those little base model airs well beyond what anyone thought they were capable of.
The same thing is happening with the Neo now. It feels like an M1 moment all over again for the PC OEM industry.
If you aren't a gamer, there is zero reason at this point to consider any other laptop besides a macbook. Apple now has one for every price point. This neo is going to destroy the consumer PC space. Dell, HP, Acer are probably sweating right now.
Their sales will continue tapering off and they'll do what they always do; reduce investments, fire some designers and engineers, keep old models out even longer, and move out of Apple's way by selling even more 380$ laptops for 400$ while Apple siphons even more profits by selling a 400$ laptop at 600$.
That's how PCs die.
Two useful accessories I had were 'surface connector to USBC' adapter (to mitigat the small battery) and a ring mouse. Scrolling on touchscreen for Windows has been as good as MacBook haptic trackpads, certainly better than most Windows oem trackpads.
There was brief moment in time where Panay was poised with the Surface Book and Surface Studio (just wish they made a monitor version of the studio) to give Apple a run for their money. But they replaced the Surface Book with Surface Laptop studio, devolved the OS with ads and AI and now I'm mainly only on the Mac...
and as far as I know, they do this on purpose!
Apple doesn't have to exist in that type of competitive environment. If you want a Mac, you're either getting it right from store.apple.com; or you're searching for Macs specifically -- in both cases, Apple owns all of the shopping screen real estate.
I see your point, but as a counterexample, look at the TV industry, at PC monitors, at washing machines, etc. There manufacturers have, for decades, created SKUs left and right, sometimes only so that a large dealer can offer to match lowest prices because no other dealer has access to the same SKU.
> it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ. The exact same specs will be in two different chassis designs.
I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
Wore off eight years ago. Can we guess?
They also have to label the products. But yes, it costs almost nothing to the manufacturer, but the effect on the consumer is large.
Also, for flatscreen monitors, I think differences go further than model numbers. It’s things like number of inputs, number of outputs, max power delivery, color of the frame, etc.
The touch screen was completely useless. Super laggy and sometimes the pen would still believe it was touching the screen even at like 1cm away. Windows 10 had almost no features for touch based interaction. It was just regular Windows with the same microscopic buttons for mouse.
Plus a ton of display ghosting, GPU glitches, etc.
My big problem with it is that the battery got swollen a few years ago, pushing out the bottom panel, and the device is way our of warranty to get it replaced. I'm waiting to find time to get that replaced.
But inevitably, some chucklehead comes along "wut? I can get <proceeds to type spec sheet> for half that! Have fun paying the apple tax, lol." Someone posted that on Ars yesterday, with a random Amazon link from Naikan, your name for quality computing. Or rather, "Naikan, your name for a quality trackpad, screen, and high-quality ABS case! Be sure to check out the $12,000 of 'bonus' software add-ons, no extra charge!". It's amazing someone can post that without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
It's amazing that people attribute it to lacking self-awareness. You can spend $400 on a laptop and have a perfectly fine experience. There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory that I can genuinely recommend to people. If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?
macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore. The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
The edu price is $499. Of course that seriously competes with the base iPad ($329 without keyboard).
Again, the trackpad will suck and the screen will be a dim, binned display panel, etc. If that works for you, fine, but that's not the conversation. The conversation everyone else is having is that your plastic $400 laptop with the bargain-bin components isn't the equivalent of $MACBOOK, no matter what the spec sheet says.
macOS isn't the power user focused, extra high polish OS it was in Snow Leopard era, but it's still the best UX and energy management in operating systems out of the box
A vast library? With 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage you're not going to be running much, nor storing many files created by that library of software. Also, the only well-designed truly native software I have on my Mac, which I use daily, I can count on one hand. The vast majority of the apps most people use outside of "Pro" video and image editing, are in a browser, or are Electron apps that are exactly the same on a Mac as they are on a Chromebook.
And those "media" people using Premiere or Final Cut would never buy a computer that maxes out at 512GB SSD.
This is a pretty Chromebook substitute, which is cool, but it's obvious Apple doesn't want it to compete with the rest of their computers which start at $1,099.
This machine is on-par with the "world breaking" top performance M1 laptops when they came out; now it is "insufficient".
I know there's a RAM shortage. But if RAM didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have stopped shipping 8GB configurations in the rest of their line. Starving these of RAM and storage is the way they've chosen to protect their fat margins of the MacBook Air. Which is fine. I just think these are best recommended only with a giant asterisk that they're for web tasks only, exactly like a Chromebook.
But then again I remember when 128 MB of RAM was simply unheard of largess; so huge that using much of it for anything but a RAM disk was hard to do (of course, I also had that problem back in the DOS era with 8MB).
Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by without.
>macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.
Maybe because computing devices overall are just so good. The gains are to be had in services that are part of the Apple ecosystem, not the OS alone (for the most part).
>The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.
In the 2000s, Apple has not cared about competing at Best Buy. That isn't their customer. If anything though, the Neo is more of a foray into that wider market. Anyone with kids lugging home a crappy school-issued Chromebook though took one look at this device and knew this is a device Apple can position into schools -- a market they once dominated and lost. There are lots of markets where this will be a great device, where the customer wants a Mac and not "just" an iPad. In those cases, it isn't the end consumer buying this device, it's an IT manager - who can likely be tempted by that Mac ecosystem and a better grade of device relative to competition.
In some countries Apple is (or was) a status symbol of luxury, but I haven't observed that much in the United States. Macs and iPhones are both mainstream and affordable. AirPods can be bought for $100 on sale. These are commodity items now, not symbols of luxury.
Now, most people go to Apple because they see it as a premium option, not a status symbol or luxury. If you get AirPods or an iPhone you know what you're getting. If you buy those $50 wireless earbuds on Amazon your expectations are lower.
Maybe I should have used the word "premium" rather than luxury.
Easily worth the extra money alone.
Apple has the distinction of the iPhone being what everybody thinks of when they hear the word "smartphone". Everybody is familiar with it. That little xylophone jingle that serves as the iPhone's default ringtone plays in every detective show my wife watches on streaming, and everybody knows instantly what it means. That sort of ubiquity has network effects that you're not going to get with a Motorola, Sony Xperia, or even a Pixel. I've had to turn to Aliexpress to score a decent protective cover for my Pixel.
Chromebook/N4500 (2021!)/4GB RAM/64GB eMMC, $149 white $179 in grey Windows/N150/4GB RAM/128GB, $219 (first Windows machine)
The first Lenovo is a Chromebook that's $299, and it's got a MediaTek processor from 2022 and is supposedly on a $100 sale.
I had a phase 2 years ago where I tried many cheap Chromebooks. I initially liked the stripped down experience and "value for dollar" hardware.
But ChromeOS UX gaps, bad keyboards, and a litany of other issues wore me down and I gave up on the "second computer" quest.
I look back now and see many of those Chromebooks don't even exist anymore.
That you pirate an OS they refuse to sell to you to get a better experience is your choice, but it's unrealistic to suggest that it's a solution for the average person.
Or you could spend $200 more (or $100 more with edu pricing) and get a MacBook Neo which has significantly higher build quality, a much better screen, a great trackpad, and amazing performance.
Seeing how college students throw laptops in backpacks, that extra $100 (edu pricing) could very easily save them money in the long run.
> There are damn good Chromebooks in the $200-300 territory
Every once in a while I go looking for a Chromebook-level laptop for some extra purpose and I am never impressed by anything. The current selection is all ancient processors, bad screens, creaky build quality. If you must stick to a strict budget then these can work, but I wouldn't call them good.
To not have to deal with Windows (or Linux (speaking as a Linux sysadmin)).
I don't rave about macOS any more because I've been here for decades and, barring the occasional fight with Windows when I want to play something, I've largely forgotten how awful all the other options are[1].
I've gone "OS blind", I guess, and now macOS, for me, is the "bare minimum of competence" - hence I won't rave about it (but I absolutely will moan about the stupid things it does[2].)
[1] I spent decades using various Unix GUIs (on Suns, SGIs, Linux, OpenBSD for a while); I have absolutely zero desire to explore them again.
[2] My current favourite is being able to notice when it's about to flip into "red battery, plug me in" mode because, for whatever godforsaken reason, the load average will rocket up into the 400s and everything turns to sludge for a couple of minutes. Oh how I laugh every time.
If you need someone to rave about macOS, you simply need to ask me. Going from Windows to Linux to macOS was like coming home.
Microsoft is also helping by making Windows an absolute dump of an OS.
Can you list one?
The battery on my Macbook Pro, that I've owned since 2013, has finally gave out and I am looking for a new laptop. I considered buying an entry-level Air or a used Pro (<$1000 budget), but then Neo came out. I am now considering just getting the Neo. All I need is internet browsing, some very light coding maybe.
But if there are $200-300 Chromebooks just as good, I want to know. What are they?
There are levels to this. Sure, recent versions of macOS have some issues, no doubt. Part of the reason Mac users complain about relatively minor issues is because Apple has set the UI/UX bar so high.
But even in its current state, macOS is still leaps and bounds better than Windows. When I worked with customers using Windows and dealing the usual Windows issues, I realized most of them had no idea that computing didn’t have to be so bad, due to the Stockholm Syndrome that Windows users experience--they think all computers are the same.
(Of course it would be even better if they just came with a totally stock install already, but that's not worth hundreds of dollars to me)
What's more troublesome is that some laptops require drivers and customizations, so you need to tinker with your fresh Windows by installing carefully selected subset of drivers, so your hardware works and at the same time you don't install the same shovelware. The driver situation for Windows is truly dire. There are drivers from laptop manufacturer (e.g. Lenovo). There are drivers from part manufacturer (e.g. Nvidia). There are drivers that Windows was bundled with. There are drivers that Windows will download automatically and install as part of Windows Update. It's a huge mess and I don't think anybody knows how to navigate that. So there's no reliable recipe to create "stable" Windows from the scratch.
My T14 Gen1 (We are at gen7 now I think?) still gets updates. It's pretty neat.
Same happens with some crapware provided by vendor. You can wipe drive all you want, but ASUS motherboard will ask Windows to automatically install "essential drivers", and to be specific - "Armoury Crate".
I feel quite self conscious saying this. It feels like whataboutism, as well as being potentially contrarian — 100% of my colleagues use and love macOS — but I fell in love with being able to read and edit the source code for my whole computer, and I don’t ever want to relinquish that freedom.
But even Lenovo cripples them:
* You need to be very careful. Select alwaysCTO build with the best available display. But even then, Lenovo *removed* the HiDPI display from the X13. The only actual competitor to the MacBook Air is the ThinkPad X13.
* Lenovo added useless camera humps protruding out of the panel. There is a thick bezel and enough space for a much better camera. And for opening the laptop used to be a dent in the (round!) palmrest, nothing protruding.
* AMD, Intel and Lenovo fail to ship a fanless X13 and T14. I would happily keep same performance for two years, just getting rid of it.
* Lenovo is drowning us in Yogas, Z13 or whatever Legion.
[1] By the love of god. Don’t order them with Windows! You are putting 80 to 130 euro right into Microsoft’s stock owners. And they will use it to harm Linux. And of course, making Windows even worse. They use it to harm you. Select Linux. Donate the rest (Fasst, GNOME, KDE…) or use it for the better display.
- [1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/subseries-results/?visi...
Also, AFAIK, Lenovo still has their ThinkPad designs developed by a design think-tank lab in Japan that they own (and IBM still has a bit of influence here as well) so I know Lenovo still gives somewhat of a damn in trying to develop a solid laptop.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/115827/new-thinkpads-score-perfe...
First, the page looks like it misrenders with garish, inverse-color boxes breaking the apparent margin of the page. Then we get to the models:
* ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (14" Snapdragon) Laptop
* ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 (16" Intel) Laptop
* ThinkPad T1g Gen 8 (16" Intel) Laptop
* ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 (14" AMD) Laptop
* ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 (14" Intel) Laptop
The builds themselves seem worse now than they have before: they're overall more expensive for what you're getting vs. a few years ago. E.g., the GPU is … gone? They're all iGPUs now. They include a "45%NTSC" screen by default, which is something I've never heard of, and I thought sRGB was the literal bottom of the barrel, but I guess we can go deeper. The warranty is pathetic, but so too is Apple's.
You are right, you can get them without Windows now.
Every time someone turns on their PC laptop next to me, my ears feel assaulted.
My Mac does engage fans from time to time, but I never notice the noise.
Apple is great at marketing to consumers. The other big players, I have to assume, are more focused on B2B where the threshold for UX acceptability is lower.
The only ads I ever hear from them are on economics podcasts ostensibly aimed at business owners. For "Copilot+ AI PCs" no less, whatever that means. They're chasing a target audience of approximately 3 people in the world that are improbably held back from achieving their wildest AI dreams by not having a commodity laptop with an NPU.
Just hired a new colleague who prefers Windows. Dell seemed like a reasonable option for a good laptop. Here is Dell's current lineup:
- Dell Laptop (with 14, 15, 16 inch variants)
- Dell Plus (with 14, 15, and 16 inch variants)
- Dell XPS (with 13, 14, and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Essential (with 14 and 15 inch variants)
- Dell Pro (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Plus (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Max (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Max Plus (with 14, 16, and 18 inch variants)
- Dell Pro Max Premium (with 14 and 16 inch variants)
It's maddening trying to sift through the differences at this level. Then when you select a model, there can upwards of 8 different pre-built options to review.
The number of overlapping iPad models and variants, for example, is getting kind of crazy these days.
Now there’s the MacBook Neo and a rumoured new MacBook Ultra in the pipeline. The easy days of “pick standard or pro, select a display size, select RAM & storage” are starting to fade.
One of the first things Steve Jobs immediately did after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill most of Apple's product line-up, which had exploded in his absence.
Too bad he's not around to save them from the same over-segmentation anymore.
Apple's current method is a pricing ladder, make it simple to spend $200+ more than you planned.
MacBook Neo, $599. Great but maybe I want Touch ID & more storage, ok $699. Well at this point now it's "only" $300 to get the air which is much better. Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."
Every product lineup is designed that way. It gets you thinking "eh, what's an extra $200" and slowly moves you up until you land at the highest tier.
Now that everything is using the same silicon, it costs Apple very little to maintain all these variants (that are mostly binning), so there's little reason not to.
Don't underestimate how much of a bitch it is to maintain all the separate SKUs. This isn't the old CTO days where you had: 1 chassis, N mainboards for different CPU/GPU combinations, a bunch of SODIMM's of varying capacities, and a couple of different fixed storage drives to toss in.
When any given MBP has 2 CPU/GPU options, multiple memory options, and multiple storage options, with everything being soldered to the board? Honestly, the Neo is the one product in their portable lineup that doesn't cause a massive headache for logistics.
But...even then, Tim Cook is CEO still, and he is a supply chain guy, so you better believe this is top of his list when it comes to their product lineup. You don't increase operational complexity for no reason, because that is where the cost for every product lies for them, it's not just dealing with silicon binning.
Sure... but when looking at sales numbers, HP and Apple are tied by monthly sales volume on Amazon [1], with everyone else being widely behind them. But HP has almost 300 models, Apple much, much less - and Apple can react much, much faster because they almost directly run the production sites and mostly sell themselves, so they can produce an initial run of products and whenever a store or a region runs out of one specific variant, they just tell Foxconn to, say, instead of making a run with black casings they now make a day worth of gray casings, ship that onto a plane and that's it. HP, Dell et al? Their inventory gets distributed by an intricate web of middlemen who all need buffer.
