* No MagSafe
* One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s
* No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.
* “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air
* Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color
* No True Tone
* 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage
* No camera notch
* Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air
* Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods
* Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air
* The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones
* No keyboard backlighting
* Touch ID not included on base model
* Trackpad does not support Force Touch
* Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7
* No fast charging
* The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma...
Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.
Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."
I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.
I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.
In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.
You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.
In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)
Wait what? How did you manage that?
The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.
And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow.
The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p
I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
the keywords here are "depending on the workload".
edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.
Most cool. Is it an M1?
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):
| device | cpu | single core score | multi core score |
|:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3708 | 14698 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |
The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.
For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk.
But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare.
*edit
https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...
Weight is the same incidentally.
I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)
* Only one external display
* No haptic trackpad
Well, I see this as a very positive thing.
It means people who need the cheapest computer can get it, and people who want to upgrade pay a small amount and get all the upgrades in a package without jumping up to the MacBook Air, etc. for much more.
Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well
Great for a student or casual user though for sure.
That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.
A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.
— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.
— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?
On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?
* $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education)
* $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education)
This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=
When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?
That’s been the case for 5+ years :)
I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar?
The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple.
Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better.
for pretty much half the price, though.
i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ laptop.
as somebody that has used both windows (at work), mac os (at work) and linux (at work and at home) the macbook neo could be an absolute steal of a laptop.
> * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
oh yeah, first world problems /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18
So this is basically running on a phone CPU
I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.
But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.
The MacBook Neo has one of the fastest processors on the market for single threaded tasks, which is what has the most impact on how "fast" a processor feels for day to day usage.
Netbooks had processors that were glacially slow.
People thinking I mentioned my (somewhat) disappointment about the CPU because it is also used in Phones, but actually what I meant is that I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.
But I don't really see doing that for the A18, personally; even though I don't doubt its a good chip!
The reputation problem was kind of baked in. Vista launched the same year netbooks did, and even though Vista was a disaster, "runs the latest Windows" is the smell test normal people use for whether something is a real computer.
Netbooks didn't pass.
The storage situation made Windows users miserable anyway. The SSD models had 4-8GiB of flash, and XP alone ate well over half before you'd done anything. So people bought the HDD variant instead, more space, sure, but spinning at 4,200rpm, which wasn't even the slow-but-acceptable 5,400 of a normal laptop drive. Then pile the standard bloatware on top of that.
Bear in mind, people chose the HDD version because it ran Vista: the thing that made it a "real" computer. The SSD variant, the one that actually worked, got ignored for exactly that reason.
Run Linux on the SSD variants though, and the thing was actually great.
(Not sure if that's really an apt description though, but then I was out as soon as I read they're neutering one of the usb-c speeds.)
And yes, absolutely. All you need is a bootchain exploit. However unlike in the old jailbreaking days when people found and publicized them for fun, these days they are worth millions. Apple will pay you $500k for sandbox escape into the kernel. If you nail the bootchain, it'll be in the millions. From Apple. And god knows how much such a thing would go for in the black market.
Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.
The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt...
I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).
So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).
Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.
Now, if only Asahi was more complete.
My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.
The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.
Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.
The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.
The metal is more "luxury", though.
This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon
I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...
https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...
Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink
Anyway, the author claims:
you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before.
Does toasty mean extremely hot?
The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle.
Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees?
You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could.
Everything’s a trade off.
My body is the heatsink
Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.
One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.
~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal
Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.
The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.
But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.
1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/
My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.
When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.
It's awesome!
Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.
Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.
- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?
- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?
- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?
Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.
(Hey, Eric!)
I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.
Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.
At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.
Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).
- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.
- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.
- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.
Fusion + blender + slicers.
Virt machines / docker + dev env
iOS Android web development
16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro
Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex
My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use
My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.
My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping
I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.
I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.
if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.
They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.
And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.
That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.
The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).
Linux powers the entire world. Billions if not tens of billions of devices. It doesn't "break all the time like a kit car". I switched my wife's desktop from Ubuntu to Debian about a year ago and I haven't heard a single complain. Not a single crash. She hardly reboots her computer. The thing is just rock solid and it needs to be: she works from home and she spends 8 hours+ on her (Linux) computer.
> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.
That said, my surface is pretty old so maybe some of these design flaws have been fixed.
But from my experience, the build quality of the MacBook is in a different league than the surface.
Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).
For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).
So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.
You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.
Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...
It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable. *Edit: This was covered under warranty, thankfully
This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.
I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.
I can run Windows on a USB stick form-factor if I want to. Or dozens of tablet sizes from various vendors. And every kind of laptop imaginable, with all kinds of features. And everything else up to massive rack-mount server hardware. But sure, if a Macbook is all you need, then go for it.
- Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit.
- The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.
- For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks. Yes, this is a numbers game. The goal is every student has a device.
- Schools using Chromebooks to log in. If you want reliable Google logins on macOS, you have an additional big spend up front, along with per-seat licensing costs.
- This doesn't even factor in MDM and app cost comparisons.
If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions
If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).
Somehow while spending the most per capita of any nation on the planet, American schools are in a perpetual budget crunch. It's about getting internet access not whether the trackpad is good. You think a chromepad is crappy - have you ever tried to do something in Blackboard?
> If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care
They won't be. Pizza sauce is considered a vegetable.
An aside: Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves? I believe they shouldn't.
The more and less cynical explanations (and both play a role, IMO):
(1) Because individuals in those roles have closer relationships to the people that set the salaries than do individual teachers, and
(2) Because otherwise people with experience in education would continue as teachers and not seek roles as superintendents or other administrators (or seek the advanced degrees sought for those roles whose only financial payoff is greater competitiveness for those higher paying roles.)
This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.
The metal construction is what prompted me to switch over to macbook pro's back in the day. The plastic dell laptops i used to use couldn't handle the abuse that it took during all of the travel i was doing at the time (cases kept cracking). I switched to a pro and was rewarded later with it surviving a 5 foot fall from a car rental counter. It bent part of the corner, but the screen was still in tact and it continued to work well enough to get me through the trip. I suspect the plastic alternative would have been toast.
Having kids today and seeing how rough they are with their toys, I'm not confident that a plastic laptop would survive them long.
And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.
My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.
Very often they aren't (the school devices are in-school resources that aren't given to the kids any more than their desks are) and anything the kids have out of school is bought by the parents (and even if they are given the computers by the school, usually the replacement costs is on the parents if there is damage). But, either way, grade school kids are, on average, irresponsible as a matter of cognitive development (its a big part of why children are treated differently than adults legally.)
> school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.
A school district that can be described as having a “penal system” is, ipso facto, dysfunctional.
What happens when a kid's laptop is broken, regardless of the reason, and the family is unable to afford to repair it? Are we going to run into a similar situation that we had when kids couldn't pay for school lunch? Do teachers write "pay for a new laptop" in sharpie on the kid's arm for the parent?
A child's educational environment is a lot more chaotic, violent, and uncontrolled compared to an office environment. If you're issuing my child a $600 laptop and making me responsible for any damages, guess what's going to be kept at home in a secure location?
Making a child responsible for securing a laptop in an insecure environment isn't accountability, it's just a form of imprisonment.
The screenshot in that Reddit post more or less looks like ours. Schools generally repair these, if they have the technicians. And everyone is cannibalizing parts out of last generation models. It's like a Jawa shop.
> Apple can only compete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.
I've never seen, nor heard of Apple providing competitive prices, even in quantities of ~10,000 units. They haven't even gotten close and they've largely given up on the idea of Macs as a standard K12 school device. ~$250 iPads are still strong in low primary grades and special education, though.
I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.
It does exist, it just requires the iPad to be managed via MDM, which most schools would have (and should implement if they don't have it). JamF, Mosyle, Business Essentials, InTune and probably any other MDM can put an iPad into shared iPad mode with multiple profiles.
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
Younger students on the other hand, Chromebooks remain the way to go. Most of the time, kids'll win in a race between their destructive tendencies and crappy hardware giving out.
100% agreed. My statements weren't meant to indicate the Neo wasn't viable. They were meant to state that the Neo isn't going to replace Chromebooks in schools (as far as being District-purchased).
> The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards.
Build quality has been steadily improving over the years. It's all still budget (target ~$290), but is more and more durable with each new generation.
Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.
I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.
Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.
Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.
It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".
As an example, my kids try to do school work on one of the house Macs, but there's too many roadblocks so they just use their Chromebooks.
I used to buy my kids Chromebooks for school, but, since the pandemic, the school issues them, so I haven't bought any since.
> Apple stuff they will likely be better made
It depends on what you mean. Apple uses higher quality parts and is more sleek.
Chromebooks are more durable, take more abuse, are very repairable, and parts are cheap and plentiful. These are keys to schools. We're at a point where schools cycle out old models and either keep a bunch around, or strip parts from them, because some parts are interchangeable between generations.
- Low end consumer
- College students
- People who have a desktop computer, but want a cheap portable for on-the-go.
> The "surface" market is minuscule
Probably so, but then again, I see a lot of Surface devices out and about and they are fairly popular with non-teacher education staff. While they aren't competing with Chromebooks or Apple on volume, I'd bet they're doing well.
I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.
Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.
