This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts.
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.
I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.
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.
It really isn’t. The track pad on surface is terrible compared to Mac. The surface has some weird edges and other spots to get caught on. I’ve seen a few with serious damage from typical daily use. The surface I have is barely hanging together, the charger is extremely finicky and will stop charging randomly. It takes effort to get the charger to “sit” in the slot and make contact.
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.
telling that this is flagged 1 minute into submission.
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.
This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.
I am in education and speak to others at the (US) national level on a near-daily basis. This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.
- 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.
Not just durability, but ergonomics. My kids have crappy screens, literally the worst trackpad I’ve ever used, and awful keys that hurt my hands minutes after typing (but I go all day on my personal computer).
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.
> Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves?
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.)
Chromebooks don’t have a durability problem. I doubt the MacBook is any more durable, even with an all metal construction - if anything, that probably makes it worse at absorbing impact than nice soft bendy plastic.
This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.
Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition. It would take a restructuring of laptops within the school system to kids/families having a joint ownership over the laptop to stop them intentionally destroying them. Even then, there are complications like kids that will absolutely destroy anothers' for fun.
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 kids have (insanely shitty) chromebooks from school and we are absolutely responsible for the cost if they break. We have to sign a release at the beginning of the year. Whether or not they’d be able to collect from the vast majority of families is a different question, granted. But the responsibility is there.
In practice, there's a huge difference in responsibility between buying and sending your kid with a laptop and signing a paper that says you're responsible if it breaks. I'd also guess it depends on where you go to school.
My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.
Who pays for the laptop when the school bully pours water on a kid's backpack? Or a kid has their bag in a seat and someone sits on it accidentally?
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.
I don't think institutions will care much about the enhanced durability since they treat laptops as disposable units anyway. Apple can only complete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.
No, we really care about durability. The amount of damage is crazy. So many units are damaged that it would be cost-prohibitive to dispose and replace them.
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.
Can confirm Apple gave up on education. If they really cared you'd be able to have multiple accounts/profiles on iPad, and that's still not a thing that exists.
I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.
Even so I imagine your average person needing something for education would consider both. The Neo may cost more but from my past experience of Apple stuff they will likely be better made.
Certainly possible. But, in the US consider that Google and "one-to-one" Chromebooks are generally dominating and the curriculum more or less requires extensions and setting.
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.
So what segment does it target in your opinion? The "surface" market is minuscule and compared to the edu market irrelevant, the "vendor lock in" angle with the google logins can easily change over night as it did with microsoft.
- 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.
If the school is wealthy enough to provide free laptops, then you're right they're going to go for the cheapest option. But if the school expects the parents to provide laptops, then the parents are more likely to choose this.
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.
Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.
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.
somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).
Not to disagree too much with your assessment, one point stands out:
> 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.
The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!
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.
A Chromebook at the same price point will get you similar if not better specs, 14" 16:10 FHD IPS display, convertible with touchscreen and pen input, backlit keyboard and 10h+ battery runtime.
Chromebooks are the SaaS of hardware where the user is not the buyer. No one says “I would love to have a Chromebook at home” any more than they desire to run Salesforce at home.
This is not competing against Chromebooks, which have very little reach outside of institutions. The Macbook Neo will likely have very widespread appeal for anyone looking for what used to be a netbook.
Pen input is the one factor that forced one of my kids to a Windows laptop for school (a Surface Pro). It was a required feature for his school. Seeing how much he uses it for note taking, I get it. So yes, drawing is a key feature for schools.
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.
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
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.
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.
"good laptops" yes. But I haven't seen a "great" one in a very long time. The Windows market is asleep at the wheel and a copilot button is not going to resuscitate it.
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.
MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.
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
Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.
Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.
Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.
Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.
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.
I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...
Their challenge is, how do we halve the price and yet deliver twice the quality? I think they are going to realize they can't. Some of them will left the market.