[1] https://laptopmedia.com/highlights/august-2025-best-selling-...
Yes
>Well, now that you're already spending $1000, might as well just do the extra $500 and get the pro..."
Disagree. The Air offers additional utility and longevity for the price, the Pro offers nothing that 90% of people will ever perceive.
I know a ton of people for whom the $500 would be nothing, but still get an Air rather than a Pro. Obviously, that’s not great data, but I feel like the jump from Air to Pro just doesn’t happen or won’t happen compared to jumps from Neo to Air.
That level of simplicity lasted from approximately 1999 to 2002 when the 14 inch iBooks, the 17 inch iMacs and the eMacs were introduced, followed by the 12 and 17 inch powerbooks in 2003. By 2005 they had also introduced the Mac Mini. And again most of these had a "good", "better", "best" variant, though in some cases (like the first 17 inch iMacs, the "best" tier was also the next model variant).
Apple's lineup is undeniably more complicated now than it has been in the past, but the simplification was never really about cutting model types down, so much as it was about making distinct model categories that people could easily understand why they would pick one or the other.
I think they still do a relatively good job at retaining that distinction, and I agree that the iPad lineup is probably the most muddled. Though special mention goes to the "Macbook Pro with M4 Pro" branding, which anyone should have caught and thought that maybe they needed a better moniker than "Pro" for the processor variant (and of course also, is the "Pro", the "Max" or the "Ultra" the best?)
Don’t forget the G4 Cube (most people do ;) which was also around at this time for reasons that are mostly unclear (looks cool though)
- decide on size
- go from your budget
- if still too many SKUs go by features
What features? Thunderbolt, Screen, Apple Pencil, Face ID
Alternatively if you know what features you want, start with that.
If you're struggling to choose which iPad you need then you might want an iPad for the sake of having an iPad (in which case get Air).
- 8.3", one tier (mini)
- 11", three tiers (iPad, Air, Pro)
- 13", two tiers (Air, Pro)
Could you spend the same amount of money on a regular 11" iPad with a lot of storage, or an iPad Air with less storage? Sure.
Some people want lots of storage. Other people don't care but want a wide gamut screen, faster processor, and better pen capabilities.
It's nothing like trying to pick a laptop from Dell where you have to spend hours digging around to even figure out what your options are. If someone asked me which iPad to buy we could figure it out in under 5 minutes.
Dell Pro Max 16 Premium Laptop
Model: MA14250
Even Dell can’t keep their computers straight.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/dell-pro-max-16...
Edit: confirmed, here is a different laptop listed with the same model number https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/dell-pro-max-14...
For laptops the buckets are portability and performance. These two will always be at odds, and people will gladly prioritize one over the other; these are the ingredients you need for creating a model lineup. Each model prioritizes something different:
- Affordability, MacBook Neo
- Portability, MacBook Air
- Performance, MacBook Pro
There's people who will be carry this machine everywhere and will gladly sacrifice performance for portability. There's people who will gladly use a laptop as essentially a desktop they can occasionally move if it means maximum power. You even see this in the wider market; there's a clear category of laptops praised by their portability (ultrabooks), and another group praised by their power (gaming laptops).
I don't think there's an equivalent for tablets, since people don't really seem to need them for that much (lol). Apple has been focusing a lot on portability, but the market of people who carry their tablet everywhere isn't really that big, most people use them at home [1]. Digital nomads, students, PMs hopping around meetings: they're on laptops. Same with performance; people who need performance are on laptops.
The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen. A single dimension for improvement doesn't give you the ingredients for creating a model lineup, it gives you the ingredients for a price ladder where more money just gets you a bigger, better screen.
I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone. In that case, I think like the iPhone, the iPad could do with less overlap:
- 8.3", $ (iPad mini, affordable)
- 11", $$ (iPad, standard)
- 13", $$$ (iPad Pro, better in pretty much every way)
And keep the iPad Air in the same space as the iPhone Air, a novelty luxurious product that isn't the fastest nor the most affordable, but showcases premium hardware and what the future could look like.
I think Apple doesn't do this because it hopes to discover what people want through the grid of different screen size, thinness, performance, etc permutations that currently exist, but oh well.
[1]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Disagree, at least coming from a current iPad owner. I’m on an 8 year old 12.9” iPad Pro and if I bought a new iPad today it would be 11” because that’s the size I’d rather have at this point.
So hypothetically it’s between the Regular, Air, and Pro, and I would get the Air because I want the better screen and stylus compatibility but wouldn’t spend $1000 for it.
iPad mini ($499) is more expensive than base iPad ($349) [1][2]
[1] iPad mini → https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-ipad/ipad-mini [2] iPad → https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-ipad/ipad
I don't disagree, but Apple seems to treat the Mini as an afterthought side project that gets updated every 3 years or so, compared to the mainline iPad being updated yearly from 2017 to 2022. Then it had a gap until 2025, apparently taking a while to get the slim bezel redesign down to the affordable model.
If the mini were the default affordable entry point they'd need to keep it up to date but they've decided not enough people want a mini for it to be worth that effort.
I have 12.9" iPad Pro, my priority was thunderbolt and screen size, but mainly screen size (battery life is given on Apple devices).
I also have iPad Mini where my priority was...bigger than the biggest iPhone, smaller than regular iPad.
> The killer use-cases for tablets seem to be drawing and media consumption, but not only is drawing not a huge market, these two aren't at odds. Both are better with a better, bigger screen.
It's like all-season tires, does not exceed in any particular field. I use my iPad for casual CAD with 3d printing in mind, it works great. I also use it as a bedroom screen on stand by the bed. Can two separate devices do a better job? Yes, but I don't need
> For laptops the buckets are portability and performance.
iPads not bucketed like this because you're not buying iPad for performance.
> I think the iPad's lineup could be simplified to just one model, but I understand Apple want's to have several for marketing and price-ladder delineation, like it does with the iPhone
Sure they can. This would lead to less overall sales. Right now 11" buyer have whole 3 feature set selections to choose from. I'd get rid of Pro, but not everyone needs 11" and Air features.
"No, it's not! It's a laptop!"
And most iPods were iPods.
The iPod touch was just an iPhone, and the shuffle lacked a screen.
Back then, Apple had 16 to 32 distinct models[1] of just desktop computer (just the desktops!) with little to distinguish them. In many cases, the exact same internal hardware was shipped in two different boxes as two models aimed at two different customers (LC/Performa/Centris/Quadra/Workgroup Server). For example, the "LC 550" and "Performa 550" were the exact same computer[2] with two different names on the front, meant to be sold to the educational and home markets.
That's extremely confusing for the consumer. You had the same internal hardware being sold for two different price points, and computers with significantly different performance sold at the same price point. You don't want your customer to get analysis paralysis and give up before they purchase.
The point of Jobs's simplification is that there is one option for you to pick at a given price point in a given category of tablet/laptop/desktop, and that pricing and capability are clearly aligned. I don't see where Apple has gotten away from that.
The Neo is either easy to recommend or rather easy to not recommend. It has a fixed 8GB of RAM. I think that’s too little for a modern Mac operating on the modern web. Others… disagree. Either way, it might entice some schools and school districts assuming they can volume discounts where 8GB is probably enough and it fills the spot in the Walmart part of the sales channel previously occupied by an 8GB RAM M1 MacBook Air Apple hadn’t sold itself in years.
It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.
Shortly after I had a TiBook (PowerBook G4) that was _only_ 1-inch thick! Compared to 1.75” Dells my coworkers had, it seemed like the future. DVD drive, modem, Ethernet, full sized DVI port, FireWire, WiFi, Bluetooth, optical audio in and out, gigantic display with a bezel that was unrivaled for years, even among Macs. What a beast!
(I know you meant 2020, but it’s fun to think about the air in 2000).
https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2000/06/
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Sp...
Only true if all you're running is matmul (supercomputer has general purpose CPUs so more flexible than M1 GPU) - also those flops are probably FP64 in supercomputer ratings and FP32 in M1.
As a smart man I knew used to say, supercomputers are about I/O not raw compute. Those have terabytes of RAM not 8GB.
Throughput-wise, the supercomputer is competitive because it has a lot of local RAM connected to lots of independent nodes, which, in aggregate, is comparable to modern laptop's RAM throughput (still much more than disk) with a caveat, that you can only leverage the supercomputer bandwidth if your workload is embarrassingly parallel running on all nodes[1]. Latency-wise, old RAM still beats NVMe by two or three orders of magnitude.
[1]: there's another advantage that supercomputer has which is lots more of local SRAM caches. If the workload is parallel and can benefit from cache locality, it blows away the modern microprocessor.
It was also used by the PS2 for local multiplayer between multiple consoles. Although Sony eventually removed that port.
All our intel MacBooks now run Linux just fine. The oldest is 2012, with 4Gb but most are 8 or 16Gb.
I would always recommend more RAM first over a faster processor; back when I would build desktop machines for Windows, I would use the second best CPU and put the savings into RAM.
Mac devices have been able to get away with less RAM (and higher priced upgrades) for well over a decade. During the Intel era, they were the first ones to adopt SSDs as the default option while everyone else still installed spinning rust. That alone provides for way faster swap storage to conceal a relative "lack" of RAM.
And when they went for their own fully integrated stacks of soldered RAM and SSD? Then everything went off the rails - close proximity and no sockets means very low latency for both RAM and persistent storage on one side and on the other side it also allows for much higher bandwidth because of much cleaner signals - remember, even at "measly" hundreds of megahertz you're already in the territory requiring precise PCB design.
On top of that, macOS's scheduler seems to be much, much more efficient and outright better in constrained RAM (and CPU) settings to provide the feeling of "the system is still responding" than either Windows or Linux. The only setting where macOS goes into molasses is when you not just run out of RAM but of free disk space as well.
Students in non STEM areas will not usually need more than writing and reading tools.
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM.
(Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
Definitely brings our engineers' 24GB MBPs to their knees primarily b/c of the RAM chewed up by those multiple Docker instances.
Will 32GB also start looking paltry soon? It's hard to say. I want to say the realistic upper limit is 3-4 simultaneous worktrees for a given developer (at this point the developer becomes the bottleneck again?) but it's a wild guess that may be hilariously low.
(Just posting this to show that you have to be very specific when talking about these kind of things. Yeah maybe you need 32GB because you run some large deployment 3 times. Others mayb be totally fine with less if they just develop a basic Python web app. Who knows. The devil is in the details. Omitting them makes the discussion ambiguous and just difficult.)
I’m not saying you can’t get away with 8GB of RAM. You can, but I won’t recommend a Mac with only 8GB of RAM to anybody for a few reasons: 1) even normal users just using the web will find RAM to be the bottleneck and that will degrade their user experience over time. 2) they’ll spend $600 and even if RAM isn’t as much of a bottleneck for them today, with modern web developers and modern web browsers, it will be much sooner rather than later. And everything is a web app now.
For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way nor should it last less than 7 years and still be a kickass experience. Ideally it should last longer. The Neo is great for what it is, but the RAM is the deal killer for me.
(Been trying to get them to switch to Safari, but they prefer the Firefox name. I don't think there's anything wrong with Firefox other than it being less native.)
It's basically a Laptop engineered in the iPhone/iPad space of the company, it's only natural for Apple to target a shorter lifecycle.
8GB RAM is maybe the best way to achieve that, many of the MacBook Neo buyers of today will be very compelled to upgrade to a newer (or higher-tier) model in ~3 years from now...
If the Neo would have 16GB of RAM today, it would be harder to justify an upgrade in 3 years from now, when the common entry-tier for laptops is likely still at 16GB...
> “For $600 in 2026, your computer shouldn’t be a bad experience in any way”
In the article, Gruber normally uses a 64GB Mac, expected the 8GB RAM to be a problem and was surprised to find that it wasn’t, and judged the Neo as not being a bad experience in any way.
8GB can be limiting on an iPad Pro, which runs a generally more memory efficient branch of Apple’s XNU-based system software and it’s not difficult to get it into a state where it is constantly paging out an app you had in front of you two minute ago if anything you’re doing involves the web at all. A Mac will just swap at that point, but swapping is also slow.
Five years from now, I have no doubt that the processor will still be fine for most uses, but I doubt that 8GB will be. Especially given that some of the most common memory hogs aren't under Apple's control (cough Chrome cough).
If it's not even useful after such a short time, then I question whether it was really fit for the intended purpose even when it was new.
Software shouldn't be written this way. I shouldn't have to disable mds-store because it likes to take up 2-3 cores at full throttle when I'm on 10% remaining battery. But it is, and 32GB isn't enough for me to even have a basic computing experience anymore, it seems.
Yes and no. I had a M1 MacBook Air for several years, with 8 GB. It's fine if your needs are relatively simple (ie: just a browser, with not too many tabs, and a few other simple apps). But try to run too many apps and it would tend to hit a wall and get very slow.
One thing that did seem to help a lot was to keep the SSD relatively empty: the SSD seems to get slower once it has < 30% or so free space remaining, which would slow the whole system down because memory swapping takes longer)
Last year I upgraded to an M4 Air and got 24GB, which makes a world of difference. But I gave the M1 to my niece and she seems very happy with it!
You and I disagree on this part so strenuously I don’t foresee a middle ground. Swap still absolutely sucks no matter how fast the SSD is, and the SSDs or probably the SSD controller are much slower than what’s in other Apple Silicon Macs.
People always forget that Apple does realtime compression on data that's in RAM allowing more things to fit in RAM; it also effectively increases the bandwidth of the SSD.
Although, I guess Windows 3.1 and 95 users enjoyed it first thanks to this extremely high quality third-party implementation!
A combination of Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) and hardware-accelerated instructions (SIMD/NEON) makes RAM compression on Macs very efficient. Because the storage controller is integrated into the SoC, the bandwidth is high enough that the transition between "Compressed RAM" and "Swap" is very smooth.
And because the CPU and GPU share the same memory, there are no wasted cycles moving data between VRAM and System RAM.
Apple uses WKDM (Wilson-Kaplan Direct Mapping), a specialized, high-speed compression algorithm designed specifically for in-memory data. WKDM is "architecturally aware"—it was built to compress the specific types of data structures found in a computer's RAM, such as pointers, integers, and memory addresses. WKDM treats RAM like a collection of 64-bit integers and pointers; and it's designed to fit entirely in L1/L2 cache [1]. This shipped in MacOS 10.9 Mavericks in 2013.
Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient. The vast majority of Windows and Linux machines don't have unified memory or storage controllers connected to their processors.
Because of this, Apple can often compress a page of memory using fewer CPU cycles than Windows or Linux, which is why M-series Macs can be so aggressive with compression without you ever noticing a "hitch" in the UI.
The fallback algorithm is their LZFSE algorithm, which is like "Zlib-level compression with 2x-3x the speed and efficiency". LZFSE achieves a nearly identical compression ratio but uses Finite State Entropy (FSE) coding, which allows it to decompress data significantly faster while using much less battery power.
LZFSE is optimized for the ARM NEON instruction set to minimize "wake time" for the CPU, making it arguably the more "green" choice for mobile devices [2].
It's safe to say that neither Windows nor Linux has the combination of hardware and software optimizations that Apple has when it comes to RAM compression.
[1]: Compressed Memory compresses the least recently used data residing in memory using the WKDM algorithm, which not only frees up memory but also reduces the amount of swapping going in the background. Not only is this faster than swapping to disk (even to SSDs), but Apple also claims it saves power -- essentially, that compressing data in memory uses less power than writing data to disk without compressing it. -- https://www.osnews.com/story/27121/os-x-109-mavericks/#:~:te...