An iPhone Pro is 3 times more expensive than an average Android phone too. If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.
The hardware lasts but they usually stop getting software updates after a few years, especially if they're not high-end models.
Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/02/apple-releases-ios-16-7...
Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.
Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.
I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.
It was great, very simple to use but still had all the features you needed.
They were acquired by Apple who then promptly killed the product.
Some schools will gladly pay more.
It should also be noted that Washington state schools are still generally heavily Microsoft and Windows, despite Google's dominance.
> The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.
We don't actually know this. It does at the level individual student purchasing themselves, but I'd imagine there is a substantial bulk discount for educational establishments. That is not a new trend for Apple, it dates back to the Apple II.
We do because this is historically the norm. Schools pay roughly the same as the "college student" pricing, aside from the occasional deals they toss us.
My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.
Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.
Another school uses iPads with keyboards for the same purpose, so I'm not sure where the school market is for these. Maybe only older kids, but a lot of edu-tech is expecting some kind of touch/pen input.
The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.
The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)
The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.
8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).
You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.
"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs
Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...
Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.
I could go on, and on...
Where is exactly the premium quality?
Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.
Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.
Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.
Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.
I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.
Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.
I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine
What are modern operating systems and applications doing?
I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular
Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.
I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.
If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.
I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.
Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?
And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.
Images, complicated CSS, JavaScript ads, they can all use lots of memory!
That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.
Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.
I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.
I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.
Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?
Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.
I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.
I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.
I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.
I can use a build server when I want one, but that's not always appropriate. Local builds are useful.
Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.
They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"
I mean, look at the colors!
Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.
I think the Surface is as close to great as you can get. I'm not saying that I know the whole market of laptops, you probably know better. But the Surface is pretty good, which is weird because it seems like Microsoft isn't really focusing on it or even backing away from it.
I agree with the parent, that Macbooks are way ahead in terms of usability, polish and charm for a laptop. And the performance is outright stellar.
I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.
I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.
I've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.
So I unplugged it, at which point I noticed the smoke was increasing. So we doused it in CO2 (maybe N2, idk, some cheap gas we had lying around for the wetlab), pried the computer part off of the base, and then IT handled sending it back to M$.
Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves
200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.
On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)
15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)
See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)
It's interesting, for years I have been trying to make my iPad a nice, slim laptop I could bring with me everywhere for lighter/coding specific tasks. I've gone through several keyboards trying to make this work. It never has.
Now with this laptop, I can do exactly this, while being cheaper than what I've been attempting to do with an iPad.
Now that Apple is attempting to compete in this space, they'll have to pitch these folks on what macOS without touch capability offers over Windows with touch capability.
Maybe it will still sell well enough, maybe people aren't that stuck on touchscreens.
A nitpick: there are two USB ports, one of them is a 10GB/s USB 3 port.
"you're plugging it wrong" will become the new version of the classic "You're holding it wrong"
Weekend project.
On the other hand, more money doesn't always mean better computer. I had a Dell XPS 9570 at a previous gig that had a lot of issues: coil whine, bad camera placement, terrible thermals, etc.
The price point, the capability, the only thing stopping Apple at this point is the MDM stuff integrating it with other identity providers but its ahead of where it used to be.
The only time macs can be a bit of a headache is if you are still using all on-prem AD & group policy and trying to force them into that environment via joining the mac to AD.
Last time I dealt with Apple MDM was integrating it with on-prem AD and it was a pain. I know it’s better now because last few “gigs” have used it and it’s been pretty seamless with Microsoft Authenticator for Teams. (Ugh!)
I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only nerds use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.
Can we talk about laptops that you can’t carry by the edge where your palm rests because it flexes the frame and registers it as a mouse down event …
Possibly, but I would wait for reviews to make that call. The hardware is slower than other MacBooks; memory may be slower, too, and other hardware may be slightly worse in quality.
> Your new MacBook Neo. Just the way you want it[sic]. 13-inch MacBook Neo in Indigo A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine Apple Intelligence Footnote ※
8GB unified memory
256GB SSD storage
U.S. English Magic Keyboard with Lock Key
20W USB‑C Power Adapter
Two USB-C ports, 3.5 mm headphone jack
Support for one external display
One reason Apple can get away with 8 GB of RAM is their SoC does realtime compression of data in RAM and they use high bandwidth memory; the A19 Pro RAM bandwidth is 60 GB/s. This enables them to treat the SSD like an L3 cache.
It's nearly 5 years since the M1 was released; I suspect Apple has gotten really good with their RAM > compression > SSD system since then.
I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!
What features matter to you?
No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5
Chromium often avoids this by rendering 1px borders as hairlines that snap to a single device pixel, even when a CSS pixel corresponds to 1.5 device pixels at 150% scaling. This keeps lines crisp, but it also means the border remains about one device pixel thick, making it appear slightly thinner relative to the surrounding content.
For some people such artifacts are not noticeable for others they are.
https://patrickbrosset.com/articles/2024-06-21-invasion-of-t...
https://flutterawesome.com/sharp-looking-flutter-application...
I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.
All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.
And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.
Macbook Neo is also 219ppi vs Surface Laptop at 178ppi. We’ll see about performance, but i’d expect the macbook to be on par or better.
It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.
And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.
If your MacBook has a glowing apple, you might be running Snow Leopard. You need to upgrade like now.
Should have spent the money on a MacBook Pro with a real GPU, I would have used that computer way longer than I had.
How do you recycle your old parts?
Any computer that you can upgrade its parts? SSD, RAM, Wifi cards, etc.
The only parts that wear out on a modern laptop are the SSD and the battery. If I replace those, I can use it basically indefinitely, paying the penalty on performance and energy consumption depending on how old the CPU is.
Why would I throw out (or recycle) a perfectly good computer if I could simply fix or upgrade it? If you're not reusing it, then you could pass it down to somebody who would use it.
20+ year old computers are e-waste at this point thanks to software bloating and lack of hardware acceleration for at least h.264.
15 year old computers are very usable, but unfortunately most use SATA for storage which is definitely not optimal for SSDs.
10 year old computers are from when PC tech plateaued, for most use cases the difference in performance is imperceptible, and maybe you lose power efficiency.
if the ssd is bricked you do need to replace the whole "logic board" tho which sucks
Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.
What exactly is your point?
With a distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu everything basically "just works", and you have much more freedom with how you setup your computer. Plus, while Apple is generally better about not bloaring their OS with bothersome corporate BS ("log into your Windows account! Sign up for OneDrive! AI in your email!") then Microsoft, they're not exactly perfect.
Thinkpads.
Or in general any business laptop, like HP Elitebook or Dell Presicion.
But they are not cheap at all haha
If you want performace get a desktop!
Or a MacBook, which is part OP's point. Apple is delivering quality at price points that Windows OEMs aren't (which is sort of the opposite of the phone world).
Only P-series are workstations.
I meant for build quality.
I don't know why the downvotes, maybe someone can chime in if there is more to surface laptop? because i am using one laptop, and much prefer to use windows on M4 macbook pro instead.
From my personal experience, Widows users in general don’t mind Windows, but, definitely, nobody I have ever met finds it more desirable than macOS.
Part of it historically was a sort of Visual Studio induced Stockholm Syndrome, where for a long time if you were doing C++ work that was the only sane way to go.
There are some companies that even filter potential employees on this basis.
When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, it wasn’t clear that was going to work. Being able to boot into Windows was sort of an insurance policy that’s no longer necessary.
Just run MacOS.
To be honest if Apple wanted to they could work with valve to make gaming on Mac a reality
To some degree it should already be possible with wine + dxvk + moltenvk
Also the era when companies were trying to “kill” each other’s devices is no longer a thing.
They all get the reality it’s a multi device world and they need to work within it.
Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices
Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases
(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)
Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.
Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb to free memory.
I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.
Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.
I don't see too many students running Teams.
Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.
I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).
Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
With builds running on big build servers.
The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.
That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.
macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.
It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.
My high school required students to bring their own laptops to school when I started in 2010. Their shopping list suggested a MacBook Pro 13" with a case - I looked up "MacBook Pro price" for the first time in my life and just about walked into traffic. I didn't have a laptop to bring, I didn't want to bring the wrong kind of laptop and get double-screwed, so I bit the bullet and brought my car savings to the Apple store at the mall. A tremendously thoughtful sales rep told me "that's crazy, what school requires a MacBook Pro for 9th graders?", led me to the white unibody MacBooks on the side, and showed me that if I was buying it for school, I would get a discount on the laptop, a free inkjet printer (with ink!), and a free iPod Touch. This blew my mind. I thought it was a scam.
If I recall, that model of MacBook compared admirably against the same year's base model MacBook Pro 13 on a stat sheet but felt worse in hand. The MacBook Neo might actually bring up the rear on fit and finish at the expense of I/O and like, the questionable idea of running an A-series chip in a laptop running Tahoe and Chrome. I'm thrilled with this release.
I've also returned Apple products multiple times, once (recently) without the packaging, and once several days past the return window. They refunded me every time, no questions asked.
This makes me wonder if it's part of their training?
Can be a little annoying (an employee actively tried to downsell my partner, even though they knew what they wanted), but overall it’s a nice practice.
Incentives matter more than training.
