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.
Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
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 wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from Linux, it's a relatively new feature to have on by default, so you might be pleasantly surprised.
Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.
Not everyone is a power user, and that's the target audience for this.
But, 8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. The majority of people open some webpages, maybe some office tools, and play some music, at the same time. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.
This lowest end offering is not for power users, to nobodies surprise. But, it will be completely fine for the majority of people, including light gaming (Minecraft, Roblox, etc).
Most cool. Is it an M1?
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
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.
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 |
When you are not confined to a iPhone body, you have a bit more flexibility in thermals, heat and power consumption.
Would there be any chance the A18 Pro in a Macbook clocks higher? or maybe clocks higher for longer?
I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.
Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)
You can also develop locally which is significant.
I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.
I suspect many users will probably accidentally plug stuff like external SSDs into the slow port without realizing. It's maybe too much to hope for at this price point, but would have been nice for a machine with only two ports to be able to offer the same spec USB on both ports.
My instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port - it's closest to the corner - but in doing so you use up the "good" USB-3 port leaving you with only USB2. It's not a huge deal, but charging in the other port to free up the USB3 one feels slightly weird to me. I suspect most users will charge off the USB3 port given its location.
Reading the spec sheet, it also looks like DisplayPort is only supported over the USB3 port too - again there appears no way to know just by looking at the ports. This has never been a problem on any of the Apple Silicon 2-port MacBook Airs, as those have always had the same specs on both ports and could drive a display over DisplayPort from either.
Ah, but, as I recall some vintage of 2016-2018 Macbook Pro users will remember that using the "backmost, corner" USB-C port for charging could cause the MBP to overheat and fans to sound like a helicopter.
Thus, the (admittedly probably vanishingly tiny minority of) MBP veterans with "back charging USB port PTSD" who learned to use the foremost USB port for charging, will know full well to stay away from using that backmost USB port, if all they need is power!
Reading the list of QoL they scrapped I guess Jobs was right all along that to hit a base level of features Apple just needs a certain price point.
Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.
No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...
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...
Maybe ok for giving power if you are careful I think, I never had any fires, knock on wood.
But it's a bummer to zap/kill the data-functionality of USB ports on nice stuff just because a non-spec connector was used in between the two things being connected, for convenience.
So I don't trust them except for conveniently connecting power to low-cost devices. Whether Neo fits that... I doubt but YMMV.
The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.
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.
Most people have no problem using a keyboard in the dark or with light from the screen.
Backlit keyboards are a nice-to-have, not a showstopper.
Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well
This is one of the things I never really expected Apple to do, since they've somehow managed to avoid the confusing black/blue colouring of USB-A ports, giving every laptop they've ever produced since 2012 USB 3.0 ports.
Seems like they're buying into hardware enshittification too (macOS and iOS 26 being software monstrosities with liquid glAss).
Great for a student or casual user though for sure.
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.
On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?
Why? Did they stock-piled USB 2.0 controllers and now need to get it off their inventory or something?
* $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education)
* $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education)
That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.
A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.
When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?
That’s been the case for 5+ years :)
— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.
— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?
This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=
for pretty much half the price, though.
i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ 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
That you seem to think everyone shares your needs and goals makes you a far less effective participant in these kinds of discussions. Maybe think for a bit before asserting what people who care about backlighting need it for and don't.
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.