[2]: https://lyncd.com/2015/09/lossless-compression-innovation/
> Windows/Linux treat RAM like a stream of bytes (similar to how you’d compress a .zip file) so it’s not as efficient.
That doesn't really follow. There are faster and slower compression algorithms no matter what, and 64-bit integers are kind of a waste of memory much of the time.
Also, unified memory has tradeoffs. The GPU improvements are real but it mostly means more pressured on memory, not less.
That's not in the same universe as hardware compression on a 6-core, 64-bit ARM processor with cores that can run at 4GHz.
I have a 16GB M1 Pro machine from 2021 with 200 GB/s memory bandwidth; I can't tell when it's hitting swap, even with tons of browser tabs open, 3 or 4 terminal sessions, and several apps running. I often run two browsers with dozens of tabs open and there's no noticeable lag.
YMMV.
On an my old Intel Mac, it was pretty obvious.
OTOH, if you are using multiple RAM-heavy apps that aren't actively hammering that RAM (e.g. an instance of Photoshop that is using 10GB but is just idling or whatever) then MacOS and their stupid fast SSDs handle that pretty seamlessly.
Most use cases are probably somewhere in the middle.
The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.
Many of the apps non-devs use will likely be universal binaries, or adapted from iOS versions. Chrome, Safari, Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Zoom, Claude, Contacts, Notes, Maps, Music, Pages, Numbers, etc. These are apps that run concurrently with no issues on the iPhone Pro 16. I'm not sure why people expect those same apps would cause issues on materially the same hardware because its package includes a hardware keyboard.
(The most RAM you could purchase in an iPhone until late 2024 was 6GB. iPhone 11 had 4 GB of RAM. I have not at any point since approximately iPhone 6 heard anyone complain about the speed of an iPhone Pro for "normal" consumer/not professional media stuff. iPhone 6s was released in late 2015 and had 2GB of RAM.)
Yes, MacOS is a different OS than iOS. But the very same company who built the Neo also make MacOS. They are known to adapt the OS to the hardware they are shipping. I'm willing to bet the experience for the non-dev is similar to the experience of using an iPhone 16 Pro in 2026.
I have 8GB of RAM in my M2 iPad Pro running iOS (yes, it’s “iOS” despite what Apple’s crack marketing team might call it), and I’ve certainly started to complain. Doing anything with the web, and like one or two other apps is enough to have apps I’m switching between page out like every two or three minutes.
I had issues with swapping before, but with the latest iOS, it has become very annoying on an old iPhone with a small amount of RAM (3GB, I think).
Apple fanboys laugh at Android users for many things, but they can use their devices longer even though they might not have the fastest CPU around (8GB+ has been normalized forever in Android world).
So, you can't really compare. On iOS you can have 3GB of RAM and it wouldn't be a bottleneck.
Except 1) that's not entirely true (famously: music, Zoom) and 2) yes, cooperative state management. Users do not know or care that an app is not actually running if it appears that it is still running when they switch back to it. #2 obviously does not work for many dev use cases, but it would not impact my workflow if e.g. ChatGPT or Chrome were suspended when not in the foreground.
I agree with most of the post's arguments, and most of the specs and limitations of the Neo would be okay with me, except there should be 16 GB RAM in 2026.
Apple could perhaps mitigate this somewhat by releasing a "slim" MacOS Neo version that is less bloated by pruning some features. Currently, the OS uses much of the available RAM for caching (I've seen "40%" of total OS RAM usage) to make the system faster, whereas 8 GB RAM permits only essential caching.
(Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.)
The reality is that nobody outside of HN cares about 8GB vs 16GB of RAM. You can do anything you want or need to do with an 8GB Macbook, including running a million dollar business, or working with anything creative on the highest level. If you are actually doing something which requires 16GB of RAM on a Mac, then you are doing state of the art tech stuff and should be rolling in money already and have no problem spending thousands and thousands on your computer.
I think it’s as simple as: 8GB is what the iPhones using the A18 Pro had. It’s this thing Apple likes to do where to keep costs down, they use some iPhone part or other SoC/SiP they have laying around as close to its standard configuration as possible with minimal changes.
Their new Studio Displays for example have an A19 Pro and 128GB of NAND. For basically just the firmware. Why? Because that’s the least amount of storage Apple ships with an A19 Pro iPhone, because like the previous Studio Display from 2022 which had an A13 Bionic in there, they probably just shoved an iPhone board in there to handle the logic and I/O.
So in theory, if they update the MacBook Neo next year to an A19 Pro, it should have 12GB of RAM.
Actually it's because the A18 Pro only supports 8GB of RAM. It's packaged on top of the SoC itself using TSMC's InFO-PoP.
That is ultimately what keeps saving Apple from turning into Dell. They want to offer you one model per price point. You'd be hard-pressed to find two iPads, Macs, iPhones with the exact same price. There's always a price difference with Apple, which helps immensely.
The Neo gives you a real keyboard, a bigger screen, and unified UX/software support with your desktop computer.
But are you sure you need two devices? Why not just get a MacBook Air (with the same spec as your proposed Mac mini) along with a USB-C dock accessory to connect charging/keyboard/mouse/video with a single cable? Also don't underestimate the value of having a battery in your "desktop" computer. It's a free UPS.
Buying this for a kid would be a no-brainer for me - especially if it was on a discount (and it's not uncommon for Apple stuff to get 10-20% discount drops at retailers). Even the USB 3.0 is enough to power an audio interface - should be good enough to run some basic DAW, a MIDI keyboard, electronic drums etc. Will probably pick it up for my son at some point to motivate him to learn to type.
Sort of, maybe (not)?
First off there is the "mini", which is basically if you want a small screen / most portability.
After that, the two questions you need to ask are "How much horsepower and storage do you need/want?" (plain vs Air/Pro), and then "How fancy of a screen do you want/need?" (Air vs Pro):
* https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/
* https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-11-m5...
The "mini" is a bit of a 'wild card', but otherwise it's very close to the usual good/better/best trope (plain-iPad/Air/Pro).
Laptops also now fall into the trope of good/better/best with Neo/Air/Pro.
...until the bestest Ultra launches, as GP pointed out?
(Also Air used to be 'the light one', not the standard/middling one on same spectrum.)
We could say a similar thing with the Dell names above, the point is that it's confusing to work out which you need/want when there's so many, not that they don't fall in some sort of order across a line from mediocre to best.
Further, I see older versions of the iPhone on display at the apple store. Does this mean I'm potentially browsing an older version of the iPad?
To be fair, there was some overlap in the Jobs apple store days (when the Santa Rosa processor dropped on the MBP and you didn't know if you were getting the older model unless you asked), but it was never this bad. You had the iPad, then the iPad 2. iPhone 4->4S->5. I don't know how the 'Air' slots in between the regular and the Pro, and I don't know if I'm seeing an older model on display. The whole thing is very confusing.
Horsepower (M5 vs M4), display ("XDR brightness: 1000 nits max full screen, 1600 nits peak (HDR content only"; "ProMotion technology"), option for more storage (2TB).
Hence the two questions I put forward:
* horsepower and storage (A16/M4/M5; ≥1T)
* display
> Dell Pro Essential
At least they have a sense of humour
Pro... Essential?! If the sold hotel rooms they'd offer a Deluxe Economy ??
It looks like a rebrand and further segmentation of the Latitude/Precision segmentation.
While “essential” cleanly maps to “can’t go without” - it doesn’t map to “bare minimum”.
For instance, let’s assume you’re surviving in the wilderness and you need to start a fire. Your fire starting kit is obviously essential, but it could also be included in a “Camper Value Pack” - but those things don’t have anything to do with each other. The kit is essential, and it was obtained in a value pack. This message brought to you by Mr. Obvious.
lol
I really don't think it would fair better than a less costly M4/M5 Pro, and would probably be just an awful experience to use daily.
For all that extra bulk it ought to be extremely robust and repairable, have the best specs possible, and be equipped with the kind of killer cooling system that a thin chassis can't deliver. Then the tradeoffs might make sense.
Like you say most windows laptops have such garbage battery life already that it's not practical to use them unplugged.
So, a simple computer? You can even choose your keyboard, mouse and screens.
It does kind of seem like, outside a few select models, the PC market just gets the laptop part of laptops so so wrong. Bad touchpads, bad screens, no battery life, unpleasant industrial design usually, crammed with crapware and other bullshit. I hand it to the few companies that do try harder to remedy these.
It's massive and heavy and feels less snappy than my personal X1 Nano after all the corporate malware uses up most of the CPU and RAM.
The screen resolution is also shockingly bad (my 13 inch X1 Nano has a higher res than this 16 inch beast).
That being said, it's nice having 64gb of RAM, a fast CPU and an Nvidia card (we build stuff that runs on CUDA). Build times are quick and I can run some of our more demanding test suites without RAM filling up and slowing everything down.
No question there, more RAM and a specifically CUDA capable card make sense. At a big corp gig I did years ago, they issued me this atrocious HP thing they must have bought in bulk. I really tried to be optimistic, since it was just a tool and I was otherwise grateful for the work, and I'm sure the ram and CPU situation was fine, but for my use it only actively detracted from my ability to get things done. It pretty much had to be docked at all times, the screen had one viewing angle, Windows was functionally detrimental for my workflow (frontend web at that time), and the battery life was just sad.
ThinkPads have always seemed a bit better, even their more chonkier versions.
Which is a whole other set of frustrations.
If the Dell product naming team is reading here I have a couple marketing buzzword suggestions: add “elite”, “ultra”, “platinum” or “diamond” to the mix please. Doesn’t “Dell Pro Max Elite Platinum Premium Plus” sound so much more marketable?
I can't speak for the other series you mention, but the XPS series is complete garbage and should be avoided at all costs. Three for three laptops, all in theory well specced, that were all horribly flawed in various ways (WiFi flakiness, constant driver issues, crappy trackpads, mediocre keyboards), does not speak well of that model line.
One thing PC manufacturers seem to prioritise and focus on is tech specs + performance and interface is tacked on (or at least the interface designers departments in their companies aren't leading the design), when by and large most consumers of their machines focus on the interface and whether the CPU is of a certain level is likely secondary to the experience.
Anyway, I keep on going back to apple every 7 years (as that's how long they typically last) simply because I can't handle the choice or the uncertainty, but I'd love to bust out and get a linux using machine next.
The one thing that makes it harder for me to go the way of the think pad is the lack of models on display anywhere in Australia. For a 7 year commitment I really don't want any uncertainty about the feel of the machine. Lenovo do have plenty of ideapads available at retail and some thinkpads, but not the higher tier.
If they want dell, though, they want dell. I'd say give them a budget and have them send you a SKU that fits :P
Apple a decade ago had like 10. Now probably 20-30 Mac configurations, and even those probably share alot of components.
Honestly, I don’t understand how Dell does it.
The Air has 24234 (maybe not precisely, I'm not going to go through all the permutations) = 192 configurations.
I'm not going to try to go through the MBP, Studio, or Pro, but realistically you're looking at a few thousand configurations, not 30.
The MacBook Neo has 2 configuations. The MacBook Pro has several, but the SOC funnels those configurations into a few paths and segments the market. You can't get a "base" MacBook Pro with 128GB of ram or a large SSD. Dell will sell whatever the components allow you to do, usually only limited by the hardware.
I want this much RAM. this CPU. this GPU. this touch screen. this size. What options? None? what if I remove touch? ok good there's 3. and so on.
All that Pro Plus Premium nonsense is just too much marketing gibberish.
Like seriously, having laptop choice is causing you crippling issues? Is other people having a laptop to choose based on preference causing you distress when you go to Apple store?
The problem is not that other manufacturers offer choices – the problem is that for a typical consumer it’s IMPOSSIBLE to really understand which computer in the lineup is appropriate for their needs. It seems most of them are focused on B2B sales.
Of course, if you are a gamer or a nerd like myself, you don’t mind spending a week finding the perfect computer. But that’s an exception.
The Air with more ram costs just a bit less than the pro non-pro. But then maybe you want the pro pro? Or do you need the pro max? Oh, and the ultra will come later but not for laptops. Also it will then be a smaller number M but ultra.
Oh, and the iPad air is, of course, heavier than the pro because "air".
The posters are ignorant of how much they internalized Apple complexity and then uses that to crap on products they don't even know.
A dozen SKUs to describe the same hardware isn't real choice. It's the illusion of choice so a sales rep can offer a "deal" the buyer can't meaningfully compare to other SKUs. They're all machines out of an ODM's catalog with the "manufacture" logo pasted on.
It's like a restaurant that has a 30 page menu, where many of the options are bad, or cooked from stale frozen food from the back of the shelf. Fewer good options are better than numerous poor ones.
Feels that way in auto too.
I go to Tesla, Lucid websites. Breath of fresh air. Clear choices.
Porsche website: WTF. (just one example, there are many)
The user will make a pathetic attempt to open the web browser to do the hotel or flight or event reservation they wanted to do. Or open a document in Word. Everything is extremely slow because of the update running.
When the user has finished her task, she will close down the computer. Windows will cancel the update which was in progress, so that the user can have that same joyful laptop experience next month when she needs to use it again.
Is it any wonder that people prefer doing things on their smart phones, even with the tiny displays and no keyboards?
This is how the majority of consumers experience using a laptop. Then they try a Mac, where you just open the lid and go. If people knew this, then the consumer PC laptop market would die in three months.
These neos are for college and high school students.
Yes!! It's awful. I'm a long time Mac user and my wife needs a Windows laptop because of a specific software. I've tried three times to pick a computer for her, but I always give up after 10min and postpone the task...
Existential crisis?
This kind of nonsense has existed for the entire history of the laptop market.
One of the major reasons Apple is a trillion dollar company is they don't sell dozens of versions of their product. When it was a mystery which Dell laptop was the good one (or insert any other brand) you just picked the size of Apple that you wanted and it would be the good one.
The last Dell laptop I bought I really liked... except for the terrible battery life and the fact that the structure was so poor that if you held it at the corner it would force reboot because the circuit board flexed to much and shorted or unplugged something.
And don't forget significantly shortening the usable battery life.
Windows 11 and the crapware it typically ships with are all very hard on battery life, and sleep support is unreliable so you can often find significant battery drain even when the machine is supposed to be sleeping.
For me it means that if I'm having to use a Windows laptop (and quite literally thank god that hasn't been true for 2 years now) then I've got to have the power supply and cables with me at all times, and I've got to be somewhere I have a realistic chance of plugging in just in case the worst has happened.
I'm obviously not the target market, but this seems to me like the "correct" way to use a PC laptop, and solves all the problems you mentioned.
(I don't game though, which seems like the only reason most people get a PC in the first place.)
They're just very versatile and performant, and they're usually very good value. As a big plus you can run very decent models locally.
Framework are among my current top choices. Hearing good things about the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7a as well, and HP rather surprisingly. But there are a bunch of Ryzen AI Max+ 395 based laptops supporting up to 128GB of unified memory, and it looks like you can hardly go wrong with these.
Running Windows in 2026 is either a mistake, or a sad necessity. Fortunately, unless you need The Right Kind of Excel, you can choose either Linux on a PC (best, IMO), or a Mac.
My sense is that consumers spend most of their tech money on phones, tablets, headphones, watches, services. People who really want a laptop get a Mac or Chromebook. Gamers buy / build PCs, for gaming. Linux geeks buy Linux machines for Linuxing.