My experience is that they are more focused on finding the right product for your needs. I've been there more than once where they happily downsell a customer.
Apple doesn't sell anything where they're taking a bath; their margins have been high 30's to low 40's for many years. All of the technology in the Neo already existed; they didn't have to create anything new.
Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.
Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.
Why would you want an iPad?
The Neo can run iPad apps and it's small enough that it can be used in most situations where you'd typically use a tablet (bed, couch, etc).
Homework for things like algebra and later calculus definitely is interesting to do on an iPad, as the ratio of time spent thinking:writing is high while you're learning.
But pure notetaking where the thinking:writing ratio is very low? I'd much prefer to type than write on a screen.
I am clearly not the target audience for the iPad. Being restricted to apps and what they allow you to do while asking for money at every corner is not my cup of tea.
Plus on macOS you can easily use note taking apps with the Wacom touchpad that then digitize the text to make it searchable.
If digital version is important, there are probably some scanning apps.
In undergrad my iPad was far and away my favorite note-taking device. Digital pen-and-"paper" beats laptop for 99% of note taking.
He’s off to university in Fall ‘26, and I’m waffling between getting him an Air and keeping his current iPad, or getting a neo and new iPad. Probably go the former because of the long term cost effectiveness of the Air.
On the other hand, I've seen more professors — especially in the humanities, but also upper div CS — start banning devices in lecture partially or altogether. Complete distraction (scrolling Instagram, etc.) during lecture is extremely prevalent, and they keep citing noticeable improvements in engagement after banning devices. This also coincides with a shift back to less take-home assignments and more exam-style assessment since they want greater assurance people aren't completely offloading their cognition to LLMs.
The exception was when people were taking orgo or a diagram heavy class. For that semester not everyone would have a tablet and some people would have pens and pencils. Or writing classes that still required a handwritten essay for the final exam
I don’t know anyone who uses any other tablet besides an iPad, they’ve basically conquered the market.
At this point, there are more people taking notes on an iPad + Apple Pencil than on physical notebooks in my lectures
Reading whole books on a laptop tends to produce a ton of neck strain.
iPads are better when you need to be constantly highlighting and making notes, like for school. And for PDF's you need to be panning and zooming.
iPads/Kindles are better because they're smaller and lighter so you can position them with far greater flexibility.
It's smaller, it's lighter, it's by definition just way more flexible to use ergonomically. You can position it in lots of ways you can't position a larger 13" horizontal laptop.
When reading in bed I use a stand to hold my Kindle at the best position. I would need a much heavier stand to be able to do that with my iPad.
In theory yes, but in reality barely any developer (at least the mainstream ones) make their app available on MacOS, and nobody enjoys interacting with a touch-screen optimized app with mouse/trackpad
The rest of the most use apps are front end for services where the app is free. There are very very few one time app purchases on iOS where pirating would make sense
TIL: iPhone backups on computers stopped including full ipa’s back in 2017…
The OneNote app sync is quick enough that I could type lecture notes on the laptop, and then quickly switch to the same document on my iPad to sketch out a diagram. It was overkill for sure, but very useful
I just wish they'd let us run MacOS on iPads.
Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.
iPad + voice, this seems like my new lifestyle choice and it looks like it’s going to work out too.
I think human beings need to move away from sitting at the typewriter like it’s 1930. We’re more than this.
blink code to codeserver
A Chromebook with 8Gb ram and stock ChromeOS gets 10 hours doing real work. And with real work I mean full local dev with containers, vscode, Vivado, and 100+ chrome tabs open. And even running small VMs from time to time.
I don't know MacOS, but comming from Linux customizability was mostly okay. Obviously there was also some getting used to. The desktop environment has decent window management and support for virtual desktops which I use heavily.
I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.
The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.
The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026.
The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have.
It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps")
People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!
This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.
As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.
Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:
- PostgreSQL (server)
- TablePlus (db client)
- Docker
- Slack
- Chrome
- Safari
- Zed
- Claude native
- ChatGPT native
- Zoom
- Codex
- Numbers
- Calendar
- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)
With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).
I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
e.g. using hypothetical numbers: if base MacOS/typical GPU usage requires 4 GB, then the 8GB model would have 4GB available for running apps (but multiplied by memory compression/swap to fast SSD). Whereas the 16GB would have a much more comfortable 12 GB for multi-tasking in that scenario especially with the multiplier effect of compression/fast swap on top.
So it still feels like a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as far as what an 8 GB model could handle in real usage. I have a friend who does light dev work on an M1 Macbook Air so I don't think an average user would have issues on the Neo day to day, but using the 16 GB as a yardstick doesn't seem that useful.
Sure, but, by the numbers I'm seeing, their much heavier load than mine would be waaaay into swap territory for them and is still doing just fine. That's really my point. That's why I think it's actually pretty reasonable to look at half their load and say "man, even half their load is a pretty heavy load for most people, so half their RAM will almost certainly be more than plenty for the target market".
Also, just for the info, my Activity Monitor says that the non-purgeable OS RAM (wired) usage is around 3GB on Tahoe 26.3.
To the major point of can it (Neo 8GB) run multiple programs at the same time, my experience would say it would have no issues doing so given what one can do in 16GB on lesser Mac hardware. (Maybe I am wrong and MacOS takes all 8GB for itself, but that seems far-fetched.)
It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.
Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.
Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up.
It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count.
Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost.
Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.
30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand.
I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive.
FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.
- USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
- USB 2.0 480 Mbps
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...
I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.
I'd like to run the external display plus an external SSD at USB 3 speeds, so I'd be waiting for experience reports on whether the one port can handle both without constraining the filesystem transfer speeds.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a future product with 2x USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support on the next generation, A19 Pro or A20 Pro maybe, if the product has enough success.
No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.
I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...
It will definitely be used to justify spending $300-1500 more for a better laptop.
... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
But they don't. And won't.
USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).
You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.
With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.
I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.
Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.
Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.
its investment into next generation of loyal apple users, they more likely be selling it at loss.
$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch ID
Honestly pretty fantastic product and price.
This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)
Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.
As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.
Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.
Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.
The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.
I don't think an apple watch would help there?
You can authorize via Apple Watch everything you can authorize via Touch ID. You get the notification on the Watch, and you need to press the button twice to auth.
I don't remember if it works every time, or only when MacBook is closed and connected to external display/keyboard.
Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.
A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!
The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.
This is the A18 Pro, specifically, which should have a faster GPU than the M1?
I’m not sure they do. They love their AI chip, but that might be where the live ends.
I can imagine schools buying them for their students and then taking them after the semester is over and then giving to next but also reselling it at a very nice value if they might want the next line of product at a decent price.
Also this not only applies to school but normal people who buy the Macbook Neo too
And even after that, yes, children are absolutely hard on their tablets I agree but they operate and the resale value of those could be decent aside from a very few IMO. There is a way to create a culture of preservation or atleast steer things that way but yeah I agree it can be hard.
IMO that form factor was perfect for a small, low end laptop, it just needed a more power efficient chip, and a screen with smaller bezels.
Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm
- Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
- Width: 30 vs 29.75
- Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
- Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23
But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).
Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.
If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.
EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.
It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!
I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.
The footprint of the Air was 11.8" x 7.56". The Neo is 11.71" x 8.12". If you liked the size of that one, you'll like this.
That seems like a product they could also potentially revive with Apple Silicon.
And indeed it's 13 inch but the dimensions are quite similar, there is a 0.8% difference in width (with the 11 inch being wider surprisingly, due to the bezels) and a 7% difference in height (11 inch being shorter). At its thickest point the 11 inch is. 33% thicker. In terms of volume the 13 inch isn't any bigger.
Just look up the specs.
8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Fantastic value for money.
Honestly what I am (pleasantly) surprised by is the minijack.
For a couple months I was on an 8gb m1 air, it was perfectly fine, even with docker containers. As long as i didn't launch teams....
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
“If you see anybody [building electron apps] in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere!” - a reasonable person, probably
How anyone could think their chat app or text editor should be able to bring a 32GB 8-core machine to a crawl is beyond me. I can have about 200 browser tabs open, but one discord chat open in the background and I’m stuttering. It’s offensive.
I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.
Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.
But I would expect you have more choice if it’s a personal computer, including paying the additional cost in memory and performance if the final choice is bloated software.
Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.
The last gen MacBook Air (M4, 16GB, 256GB) was down to $749 with retailer discounts last year. Currently $759 on Apple's certified refurbished site.
Even as a main machine for most people. Heck I could probably even get away with it. I have my work laptop that's technically my "main" machine as I spend 8+ hours a day on it, and it's sufficiently beefy.
I hardly do much on a personal computer (not counting my gaming desktop), this neo would be more than enough for my non-work needs.
Granted, I don't currently have a need for it as I have my own MBA and an iPad pro, but if I had neither this would definitely be a no brainer and I could confidently recommend this over pretty much any off-the-shelf budget windows laptop to anyone who asks me "What laptop should I buy?"
Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.
That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.
I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.
On the other hand, Apple pushes Xcode & iPhone development quite heavily to students (and not say Python or JS), so it’s definitely something they care about.
Kids already are well aware of iPhone upgrades. Parents will get them this machine. They'll get going and soon enough be badgering their parents for an upgrade to a more competent machine. That is all by design while being an affordance for people who can only get in at the cheap end.