I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad
Not if you move windows between screens with different scaling, or launch apps that don't support the scaling stuff out of the box, or launch apps via X11 forwarding in WSL.
All of this works much worse on macOS: Scaling sucks, as it's integer-upscaled rendering + fractional downscaling in a shader. Windows can't span screens either.
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 have the Lenovo X1 and I'm very happy with it, though obviously that's in a very different price category than the Yoga, Surface, or Macbook Neo.
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 ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
What about color quality? I've used high resolution laptops with shitty washed out colors, but one thing I've always appreciated about Apple's displays is their vibrance.
> The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones.
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.
I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen. The only time I touch the screen is when I take a screenshot using the Snipping Tool and want to circle something.
In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.
> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts
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.
I think macOS applications feel like they have mostly updated to use the native resolution, so arbitrary scaling works great now. My comparative experience with a new Windows laptop is how I remember macOS felt when they first made high density screens many years ago: lots of render bugs all over, and every program has to be re-opened when I plug in an external screen to be usable at the new resolution
Except most Germans don't buy Surface Laptops, and there are much cheaper options with 8 GB, naturally they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.
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.
The Apple logo is on the wrong side of the screen to be concerned about. Apple's OS and user experience is miles ahead of the competition and so are the displays they use.
The post that I commented on was arguing that what sets the Mac apart from other options with 8 GB RAM, and what makes them more expensive, is that they are seen as a status symbol. I made a point against that mentioning two areas in which Macs are truly superior.
all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.
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.
Oh man I'd pay premium for a sleek device like this that CAN'T run Windows or Mac OS. Just a mere thought of being able to run pure Linux on that sweet sweet apple silicon with full driver support makes my juices flowing.
The games industry remains a hotbed of people that vehemently hate Apple, even those that have never touched a Mac.
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.
Apple leaves gamers alone, it does not even attempt to be a nontrivial gaming platform and makes no promises. Why would gamers and gamedevs hate it? It just doesn't exist in their market.
Bootcamp was a hedge when Apple was a lot less dominant than it is now.
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.
The experience I have had with Thinkpads, both current-gen and old during my childhood, did not warm me up to the line. They are not particularly better in feel, thermals and screen quality against its cheaper alternatives including those from Lenovo themselves. The only good thing was its keyboard, but then most Lenovo laptops in general have good keyboards. Its popular acclaim is weird to me.
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).
Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.
Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.
While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.
That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.
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.
> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors.
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.)
I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.
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.
I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).
16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.
I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.
Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.
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.
People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.
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.
I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)
They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.
There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.
I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.
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.
This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.
Crazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad.
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.
Only if you want to take notes with a pen and prefer digital over paper. For me that's terrible, but some kids swear by it. I think if I grew up on it, it'd be different.
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.
iPads are pretty common in education for the drawing capabilities. You can take notes by typing for most things, but when you get diagram/math heavy, you just cannot beat the pencil. I think it's probably pretty poor value of the small ability you gain to cost, relative to other things you could do (I like paper/pencil personally) but I see the use case, if limited.
I haven't been on campus in a few years but even then paper was basically absent on campus. A class where a professor wouldn't allow tablets or laptops to take notes would be an aberration and a PITA. I remember I had to write like a paper check once and I had to physically go buy a pen since neither I nor anyone around me had a regular writing utensil on hand.
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 used to use both...laptop for quick typing, and then the iPad for hand-written notes or annotation.
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 mean at this point with the latest ones, an iPad Pro with it's keyboard/trackpad accessory and a pencil could probably manage both for you pretty damn well.
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
That's an odd choice (for said developers), given in most cases it's a matter of checking a box. The second half of your comment is a generalization though.
It makes it easier to pirate your app if you enable that checkbox. macOS attempts to disable iOS apps when SIP is disabled to prevent this but it's not difficult to bypass. I don't agree with it but this probably does factor into their decision process.
That couldn’t be the reason. 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of consumables from games. This came out in the Epic trial.