I’m not saying no one buys PC laptops at consumer retail. I guess I’m just wondering how big that market is anymore after consumer discretionary spending on tech has been hollowed out by the above list.
(I’m sure most people reading this have purchased a laptop. I think the HN audience is a tech outlier compared to most consumers.)
I have never seen a shopper testing out the wares.
Same for Apple, especially as you can't upgrade them so if you get a 8gig Nano, you have a 8gig Nano, That's a different SKU than a 16gig Nano. And if you get 16gig Nano with 256gig storage, that's a different SKU than a 16gig Nano with 512gig of storage.
Apple has 48 SKUs at their stores, not included adding in color and custom configurations
In the past Apple had constantly sold high-margin products and grabbed 70 to 80% of the whole industry's margins. Now they're coming for the rest !
Ann then try to buy a nice linux compatible laptop. The research period climbs to days. It's ridiculous.
I don't even really mind spending 1500 (well , I do, but if that's what it takes) but 'just buy apple' doesn't work when you want a linux laptop, with apple trying to sabotage running linux on their hardware at every opportunity.
Model identifiers are often unique to specific stores, because they carry laptop configurations made just for them.
Apple, AmazonBasics, and a few others, by contrast, understand the consumer and offer a very limited—though often configurable—selection.
The crazy thing is we often cite an Apple Tax, but in this case, I think they actually have a cheaper product.
> Remember Apple in the late '90s? The tech giant was facing significant struggles until Steve Jobs returned and pinpointed the crux: a lack of innovation and focus. Jobs took bold steps to streamline Apple’s bloated product line. He cut down on the excessive range of choices, simplifying the product lineup to focus on quality and innovation. Jobs famously asked his team, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?" When he didn’t get a simple answer, he decided to reduce the number of Apple products by 70%. This move included cancelling projects like the Newton digital assistant and focusing on just four key products: the iMac, iBook, Power Macintosh G3, and PowerBook G3.
https://strategeos.com/f/how-your-business-can-focus-on-the-...
> Apple pulled off what I thought wasn't possible. The MacBook Neo is poised to set the budget-laptop world on fire as a $599 system that's better-built and sharper than anything else at or below its price.
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-macbook-neo
Similar to the Verge:
> even the cheapest MacBook Neo is good enough to be the go-to Apple laptop for a lot of people. Actually, not just the go-to Apple laptop; the Neo’s hardware simultaneously embarrasses an entire class of affordable (and even far pricier) Windows laptops, as well as just about any Chromebook. And the thing runs on an iPhone chip.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/891741/apple-macbook-neo-a18-p...
> MacBook Neo review: Apple puts every $600 Windows PC to shame
https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/macbook-neo-revie...
This way you'll be able to run more than one "web app" at the same time on your devices.
A few years ago, I had two computers on my desk, my beefy dev with double screens and some good specs for the time and my test machine which was the standard given to every non dev, with a 1024x768 screen.
I couldn't say to the boss that the code was ready until I tested it on that machine, which was sometimes eye opening and why a 2Mb HTML page wasn't a good idea.
If you are making products that depend on people spending money on them, you generally don't have to care about broke people with 15 year old computers.
The PS4 came out in 2013 and has 8GB of RAM. In case you need help counting, that’s 13 years ago.
And that’s an optimized game console with no general purpose operating system and limited multitasking capability.
10 years ago, Samsung phones were shipping with 6GB of RAM. Not many phones even physically last that long.
My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
I was stuck once in a cabin in the woods with an old Android phone. I’m glad it still worked, and that people curating software experiences for it had more empathy — and more business sense — than this comment displays.
Found it, it was from an earnings call: https://appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/22/steve_jobs_on_app...
There’s no irony here. The plain fact exists that 8GB of RAM has been considered not an especially exotic amount lot even on cheap on laptops and desktops for about a decade if not longer.
$450 in 2015 would have bought you a Dell laptop with 6GB of upgradable memory:
https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-inspiron-15-5...
The PS4 launched in 2013 and had 8GB of RAM with an operating system that barely multi-tasks.
The point was that Apple has completely been uninterested in the bottom of the laptop market from 1976 to 2026, and there is therefore no irony in my statement that many businesses including Apple will purposefully ignore customers who do not have enough money to buy their stuff.
From the first comment I responded to:
> “Anyone who can’t afford 8GB isn’t worthy of being my customer,” is literally the opposite of what Steve Jobs always said.
This commenter is wrong. This idea that the bottom of the market is below Apple is almost exactly what the quote from the earnings call said. Jobs effectively said “we only make mid to high end computers, someone else can take the serve the budget customers.”
This is why I pointed out that most people employed making commercial software don’t have to concern themselves with the needs and desires of users on desperately outdated hardware, since those users can’t afford your product anyway.
Of course, at the time Jobs was alive that number for RAM was below 8GB, but that specific number is not specifically relevant other than the fact that I brought it up as a general example of the standard of the day from around 10 years ago.
I brought up a bunch of computing examples from the mid-2010s after Jobs’ death because they are about the oldest reasonable hardware you’d find around today, proof that even buyers of low-end hardware 10+ years ago were regularly getting more than 4GB of RAM.
Apple’s base model MacBook Air in 2017 had 8GB of RAM. The 2015 model started with 4GB configurable to 8GB. The 12” MacBook from 2016 had 8GB RAM.
So you literally have to go back a decade to find anything sold by Apple where getting less than 8GB was an option on the lowest possible configuration, never mind PC manufacturers who generally gave better specs per dollar and included socketed memory.
But hey, Apple shills will shout from the rooftops that a 2026 laptop with 8GB of RAM is a good deal just because it’s $500 if you lie about your status as a student and pinky promise with Apple that you’ll never use the computer for commercial usage.
The Netbooks available in 2010 were junk even by that days standards.
The MacBook Neo which is fast enough, a better display than low end PCs and a good trackpad is not junk. It can do what most low end consumers care about well.
At least in the US, even during the SJ era you could get a “free” iPhone with a contract that anyone could afford - it was the last years phone
The MacBook Neo is getting so much hype for being better than a low end PC, before it’s been put through its paces over the long term.
I had the same initial reaction. Wow, a Mac for $500, how incredible, how disruptive.
But then this morning I decided to look at the actual street pricing of laptops at my local Best Buy.
And here’s the thing: now that Apple has this machine with no haptic trackpad, no backlit keyboard, the worst screen available on any Apple product, very small keyboard, and very basic non-upgradable specs including a generations-old efficiency processor, I think the actual story here is that Apple has changed their mind and is willing to make a product that they would have previously called “junk.”
I’ll list off a couple of systems that I would absolutely buy as better machines over the MacBook Neo:
HP OmniBook X Flip, 16” 2K touch screen, Intel Core Ultra 5 226V, 16GB memory, 512GB storage, $699.
For the same price as the top model Neo you get double the RAM, a bigger and probably better screen, which is convertible and touch enabled. It is not some kind of bargain basement SKU, either, a legitimately well-reviewed laptop.
Lenovo IdeaLad Slim 3x, 15.3” 2K touchscreen, Snapdragon X1, 16GB memory, 256GB storage. $549
Right there in the pricing sweet spot you get more memory and basically all the benefits of an ARM architecture in another laptop that is well-regarded. You also get a number pad on the keyboard.
All these laptops have been getting well over 4.5 star reviews, like this one:
> This little guy has been amazing this semester plenty of power while being light and getting good battery life the quick charging feature is particularly impressive from almost dead to full in around half an hour all and all this laptop has met or exceeded all of my school life needs
Finally, this is probably my choice if I was in this segment:
Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 14” 2k touch screen Ryzen AI 340, 16GB memory, 512GB SSD, $679.99.
Another great example of a laptop that is costing you less than the Neo’s top model before education discount, has better specs, and is again a legitimately good model of laptop solidly in the mid-range of the lineup, not a bargain basement SKU. I would actually be surprised if the Neo kept up with this particular model in terms of build quality, keyboard, etc.
The Neo’s main advantage is that it’s got a chassis made of aluminum, and that’s really its only differentiator. And I’d say that’s an overrated differentiator (e.g., plastic is lighter and isn’t automatically weaker/worse for long-term ownership).
The Lenovo Yoga has an OLED screen, I am somewhat doubtful the average person would find it worse than the screen on the Neo.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_a18_pro-vs-a...
The Ryzen AI 340 isn't a bad match against the A18 Pro. It's actually ahead of the A18 Pro on multicore performance, and only 20% behind on single core benchmarks, not enough for anyone to notice. Yeah, it's true you're losing a lot of integrated GPU performance. Integrated GPUs do need more RAM, though, and I doubt the Neo is going to be handle a lot in the realm of "high school kids who want to game on the side" between that and the software compatibility situation.
$450 in 2015 would have bought you a Dell laptop with 6GB of upgradable memory:
https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-inspiron-15-5...
My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
And they turn into "free" with IAPs.
Rather not.
It's probably a bit better than when Unity was new. I do remember the first x-com remake in 2012 was lasting longer on battery than $random_unity_indie.
I don’t think I would want to work in that environment anymore.
I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks.
Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!".
In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper.
A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.
This line of thought is ridiculous Ludditism. Artists and craftsmen deserve to work with SOTA tools, you can only benefit from having better more accessible more performant tools.
If that’s your goal this machine is still too powerful. Web apps generally care about single thread performance. The machine has a single thread performance that exceeds any and all Intel/AMD processors, according to Geekbench (A18 Pro: 3445; Ryzen 9 9950X: 3385). My own test for ensuring my web app performs well involves a machine less than half as fast, and my web app runs with all assertions turned on.
Not true at all: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
M3 Ultra being fastest in single core than M4 or A19 Pro doesn't make any sense.
Those chart also suggest that M3->M4 was a _regression_ in performance, which, is... an interesting conclusion.
Especially not when a certified macbook air refurb straight from Apple isn't that much more if you're not able to get the $500 EDU pricing on the Neo. $850 gets you a 16GB RAM / 512GB M4 Air, which is significantly better than the $700 Neo in every way.
A few years ago, my parents asked me for a laptop for my sisters, for university use. We targeted this price range. It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage. And I'm not speaking about the other specs like display or build quality. We ended up buying second-hand M1 and M2 macbook airs, and both I and my sisters are very happy about it.
(also, as the "tech support guy" of the family, I'm oh my so happy about them not running windows)
> It's shocking but pretty much all laptops from Dell, HP, etc come with some form of eMMC storage.
I just went to Dell's website and picked a random $400 laptop and it had an NVME SSD. The $650 Dell 14 Essential also is NVME. Both of which are M.2 so easily upgraded, replaced, or have data recovery done on them. The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
That's sequential, not what you want for swap, but already a good start. I agree that it's not impressive, but already leagues ahead of a SATA SSD. And for swapping a 8GB machine it's more than enough (when the swap pattern is sequential though): you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive.
> The only eMMC options I'm seeing are the $300 Chromebooks? Which is no where close to "pretty much all laptops." In fact it'd be "pretty much none of the laptops"
Then it's good the situation improved, genuinely! Less e-waste being on the store shelves. Pretty sure windows is nigh unusable on eMMC. And yes, those were sold alongside chromebooks, but at a markup of a "real computer" despite having roughly the same internals.
Another thing that could impact, though, is availability in different markets. I am in France, and the offerings are perhaps worse than in the US? (quite likely, in fact). Add to that the usual price markup where US companies tend to do, at best, 1 USD = 1 EUR, and we get worse machines for the equivalent price range.
As a user a 3 second hang is unusable. Also, critically, swap consumes the life of the drive. Since the Neo's isn't user-replaceable, a 3-5 year lifespan before death is actually a non-trivial compromise, although time will tell on that one I suppose.
iPhone and iPad does not have a hardware indicator light
People who are truly worried about cameras will cover it regardless of indicator.
Treat every gun as if it's loaded, and every camera as if it's filming.
This is a "nothing-up-my-sleeves" implementation, it's not really possible to hide anything weird in the complexity. Apple clearly didn't just want a light that's always on when the camera is on, they wanted an implementation where they can point to it and clearly prove that the light is always on if the camera is on.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09272 https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c... https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/19/on-apple-exclav...
We've seen a few examples on HN lately (Coruna iOS Exploit Kit) of nation state level exploits in the hands of financially motivated organizations. I'm not free of bias here but the industry is quickly headed towards a reckoning in terms of security over the next few years.
I have no way of interrogating some GPU firmware.
State-level actors have been know to fiddle with firmware, specifically in the past for hard drives:
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13534...
* https://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/
I could see how cameras and microphones could be enticing targets.
I used to know a guy, about 15 years ago, who made his money exclusively through buying up laptops and hacking the tally lamp code (to stop it activating) one-by-one and selling the code directly to 3LAs. It was really good money.
But it's not like hardware indicators are foolprof, even apple has suffered hardware based circunvent via firmware: https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/18/researchers-find-...
I guess for Neos it's back to the good old postit.
Its portable. It has a great keyboard, screen, and battery life. No fans or overheating. No issues with the operating system or installing software I need.
I can even use it for some lighter software development directly, and for everything else I can ssh back to a beefier machine.
If I weren't already so happy with this macbook air, I would be ecstatic for the neo.
Hadn't purchased a laptop new since college scholarship decades ago. This machine continues to make an immediate impression. The entire thing is thinner than just the bottom of my college CoreDuo. It also lasts 8x longer, on battery.
I just use mine as a tertiary machine (i.e. bedtime reading/podcast), but if you ever want to run the machine hard long-term, you can use 1mm thermal pads between the heatsink and bottom of external case (and then it'll never throttle).
That will spread the heat to the battery and degrade it much faster.
This removes heat from the internal compartments (which logic board heat sink and battery co-habitate [0]) by transferring it outside via heat conduction through the case. There is no detectible heat increase (to touch) — consider the heat masses relative sizes (processor v. entire metal case).
[0] See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXY9tCBpf48&t=188> — thermal pad placement goes between four central screws (above processor)
As a thought experiment: how would ejecting heat from the inside increase its temperature?
Coming to terms with two uncomfortable truths: I'm a hoarder, and an unapologetically incorrigible Apple fanboi.
I would argue the opposite: while Apple hardware is generally excellent, it is the software that leaves to be desired. Apple has also been consistently pushing the industry in a dangerous direction (walled gardens with app stores, excessive power over developers and users). MacOS is also very behind Linux these days in terms of app compatibility (especially games).
I won't be buying a Neo before a compatible Linux distro is confirmed. If the stock OS can't be replaced for one reason or another, it's dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
Like sure it’s DOA to you, but in what world does that really matter when it’s going to sell so well?
Personally I agree with the parent's comment. I used to buy Macs, but nowadays Apple alienates me. I'm one of the millions that don't buy a Mac because the hardware is gimped by arbitrary software limitations. Unless Apple changes that stance, I'm a lost customer. Cupertino has the market share statistics, they know where to find me.
Especially seeing that with the Apple now selling the 13 inch Neo and it decided to sell a larger Air instead of a small one, I don’t think it sold that well.
I have to imagine that a big part of it is the company can plan and act as a single unit. The teams building the CPU, the computers which house that CPU, and the operating system and software that'll run on those computers are all working together, and can plan new features which cut across those boundaries. Other ARM CPU/system manufacturers don't have that advantage.
Can I update video drivers in Linux without seeing a console? OS X updates them automatically where it's a non-issue.
I own a steam deck and love it, but please, let’s temper the enthusiasm with realism.