So IMO in 8GB most types of coding is possible actually.
But regarding Xcode+Iphone simulator, I am not sure if that's possible tho. It's possible to run android simulator on Linux 8 GB with waydroid while being pretty smooth. So theoretically could be possible but I am not familiar with building with Xcode/Iphone simulator.
These things will be running in 5-10 years.
Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.
I had an M1 Air w/ 8GB when it first came out, and although I haven't used Tahoe on it, it handled anything I threw at it no problem while swapping. Tons of Chrome tabs, mail, music, terminal, VSCode all open without so much as a hiccup. macOS also has really good memory compression compared to Windows.
Trying to do the same on an 8GB Windows machine would be an effort in frustration.
I do wish it had 12GB, but AFAIK Apple didn't make an A18 Pro with 12GB. I suspect if they refresh it in a couple years with the A19 Pro, it'll have 12GB of RAM.
For the Neo, it's:
+ $100 -> $699 Macbook Neo (well, I probably want Touch ID like my iPad...)
+ $100 + $400 -> $1099 M5 Macbook Air (8 GB feels a little tight, but this new Air has 16GB plus a better CPU...)
RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.
Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
I really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e
Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.
12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.
I've done both with success: am still riding a maxed out M1 Ultra Mac Studio which hasn't lost a step, no matter what I ask it to do. For a daily driver that doesn't try to do the most extreme things (think: able to edit your 6K videos but not scrub them, and media storage space can't live on the actual machine but only on some outboard storage) the base models of these will be a breath of fresh air. This is of course assuming the liquid-glassification of the OS doesn't ramp up, rendering the system unusable to actual Mac users.
This is really nice for schools.
I really want this to work for me too, just because of those colors, but the RAM is really the only issue. Oh well, at least this forces every other budget laptop to compete harder.
Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren't getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.
What's the CPU performance like compared to an M1?
This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.
I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).
After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.
Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.
They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.
Stats software is cross-platform or open-source.
Art programs are cross-platform or open-source.
Office suites are cross-platform or browser-based.
Unless you're specifically trying to learn Windows development, dev tools are cross-platform and open source.
15 years ago, what you describe was probably quite common. Today, it's almost completely disappeared.
Also most "professional" CAD software is Windows-only, which is going to affect a big chunk of engineering majors.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.
People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.
Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.
This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.
akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.
C'mon, man.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Maybe a slightly used one as well.
But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.
I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.
For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.
For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.
- M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377
- M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712
- A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288
So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster in single core speed.
I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.
But hey the colors are cute.
My M1 8GB Air did great before Tahoe; even medium complexity Xcode projects ran fine on it with other apps running. Since I made the mistake of upgrading it to Tahoe, it’s too painful to work in those projects.
AI is so good these days I am using the laptop for quick changes more often, as I just push every change. I rarely need to fiddle. The general experience of using my desktop and laptop are converging.
Running a node.js server on Tahoe makes your macbook sluggish and you feel like Tahoe is fine performance wise?
May I reminded you that 10 years ago people also ran chrome and node js webservers and this was not a problem in any way with 8GB of ram.
May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.
Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?
For general browsing and webapps and writing papers and watching Netflix and whatever, this is great.
Tahoe is a massive regression in my personal experience (16GB here). So many random bugs and menu bar pop-up slowdowns (how is the system menu bar this unresponsive?).
Spotlight has gotten so bad, I can literally count the time it takes between typing the app name and the result showing up in the dropdown. Ended up switching Spotlight to Tuna.
I've experienced this too, even after giving spotlight multiple shots months apart. For your sanity, I say just stop using spotlight. Don't let Apple steal your valuable waking hours with their crap QA.
It's a night and day difference compared to the pile of garbage Spotlight.
And settings app does actually work!
Ditto for iOS 26. They need some Snow Leopard action, for real.
And I am quite happy with Sonama.
Sheesh - in iPadOS you’ve got multitasking, multitouch, full windowing support, external input and monitors, and a ridiculously accurate pen. If that’s holding back, what exactly are you looking for?
I’d still argue a device that size works better with just split screen than the new windowing, but other than the walled garden approach it does pretty much everything today that us techies have been whining about.
File management that doesn't suck, incl. better handling of external drives.
It's Mac OS Vista. This is the proper name for this abomination Apple calls Tahoe.
Honestly, we’re not the target market for this. I’m pretty sure at this price point though, it will sell like hotcakes. Once people get slightly into the ecosystem, it’s usually a big win for Apple since their stickiness ( from my experience of people around me) is undeniable once you get one product
If you’re doing “real work” then 16gb won’t be sufficient, either. My “real work” machine has 96 and I sometimes wish it had more.
If only we could get fun colors for those…
Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:
TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.
Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.
I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).
Also these days Apple actually allows sales and discounts at retailers. I bet this will be on sale for $499 at Amazon or BestBuy before the end of the year.
* 86 million (27%) are under 21 and most of those are students. * Those people have parents, assume 2 parents per 2 children = 86 million parents (27%)
That means 55% of the US population is eligible for the cheaper rate before you even account for people getting secondary degrees, educators, and yes - the schools themselves.
--
$799 in Canada for the base model & $999 for the one with touchID & 512 GB ssd.
Looks like both models only come with 8gb ram.
The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.
You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.
Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.
I personally liked iOS and macOS being separate things because making a desktop OS also work on a touchscreen has wider implications than it sounds. That's why these days everything in Windows is blown up like Fisher Price software and way bigger than necessary for a mouse cursor. Seems like that's the direction Apple is headed in anyway with Tahoe.
The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!
Also this week: Lenovo's new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability showing that even popular modules of mainstream manufacturers can build with repairability in mind.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/115827/new-thinkpads-score-perfe...
Apple I imagine is still soldering their storage and memory to the motherboard.
And no, Apple is not soldering memory to the main board on most of their computers these days. All of the M series computers have the memory on package with the CPU, because there are latency issues with putting it any further away. The A18 Pro that this laptop uses is package-on-package, the DRAM is directly on top of the SoC.
There are no socketed standards for LPDDR anyway.
Data Units Read : 1267900331 (649.16 TB)
Data Units Written : 904681650 (463.20 TB)
power_cycles : 667
power_on_hours : 9611
and yet it's still only:
available_spare : 100%
available_spare_threshold : 99%
percentage_used : 16%
I don't expect it to fail anytime soon.
It’s a pretty bad idea to keep valuable documents on a mobile device. You can’t recover the data from socketed storage if it’s lost or stolen.
The SSD is difficult to replace because Apple uses storage chips with no controller; the SSD controller is in their CPU. So you can't put in any M.2 in there even if you wanted. Some small companies have managed to offer upgrade parts for the Mac Mini, which has socketed storage chips.
As time marches on and PC manufacturers stay still, Apple manages to simplify its logic boards by reducing the number of connectors and parts, lowering the price to make a computer. Apple, which has never really offered anything below 1000$, has entered a new market with a bang.
I expect a computer in 20 years to look like the system-on-a-chip that Apple makes for its watches. I don't know why people are adamant that we need more controllers and chips on our machines, not less.
For contrast, I used a Surface Book throughout college and within weeks of the warranty expiring I ran into serious issues with the battery, then the charging port, display backlight, fan. I loved it to death so I kept it on life support and changed my usage patterns until I gave up on it. And yes, my next device was a used Thinkpad, and I was able to fix most issues I ran into. But I'd
I am NOT a fan of the measures Apple takes to monopolize the maintenance and repair of their devices.
Compared to pre-Apple silicon I was getting company exemptions to upgrade before I was technically allowed.
M series Macs are just amazing devices.
The lack of upgradability is directly what provides a lot of benefits that I expect the average consumer vastly prefers: better performance with soldered memory and better battery life. It's not just to shaft you on prices (though that's definitely a big factor).
Memory would be in the SoC no?
2020 called, you're going to want to stock up on toilet paper.
I like the keyboard on my gen1 T14, did it change later on?
Thinkpads have good repairability, few people would debate that. They are not perfect and the ifixit "review" itself acknowledges that the wifi antenna is soldered, hence not repairable.
2009 Me would've LOVED this! I'm so glad Apple released this.
Back in 2013/14 Guillermo Rauch (CEO Vercel) shared a brilliant insight -- develop software on a weak machine and optimize it to work well on it so that when it's used on a powerful machine, it's going to fly. This'll force macOS developers to consider these resource constraints.
Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.
And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.
Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
–––
edit: just to clarify, currently Apple's lineup includes the "What's a computer?" iPad – $349+, iPad Mini - $500+, iPad Pro – $999+ and iPad Air – $599+.
These come with a pencil and a magic keyboard. Also some of them are more powerful than the A18 Macbook Neo.
Then there's the Macbook Neo - $600+, 13" Macbook Air - $1,099+, 15" Macbook Air – $1,299+, 14" Macbook Pro – $1,699+, 16" Macbook Pro - $2,699+.
Who are all of these things for? Why does the iPad Air exist with the magic keyboard alongside the Macbook Neo? That's the same keyboard attached to a less powerful processor and a touchless display for a spitting-distance price.
