I built multiple iOS apps and went through two start up acquisitions with my M1 MBA as my primary computer, as a developer. And the neo is better than the M1 MBA. I edited my 30-45 min long 4k race videos in FCP on that air just fine.
Before I was a professional software developer, I used a scrawny second-hand laptop with a Norwegian keyboard (I'm not Norwegian) because that was what I could afford: https://i.imgur.com/1NRIZrg.jpeg
This was the computer I was developing PHP backends on + jQuery frontends, and where I published a bunch of projects that eventually led to me getting my first software development job, in a startup, and discovering HN pretty much my first day on the job :)
The actual hardware you use seems to me like it matters the least, when it comes to actually being able to do things.
T420s has loose USB ports and the power socket is almost falling off, so I plan to replace it by a 5 years old T14 G2 in the coming months.
I can afford the latest MacBook, but I'd rather not generate more e-waste that there is, and more importantly I feel closer to my users, and my code is efficient and straight to the point.
My non-hobby laptop is an old cheap Dell from 5-6 years ago.
The best laptop I ever had was a maxed-out Thinkpad P7x, and it came with the most meaningless job ever.
I can only compare that job to the one at a unicorn that gave me the latest and greatest MacBook. Not only the job was meaningless, the whole industry made no sense to me.
After all, the actual server ran the code, I just needed text editors, terminal windows, and web browsers.
i have a computer that benchmarks literally 10x faster and with 32x the amount of RAM, but i miss that little thing that helped me build my career from nothing
I still remember retiring that computer. The first thing I did when I got my Pentium IV chip a year later was download Macromedia Dreamweaver. Did me well.
But I'm planning to do a big jump: Soon I will switch to a 2012 Mac Mini as my primary linux server!
Running neovim on termux was fine. Developing elixir was no problem, the test suite took 5s on my phone, and takes 1s on my laptop. Rust and cargo compiling was slow enough that I didn't really enjoy it though.
Meant that I could just pack up instantly and have an agent do review workflows while I was out and about as well in my pocket, and didn't really notice a big battery hit.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-linux-termi...
The main activity was still the traveling, hiking and enjoying some calm time. But instead of spending the usual downtime reading or something else, I had a blast coding and experimenting.
So maybe different meaning for everyone. For me it’s getting away from technology and into nature.
When I'm hacking on my Linux desktop automation scripts on my free time, I can assure you that my good mood is positively contributing to my mental health.
> So maybe different meaning for everyone.
Indeed.
Not sure the difference other than weight, but I wasn't carrying it day to day when i could leave it in my hotel room.
(Maybe the fans sometimes sound like they're a jet engine taking off…)
Finally just put an order in for a new 16" MBP M5 Max with 48GB memory only because it looks like they're going to stop supporting the Intel stuff this year and no more software updates. It'll probably be obsolete in six months with the rate things are going, but I've been averaging seven years between upgrades so it should be good!
So, the m5 with 48gb of ram will be amazing.
Obviously the LLM inference is super heavy, but the actual work / task at hand is being executed on the device.
I have a 2010 MacBook Air that I still use when traveling.
The battery is completely shot, but it works fine when plugged in. And if I'm on the road, I don't use my computer until I get to the hotel anyway. And even then, it's just fine for e-mail, browsing, and even Photoshop.
Am probably giving newish iPad and magnetic keyboard a spin on my next trip mostly to see how it goes.
Is still handling the load well, though at times, fans get quite loud, especially with all the background processes and VM setups.
Hope to get a new MBP this year, as being on Intel means lots of software that won't run on it (ie, Codex app for example, won't run on Intel Macs)
I also was using an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB at the time. Doing the same thing there was much smoother and snappier. On the whole, it actually made me want to just the laptop instead since it "felt" nicer. (This isn't measuring build times or anything like that, just snappiness of the OS.)
8gb has ALWAYS been fine in Apple Silicon Mac OS. RAM usage on a fresh boot is a meaningless statistic (unused RAM is wasted RAM). And they're just plain capable!