Windows has more drivers for more things, but if Linux has drivers (e.g. you buy a Laptop with Linux support) then driver management is massively easier.
I spent god knows how many hours getting the windows drivers for my last self built gaming PC working. Linux I just installed and was done. In reality the Windows experience was also a lot worse than having to drop to the console occasionally. It definitely required more in depth knowledge, even if everything was UI driven...
Linux is significantly easier than it was 20 years ago but still not as easy in general.
In linux it tends to be a nonissue.
Graphics drivers moved out of kernel space in Windows Vista.
Oh and don't forget to watch the ads.
I would argue that ecosystem integration is the only primary consideration that you need to use at the top/first-culling-step of the flowchart to either include or discount Apple products in any purchasing decision. Anything else is secondary, and has workarounds.
> UI has regressed
Honestly, I love the UI of MacOS 9.2.2 the most. But I don’t have a Time Machine or Elon Musk levels of wealth to chart a different course.
And sure, some UI decisions of late have been questionable. That is always the case with non-niche products that don’t have highly focused and largely conforming users. Apple moved out of that category back in the early 2000s, and it is forced to make the same UI tradeoffs that Microsoft makes.
I actually don’t mind the modern UI, and aside from a few warts I think they’re going in a very user-friendly direction even if power users feel slighted and abandoned.
However, there's too many bundled apps. Just wrote about this last week: https://medium.com/@hbbio/let-me-uninstall-spotlight-1fe64a3...
I would argue the opposite. Shared clipboard with my iPhone is a killer feature (i copy a lot of OTP tokens) and I envy you in the US that can remote access the iPhone (it is currently blocked in the EU, but hopefully will come eventually). Also mulit-monitor setup has become way better (I used to use 3rd party tools to restore window and monitor positions).
If there are reasons its not good enough, since it's open source you should be able to help fix them (excepting iOS issues, since those are mostly just apple locking down the OS too hard for various things to work).
We're on hacker news, we should all want something we can hack on. Shared clipboard between two devices with proprietary OSs we can't hack on is a great feature for the masses, but not us.
> since it's open source you should be able to help fix them
And I can also grow my own tomatoes and cucumbers in my back yard, but I still prefer to buy them from a supermarket.
For the average consumer looking for a $599 MacBook Neo, Mac is the better choice for apps they actually use.
Linux can be used for gaming with a lot of titles, but both Mac and Linux are too far behind Windows or consoles to be considered as gaming machines.
*but it’s a bit slow because you also have to emulate Vulkan using Metal
That's absolutely not true, the vast majority of Windows games now run flawlessly on Linux via Proton. This is especially true for the kind of games you can expect to run on such modest hardware, i.e. not AAA games with kernel-level anticheat.
Linux is not even remotely considerable as an option for the average consumer, which is fine and fully intentional with the audience and goals Linux distros serve.
You could even consider this a strong positive, because a Linux distro geared towards average consumers would probably be an analog to Samsung's take on Android. What makes your experience with Linux good is that it isn't catering towards a wider audience.
Linux has twice the number of active Steam users as Mac, with probably very nearly all of them using Proton to some degree: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Personally, I've actually had noticeably better compatibility on Linux with older games, compared to Windows. And every single one I've been interested in for the past several years works flawlessly on it. (I don't enjoy most AAA games, so my sample is definitely skewed, but it's a fairly common result)
Regarding gaming I disagree: my gaming needs (using a Mac for everything else) are fully satisfied by an additional steam deck, a "console" running linux. Of the top of my head I know only of one game I would like to run it on the steam deck but can't.
That is how I had interpreted "And certainly not software quality" - that the PC not only competes but crushes the Mac.
As one example of many, Night Light (Windows' version of adjusting your screen to be warmer at night) has been broken for me, for 5+ years. I mean literally it just never works on its own. The only way to kick it into working is toggling HDR on and then off, every single time I wake it up.
I would guess it's just my configuration but I built a second PC from totally new parts, and got a different monitor, and installed Windows 11 instead of 10, and it's still broken.
Nothing's perfect but Mac seems good at the basics of running quickly without crashes.
I disagree that the software leaves to be desired
Just an example, I'll take Apple's Office suite (Pages, etc.) over MS Office any day - or LibreOffice.
Macs have very strong advantages but the software, the OS is absolutely infuriating. There's so many annoyances over regular use. You can remedy some of them with third party software (which should have been just system settings), but not all, and by the way some of these cost money for stupidly basic settings.
Finally and probably most painful, is Apple's constant push to update your software stack and things just stop working, and they expect you to keep chasing their decisions. You can't really build anything for Apple that's meant to last. It's exhausting. Meanwhile Windows can run programs from 30 years ago and Linux has extremely efficient, beautifully implemented software from all eras probably already installed in your Distro.
This gets less and less true when you start pluging peripherals and wanting to change the default behavior or use certain apps. But then they're not the target of the Neo.
The only GUI I use on Mac is browser, so I never felt anything - maybe the only thing that I don't deal with on linux is the weird requirement of xcode, which is mostly a chore that you do once. Still can't beat the hardware.
Modern linux software won't run for sure, unless it is written with osx in mind and comes with plenty of workarounds.
You mean confirmed by Apple? I think that seems unlikely
Both Apple and Microsoft have been pushing the industry into directions we aren't happy with. But MacOS is still fantastic and in this laptop will work extremely well.
People also aren't buying this laptop to play any games that require decent power.
Hopefully this product gives other companies the kick in the pants they need to improve their hardware.
Though they still haven’t been able to complete that well against the Air and Pro, so seems unlikely they will adapt well to this either.
I think that's ended up with a bit of a mess.
Apple and specifically MacOS is significantly worse than it has ever been, but again, still far better than the alternatives.
I've been of the firm opinion for a very long time that Macbook's are the best productivity laptops and now even more so once Apple moved from Intel to their own M chips. Their entry level Macbook before the Neo you could buy and it would be a laptop that would see you for many many years.
I hope they fixed the ultra brittle screens of their Macbook lineup. I bought a MacBook Air M1 a few years ago and I've been royally pissed off when, after 13 months (one month out of warrant in my case/country) the "bendgate" hit me: the screen died overnight, without any reason (was fine the day before, woke up: screen dead. MacBook Air didn't move). Many people had the same happen to them and they called this the "bendgate" (except there was no "bend").
This prevented me from buying a MacBook M2, M3, M4 and now M5.
Well... Unless I can be convinced that this time the screen isn't going to die overnight.
Saddest thing of them all: I'm the kind of person to only ever use the laptop at home on my lap and never ever put it in a backpack (I don't even own a backpack).
Ofc a huge chunk of that is in companies but I'm fairly sure there are at least two windows 11 machines per one mac in consumer segment as well.
Now introduce a choice… and things might change.
With the vast majority of software nowadays living in the browser, your OS matters less and less, especially for a business that buys machines for its employees.
At this point I would not be surprised if MS started to subvent the PC manufacturers to favour Windows over Linux if that ever comes to that.
I've always assumed this has been happening since the 90s.
I'm sure there are readers with actual insight here :)
Microsoft is structurally incapable of making Windows better. Intel is intrinsically incapable of making x86 better (enough to matter). x86 hardware manufacturers are in a price race to the bottom, and there's no way around that.
Apple doesn't have any of those problems. Instead, more and more young people can afford and aspire to get a Mac. They want to buy software that works on the mac, and they'll want to write software for the Mac. The network effect compounds.
x86 OEMs are a race to the bottom because that's how the PC market has been for eons as PCs are a tool, not a status symbol, but how has x86 not 'gotten better'? It's significantly more battery friendly than it has ever been by a long margin, matching the M-series.
In the broader B2B sense, Apple lost pole-position to Nvidia. They're not the ecosystem kingmaker they once were, and their ARM architecture is failing to subsume demand for their competitors. The "Private Compute" Mac-based servers are going terribly according to reports, and their contribution to the chip shortage has even driven them to collaborate with Intel Foundry Services: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/28/intel-rumored-to-supply...
I can’t stand it and every update makes it worse.
Been running popos abs everything I can and it’s petty nice.
Installed it on a new LG Gram and everything works including fingerprint reader. Is my favorite laptop and my old Mac sits gathering dust,
macOS has plenty of it's own OS adverts.
It's a useless metric.
MacOS's ads whilst I still detest, is a one-off prompt. Window's ads can sometimes only be removed with registry key configs OR deployment of management policies...
I’m a local account user. I don’t use any of the above.
And if you have the notch this is very far from a theoretical problem.
If I delete my Dropbox icon out of the menu bar how am I supposed to know that it's running, click on it to see its status, quit the program, etc.
Sure, I could also uninstall all the programs I use but that does seem to defeat the purpose of having the computer.
We’re talking about a limited resource (a few inches of screen real estate at the top of the screen) that tons of app developers feel entitled to occupy. Now we could have some kind of system whereby excess icons get dumped into a … menu, but that defeats the entire purpose since they’re no longer on the screen all the time!
There are plenty of apps out there which do not feel entitled to a slice of this precious screen real estate. I think it’s worth supporting them!
This is just not true. The purpose is not necessarily to have the icon on the screen all the time. If the menu doesn't exist, the buttons don't exist either, and plenty of applications are built assuming that you have access to their bar icons while they're running.
If the icon is missing there is _literally_ no other way to use the relevant functionality. If the icon is hidden in a menu, you can use the functionality, it's just an extra click.
Why do people keep saying this? I have been on M1 Air on Asahi for the last 4 weeks, getting 8-10 hours daily. I see my wattage consumption on screen at all times, it varies between 2.5-3W when scrolling web and around 5W when actively working with apps. I see no difference between macOS and Linux! The only difference is the s2idle consumption but personally I don't care, besides all other modern Linux laptops have same exact issue, often worse.
On my Intel T14s 4th Gen I was getting maybe 5 hours, and that's already with heavily optimized setup!
I agree, they are lazy.
Not to mention the amazing amount of services running in the background, at least 80% of which I haven't needed in the 6.5 years I have my Mac, but can't stop / remove / disable.
My Linux laptop is supposedly 40% weaker than my desktop Mac, so the online sheets say at least. It runs my work's integration test suite 15% faster.
A lot of us have given Macs a very honest chance. It's okay and it's very workable, that much is a fact -- but if one is willing to pimp their machine and OS -- nowadays made even easier by LLMs -- then the experience and everyday ergonomics and actual dev-enhancing abilities quickly outpace a Mac.
And I wish that wasn't true because I wasn't looking forward to changing my main machine. But the annoyances and slowness and closeness just compound until they start literally reducing your everyday productivity.
And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time? Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar.
> And really, who cares if it had 10,000 background services if 9,999 are idle at any given time?
Normally I don't. I have an okay idea on how modern OS-es work; temporary swaps, compressing RAM for rarely used background processes etc. -- they work amazing, macOS included.
I suppose my problem is more the services that _do_ interfere, like the one that feels it has to scan every CLI command I launch, to the point that it became noticeable, especially side by side with the "weaker" Linux laptop and hell, even with a VM-ed Linux inside my gaming PC as well.
So OK, I accept the correction: does not much matter how many are they in general. Those that interfere though, and I can't stop them -- this is where I drew the line and gradually started my migration away from macOS.
And this:
> Run `ps auxwww` on a Linux box sometime and it’ll look similar
...is objectively false. I just tried it; even my home server that's doing plenty of stuff I get 244 items. On the Mac I am writing this? 840.
Maybe the laptop with KDE will have a touch more than 244, but I doubt they'd be 840.
Call me a purist, I like to know what my background services are doing, though I'll admit I care less and less with age.
I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I genuinely don’t know what you mean here. Macs have built-in virtualization and containerization. Docker and podman etc are wrappers around it, but the internals are built in.
Did you mean they have to emulate x86 code if you download an x86 image instead of a native one?
OrbStack bridges a good chunk of the Linux performance gap however. I was using Colima before and then the Linux laptop was running the integration test suite ~60% faster. OrbStack reduced that to 15%.
If you asked me to use a Windows machine I would be frustrated from day one and would want my Mac back, but everyone else where I work (except one) uses Windoes every day, and I don't know how they do it.
As far as needs, I haven't been a serious dev for a long time (ask my employees who won't let me near any code), so containerization is a non issue I could care less about for myself, but (for personal use) there are apps on Mac that work for me that don't run on Windows, and definitely don't run on Linux.
There are probably reasonably "objective" measures that can be used to rank OS's agains each other, like security or bugs, but even some measures that sound objective may be based on data but their value is subjective. The OS wars are old, and maybe I'm old too, but they're getting tired (unless we want to discuss how the AmigaOS was better than any other OS at the time but with one fatal flaw.)
Use Macports. Installs itself properly out of the way in /opt. Works with the Apple frameworks (eg Python), allows multiple versions of software to be installed in parallel (using port select).
> Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards.
Yes, you need some free 3rd party apps for affordances that should be built in. Hardly a deal breaker.
Rectangle allows you to set the hotkeys for window snapping and sizing for example.
As for scroll directions, yes, it's different to Windows, but it's the same on the Mac and iPhone. Didn't take very long to adjust.
Agreed that the new Settings app is a PITA and obviously inherited from iOS and sucks, but how often are you accessing Settings?
I believe this is the whole reason this device exists. Apple saw Windows 11 fiasco and decided to push MacOS to low-end computer market.
I really, really hope Apple fixes liquid glAss with macOS 27, especially now that Alan Dye left.
My first laptop was a decommissioned pos office dell ultrabook. By every metrics it would've been the worst option to choose, but since it had replaceable memory I was able to push it to 16 gigs and get through my computer science degree and many side projects. Computational speed was adequate for me, I ran Linux on it. It had an Intel U series 6th gen (12th gen was latest then) i5, an NVMe ssd and was always responsive.
If I were a student in this day, and all I could find were these laptops this is what I would think. 1 they're out of budget for most students in developing countries. 2 I will most likely out grow 8 GB ram faster than my laptops CPU performance. 3 I am limited to learning with what can run on apple silicon(most Linux distros excluding asahi). Finally I end up paying basically 50-60% of the cost of a decent machine and replaced it with a disposable one.
Maybe this machine is perfect for a specific set of users, students with higher income households or degrees which need better a better quality display.
I still advise every computing student I meet to get a under $200 old used laptop that has expandable memory and atleast an NVMe ssd. That way they can maximise their time learning and experimenting. Anything that needs more complex hardware can always be offloaded into your institutes machines. Once you're settled a bit and have a decent amount of cash to burn go ahead and buy whatever maxed out MacBook your heart desires.
The distinction is a lot of (most?) Apple products are _expensive_ for middle class buyers, while this represents good value.
If it's well designed and robust, it might be a great machine to buy second hand in 3-5 years.
I'm very keen to buy a 50€ macbook Neo in 10 years.
A couple years ago I would have agreed with you. Today I'm not sure how reasonable it is to try to future-proof via expandable RAM. Imagine a hypothetical point a few years in the future where RAM factories have ramped up production and manufacturers are pumping out laptops with 512 GB RAM to enable running local LLM. You couldn't expand a current laptop to have enough RAM if you wanted to, so I'm not sure how reasonable it is to try to prepare for that future.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/12/macbook-neo-six-minute-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k7Lv7f-5CQ
Non-expandable is a fair criticism. I think 8GB would be a bit constraining for a CS student but will be fine for many others.
I would argue that things have changed significantly since then.
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
So it was a failure in implementation.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.