Today it's the MacBook Neo unless you have a higher budget and want a nicer screen and more power. Then it's the MacBook Air, unless you do serious photography, video, audio, or development work then it's a MacBook Pro.
It's still a pretty simple, linear progression up the line.
Steve Jobs presided over an era where they were selling:
- A white plastic 13" MacBook
- An aluminum 13" MacBook
- 13", 15", and 17" Macbook Pro
- A high end 13" MacBook Air that thermally throttled and was more expensive than most of their other laptops
Replacing my iPhone was a nothing burger of choice, on paper the iPhone 15 pro was the best feature set for value vs buying a new iPhone 17, but Apple know that so don't sell the older models directly when the new models come out.
There's really limited impactful innovation when you get into the details.
Today Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and every product line is ruthlessly optimized/scrutinized to maximize their revenue/supply chain use/suss out consumer needs for the next cycle.
There isn’t a world where Apple has a $4T market cap and where their product offering fits in a neat 2x2.
Well first I would ask them what they are planning to use the Macbook for.
Then I would make the recommendation. There is Macbook Neo for basic stuff. Macbook Air for regular stuff and Macbook Pro for gangsta stuff.
It seems there is still good differentiation between the Macbook lines.
Now the 8gb can be concern to some but not to many IMO. And I am also feeling just a bit optimistic that Apple will realize that the largest criticism of this product can be that it doesn't have 16GB otherwise even more people can buy so in the future, I expect 16 GB to be possible too (When Ram bubble finally bursts)
Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.
With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.
Depending on their budget and needs, a Neo, Air, or Pro.
As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.
However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.
They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that?
But on a more serious note yes, I agree with you. Tablets - absolutely great for the use cases you mentioned, for everything else I want a proper keyboard, etc.
macOS is awful to manage on an enterprise and education level. This will always be Apple’s achilles heel in truly breaking into this market. Admins will push back.
Google has Security down to a science. ChromeOS has little to no malware. Google is constantly reporting malware and exploits to Apple so they can patch active vulns.
iPads a Macs stand up to much more abuse by students.
MacOS has very little malware even though users have more access to do things.
All google data is used to train AI and advertise. I’d like to not have that near my kids. Would rather have Apple’s “make money off hardware” from a data privacy standpoint.
The argument with Chromebooks is you can usually buy 4 of them at the cost of a single Mac.
My point is device management and security. This is what enterprise and education cares about and scopes around.
macOS is not nearly as robust or secure to manage as ChromeOS, and Windows flys above both with almost every single feature being manageable at a domain level.
Also your AI point is moot. Enterprise and Education have much different terms than consumers.
You think Apple is letting Google, Slack, and Zoom use their internal company data for training?
Not that i’m a fan of it, but meh it exists.
They need to move to having the students ID under both their parents and the school, detachable from the school when a kid moves.
The devices need to be enrolled to the org and then act as thin clients so any kid can log onto any laptop, not have the laptop locked down to a specific kid.
Apple Parental controls are either controllable on the kids device or one parents device but not both at the same time and definitely not two parents at the same time. Whose bright idea was it not to allow two parents to see and manage a kids settings from their own devices, at the same time. That’s a lot of the world that doesn’t appear to anticipate two parents wanting to manage a kid from separate accounts, but Apple should know better.
With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.
Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.
I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.
Really great to see.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
Qualitatively I'm running way more things in the background than I could on Linux and Windows machines with double the RAM, with far fewer hiccups.
I haven't tried a modern Surface or other high-end Windows laptop so maybe their swapping is comparable, but given the shocked reactions of non-Mac users at 8 GB of memory, I don't think so.
This is for people who want the cheapest MacBook possible, with the edu discount it's only 499$.
You drop it being silly, cool that's only 500$.
Why not? I would.
There is no "only". It's $500.
Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?
The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.
My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
https://arslan.io/2025/06/14/fujifilm-x-half-is-it-the-perfe...
And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.
Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.
I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...
I would like the bubble that is this website's "community" to pop, crash down back to earth and see them struggle living like normal people again.
Though I agree with you completely regarding the "oops I dropped it".
Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby
however for the common person out there, unless they're buying for status -- this will meet most of their needs
office workers, hospital workers, stay-at-home parents - who just wanna fill forms occasionally, write emails, browse the web - design a few posters on canva for a funeral, special event etc
so yeah to those people they don't give a shit about M-series, as long it has enough memory and can do what they want without freezing.
well done to apple
My understanding is this laptop matches or exceeds the M1 Air’s performance, so it should be pretty damn nice for most people.
I looked at OfficeWorks and I found some really cheap Chromebooks at the $300-500 level.
I picked two $500 Chromebooks:
- HP 14" Chromebook N200 8/128GB with usb-c + usb-a (quad-core).
- Lenovo IdeaPad 3i 15.6" Chromebook Laptop 8/128GB Celeron.
Looks like both are 1080p displays.
First at simple tech spec glance they're below the entry level Neo except they both have larger displays, but obviously as Neo costs $250 more.
But the question then is what do you get for that $250 more. I think once you take into consideration the finish, keyboard, webcam/mic, speakers, display, and even Apple's support which can be sometimes pretty decent, you're looking at a pretty strong contender.
The problem I expect though is that people tend not to be educated consumers and don't look into the other aspects outside of specs or cost, so Apple is really selling on branding, word of mouth, and probably through their salespeople at the stores. But also, if we start seeing these one the shelves of JB-Hifi, Officeworks, etc. (for US your local Best Buy and Walmart I guess), then it could penetrate the market well.
Assuming the Neo embodies Apple's signature quality and reliability, I hope it does well for first time laptop users / early education market.
There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.
Windows update on a Celeron chip makes it 100% utilisation with full boost.
I would actually rather but an Android phone than a laptop with a Celeron chip for the same price.
Anyway, updating my priors a bit with this Neo laptop. This feels like it could maybe spark some renewed excitement over Apple as a student / classroom device. If nothing else, the price makes it more of an option.
Neo:
Height: 0.50 inch (1.27 cm)
Width: 11.71 inches (29.75 cm)
Depth: 8.12 inches (20.64 cm)
Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)
Height: 0.44 inch (1.13 cm)
Width: 11.97 inches (30.41 cm)
Depth: 8.46 inches (21.5 cm)
Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)I can see there are a lot of Apple users here apparently. I have some old hardware I still make use of but couldn't see a case for anyone buying new stuff (overpriced, locked down, etc.)
- 2 fun colors + 2 regular
- The Magic Keyboard looks like it has a decent amount of travel and should hold up well
- Headphone port, recognizing that wired headphones are way more durable in a classroom setting
- Decent price and display, though I wonder about performance w/ Tahoe
I don't currently have a modern macOS machine, so a basic machine like this could be useful to have around even though I daily drive Linux now. Maybe it'll get Asahi support!
Which everyone on HN already says, but Apple seems to have its own idea what the iPad is for.
This new offering seems comparable to the price of a refurbished M1/M2.
Nope. It is mechanical.
(Honestly I can't see Apple doing that either though since it'd cannibalize their other product lines. But c'mon, Apple!)
- M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377
- M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712
- A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288
So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster single core speed.
It’s still the fastest computer I’ve ever used. (No Tahoe for me)
Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.
It also probably doesn't have a ~60% margin.
On the other hand, the iPhone is water proof, made of sturdier materials to survive falls, has cellular, and the high end ones have more memory
- Older chip (and with fewer thermal constraints)
- Only one camera (and much cheaper)
- Less RAM than 17pro and Air
- No cell modem, FaceID, ProMotion, MagSafe, etc.
I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.
And yes, that's fascinating. Are carrier subsidies in Canada higher or something?
Obviously just so many reasons why this won't happen. Or would happen on iPad first. But dare we dream?
There are some practical issues with having to make sure you have the screen and keyboard access (in practice the all-in-one of a laptop is pretty handy - though I guess you could still have this form factor in a much lighter shell minus the compute) but for a lot of cases like home <-> office this would be the dream, just carry your computer in your pocket.
The RAM shortage is only starting to hit but I think this could potentially start to be more appealing if it lasts too long and gets too bad.
That'd be the dream
But now more colorful and official.
I’m pretty interested in benchmarks. We haven’t had a phone chip and a desktop chip running the same OS so we could compare them better with benchmarks since the original Apple Silicon dev kits.
Also it’s $499 to start for students, which is impressive.
But the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me. Having that is such a huge improvement over having to type passwords constantly.
But that's the point. If you're super price conscious and a student, it's only $499! Typing a password is not a big deal compared to $100 for some people.
But if you want convenience, it's $599. Which helps subsidize the $499 price.
Product differentiation like this is what enables the cheaper price to begin with.
Used to own Yubikey before fingerprint scanners were a thing. I don't see the appeal now, to be honest. I considered it now that I use Asahi on my M1 with no support for TouchID, but still just type in the password because I couldn't be bothered with Yubikey.
Or I'm missing something?
Or perhaps this will be the perfect machine for the Asahi team to focus on…lots of demand at this price point, and a lean Linux install would make this machine fly.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
When forced to use macOS, a Linux VM provides a very convenient experience.
What's fun about this machine is its constraints, and it sort of reminds me of one of my processors orchestrating our school's server cluster via nothing but an 11" MacBook Air back in the day.