The worst corner they cut is no keyboard backlighting. That saves them what, $1 BoM per MacBook Neo? Especially because now they have to put up an entire new keyboard production line instead of just piggybacking off of the Air keyboard production line.
No 8GB, compressed or whatever was not enough for MacOS when M1 was released. Even for simple outlook, web browser, excel type of workflows.
After 3-4 hours of work, the window manager process itself is consuming gigabytes of memory. Not even considering any browser or electron apps.
My M1 Mac mini was choking up so much that I had to trade it in. That was back in 2021. Today apps are even more bloated.
1. WindowServer : 4.33GB 2. Safari pages (~10 open): ~ 5GB (monitor reports per tab) 3. Outlook: 1.45 GB 4. VS Code: 1.43 GB 5. Excel: 1.25 GB
Swap Used: 6.46GB.
Memory pressure is already orange and machine is slow.
Or for general memory `footprint` is good.
Still does not explain why this balloons over time. Aka if I restart my Mac right now and reopen the same exactly apps with the same exactly windows the WindowServer will take 80% less memory.
If you send me the number it will get looked at.
Couls you please describe your dev process.
I setup a self hosted runner and then use that in my CI workflows. Then I disabled it from sleeping so it can clamshell forever and now it sits here in my living room silently workin' https://imgur.com/a/EaBICdo
I am jealous of my wife’s 13” M5 iPad Pro though, that oled screen is gorgeous, a wonder of modern engineering.
Well, the MacBook Air was also a lot more expensive than the Steam Deck?
Those apps don’t need every single byte of memory you see in Activity Monitor to be active in RAM all of the time. The OS swaps out unused parts to the very fast SSD. If you push it so far that active pages are constantly being swapped out as apps compete then you start to notice, but the threshold for that is a lot higher than HN comments seem to think.
Everything from apple to modern software is rotten to its core.
…in reply to someone who just said their experience is fine, and included details. If you just want to rant about Apple, have at it, but you’re going to have to do better than “nuh, uh” if you want to be convincing.
8GB really shouldn't be an option in 2026, it is just shortsighted and an insanely uneven build.
I could rant about Dell too. Or most other manufacturers (surprise, greed isn't apple exclusive). But Apple at least tries to keep the appearance of a higher profile.
Fair enough; though experience says 8Gb will run VScode, it would very much depend on the use case, I agree. OTOH, I would argue that anyone working VScode that hard probably isn’t buying 8Gb machines, but OP did say they’re running it so it’s up for discussion.
My M1 Air would slow down a little, but was still usable doing the same thing. And they both had 8GB of memory.
Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked if you’re legitimately still having these issues.
I developed some work that keeps tens of thousands of people alive every day on a $100 Acer netbook almost 15 years ago. The tools are always there, I don't think anyone thinks the work is actually impossible to do on a limited machine.
Any modern Mac is more than capable. I had the baseline M1 Macbook Air that I did work on as well, just to see how that fared. Much better than this machine - 10x the price, but more than 10x the performance. This one is great as a "I don't mind if I break it or lose it" device.
Also a browser sneeze takes more than 4gb.
The other I just owned the front end infra and was on the growth team. The rest of the folks were the stars on that one.
Edit: I guess I brought that up because I guess I don't know any more "real work" that that, ha. What is 'real work'?
But... you can do the same exercise with a $350 windows thing. Everyone knows you can do "real dev work" on it, because "real dev work" isn't a performance case anymore, hasn't been for like a decade now, and anyone who says otherwise is just a snob wanting an excuse to expense a $4k designer fashion accessory.
IMHO the important questions to answer are business side: will this displace sales of $350 windows machines or not, and (critically) will it displace sales of $1.3k Airs?
HN always wants to talk about the technical stuff, but the technical stuff here isn't really interesting. The MacBook Neo is indeed the best laptop you can get for $6-700.
But that's a weird price point in the market right now, as it underperforms the $1k "business laptops" (to avoid cannibalizing Air sales) and sits well above the "value laptop" price range.