Apple was not a bastion of quality in the 90's. They couldn't modernize the Mac OS, and that continued with little more than window dressing over what was released in the 80's. The Mac line up was a horrible mess of barely different models that needed a Ph.D to figure out what was different. The company was bleeding money and seriously close to bankruptcy.
The Apple of the mid 90's wishes it could release something like Tahoe.
OS 8 was a platinum theme over System 7. Which was a slightly better System 6, which wasn't significantly different than System 4.
System 7 was good for the time, OS 8 and 9 were not, and Apples inability to improve the OS were really starting to show. Windows 95 was a more stable OS than OS 8. Tahoe is better.
Not to mention that the OS itself was still mostly 68K emulated code even on PPC Macs and holding the mouse down over the menu caused all apps to stop running.
Suddenly you could have a Unix, with pretty much the same CLI as Linux but without all the supported hardware/driver issues. Laptop sleep in particular was pretty finicky.
If MacOS didn't pick a Unix/BSD base, I'm pretty sure all the tech companies running Mac would be on Linux.
FoxTrot comic from 2002:
* https://archive.is/https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/...
<cough> xattr...
The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.
In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).
Especially not very large ones like in a laptop.
Didn't even last a month.
No? Apple has been delivering way cheaper laptops ever since M1, this one is just even cheaper. I thought PC execs were asleep at the wheel but not this bad.
I wouldn’t "way cheaper".
A baseline Neo with 256GB SSD is $599 vs the first M1 MacBook Air with 256GB SSD was $999 ($1,251.09 in 2026 dollars)
A Neo with 512GB SSD is $699 vs the M1 MacBook Air with 512GB SSD was $1249--that's $1,568.38 in 2026 dollars.
So this is a big deal; the Neo is the first Apple Silicon MacBook where the starting price is less than $999.
> so I guess they started to have trouble sourcing components and came up with the Neo as their replacement.
There’s no indication Apple had any issues with getting components; they’re have problems with sourcing more expensive components.
Apple tends to be very deliberate with products; this isn’t a replacement for something else.
In fact, there was an article stating unlike some other laptop manufacturers, Apple’s prices aren’t expected to rise because their buying power and having contracts in place [1].
A low-cost MacBook using an iPhone process has been rumored for at least a year.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/10/apple-holds-edge-laptop...
They waited until they could do it in alignment with Apple’s brand, going back to Steve Jobs saying during the netbook hysteria: “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk. [1]”
And to their credit the Mac Neo is not a piece of junk.
[1]: https:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/blogs/21bits-read-m...
I took advantage of this after the fact. I bought a pristine open box M1 from VIPoutlet (Walmart's closeout brand, as I understand it) on Walmart last month for ~$350 as a backup computer.[1] The Neo reinforced the wisdom of my purchase, as M1 has slightly better specs for less money.
[1] If the M4 Pro MacBook I am typing this on needs repair, I will use the M1 with a bootable clone of the M4's drive made with SuperDuper!.
Yes, Apple has offered discounted prices by continuing to sell older models or offer straight discount sales via third party retailers. But I expect that will continue here too. This is $599 MSRP at Apple but will probably be $499 via the usual retailers by the end of 2026.
That's a bit different than continuing to sell a 5-year-old model at a discount.
https://youtu.be/d-VOt9559Gk?si=tYlDstnaxtQWoJ88
He opens 50+ apps at once while working in Final Cut and Lightroom. Obviously anyone doing those full time would benefit from more resources but I think this is going to be enough for a big chunk of the population, and will be more appealing than the windows alternatives.
I can open even 500 apps on any laptop. This is what swap for. But with only 8GB you are getting into the swap territory very fast because you need almost half of it for the OS and video memory.
As a glorified terminal? Sure.
> Did you even bother to watch the video for responsiveness before commenting?
I did, now what?
> Also it was a couple years after the transition to arm t
Hello, we are talking about Neo with the same 8GB.
What in the video is remotely glorified terminal like? What terminal are you using that gives you local 4K editing capabilities and the ability to run locally run Lightroom for 50MP files?
And yes nowadays your terminal is capable of rendering HTML5 pages and encoding MPEG.
EDIT: to give you an improper analogy:
You are pointing at a sport bike and say "this is very good vehicle because it is very fast".
Is it fast? Sure. Does it allows to move 1 kilogram of cargo very fast? Surely. Does it allows to move 1 tonne of cargo very fast? Hell no. You need a 1 thousand trips to move 1 kilogram each time or you need a cargo truck - totally different vehicle.
This laptop is nowhere near the "moving cargo" territory despite being hyped as such.
And yes you can encode an mpeg from your console. Don’t be facetious, because that’s NOT what is shown in the video. They show editing the video and photos interactively with live views of the changes taking place. Can you do that in your terminal?
Anyway, enjoy raging about the product with your arbitrary goalpost for what constitutes being usable. It seems like that’s really what you want to do rather than talk seriously about the product.
But again you are again comparing a single task in a demo (when was the last time someone bashed pre-release Apple products?), totally ignoring what 5 years ago very similar M1 with 8GB showed where this configuration did work - and where it did not. But you don't need common sense, you need to argue in the favour of your beloved company?
> Again, in the video (that you clearly didn’t watch)
Except I did but you need to claim what I didn't, right?
And if Time Machine kicks in, there goes any form of performance since Apple can't seem to figure out what a 'background task' is.
The additional 5K monitor doesn't help. macOS WindowServer is a pile.
But I think a lot is also down to things like the dispatch library and scheduler being able to work together and being able to make assumptions about the hardware to have a smoother experience under pressure.
So do Windows and Linux
It comes down to Microsoft not doubling down on "let's make Windows as annoying as possible" (with ads, with telemetry that can't be turned off).
A decade ago, but still relevant: https://beneinstein.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-ap...
Seiko could make Grand Seiko...
600 might seem budget, but it's out of budget for most people. And my guess is PC manufacturers will retaliate against this by cutting prices just a little to drop under that 600 price point for mid range ryzens, with more ram and space.
Any family members I've helped shop for computers only care about how much space it has, how cheap it is, and will it struggle to run things like the last one. As it sits the MacBook is more money for less gigabytes
Out of budget for my parents but I'll pay the difference myself. It's just painful to see them use their pile of shit $300 laptop that can barely open a text editor, sounds like a jet engine and has about 45 minutes of battery life.
The only haptic feedback they get if the entire fucking thing creaking as soon as you lightly touch it.
They've been through at least 5 of them since I bought my 2015 mbp, which is still working fine in every aspects
You need to spend a ridiculous amount of time on research because the producer itself is selling very different product (very different quality) from a year to another.
I wish a "brand" would be consistant but it's not 99% of the time.
Most of the support questions I field from my folks and in-laws are actually phone things these days. 90% of what I have to deal with is "this thing came up on my phone during the week and I clicked on it, am I hacked? No I don't remember what it said"
At least the build-in remote desktop on Macs makes it very easy to provide help. I don't know if Windows has something similar build in.
Phones are more of a problem as I can't have a look at their screen remotely.
The monitor is awful. Like, the horrible way it changes color and brightness depending on exact viewing angle is sickening; I am shocked California hasn't declared it illegal. It feels cheap, keyboard is cheap, who knows what the battery life is.
If the Apple Neo were available then, and he had asked what to buy, I would have instantly told him to get one.
If you ask me, for a comparable price range, the ThinkPad still is a much better pick than the MacBook Neo: that thing has no IO and not even enough RAM for nowadays light web browsing.
I'd expect it to be. In fact, I'd demand it.
(I'm ignoring the "old model, found cheaply" bit because that's entirely irrelevant. You can find old Macs on sale around, too, but that doesn't mean you can reasonably compare them to the MSRP of a brand new device.)
[0]https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/c/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/
[1]https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/say-hello-to-macbook-...
No, I'm not: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
And I still stand behind the fact that, for that price, you've got a very competent device that is better specced for light use and friendlier for mom and pop (look, it has a HDMI, you can straight up connect it to the telly! Look, it has USB A ports, so that old camera, hard drive with the family pictures, old weird ergo mouse just works out of the box !).
But for giggles, let’s look at the old PC.
Despite being heavier, wider, taller, thicker, slower, dimmer, lower resolution, hotter, older, and having less battery life, it is, indeed, $20 cheaper.
Put another way, there’s no way on earth I’d pick that over a MacBook Neo to save $20 at the cost of having a worse laptop in almost every way.
TBH, if I imagined I was the median casual user, I would also take the $20 marginal cost for the Neo. "Worse in almost every way" just depends on how you weight each individual parameter, which for me, is quite atypical.
Of course, old Macs should factor into that too. Also, it's a different story if I do want something brand new.
If we want to compare new vs used, then how much would you have to spend to buy a brand new PC laptop as powerful as last year’s MacBook Pro?
You can literally open up every app (50+) on it and simultaneously edit 4k video without issues. It handles all of the pro apps really well. So it objectively can handle light web browsing just fine.
And to think I'd explicitly mentioned to him that Apple would probably be releasing the kind of cheap beautiful laptop he was looking for in a month :(
Had this existed when they were shopping, I would've just asked what color they wanted it in, ordered it for them, and been done with it.
[0] OTOH, that got me out of all future tech support duties. "Hey, why can't I connect our new printer to it?" "I'm not sure. Does that Best Buy expert still work there? He might have some suggestions." (Phrased more politely IRL because I'm not a monster, but the intent was there.)
Tough love works.
He loves his 24" iMac, it just works and I can fix things remotely if necessary (it hasn't been).
I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a 32-bit CPU in an era were 64 bits were already becoming standard - the sum of which amounted to a barely usable imitation of a real Windows machine and as a result most of these became garage sale fodder pretty quickly.
Once i got Debian, fluxbox and emacs on it i was able to do java development (with ant and the j2me toolkit).
It was no big issue at all really, once you got linux on it.
I must say, however: the web was much lighter back in the day and electron was still to be conceived. That’s very relevant.
edit: also on a tangent, Apple's pricing has become weird. It actually feels like it's a really good bang got the buck. Regular iPads are under 400 now, and they're just better than the competition. MacBook Pro is about the same price as it ever was, but it's just so much better than it was etc.
I work professionally on a Macbook Air 16GB now and I have quite a few docker images and services running bare metal, + browser, vscode etc. on top. Not a problem until I start loading up some LLMs.
The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.
If anything, I'm much more bound by the CPU limitations and the eco-cores than the memory.
On a PC, I wouldn't think about less than 32GB for a dev pc.
If I had a fulltime gig programming C, I'd even say I could work on this A14 8GB device. Why not? It's as powerful as a 10 year old powerful machine; probably. Or in that ballpark.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255765423?sortBy=rank
Why on Earth do I need a 32 GB PC?!?
Turbo C also worked just fine with 640 KB in MS-DOS, but then again MS-DOS wasn't full of Electron crap.
I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).
Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.
Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.
But nice for Apple. Millions of replacement on the Neo 16GB release next year I guess.
I imagine the next version will have the A19 Pro chip - which has 12 GB of RAM.
However, I think that two will bring sour tastes to people’s metaphorical mouths much more than expected: the RAM and drive space.
There should have been a 16Gb option. Nosebleed the price if you have to, or include a SODIMM slot if needed, but the option should have been there to expand the memory to 16Gb either on spec or at a later date. Because each version of MacOS gets weightier and more demanding of hardware - Windows isn’t the only resource hog out there - and at 8Gb the pain will begin to be felt long before the 7-year usability cycle comes to an end.
There should have been a 1Tb option. Not because people use that much drive space - many don’t - but because 1Tb is the level which provides enough cells in parallel to properly saturate the PCIe bus, ensuring maximum performance. Not always at that 1Tb level, and not on every machine. But typically 1Tb or above, rather than below. Even if it required a hairdryer to unstick the original due to the constrained space not permitting a lock-down screw, the drive should have been either replaceable or with the size as (again) a nosebleed-price option at provisioning.
Because while I see every other compromise as acceptable, it is those two which make me hesitate on getting this as a long-term secondary/casual system.
Other than that, this is a laptop which can only goose Apple’s further adoption among students and casual users.
Why do you think the cheapest MacBook available should be one that costs more to support power users. Apple has the MacBook Air for those users.
Why? I am a power user, and if I didn’t already have a copious stable of second-hand machines (a side effect of also being in the hardware end of IT), I would gladly pick one of these machines up as a “vacation/personal device”.
I mean, as a power user I am going to need high specs… for my work.
In my off time and on my vacation time, all I need is something that can connect to the Internet, let me do basic eMail and web surfing, and lets me connect remotely to my iron back in my office to keep a light touch on things.
And in that regard, this machine is perfect.
My issue with the device is in term of long-term ownership, where 8Gb RAM and 512Gb of storage isn’t going to get me all the way out to 7-8 years of usage in a comfortable manner. Even with light duties, imma gonna see the seams stretch uncomfortably so somewhere in the 4-6 year stage.
I’m curious to see this machine in person, but I’d bet the an iPad is still the best large device in Apple’s ecosystem for anything that benefits from viewing in portrait mode.
Assuming the software you need supports iPad, etc.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/rotate-the-image-on...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255072447?sortBy=rank
FWIW, it's easier to rotate the view in something like Acrobat, and then you don't have issues w/ the cursor direction.
Edit: Just tried rotation in the built in MacOS Preview app, (Command+R or Command+L) and works really well. You do have to set the View to Single Page, and rotate each page separately (it does remember which pages were rotated), but other than that it's great.
I don't see any way they can get out of this situation without seriously improving the UX of their products. Windows itself is likely implicated here too.
The fact that the "usb 2" port works for (fast) charging is a big win. That means you can charge and use the fast usb port at the same time.
For some use cases, you can do that with a single USB port, too. For example, a single USB cable connected to a monitor can both send video and charge the laptop.
Doesn't seem to be very Apple-like to have two identical looking ports with different function, though.
If Linux would be able to be installed and fully working on this out of the box, then the laptop wouldn't cost 600 dollars. Apple profits from monetizing people tied to its iOS+MacOS ecosystem. If you're not gonna be a MacOS/iOS user, you're worthless to them and selling you a laptop for only 600 dollars is not good for business anymore.
How's your reading comprehension? Where did I say they sell at a loss? I said they want to monetize people inside their ecosystem.
My wife is using a fancy new air for 2500€, which is way better. But I still think of the good old MacAir times, they'll try to bring up again.
1: https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c...
2: https://asahilinux.org/2021/08/progress-report-august-2021/#...
It's not just the menu bar icon (which can definitely be spoofed), but an on screen dot where the system is controlling pixels directly bypassing any OS level drawing on the screen.
Related: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1in0681/iphone_16_m...
Edit / Link: https://www.macworld.com/article/2986234/walmart-m1-macbook-...
Combine that with the enormously improved single core performance (which matters more in the real world than sustained load for an entry level notebook), fun colors and 499 price tag for students and I can see the interest.
The screen is good compared to the MBA (only loses P3 colors) but the bummer seems to be ports and the "normal" trackpad.
I know many people who would not care about the differences you have outlined and gladly pay $499 for the Neo.
How do you came to this conclusion when both are passingly cooled and A19 Pro is faster. Not to mention AV1 and other newer codec hardware accelerator and NPU / GPU improvements.
Also remember M1 MBA is may be Walmart and US only. Around the world most dont even get a chance to buy M1 at $599. The display dont have P3 but is actually brighter than M1 400 nits. Not sure how Keyboard is worse. Neo also have 1080P webcam rather than 720P.
And if Walmart is selling M1 at $599, I am sure they will also sell Neo at lower than RSP may be even same as educational discount $499. And this point surely Neo would win?