My iPad with an 'M1' chip actually consumes more battery than much older iPads when both are locked and with the screen off. I ended up figuring it was probably because, in the 'M' chip, the lowest possible energy usage is way higher than the 'A' chip. So even small background wake-ups used more energy.
I'm still hoping one day we have an iPad with macOS.
MacBook Neo is cheaper and weaker than a MacBook Air, yet shares the same price and single-app mindset as an iPad. It uses a phone chip similar to an iPad Pro, but gets multi-user support and a keyboard.
I struggle to run Tahoe on my 16GB M2 Air and somewhat I have to believe running it on a 8GB phone chip is gonna be alright, which if true have me thinking what exactly is the role of iPadOS anyway.
Ultimately, it feels like iPadOS and Tahoe are on a crash course for a middle ground that nobody asked for.
Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.
I’ve seen a Gmail tab eat 2.5Gb of memory all on its own… just sitting there. And you need some headroom for content and file caching and such to keep things feeling snappy.
The A18 Pro is going to out perform many "decades old" processors, which would you be referring to?
I wouldn't conflate "affordable" with "low-end" in terms of processing speed. Apple is able to get the price to this point because of decisions that the rest of the market did not make.
I'd agree that an m1 chip can probably continue to run modern macOS for a very long time, and they will likely drop support for it much earlier than they would need to.
The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.
I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.
MacBook Neo is A18 Pro and if you look at benchmarks, the A18 Pro single core performance is 50% faster than the M1...
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-introduces-colorful...
Single Core performance: the A18 Pro is faster than an M3!
Multi Core performance: The A18 Pro is essentially the same as an M1.
This balance seems right for the target market of a $599 laptop.
Apple is second to none in supporting legacy products.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/04/apple-macbook-neo-budget-lap...
That assumes Apple dev teams use one in their test suites.
One downside to the 11" Air when it was still sold is so much software that would be slightly broken on the vertically-constrained display.
- 2.7 lb on the 13" neo and 13.6" air
does that 2/3 lb difference really matter in a ~10–15 lb backpack?
Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.
I used an M1 Air with 8GB as my main software development machine for a year during Covid. It was fine.
I suppose we'll find out pretty soon, supporting virtualization would be important if they wanted to sell these to CS students that need eg. Docker.
Apple is doing everything they can to ensure it doesn't appear as a premium product.
A decade ago, they had the 12" MacBook (not Air, just "MacBook") it it felt super premium because it was lighter and smaller than any Air/Pro ... and used by executives (because it targeted that use case).
By having this product:
- called "Neo"
- thicker
- as heavy
- limiting RAM
And marketing this towards kids and lower grades, they are avoiding any mistaking this product as premium.
No it doesn't - no iOS device has ever shipped with an M series chip...
> Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?
Yes to A, no to B.
Also, you're completely leaving out scale and cost. Apple has already made (ok, had TSMC make) hundreds of millions of A18 chips, so throwing an A18 pro in their least expensive laptop ever makes a lot of sense.
Apple customers forgot about the golden trophy real quick, huh? https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
For the rest of us, happy with gently used 2nd hand devices, the original M1 MacBook Air and the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro are a *much* better deal for the same price, pretty much across the board, especially the Pro: bigger, brighter, 120Hz screen, beefy specs, ports.
That citrus colour, tho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(3rd_generation)
Or will they keep doing this with "neu", "nouveau", "nuevo" etc?
It's a subtle distinction, but I think the general connotation is more like "hyper-modern" or "reinvention/reinterpretation."
People won't see "MacBook Neo" and think "oh there's just a new MacBook."
Probably when they update it, if they decide to keep the product line going.
I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that.
The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going to confuse a lot of people. One of Apple's perks in terms of connectivity has been that you can basically assume all USB-C ports do everything. It also seems like they didn't include an SD card reader, like they used to. That's going to make the 256GiB rather cramped, I feel.
Without context on total memory available, this is a meaningless metric. Free RAM is wasted RAM.
Even with macOS deep into swap space during development (about 6-8GB of swap), macOS internals will happily keep 2GiB of memory reserved for window management and spotlight.
Apple's fast SSD is the only reason this laptop doesn't get bogged down under load, and with it being irreplaceable I wonder how long the disk last being used like this.
Obviously you're not going to use Apple's new netbook to do heavy development, but I don't expect the base model to remain usable for long with only 8GB. I don't exactly get the impression macOS has gotten lighter to run over the years.
Very bad truism that's not even compatible with the first half of your post.
If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.
I used to only want black/silver "base" colors for resale reasons but that has fallen far on my needs for a laptop since I keep/repurpose them or cycle them through friends/family instead of reselling in most cases now.
Anecdotal, but whenever my friends/family are looking for a basic laptop I almost always suggest a Lenovo for the price/performance/quality they're looking for in the $400-600 range, even though I myself would never get anything besides a MBP.
I would recommend this to them instead every single time. The build quality of macs are unmatched and now in everyone's price range.
My fear is that it's going to be made useless in no time with software updates, or that it has some important limitation (like i can't use XCode command line tools)... But i wanted to replace my old mid 2012 for a couple of years and i decided the next laptop would be either ARM or RiscV (browsing, writing text, scripting, light programming)
The Neo runs on the same chip as iPad so fat chance unlocking the bootloader
i'm holding my breath for armbian
> fat chance unlocking the bootloader
yeah, i know
iPhone’s are more expensive than this laptop anyways and Apple could upsell all the docks and accessories with sky high margins. It’s a mystery why they haven’t done this already.
Whatever they did with the 11" macbook air was magical. It doesn't seem like they can pull it off twice.
If they made an 11” model, it would probably weigh less than the original.
Makes no sense for a $1500 "Pro" iPad to have desktop-class RAM, storage, an M5 chip, and be stuck with a Fisher Price OS, while this one has the equivalent specs of last year's iPhone and gets the full power of macOS. Just unify the two already.
Yeah but some people buy both, and apple wants to keep it that way
(I'm being facetious, if the hardware was open, someone would have already written a custom boot loader for this :P)
I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.
I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.
This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
Anything for the price of the Neo that I could find was an ugly looking 15" piece of plastic from Asus or Lenovo (no offense, I love my Thinkpads).
However I do have to say again that I use an 8G M2 at work without any issues and I've had an M1 as a temp replacement for work recently again without any issues and they say A18 is equivalent to M1 in performance so I really don't see why this new Neo wouldn't be enough for a home/personal laptop. All my consumption is SaaS-based, I really don't need better spec. What I need is a lower price and familiarity that I appreciate and I think Apple nailed it here by offering both in a product.
Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
A return to 8GB laptops would be a good thing overall, so if this becomes a "target" for electron based apps, it would be a total game changer. The iPhone 17 has 8GB RAM, and honestly for the workloads we're doing it should be enough. I think there was a big jump when we jumped to 1080 screens on laptops about a decade ago (seriously...) but most of the resource usgae growth there has been needless since.
I have an Air (M2) and I use it where I once owned a Pro. No fans sold it to me -- that's a quality feature, tired of them getting dirty over time. But I have the 15" model and essentially use it as a pro laptop.
This? This is an Air.
But the Air has become the Pro, the Pro has become the one you get for ports and super power and I don't know if many people even need it, and now 'Air' has lost its meaning (light, entry-level, portable) so they need a new name. So they name it, literally, neo: New.
Steve Jobs would weep. What happens in five years when it's not new any more?
Once upon a time, there was the white MacBook. Maybe this is trying to be the new plain MacBook?
Well yes, obviously!
RAM, CPU cores, GPU cores, for the most part.
I don’t dislike it! Just, confused how three models all fit together.
MacBook Neo: for students (some primary school, probably more geared to post-secondary) and people who want a lightweight (form factor, price, performance) laptop that still feels premium.
MacBook Air: people who frequently move around, have an actual need performance but in a highly portable form factor.
MacBook Pro: professionals who highly prefer performance over ergonomics, basically a portable PC, as they likely keep it plugged in more than not, and it spends more time on a desk than being used as a laptop.
Basically the Pro is like a PC that also happens to have a screen and a keyboard and foldable, the Air is their laptop that intends to be a laptop, and the Neo is their Air on a budget.
For me an iPad with the Magic Keyboard case is already my personal laptop, and this device would be a downgrade in almost every way (ergonomics and specs).
The one thing I can’t do with my iPad that interests me, that’s got me thinking of buying a personal Mac, is develop software for iOS.
I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.
I don't want kids who think [incompetent] typography is hip designing my laptop, even if they use said laptop. Good type on Apple marketing says "don't worry, we hire boring people to do make your computer work". This looks like incompetence on the part of some designer IMO.
Also: if Apple wants the hip kids to know they are being marketed to, they just show a picture of a hip kid using their computer to do trashy type.
* I didn't mention any page layout programs on purpose.
But the only issue in school is the rick kid's parent will get them Macbook Pro or even Macbook Air, and the poor kids will get Macbook Neo... I'm sure the kid will not feel great about having Neo while her friend have Pro version.
But now they'll have more options! If they like Apple, they'll have a (likely pretty good) Apple laptop! It's great! I think a more affordable Mac is _good_ (at least better than no affordable Mac) and will make the poor kids happier.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dec everywhere.