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
I have spent most of my life in a lazy couch posture and a laptop and keyboard doesn’t fit that lifestyle choice. I need to make more apps for people with my lifestyle choice, like IPad IDEs for development.
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.
Laptop is way nicer for lazy couch work. I can sit there with it on my lap with my arms crossed and I don’t have to waste a hand just holding the damn thing up the entire time I use it. It is the ipad that is actually the nonlazy choice.
This. My daughter is a high-school junior, and she's been asking for a laptop going into her senior year/college. This is exactly who Apple is going after.
I convinced my parents to get me a 2017 MBP for college, yes it was overkill for the day-to-day classes, but I ended up getting into iOS app development and was so fortunate to have a beefier-system. However, for a liberal-arts student the MBN appears to be a sweet spot.
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.
Apparently the two USB-C ports are different specs [1]
- USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
- USB 2.0 480 Mbps
Both support charging but only one supports higher speeds and DisplayPort (A18 Pro limitation, as Apple probably doesn't dedicate much silicon to USB I/O).
Makes sense, the iphone has only one port after all. Interesting that it supported a second one though, or maybe that's the Pro revision designed for this use case?
The second port is likely necessary for USB hubs that rely on both ports. I had one for my M1 Air. I assume it'd still work with the 2 different speeds, but I'd be curious to try it.
I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.
Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)
I don't think this is intentional to cut cost. I simply think that the chip was primarily made for devices with one port (iPhone, iPad) and this is a bit of an afterthought.
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.
This is going to be a primary complaint people have (even if it's not terribly important) - hopefully they have some circuitry that warns you if you're plugging something into the wrong port (e.g. a USB 3 device into USB 2 at slow speeds).
If they want to get these things into schools it would be insane to expect the schools to also supply everyone with AirPods or some other kind of wireless headphones.
This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.
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.
> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID
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.
My experience with the Apple Watch is that Touch ID is faster to unlock my Mac. The “unlocking with Apple Watch…” thing takes too much time and by the time it would have completed my finger already reached the Touch ID and unlocked it.
I have one of those, it's perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn't a lot, but I've never run into issues with it not being enough.
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.
$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.
These are probably gonna have a decent resell value. Macbook products have a very higher resell value compared to say chromebooks/normal laptops.
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
My understanding is that students are very hard on school provided laptops, I don’t think many of them that have been in use for a year will be in good resale condition.
My mother is a teacher and the idea there is that if students break/damage the school provided (tablets in that case), the students have to pay the fine.
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.
Only the smallest or independent schools are bellying up to the Apple Store to buy 250 laptops on educational discounts; almost all of them go through companies that handle the details; and it can be structured as a lease or a purchase, depending on where they want to allocate capital and expense.
They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.
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
11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.
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.
The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!
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!
Somewhere on my list of projects is "Gut a 12" Powerbook and put the guts of a modern M series Macbook in it". The chassis is so spacious and the Macbook Air logic boards are so small, physics is not going to be a problem. Just hooking up screens, the keyboard and trackpad (using the original, natch), and ports. There's already a high-res display swap you can do in that chassis to get to 1400x1050.
I had the 11” dual core i7 and I wouldn’t even call it slow (for its time). Loved that little machine and I keep longing for that form factor but with modern specs.
I was thinking yesterday while reading the Thinkpad repairability story that I would pay an unreasonable amount for basically this laptop in the chassis of an X220, with a 7 row keyboard and Mac touchpad.
This is a 13" 16:9 screen. A little smaller than the current 13.6" 16:10 MacBook Air in display size but not really any more portable. Weight is the same as the 13.6" MacBook Air.
No it isn't. It's 1.08kg vs 1.23kg, or 13% heavier.
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.
This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.
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've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.
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.
In the workplace, it does not matter as it’s not your device anyway (or buy something powerful if it’s a consultancy). For most utilitarian uses, you only have to endure a few.
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.
> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
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.