What a lot of people dont talk about, and may be wait until iFixit to confirm. Neo is basically the iPhone 17 of MacBook. It is perhaps the easiest to repair and cheapest MacBook for Apple to services.
I had an M1 MacBook Air and just set a Neo up for my niece. If I had to pick between the two for myself I'd choose the Neo again.
This is a daily, albeit minor, annoyance on my MacBook Air too.
Not as obvious as the author implies. Apple has some docs out, IIRC, explaining how it is implemented. Worth a read...
> "As it stands, I might buy a Neo for that same purpose, 2.7-pound weight be damned."
The wonders of the closed ecosystem / walled-garden, where you don't have to face competition on equal terms, because you already locked-in your customers...
Going to be signficiantly harder for Qualcomm X2 Elite to make a splash, given the price here. I have high hopes for the X2 Elite Extreme (even if it is going to be cursed with incredible difficulty trying to get each of these non-ACPI / DeviceTree systems running Linux). But this raises the bar signficiantly.
You are correct that the architecture was indeed the same, but it was quite a different chip. "Literally a phone chip to begin with, based on", to me, misleads from how different the m1 was. But yes, they appear to share the same architecture.
I wonder if the real clicks on mechanical trackpad will actually feel better than the simulated clicks on the Magic Trackpad.
MMMMMMM.....I don't know. I think the biggest shortcomings of that laptop were super common keyboard (dustgate), SSD, USB-C port, display, battery, and CPU (popcorning) failure.
IMO there is a small subset of Mac users today(gamers, local LLM users, editors, mobile devs) for which this won't be the best option
The article sums up why quite well:
"The biggest shortcoming of the decade-ago MacBook “One”, aside from the baffling decision to include just one USB-C port that was also its only means of charging, was the shitty performance of Intel’s Core M chips. Those chips were small enough and low-power enough to fit in the MacBook’s thin and fan-less enclosure, but they were slow as balls. It was a huge compromise for a laptop that carried a somewhat premium price. Today, performance, performance-per-watt, and physical chip size are all solved problems with Apple Silicon. I’d consider paying double the price of the Neo for a MacBook with similar specs (but more RAM and better I/O) that weighed 2.0 pounds or less. I’d buy such a MacBook not to replace my 14-inch MacBook Pro, but to replace my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro as my “carry around the house” secondary computer.5"
Considering it'd be running an M series chip, plus battery life, it would have more horsepower than the 12" Macbook. Add to that more ram, and the 2lb or less alternative to iPad is real.
With a cheaper Windows alternative to the MacBook Neo, your options are inferior battery life with AMD 64, or Windows Arm’s inferior compatibility.
I doubt Microsoft is holding developers hands when transitioning to Arm the way that Apple does. Not to mention they’ve been using their own chips.
While this is key it has nothing to do with the walled garden approach, and everything to do with Microsoft's contempt for users of its platforms.
The distinction matters because it changes what the lesson is for the rest of the industry. You don't need a walled garden to compete here. You need to own enough of the stack that you can make aggressive tradeoffs (like shipping 8GB and an A18 Pro) without everything falling apart at the integration boundaries. Microsoft can't do that because they don't make the hardware. Dell and Lenovo can't do that because they don't make the OS. Qualcomm can't do that because they don't control the software ecosystem.
The one company that could theoretically pull this off is Google with ChromeOS on their own Tensor chips, and the fact that they haven't is probably the more interesting question than why Asus is shocked.
Successful Chromebook’s have always been the throwaway $200 models. Higher end ones like the Pixelbook served more as flagship devices to prove they could do more but were never really marketed.
I don’t think Google’s gonna make a souped up Chromebook because they know their place. They’re entirely internet dependent devices with little brand recognition and no serious software. The Neo serves somewhere in between that. They have the brand recognition and MacOS.
What software do you want to be considered serious? With the addition of Linux/Crostini, there's 3D modeling, CAD, and NLE video editing and compilers and everything else.
I wonder how much of the Neo pricing wow factor is Apple taking advantage of the strong dollar vs much else that's changed on the ground (obv the processor pick is a "real thing")
2013 MBA pricing in USD was $1100
2013 MBA pricing in JPY was 110k JPY
2026 Macbook Neo pricing in JPY is ~100k JPY
2026 Macbook Neo pricing in USD is $600
2026 Macbook Air pricing in JPY is ~140k JPY
2026 Macbook Air pricing in USD is ..~$1100
So depending on the currency either the Neo is a massively cheaper thing or filling a gap in a product line that inflation created.
I wonder how much of Apple's costs are USD-denominated. The fact that the MBA hasn't changed pricing at all makes me guess that not that much, but I don't know how manufacturing contracts work
I dunno, I find it interesting, but JPY inflation is a recent phenomenon
They also have some of the highest margins on consumer electronics in the business. Higher IIRC than Nokia had, before smartphones killed them. So absorbing a 3% bump in the dollar isn't that big a deal for them.
Honestly, I have a hard time typing on a new Apple laptop; it doesn't feel right until the keycaps are a bit worn.
This pretty much matches the described experience in the article that Gruber had, as he mentions he had to adjust brightness up and down at least twice every day...
Incomprehensible how much time and effort people spend on something which takes no more than a few minutes.
One other thing, how repairable is this thing going to be? I'm guessing it's going to end up with an extremely low repairability score, considering they seem to solder both RAM and storage these days. Looking at the MacBook Pro (repairability score 4/10) it seems crazy difficult even to swap the battery: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+(...
When we buy them personal laptops (not there yet), it'll be a MacBook Neo (or its successor). I expect that unless they're forced to at work, they'll never touch a Windows computer in their life.
But it cannot be done because it only allows AppStore content with a 30% cut for Apple.
Technically it's not challenging as you can see with this new MacBook.
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
At some point the XPS 13 dev edition was the almost perfect laptop. Then they ruined it with the following generations of it.
System 76 already has Pop!_OS. Lenovo.com/linux will redirect you to a list of linux compatible lenovo laptops that's a mile long.
So far I think the only thing I can add to the conversation about it is the only real disappointment is that the only upgrade option is to go to 512G w/ touch ID for $100. That's not to say the 8 GB option was bad by any means, it actually works even better than I was expecting, but it still leaves a big gap on the way up to the base model Air at $1100 and the splash could have been twice as large.
This is fine, and actually a brilliant business move to monetize inventory investment that is otherwise sunk while releasing a new product that doesn't require them to fight for fab capacity.
It's just not something I'm seeing in the consumer discourse that, perhaps, people might like to understand.
A12Z is really M0 (or you could say M1 is A14X or A14Z depending on GPU bin), so I would not characterize it as "(iPhone) A-series."
I worked in retail for a decade, a lot of that was selling computers. The vast majority of what people buy computers for could be done a toaster. You don't exactly need top end specs to browse the internet, reply to emails, and write the occasional document.
gaming is a different beast, but there are xboxes, ps5s, steam boxen, etc.
For the most part, there's gamers/editors and a few other groups who need a lot of horsepower. They're generally gonna have decent hardware. Then there's everyone else, who wouldn't notice a difference regardless of hardware (to a point). There just isn't a whole lot of middle ground.
I want to do more travel and photography, with occasional light work on my own project. And this feels like better option than iPad, because i can use Xcode and android Studio. And for +- the same price.
Too bad that performance is (still) locked in the walled garden and cannot be used as a small Linux server.
I think a lot of us wish that! I'm struggling to pick either the Neo or the new iPad Air 13", the former for having MacOS, or the latter for light weight and light usage purposes. And come this fall pair whichever choice with an M5 mini at home.
This is the kind of reasoning behind why I can not take any Apple product review seriously, or any Apple fan seriously.
I was surprised that a guy who shills Apple for a living still uses a 5 year old MacBook. It goes to show how the longevity of laptops has increased over time. I'm also on a M1 Macbook and find it hard to justify an upgrade.
He has also been a continuous critic of Apple’s App Store policies and its handling of regulators
Exactly what would you like him to criticize? That the latest Apple Watch doesn’t run Linux?
Why exactly would he need to buy a new Mac just to maintain a blog? He buys a new iPhone every year and he gets review units of everything.
So, Gruber, you're telling me that you didn't have a laptop before because of the price and you had to settle for an iPad?
Damned if i ever noticed, and all my laptops since like 2013 have been Apple.
I knew I had it on one of my previous iPhones but there it was an annoyance because I never knew what was going to happen on a touch.
I am still sad that they stopped putting it into iPhone, I think the tech is great and the watch really proves what can be done with it when it is a fundamental part of the hardware and the OS can be built around it. But we never had a situation that every compatible iPhone had force touch so everything that could be done with it had to work in other ways.
I think the iPad made that even more complicated since I doubt we would have ever gotten it on a screen that large, if it would have even worked.
As far as it being on the trackpad, it is honestly pretty wild when you realize it. It does an incredible job of faking feeling like it is actually moving. Was similar with the fake home button that some iPhone’s had for a little while.
Well I'm not, because i only managed to register a force touch when i meant a normal touch :)
You don’t have to if the software you need needs Windows.
I think they got just cheaper marketing since jobs died. No focus or brand protection.
If you were to align the MacBook line with iPhone line logically this would be an ‘e’ class device, the Air would just become the MacBook, pro remains pro, and there would be a nice gap for a new ultra light MacBook Air, a modern Apple silicon version of the 12” MacBook - expensive, small and fast, analogous to iPhone Air.
Also new names are fun. This name is a fun name. Nice to see some playfulness from Apple.
This already happened in 2015, they probably don't want for it to happen again.
Limiting cannibalization wouldn't be hard. Just load up a Neo, a 13" Air, and a 15" Air on the Apple web store's Compare page - a 15" or 16" Neo would be the "obviously lesser" laptop by 90% of the metrics.
My bet is that Apple has prototypes of the larger variant, and is waiting to see how the situation develops.
Interesting metrics, though I'd add that if you count storage and memory as metrics, it'd be hard to find a worse PC laptop. And I don't see why we should artificially exclude ARM PC laptops from the comparison.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-vivobook-14-wuxga-lapto...
2x the RAM and 2x the storage isn't meaningless to a lot of people.
The PC has a single-core geekbench around 2100 single / 10,000 multicore. The Neo is apparently in the range of 3600 / 9,000 multicore.
No arguments on the Mac's screen being way nicer though. However, the low-end computer market - unlike most of us on HN - has never cared about pixel density, color accuracy, or really any screen specs other than size (Looks like the Asus has the Mac by an inch on that spec).
Bottom line, for a high-end Chromebook replacement (literally everything is done in the cloud, so storage doesn't matter, and only running a browser, so RAM isn't a big deal), as long as it's for someone who will take care of such a delicate device, the Neo is pretty great. For everyone else, it's debatable.
> And certainly not software quality.
This is most definitely only a little true in that Windows has jumped the shark lately with ads and various enshittification, and thus ties with Mac OS. Tahoe is without a doubt the worst Mac OS ever released. It's both poor quality and poorly designed.
Users on the other hand, they definitely care about display quality more than they care about RAM. The display is the part you look at!
If you're in store and there's a Neo with a crisp 200 PPI screen and a Windows laptop with a cheap screen but more RAM, the vast majority of consumers will choose the laptop with the better display. People make purchasing decisions based on feels and the Neo has great feels.
Quality speaks for itself, and the way that people buy computers is through their eyes and fingertips, not their heads.
Go to the Apple Store and just observe how people make their buying decisions. They don't just look at the spec sheet, they lift, type on, caress the computers. They want to know how it will feel to own one.
Go into a non-Apple space though, where money is not "no object," and see how many people would choose a 16-17" 1920x1080 screen over a 13" MacBook Neo purely because of the big screen, nevermind that the Mac has roughly 4x the number of pixels. I guarantee you, it's more than you think.
My only point was that yes, the MacBook Neo wins on quality construction and aesthetics (but I'll argue NOT on durability since plastic laptops can take a lot more incidental bumps than Macs will), cool factor/perceived eliteness, and screen quality. I am sure there are plenty of people who care about those things, but I think most of those people are already buying a Mac today.
I suspect we'll actually see a modest cannibalization of those casual but cheap Mac users from the MacBook Air, since most people don't really understand how to evaluate RAM and storage size, but a lot of them will have a bad experience after filling the disk.
As an ARM enthusiast who has tried a lot of WinARM, I think at this point I really struggle to believe MS has a single care in the world for improving quality of life for WinARM users. They sure do market it, and the laptops do work most of the time. I've just never had any other computers shit the bed when it comes to graphics drivers like a Qualcomm powered PC. Website with too many video/gifs playing? Screen whites out/all the video boxes go pink and explorer resets. Open up the gif search in Discord? Basically a coin flip chance its going to kill the graphics driver and reset explorer again. I had a Dell Inspiron with the Qualcomm 8CX Gen2 that could reliably be crashed just by quickly scrolling twitter on a video posting heavy day.
I would rather take a Mediatek powered Chromebook any other day until the Neo showed up and started to approach the sub $500 ARM chromebook price point.
But that's very wishful thinking.
> I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house.
My wife and I prefer iPads around the house as she is a pencil centric artist and loosely speaking I prefer touch to keyboards. But his framing points out Apple is expansively addressing broad market work/school/home computing needs/preferences and thus also brings up a question I think is under discussed...
What is Apple's user experience roadmap for Apple TV mass market home computing? And for home computing in general?
We are overdue for a leap up there, where Apple, as with the Neo, exploits their ability to profitably deliver higher end hardware which enables features at prices below any comparable competition.
I know folks are fond of pointing to Apple struggling to deliver Siri/AI advances but I view that like their Apple Maps fiasco: an ongoing priority roadmap that they will keep working at until it is better than good enough.
I believe Apple will soon accelerate the power ramp up in Apple TV both because they could now ~ Neo that device into very $/performance competitive vs game consoles but also because they likely predict an ever increasing demand for home compute by consumers.
Not just speech i/o and AI conversation but also active realtime cheap private application of compute, such as personalizing your sports game feed, for example:
a) continually show me where the ball is by [dynamic method] b) rewind to when player X had the ball c) freeze there and show me what might have happened if they had passed to Y d) dress all the players in tutus e) change to my cooking show but warp me back to this game if someone scores f) etc etc etc.
Their 5+ year planning and commitment to the Apple Watch and Vision Pro show that they are ardent bettors on personal computing continuing to evolve very rapidly if they can concoct a profitable multi-year course from niche to ubiquitous. [not just for a product but for their synergistic products]
Remember they build elaborate fake homes as test centers, and not just to film product promos. I would be very surprised to learn their current 5 year outlook ignores robotics. Look around the edges of their public activities and imagine how what you notice might also fit together with something new but hidden.
They are ambitious. Very Ambitious. What's next?
> Parallels Desktop runs on MacBook Neo, but the experience will depend on what you intend to run inside the virtual machine. > For light, occasional Windows use, like a legacy business tool, or a Windows-only utility, MacBook Neo may provide an acceptable experience. For CPU- or GPU-intensive Windows applications, this computer is not the right choice.
Want to edit some raw video into a polished 20 minute video suitable for youtube? You don't open final cut pro, you tell your thin client to edit the raw video into a polished 20 minute video. Your monthly subscription includes AI and out pops an edited video.
RK3399 6-core ARM v8, Mali-T864 GPU, 1.9lb aluminum body, 10" IPS multitouch display, USB-C, compact chicklet-style keyboard -- or since it's a 2-in-1, flip it around and use your own portable ergo/ortholinear. coreboot/libreboot support...