Apple try to provide updates for a certain number of years after the model was originally released. The M1 Air was released many years ago now.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686
The refurb M4 Air are on Apple website.
It looks like this MacBook Neo doesn't even have an option for 16GB, unfortunately.
* i'm not buying any machine at all, or waiting for omarchy to support the new dell xps (32GB & 1TB = $1899)
* i'm buying the macbook neo at the top specs
* i'm buying the macbook air at the bottom specs
* i'm buying the macbook air with 32GB RAM & 1TB SSD (also $1899)
EDIT:
* adding an M5 Macbook (not Pro) with 24GB RAM & 1TB SSD also $1899
as someone who lives in claude code / opencode these days, the 8gb hurts but.. maybe, i dunno. they made this decision very painful. for me it could basically be a coffee shop opencode terminal that lets me access my apple iphone reminders, notes, etc.
but 8gb?
- No touchID on the base model
- 8GB of RAM
- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2
- No MagSafe.
But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.
The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.
Software has gotten shittier tho, but I think it is an overall trend and not just Apple.
Kidding aside, I think this is one of their key differentiators from the MBA line. It's partly the MagSafe itself, and partly that you have an extra USB port open even when charging.
I don't really see any downside to a proprietary connector if you also have the option to charge over USB-C as well.
MagSafe + 2 USB C, all on the left
vs
3 USB C, 2 on one side and 1 on the other
I don't care much about MagSafe, but it is sometimes annoying to have to plug everything on the left. If given the option, I might pick the extra USB (which could also be used for data/monitor/etc. when not being used for charging, of course.
I charge my M2 air with a usb-c cable.
Soooo, continue to charge the M5 Air with a USB-C cable? What's your objection here?
Just look for a2337 usb-c port replacement.
Magsafe on laptops is so much better than any other option: zero force "insertion", convenient breakaway if tripped over causing no damage to either side. Magsafe is fantastic.
Seriously though. Every feature someone says is missing and should have been added would be another $100 on the cost. This is already likely a low margin product meant of someone who's only using a browser and maybe a few apps.
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-neo/a/images/overview/welcom...
Also, why not just MacBook? Wasn't that historically the base-level laptop name?
Too bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.
Which virtually nobody bought... Everyone loves an ultra-light ultra-compact laptop, then decide that one of the sacrifices required to make one is a deal-breaker and the company was dumb to not "just include X".
I meant to convey if it was made to today's specifications...
The Macbook 12 inch was super thin, super light weight, was excellently designed (apart from the keyboard fault that I got a replacement for free for). That was a laptop that made the iPad redundant. Which is why it will never comeback.
I only had to buy a new mac because it allowing getting updates. It lasted me 7 years, I coded apps on it with xcode, and it ran the earlier versions of logic pro and final cut fine for small projects.
If they had put that engineering effort into the Neo, then that would have been something. The Neo is not a serious laptop, nor is it an iPad replacement; because most really cant and dont do serious work on a iPad. The iPad will still be an excellent internet browser and streaming screen.
Edit: Not 16x9 as originally stated.
iPads with neither an ability to run VSCode nor Parsec have been frustratingly useless for this category.
I have friends that have gone on extended vacation work trips and have lugged along a laptop purely to connect to a beefy workhorse PC at home.
Maybe this is a tweener category though in that that sort of person would simply bring along a Macbook Air they already own? I dunno.
(Looks like a decent option, technology and price-wise, for parental and sibling light-browsing and email usage patterns but they normally get my seconds when I upgrade.)
8 gig cap though? That seems strange... But, for a $600 Mac for the kids' homeschooling though, maybe I can forgive them.
I always buy the new color option from Apple when getting a phone, it helps me keep my device generations apart. But Macs have been sadly boring in recent years. "Starlight" is barely different from silver... I loved the rose gold they had for the M1 Air, that was a great computer.
Benchmarking is not only about raw processing power, we can easily prove this on chips that are not hardware bound, benchmarks can vary wildly between machines running Intels or AMDs. The hardware between a phone and a laptop are orders of magnitude different, even though the CPU is the same
Unless you are going to build software projects, a difference in single-threaded performance is going to be much more noticeable.
edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750
So the higher price in Denmark looks like VAT + some extra costs for being in the EU market; import duties, corporate taxes, etc.
With state sales tax of 8% where I live, the base would cost me $648.
So not a huge difference.
Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.
That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port
Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.
Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.
The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.
The M-chip with that balance is the A-chip.
Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.
Also, the chip used has no impact on the viability of merging macOS and iOS anyway.
The increased compatibility is great and kind of obvious given the switch to ARM, but if it went both ways then the M4 chip in iPads would be a lot less bored.
M1 evolved from the A cpu line.
Tahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.
After 14 years of service, though, he'll get to retire soon, probably taking it easy running some version of Linux in his old age. Just as soon as that new M5 MBP (with 32Gb this time) shows up tomorrow.
I think something like that is in the works, but you could leverage Claude or ChatGPT or a similar service, right?
Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
It feels like one of the only Apple products where the name is completely divorced from its intended usage (or defining feature)
- Phone
- Watch
- Pro
- Studio
- Mini
- Vision
- Air
- Neo???
as someone who likes bold colors, the citrus is nice.
It's been a while since we've had excitement at the "cheap and cheerful" end of the spectrum.
Anyone remember the initial Eee PC... and the problems it created for MSFT during the Vista transition?
although it IS hillarious to read a group of enthusiasts in 2026 screaming "8GB IS FINE!" -- meanwhile people want more ram on their RPis..
If you do serious development, you might need to think about it.
I do serious development with local applications on my 16GB M2, and my current usage about 6GB. It goes higher when I run LLMs or VMs, and of course Xcode. Aside from iOS dev, I do not use an IDE.
The Neo should offer similar if not better performace as the first round of entry level Macbook Pro/Mini/Airs that Apple launched in 2020 with the M1 chip.
And maybe, just maybe, that fact, once it becomes clear, will make at least a few of the people who assume that Apple desperately wants to lock down macOS realise that that's bullshit and always has been...
One of the worst supported features Apple has shipped. Idea was good though.
No idea how the processors compare, but that RAM isn't a good sign
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16858435?baseli...
you’re essentially getting an m1 macbook air with a worse keyboard
a quality used m1 air on ebay is about $400 w 256gb storage https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1+macbook+air&_trksid=...
It's like the crack dealer giving free samples to the young ones
I assume it's not Linux, because things are pretty good there too (aside from the poor behaviour when you reach OOM).
And will we have software compatibility issues because of A versus M issues?
It's interesting because the new studio display has 4 usb-c ports and 2 support thunderbolt, but they do indicate which ports are thunderbolt above the port.
That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
That might be the reason, but the number of people that actually use a mouse these days is tiny.
Today, every unemployed teen and stay at home mom has a $40/mo iphone. It lost its status.
These are some final nails in the coffin. As an Apple stock holder, I might exit my position. They have no growth left, they are just another Blue Chip now..
The fact it stood for quality doesn't mean you can't keep offering quality at lower budget and lower spec levels, while still pushing high-budget and high-spec levels. In fact it seems very succesful in doing so and keeps capturing more of the market.
You could say there is limited growth in the hardware (total pie), and that there is are increasingly smaller shares of the market share pie left to conquer. And that's mostly true.
But Apple has built out its Services business, from $12b in 2012 to $110b last year. That $110b revenue is more than Tesla's revenue, and that has a market cap of $1.2 trillion. And unlike hardware, services (i.e. software) are extremely high-margin. It's estimated that $110b revenue constitutes something like $80b in gross margin, whereas Tesla's $100b revenue lead to <$17b in gross margin, and just 3.8b in net profit.
A push into budget offerings increases users and scales service revenue, a high-margin and fast growing business. Apple has been a tremendous success. I won't make predictions of the future but its push for affordable devices was a strategic win, to the contrary of your point.
I think their marketing pretends they are cutting edge, but I always found them behind. iOS was years behind Android in features. Macbooks don't even have Nvidia in them.
Apple is never 1st place in tech quality. At best they are 2nd place.
The US per capita GDP is 90k now. This means its 5% per year. Not really a luxury when people spend all day on their phones. Heck, you'd call walmart groceries a luxury because they are more expensive. Both are needed in 2026.
Most will at least want something like https://brew.sh/ to get you current versions of standard Linux utilities rather than the bundled ones and then maybe even set up a separate profile in your terminal of choice (iTerm2 is a great option as well) which defaults to using them so you don't break normal system usage which assumes the built in utilities.
Even then, if your use case requires using standard Docker images, assumes certain features of the kernel, or assumes common distro environments rather than just you wanting a posixy feeling terminal you'll still need to run a Linux VM in the background.
There's also another HP for $359 with 8 GB RAM & 1 TB SSD. For half the price of this MacBook Neo, it should offer comparable performance with double the storage.
PS. Wonder why they didn't use A19 in this? Imagine they thought "yeah, that A18 will do for an entry-level laptop", but the entry-level iPhone 17e with A19 needed more kick? What for, our social media apps and mobile websites? This is soooo absurd!