And, the whole shittiness of the experience will even distract you attempting real work: the horrible touchpad, the bad screen, the forced windows updates when you trying to start the machine to do something urgent, ads in Windows, the lack of proper programmability of Windows (unless you use WSL).... Add the fact that the toy is likely to break in a year or two. These issue exist on far more expensive Windows machines, how much more a $350 machine.
Leaving Windows machines and OS behind for more than a decade has been a continuing breath of fresh air. I have several issues with the Apple devices and macOS (as I have with Linux too), but on the whole they are far better than Windows. The only good thing about Windows that I miss on Macs is the file explorer and window management, not sure why Apple stubbornly refuses to copy those.
If Windows/Linux/x86 is non-negotiable and that’s your budget, I would never in a million years recommend anything brand new. This is when you go pick up a $350 used midrange ThinkPad on eBay. It won’t outperform a Neo in terms of CPU and battery life but I guarantee it’ll be a better experience than the garbage routinely sold at this price point.
Sigh. I mean, even absent the obvious answers[1], that's just wrong anyway. You're being a snob. Want to run WSL? Run WSL. Want to run vscode natively? Ditto. Put it on a cheap TV and run your graphical layout and 3D modelling work. I mean, obviously it does all that stuff. OBVIOUSLY, because that stuff is all cheap and easy.
All the complaining you're doing is about preference, not capability. You're being a snob. Which is hardly weird, we're all snobs about something.
But snobs aren't going to buy the Neo either. Again, the business question here is whether the $350 junk users can be convinced to be snobs for $600.
[1] "Put Linux on it", "All of your stuff is in the cloud anyway", "It's still a thousand times faster than the machine on which I did my best work", etc...
But as to the 4G quip, that's showing some ignorance of where the market is. The value segment is filled with devices like this: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Stream-BrightView-N4120-Graphics/d...
That's a 16G windows box which will happily run multiple VMs for whatever your deployment environment is, something the Neo is actually going to struggle with. The Jasper Lake CPU is indeed awfully slow, but again for routine "dev" tasks that's just not a limit.
You would obviously refuse out of taste, but if you were actually forced to use this machine to do your job... you absolutely could.
$350 USD can get you a decent laptop with a SSD, 16GB RAM and something like an Intel N100 or N95. And they pretty comparable to a decent Intel Skylake CPU which are still pretty usable.
https://www.amazon.com/NIAKUN-Computer-Processor-Keyboard-Fi...
https://www.amazon.com/AOC-Computer-Processor-Laptops-Window...
Yes, the Neo has a faster CPU but it also has less RAM and less storage and costs more and has less ports. Besides ray traced games what can the Neo do that the others can't? They'll take longer but they'll get there.
And if you're willing to go used? That $350 goes a lot further.
8GB on Apple Silicon is far better than 16 GB on Wintel, and I don't event trust the quality of 16GB of RAM on a bottom of the barrel Windows machine.
Would you prefer a machine that is still good 7 years from now with less ports, or one with more ports that you have to replace in 2 years? Yes it is more expensive now, but over 7 years it is an absolute bargain.
Why would you have to replace it in 2 years? How do we know Apple will even be offering updates to Neo in 7 years? Will 8GB still be usable in 7 years really? 8GB is barely on the fence already.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple drops the Neo from software support in less than 7 years.
It is completely feasible, and the battery life - amazing. Even when running a whole pile of Kubernetes services.
Using older hardware has helped me not accidentally build slow stuff. Although at some point I gotta upgrade and just add more performance tests :) but nothing replaces feeling it yourself.
i just got an m5 max with 128gb of ram specifically to run local llms
But damn I like that design
I used to think this way about Apple and its jarring to read with it 10-15 years behind me.
It reads as aggro and oddly tribalistic / sports fan-y.
(what people? who thinks its slower than an M1? who thinks you can't code on it? what will you coding on it prove to these people that the benchmarks they read can't? with all that, why get so invested you're buying a machine you don't want to use day to day? what does "handicapped" mean in this context?)
Only sharing b/c I never understood why people would roll their eyes at me, and apparently I finally reached my own graybeard moment, and I am now rolling my eyes at both of my selves :)