Bring out a refresh, Asus.
https://www.asus.com/us/laptops/for-home/chromebook/asus-chr...
If your point was that it's crazy that 11 days of rent costs the same as a mid-range laptop, I completely agree. That's where we're at though.
PCI slots are from the 90s. DIMM from the 90s. SATA from the early 00s. LGA sockets from the mid 00s.
"I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant."
What this reflects is all those comments and users, myself included, over the years saying "I would get an iPad if only it could run MacOS", and the ensuing discussion to the effect of why Apple won't do it, the chips are just as powerful, etc. A tablet Mac is a lot of people's (both casual and tech) holy grail in portable computing, justified/sensible or not in terms of technology and UI form factor. Gruber's wish is precisely the expression of this not unpopular sentiment. And also the Tahoe iPad OS features is a clue that Apple knows this.
I’m not the target market since I require Linux compatibility but I realize that is not a necessity in the market.
Fortunately/unfortunately for Apple, the M1 MacBook Air from 2020 is still a great laptop.
The form factor is the defining characteristic, because that informs how people use it. The CPU does not.
In other words, indistinguishable from a laptop by virtually everyone. I don't even know what difference you might be referring to.
Yup
“MacBook Neo is built on an iPhone chip—the A18 Pro. It’s far less capable of running intensive tasks than any of Apple’s M‑series chips or any moderately powered Intel or AMD processor.”
and that:
“It’s merely the right kind of performance for anybody who wants to browse the internet or stream video.”
...at this price point there are plenty of alternatives for laptops with better performance and specs.
For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Graphics-Ke...
Or a 15.6" Intel Core i7‑1255U/12650H laptop with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD in a similar price range:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Laptop-High-Performance-i7-1255U-4...
Both of these offer:
* A more traditional laptop CPU
* 2–4× the memory
* 2-4× the storage (1TB vs 256GB base on the Neo)
Standard HDMI/USB‑C video out for external displays
So I can definitely see the appeal of the Neo for people who just want an inexpensive way into macOS, but the claim that “no other budget laptop can compete.” doesn't track.
Maybe it should have been "The least expensive Macbook yet, but that comes with significant downsides."
Now the color options, that's a tragedy.
Thanks. Fixed.
>This isn't for people that really even care about performance. It's for people that want a laptop that works with their iPhone
That was my conclusion to my comment in my original. The title of "no other budget laptop can compete" is not just sensationalized, it is factually wrong. It should have been "the least expensive macbook yet comes with a catch"
Maybe they need to bring back psychedelic iMacs.
https://www.slashgear.com/1706745/rare-apple-imac-designs-fl...
In terms of performance the raw compute people have in their pockets nowadays surpasses what they typically need by magnitudes for a while now. Granted: programmers and tech companies find new ways of wasting that compute on features that people ultimately do not need, so they may need that the compute so things feel snappy, but if I think about what my parents do on their devices you could easily enable them to do theirs tasks with far less. They are essentially doing the same as ca. 2006 with pictures and videos being higher fidelity & resolution and websites running hundred thousand lines of javascript being the main difference.
I’d give my entire family these ahead of Windows laptops any day.
Mister Gates, is that you ?
As for your comparisons: My aunt doesn't need a terabyte of storage or a Ryzen 7 5700U, she needs 15+ hours of battery life because the laptop is going to live next to her spot on the couch and she most likely can't remember to plug it in every night.
Also the first laptop is from a reputable brand called NIAKUN. They must have amazing customer service and unbeatable warranties, right? =) And they certainly will exist in 12 months when you go look for the brand on Amazon and won't be replaced by another random set of letters in all caps selling the exact same product?
The HP is on sale, it's MSRP is $699 and for some weird fucking reason has the numpad on it, making the whole keyboard wonky. Who wants that on a laptop?
And the final thing, as with all price-forward comparisons: build quality. We need an objective standard measurement for chassis and keyboard flex, the ability to open the lid with one finger, the amount of creaking and squeaking said laptop will do in normal use and how hot and loud it gets in your lap when doing light browsing.
But they're clearly not the majority of the people - the rest of us have to live with a lopsided keyboard because a few people for some reason do data entry on a laptop keyboard.
The latest reviews are showing that's not really the case
Laughable. Seriously, how long has it been since the M1 Air dropped? And we're still this clueless?
> For example, you can get a 15.6" Ryzen 7 5700U laptop with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD for less than the “unbeatable” price of the Neo:
Awesome spec dump. Now, what's the real life usage battery life of that laptop like? Oh? Yeah, thought so.
Nobody buys a list of specs, they buy a set of capabilities. And the Neo is capable of supporting normal usage for 12h+ on battery. Go ahead and link me some alternative laptops that can do that, with comparable performance of course — which is on par or better than the original M1 Air mind you.
Killer move by Apple, and I'm shocked there's still so much ignorance around.
I own one. It lives long enough not to get bothered by charging.
plastic chassis: gross. keyboard with a numberpad: yuck no inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck limited size trackpad, not to mention a PC trackpad: yuck display looks good and is matte: nice fans: gross usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array: yuck supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
But at least it seems to have comparable battery life to the neo.
I don't care, it holds, it is not slippery (a huge problem with my current phone with metal body). What exactly is better with metal?
> keyboard with a numberpad: yuck
I would prefer one without, but that's just a matter of preference here. The layout is good. In fact, it's the keyboard that mostly makes me feel good whenever I use this laptop.
> inverted-T for arrow keys: yuck
In theory I agree, but for some reason that did not feel problematic on this particular keyboard.
> limited size trackpad
?
> not to mention a PC trackpad
To each their own
> fans: gross
Never heard them, not even sure they are there.
> usb-c (charging) port is not the first port in the array
Sounds like a minor issue
> supplied charger brick: yuck, why not something a bit more modern
I prefer "bricks" on the wire to "bricks" on the plug like Apple does because it does not take 10 slots on a power strip.
eww
I'm sure a similar story can be said about the HP.
If you didn't detect the sarcasm, a laptop is much more than cpu, memory, and storage; it'd be short-sighted to only fixate on this trio. PC laptops compromise on pretty much everything and usually do everything poorly, including CPU (since apple silicon Macs are much better performance per watt).
Then there's the whole aspect of Apple support for both hardware AND software, something no PC vendor can provide.
PS: I wrote this on my Macbook Air.
This is false. The A18 Pro has much better single core performance than the M1 and slightly better multi core performance. Most people would see no noticeable benefit to a faster CPU. Especially with a fanless design, the additional cores of a comparable M-series chip would give you better burst performance for some workloads, but possibly not much improvement in sustained performance.
For the first few minutes of sustained use. Then it drops like a rock: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...
> In extended single-core benchmarks, performance drops to the 3.7-to-3.5 GHz range within a minute or so, and they drop to the 2.9-to-3.2 GHz range after about five minutes. Both the M1 Air and the new M5 Air (4.46 GHz) are able to sustain their peak clock speeds indefinitely in single-core mode.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-apple-studio-displa...
I dream of the day I can kick windows into the next bin, but this is the one thing that the Neo fails hard on, all other compromises would've made this a great remote dev machine.
my mom might need a 2nd monitor, but probably not. that's who they're chasing.
my crappy business dell work computer can only do one too, but it comes with a docking station to do real multi-monitor
I can get ThinkPad E14 with a decent lunar lake CPU and 16 gigabytes of memory, at a slightly lower price.
So I'm not as hyped as others...
The best selling Macbook in history, as percentage of total MacBook sold is the 11" $899 MacBook Air. That was when Apple learned people are willing to give up on performance and features just to get a Mac, or just to use OSX.
And despite the declining state of macOS, as Gruber said it is still zillions times better than Windows.
Apple Mac has always been more expensive than PC. But they are also better built. No Laptop has decent trackpad until M$ pull R&D into their surface book. PC Speaker was appalling until YouTuber start to state the obvious how MacBook speakers were better. But none of these matters, at the end of the day most consumer dont understand spec. They see that is the cheapest MacBook, it looks good and works, just like the MacBook Air 11", if they could afford to buy a $500 laptop, they will spend extra $100 on Apple. Even if the spec on paper is arguably worse.
And if we are really talking about spec and compare. If you even want some after sales services, you would at least have to look at Dell, HP or ASUS. And not some random Chinese brand.
These 1920 * 1080 15" screen is not a decent screen. Even ignoring P3 colour, you will have to find a screen with 200PPI+, let alone Apple do it with 220PPI.
If you want to use Amazon as comparison, they have been selling M4 MacBook Air at $200 discount sometimes $250 for most of the time. I have no idea why, but I would not be surprised the $699 model be selling at $599, same as EDU price. Then at this point the MacBook Neo is extremely competitively priced. You get better screen, faster CPU for less storage and less ram.
And let's fast forward a year. A Neo with A19 Pro as used in iPhone 17 Air and Pro with 12GB RAM, Double the SSD Speed. WiFI 7. Assuming that is true, I dont even see anything on the PC roadmap that is competitive, especially when they are all facing DRAM pricing pressure. ( Although I also think Apple will bump A19 Pro version by additional $100 )
Forgetting all that for a second, not a single review look into the actual Neo hardware. We will have to wait for iFixit for detail teardown. But is should be the easiest to fix Mac, and designed to be simple to manufacture as they said in the interview. The chassis is likely heavier due to this process but could see further refinement. The mechanical trackpad is work of genius, I am not sure if this is Apple only innovation or something that is on the market already. That trackpad alone is 150g, that is nearly one tenth of the weight of whole Neo.
The Neo is, as far as I am aware perhaps the first Apple product that was designed and engineered to be as practical and cost effective as possible. True to their words this isn't some cost reduction exercise using old design and components. This makes Neo the most boring Apple product on paper, but sometimes boring is good. And I agree with MKBHD, this is perhaps the most disruptive Apple product since the original iPhone.
There are roughly 1.5 - 2 billions Windows PC in use today. And Apple has at best 150 to 200M Mac user. So there is plenty of room to grow. I would be happy if they could double that in 5 years time.
I am really liking everything this New Apple is coming through so far. Molly Anderson as Industrial Engineer. John Ternus on Hardware Engineering. Not sure if Steve Lemay is great but my gut feeling is he would restore a lot of Apple HID.
The only thing missing is software ( And may be Services lead ). I know Craig Federighi is popular on HN and internet but I haven't liked a single software engineering direction since he took charge. Stop adding features and Resume driven development and start fixing bugs.
May be lastly, Tim Cook has never been any good at picking person. But all these new selection seems to be great. This cant be a coincidence. I am wondering if there are some additional changes in the background at Apple we dont see.
I have been giving Tim Cook's Apple plenty benefits of doubt but losing faith steadily for 10 years. This is the first time ever since Steve Jobs passed away I am excited to see changes in direction. The name Neo is just great. Truly something new.
I dont think there has ever been a MacBook that has been designed with this level of practicality. I think we need to go back to Powerbook era and I dont think we have that either.
Would have been perfect if they come with A19 Pro 12GB DRAM and double the SSD speed next year.
nb I haven’t delved too deep into RISCV but I am under a general impression it did away with all this. My concern is the layers that are added will turn it into a CISCV over time.
nudge/"help" people to join the party?
trying to ride something around the windows-bullshitization , recent memory-prices etc..
He was referring to the supply chain. The shock is that Apple was able to build something like this with current component costs.
The Apple Neo is only slightly better than an HP or Dell for the same price. But HP and Dell don't need to maintain a service center in every major city and shopping center. They make cheap devices that just work.
My old x86 "PC" laptop with the $0 Debian certainly compares positively to Apple in terms of software quality.
Bought yet another second hand 11" MBA instead. Now looking at SMT soldering equipmemt for doing ipgrades and repairs.
It's really cool that this device is cheap but 8GB of RAM is the elephant in the room. Even non-technical web browsing users will notice the sluggishness coming from that spec.
The moment they upgrade it to the next iPhone processor, it'll get 12GB of RAM, and it will need it.
And the other elephant in the room that John doesn't bring up is the fact that you can definitely find in-warranty MacBook Air options for ~$700 and they'll be much better buys.
You'll get more RAM, keep your Touch ID, better trackpad, better screen, better battery life, better speakers, better mics, I think even a better webcam? Maybe.
That reminds me: the small battery in the Neo means that high screen brightness or more than light usage will more quickly deplete it compared to other Mac systems.
I'm sorry but this line invalidates most of your comment, to the point of looking like satire.
We have reviews and videos of people editing 4k videos with glee, launching and switching between all apps at once, and stuff like that.
I used the base M1 as a power user/developer for years when it came out, and the only reason I had to switch was the storage. Sluggishness wasn't on the top 10 issues I had with that device.
Dave2D had his MacBook Neo on his desk with an edited video completed on the day the computer was announced. That's the special access I'm talking about. And you'll be lucky if you watched an early video like that from someone like him who is willing to be reasonably critical and risk losing that special level of access.
This segment of the Just Josh Tech podcast talks a lot about the caution you need to take with Apple reviewers who are just rushing review content out there: https://youtu.be/kSwXyxAA9XY?t=2406
I think it's very interesting how they note that someone they know who is very non-technical noticed the sluggishness of web browsing with an 8GB M1 MacBook Air. I noticed that when I owned mine as well. I bought into the hype surrounding the faster RAM and was happy to save some money at the time. I wouldn't say I regret it but I would say it made the system last much less time.
Yes, you can edit 4K videos, but not all 4K video editing workflows are created equally. You can't just jump into Final Cut Pro with complex timelines and lots of plugins and expect a good time. But of course if you're editing 4K videos in CapCut, that's no problem.
For more casual users, this same concept applies: a Safari user who has 3 tabs open is having a much different experience than a Chrome user with 40 tabs open and a simultaneous big file download competing for swap disk writes, even though both of those users are "casual" and "non-technical" computer users.
And here's the other thing, which Dave2D also mentioned: If you're locked in at the level where you just cannot spend more than $499 on a laptop, the Neo is a good deal. But if you actually have some willingness to spend just a little bit more, you'll almost certainly find some kind of M2/M3 MacBook Air, often brand new discounted at a retailer like Walmart or Best Buy where you end up 16GB of RAM and a ton of additional niceties over the Neo (Haptic trackpad, backlit keyboard, larger battery, better screen, speakers, microphones, etc). That system is a system that will ultimately last you longer than a Neo and only a small additional cost gets you there.
6:49 to 7:00 is how long Photoshop takes to go from the preview to the viewing the original resolution image zoomed in. Quite sluggish.
Dumping a bunch of out-of-focus idle apps into swap not only isn't the best test, but also isn't a magical solution that has no downsides even if it stays responsive a lot of the time.
There are all kinds of ways relying on swap can quickly turn your system into having a storage/memory bottleneck rather than a CPU bottleneck and they have very little to do with having a ton of backgrounded idle apps open.
He even mentioned one of them, which was screen recording, since that's adding write cycles to the disk while your system is also competing for disk writes for swap memory.
For example, let's say I'm downloading/extracting a large file (e.g., a game on Steam) while I have a lot of Chrome tabs and programs open with a good amount of RAM pressure. Now I might see more sluggishness than if I had a larger amount of RAM and the exact same system specs since my swap is competing with file write activity.
This isn't some kind of exotic uncommon activity.
A YouTuber doing a quick "open a bunch of apps and play around with them" doesn't necessarily test the kind of specific actions that would deal the most damage to a RAM-starved system.