You have to be able to get enough of the things made, too. A19 and A18 Pro are made on different TSMC processes, and most likely it's easier to get production capacity on the older N3E process.
topping out at 512GB storage is lame though
edit: somehow missed it has Apple Intelligence - whoops
I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.
That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.
Otherwise the limitations are fine. In fact this really has the chance to canabilize the iPad a bit though the iPad has a better screen and a faster chip...
Unbalanced USB-C ports has become a common bad design in the laptop industry.
This is why I choose the Framework laptop over the big names. Their design has balanced USB ports were it can be charged from the left or right. Balanced power USB ports improves user experience with using on a couch or in a bed. Plugging in two USB to NIC adapters allows the weight to be balanced while working on a lap or some other non-desk environment.
Balanced USB-C ports sold me and what I first look at when reviewing a laptop.
not sure how you can make a cable that doesnt connect power from end to end. I can see if it doesnt charge as fast as others if it doesnt have the bits required for higher current support. and if a device requires >5V to charge, thats on the device not the cable.
> other cables won't transfer data
again, not sure you can make a cable that doesnt connect the USB2 pair from end to end. but if device doesnt use USB2 and requires something else without mentioning it then that again seems to be on the device not the cable.
Source is the eternal benevolent champion of usbc compliance testing, Benson Leung: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/tdduha/commen...
(and also my personal experience, but Benson explains why)
I also have cheap cables that don't seem able to do data transfer. Guessing it's not actually following the USB-C spec.
I don't like swearing on here, but fuck that.
The "real" USD-GBP exchange rate price should be £448. Apple are basically taking £150 extra on top for UK consumers.
I'd hate to jinx it, but I reckon this thing will dominate the market.
Good job Apple.
> Apple also pointed out that the MacBook Neo is Apple's lowest-carbon Mac. It features 60% recycled materials, more than any other Apple product. This includes 90% recycled aluminum and 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.
This is _incredibly_ cool.
Not in a world of everyone shipping fat browsers with everything.
Edit: everything my kids use in their educational side is browser based or thick web apps. This is going to suck.
We shouldn't be here and 8Gb should be absolutely fine, but that is not the case.
As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.
They should all be native apps.
This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn't great but 8 with apple's really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.
Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.
The problem is when you start throwing half the modern tech stack crap on top which is built on standalone browser engines. They are NOT memory or CPU efficient compared to native apps. Really kills a nice machine dead.
I just noticed that according to https://support.apple.com/121115, devices purchased in China don't support Apple Intelligence but it's odd that they explicitly mention a workaround where devices purchased outside of China support Apple Intelligence if the region isn't set to China.
Personally, I might not get this device because of the hard limit of 8GB unified memory. This is unacceptable in 2026 because there were iPhones with 8GB of RAM in 2023. The current generation of iPhones have 12GB of RAM available.
With 8GB RAM?
After Tahoe and Apple Intelligence what's going to be left for actual applications to use?
People, I get it, you love Apple, but get in touch with reality.
So not bad, maybe a tad underwhelming but for those in the Apple ecosystem it's a decent student computer.
Curious how the cell phone chip holds up to desktop-esque workloads.
* If we're talking "child's first laptop", this gives them a full-fat desktop OS with ample power to get into various mischief (experimenting with audio in Garageband, making videos in iMovie, writing stories in whatever text editor they fancy, presentations and spreadsheets for school, and the ability to install whatever they like with a quick reformat/refresh if things get borked). $599 isn't quite "disposable", but it is "accessible".
* For "parental computer", this also fits the bill. The extra $100 doubles storage and adds TouchID, enabling Apple Pay on-device. It's affordable, resilient, and manageable by remote support (i.e., us kids). 8GB of RAM is more than enough for common tasks for most folks, provided they work intentionally and not just stack tabs infinitely.
* As a Chromebook alternative, the results are a bit more mixed. Sure, durability seems higher at first blush, and the user experience is better, but as @runjake points out Chromebooks play a "numbers game" Apple won't compete on: rock-bottom pricing, disposability, replaceability, and integration with Google's (mostly free or heavily discounted) educational tooling. For schools that have the CapEx to move back to Apple's ecosystem (or are in it, but want to expand it), the Neo is compelling; for public school systems lacking disposable funds, it's a harder sell - though maybe moot, given the studies linking negative outcomes to early and forced technology adoption in schools.
* For businesses, meet your new "loaner laptop". Keeping a few of these on-hand with corporate profiles preloaded and MDM/DEP managing provisioning makes these the ideal daily replacement while a laptop is being serviced or forgotten at home. Keeping a half-dozen of these ready to go is half the cost of Macbook Airs or Pros waiting in the wings, and perfect for 90% of SaaS-reliant business use cases.
* Speaking of business, say hello to your new "contractor special". Cheap enough to not fret if they're lost or destroyed, but still managed by the same impeccable MDM/DEP tooling, and with enough headroom for most contractor work.
For every niche where you don't mind paying the premium for a better UX in hardware (software is a bit...questionable, at the moment) and don't need a monster of power, this thing fits the bill almost perfectly. That said, I do have some annoyances with the Gen1 that I'd like to see addressed in the next revision:
* Don't make MagSafe a premium feature. It saves cables, it saves ports, and it saves computers. It should be standard.
* I get that the USB ports are limited by the A18 Pro's onboard controllers, but stop silently making different USB ports. Either label them, make them identical, or drop the lower-spec ones entirely. USB-C at USB2 speeds and missing DP video is dumb, and it makes the user experience worse since the ports aren't labelled somehow.
* I know I'll never get it, but either hardware mute toggles to keep speakers from going off during class/meetings, or profiles that let IT mute/disable speakers entirely to force headphones.
It’s all the same damn hardware. Just let me install an OS that isn’t purposefully gimped!!
Apple released the M1 MBA for $999 and it was considered insane value, and it had 8GB of RAM as well.
I don't think it's criminal, sufficient for plenty of casual users. Of course not for everyone.
It's not about specs, it's about capability. You compare the Neo to the wrong iPad.
The base model iPad + keyboard folio match the MacBook Neo price, which seems to be intentional. iPadOS requires less resources to run but is functionally equivalent outside of being able to run arbitrary programs.
Which makes me wonder who the Neo is for. If someone wants to build software they should be paying more money. The average person is fine with an iPad, and it will even give them a touchscreen, the Neo won't.
I'll be interested to see a true comparison with the M5 Macbook Air. I don't think we have any direct comparisons between an M chip and the A18 Pro. The A18 Pro is used in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, not even the 17. I found this spec comparison [2]. Not sure if it's accurate.
It seems like this is an iPHone 16 Pro in laptop form because the iPhone also has 8GB of RAM.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/specs/
[2]: https://erickimphotography.com/apple-m5-vs-a18-pro-comprehen...
If you primarily use native Apple apps though this thing is awesome. $499 with student discount? This thing is going to do NUMBERS.
I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.
As always, you can get a more performant laptop for the price. Price sensitive consumers have shown time and time again they will put up with all the little annoyances of a cheap laptop if it means more performance. I'm not saying those details Apple puts into their products aren't nice, but yeah this is barking up the wrong tree. For those people, any laptop purchase is going to be their one and only device that isn't their phone.
Those who absolutely need MacOS and have this budget will just get a Mac Mini.
I think there are many users who will be interested in an inexpensive laptop that neatly integrates with their iPhone. Same as there were many users who were interested in Airpods and a Watch.
I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)
Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.
I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.
> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.
So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.
8GB memory is pathetic. But that doesn't matter for most users yet.
In fact, it may not matter at all. If the hardware limitations push us to have several machines, a well-built entry laptop becomes a terminal (you won't run things in it, you'll connect to things). For that, 8GB might be enough.
2. Would a used older hand-me-down Macbook Air/Pro not be better performance/value than this iPhone board in a cheap laptop shell? There was a guy here saying he bought a used Macbook Air M1 16GB for 250 Euros.
To an individual consumer perhaps, but schools need to buy hundreds at a time and the second-hand market isn't really great for that.
This is basically Apple taking a bite at the Chromebook market. Interested to see what reviewers have to say.
This is by design, who do you think the target market for this Macbook is?
This is very clearly targeted at Chromebooks in education, where the iPad is not doing too great:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-apple-lost-the-k-12-educ...
At this price, a new device seems very tempting over dealing with a used hardware which is always a bit of a lottery.
Performance-wise A18 would be plenty for casual stuff. IIRC it's faster than M1.
(But they have never not locked down a product with an A-series CPU - hence my concern)
Lay off the hater-ade for a second.
If it's aimed for education, where does the need come from?
I use ~500 Gb on my laptop, but that is only because I have all my music on that thing. Doubt most students today have that need.
I swear to god they can transmit virtual ecstasy through their website, it's so incredibly impressive you want to buy one even if you don't need it. Everything is so perfectly presented, it has speakers! it has USB-C! WOW! No I am not being sarcastic, I am just expressing how joyful it feels watching marketing to its fullest. Just watch the videos.
Apple should be studied for centuries to come not for what they sold but for how they sold it. Pure genius. Beautiful up to every detail.
This 3m49s "Hello, MacBook Neo" video is so insanely well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4
I love how they have gone back to actually showing off the stuff they are proud of. This is the most product-centric Apple ad I've seen in years.