The performance gap between Apple’s flash and a typical aftermarket NVMe drive in a Windows laptop is more attributable to controller design and integration than to trace length.
If by basic you mean running a simple Python script then sure; but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter.
The relationship between coding ability and memory requirement is nonlinear, right? Just a short Python code and an ide? Probably fine. Some complex ide with all sorts of agentic stuff? Need more ram. True enlightenment? Vim even with some unnecessary extensions will run on megabytes.
> but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter
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.
There can be different cohorts of students. If a student is at the point where they can start exploring iOS development they can perhaps have a swing at it with this machine. In reality, they'll have been using this machine, know enough about the limitations, and be thinking of upgrading.
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.
Atleast on Linux, I have been able to do almost everything in 8gb without any concern but I have the macbook air which has 16 gb and this can also do everything pretty much.
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.
My 2010 Macbook Pro with 8GB works still. Not a daily driver anymore, but Word, Excel, Lightroom, Garageband, MainStage etc work just fine. Youtube videos up to 1080p play without stuttering in Floorp. It's not quick, but it is useable.
I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.
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…
Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.
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.
Yeah I think there are a couple of advantages of a Macbook versus a Dell mobile workstation. it is definitely lighter and more pleasant got general use. I'm only concerned that modern apps usually take amount of RAMs that are close to or north of 500MB, so if you have say a word processor plus 10+ Chrome tabs you quickly run out of RAMs (I tend to have way more on my personal gig but I'm a developer). But maybe swapping is not a big issue on the Mac as both comments said.
Swapping isn't a big issue on the apple silicon macs, the storage is generally fast enough.
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.
I feel like the 8GB limit is partially market segmentation. If they had a 12GB or 16GB model, everyone would buy that instead of the Air/Pro and they would lose money
Chrome’s kind of a hog. I wouldn’t think twice about having Pages and dozens of Safari tabs open side by side on an iPad. I’m confident this could zoom through the same workload.
RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.
Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.
The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.
Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.
I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.
12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
That's true, but I just know a bunch of people looking at this will have that lingering thought at the back of their minds on how that extra 50% gets you just enough little improvements across the board to make them second guess.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.
There is no sense getting anything but these sorts of Macs, or the maxed-out top of the line ones even considering the hilarious prices. Either get the entry level or go hard.
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.
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.
Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.
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.
It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.
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
The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.
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 had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.
It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.
Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.
I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.
For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors.
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!
You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.
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!
So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
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.
It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.
The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.
I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
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.
There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.
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.
There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.
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.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
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.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
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.
This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
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.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
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.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.
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.
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
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.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
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.
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
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.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
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.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
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.
I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a
redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
Press release touts "built with the environment mind", but is silent on repairability.
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.
Non-Socketed memory and storage is more of an upgrade friendly feature rather than a repairability feature. They don’t often fail. And most people do not attempt to upgrade their devices anyway, especially the type of people who are not power users, and are buying low end devices. For most people, upgrades are no longer a purchasing consideration, and they will buy the laptop that’s five dollars cheaper and has more attractive packaging.
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.
Not since we got rid of spinning rust. Most common failures are batteries, and the parts of the computer subject to direct abuse by the user: keyboard, connectors, the display, etc.
You're out of date; Apple is soldering the memory to the CPU directly. I mean are you complaining that you can't swap your L2 cache or replace the math coprocessor? The history of computing is one of the CPU absorbing every single discrete component over time. Apple is at a point where the CPU has to absorb the RAM to maintain their performance lead. I'm happy I get a super fast computer.
I expect the customer of this product is not worried about repairability: to them, it's just an iPad with a keyboard. You're also citing 3x higher costs, so they're really not comparable.
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).
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.
8GB RAM was actually pretty workable for lightweight work… until they shipped Tahoe. Now macOS is just a slog doing even the most basic things unless you’re at 16GB. Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.
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.
It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.
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.
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.
Oh my god, yes. Spotlight on Tahoe is a joke. Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal? You’d think those would be in an always available cache guaranteed to always show up instantly? So many questions.
> Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal?
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 would be sensible/wonderful for Apple to release a deliberately lighter version of MacOS for these laptops; but their intransigence and (e.g.) willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back year after year suggests they won’t.
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.
Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.
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
It's perfectly adequate for most office work: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, web browsing / research. The vast majority of users are not doing software development and never will.
This, coupled with the nightmare fuel that Windows has become as of 2026, means no one sane should buy a Windows computer. It's more expensive, more intrusive, and Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.
A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.
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).
What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.
You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.
Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.
A18 Pro is generations ahead of M1 and M2 on single thread if these scores are true.
Are you saying we had this incredibly overpowered silicon shipped on millions of Instagram machines?
I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.
Mobile devices, to give you good battery life, operate in a “race to sleep” mode. Good performance is necessary not to compute a lot of things, but to finish your computation quickly and shut down the power hungry processors. So do not worry, the performance is not being left on the table. It is there so that your phone lasts throughout the day.
Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...
IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!
When Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 he said it was running OSX but what that actually means is anybody's guess. iOS is closer to macOS in functionality today than the iPhone's first OS.
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.
Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook / education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.
Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.
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.
8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.
I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
What's so special about this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?
I'm not sure. I think it does swap more aggressively. I think the disk is also just really fast and has a higher speed connection to memory.
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.
It's mostly for people who need to edit some documents, a few photos here and there and other things like that. 8GB of RAM is going to be enough for the average user.
Assuming nothing really bad comes out of the reviews, this looks like the best computer for like 99% of users. I really can't imagine buying some plastic-fantastic Acer unit when this is on the market.
The thing is you could use it for 6 to 8 years if all your doing is editing documents and other tasks like that. No one is buying this to play games on or code massive AI powered applications, it's literally the "Well I need a computer sometimes may as well get the one that matches my phone"
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.
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.
When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.
I think 90% of people will be fine with just an iPad. Some will need a small bump for laptop OS but not necessarily the specs which is where the Neo comes in, then the Air is for medium workflows and Pro is for if you do anything long running and intensive. It's quite a good ladder actually small steps that just add what each tier needs.
I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.
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.
The Neo is definitely a response to Chromebooks. Apple bet on the iPad for the education market and lost that bet for obvious reasons. This was already obvious 10 years ago when I was working in edtech.
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?
My last tablet was a Nexus 7, so I wouldn’t know ;)
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.
Chromebooks are much more secure for enterprise and education.
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.
I’m not sure about that. Physical build quality on chromebooks is poor. My kids school switched off because the kids were always breaking them.
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.
I never talked about build quality. There are in fact nice quality ChromeOS devices, it’s just arguably never worth the added expense.
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?
its quite common for schools to issue windows laptops to staff (who use MS 365) and chromebooks to students (who use Google Classroom). The windows laptops also have no problem with google classroom of course.
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.
I think branding and reputation basically encapsulates all the build quality and support and stuff you mentioned. Non-technical consumers will see this, decide that it's probably better than a Chromebook, and be right.
There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.
Resale value. You practically have to pay someone to take an open box chromebook. The secondary market for apple products lasts longer than apple’s software support.
Apple isn't good enough at software design to make macOS work on touch screens. Plus, they don't want to compete with themselves. Why sell an iPad running macOS when they can sell you a Macbook and an iPad instead?
Because now, at this price, there’s not a situation where I’d buy an iPad Pro over this. Although it’s marketed as a “pro”, device, a keyboard plus professional apps minus a touch screen is more pro than the same device minus keyboard minus apps plus touch screen.
8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.
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.
Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.
This sounds great, but it pains me that I can't dual-boot my iPhone 15 Pro as a lightweight Mac. Would be great with an HDMI connector & BT keyboard/mouse.
Outside of college students, I think this also unlocks the Mac to rest of the world. Now $599 allows most of the world to buy/lock into the Apple ecosystem. 8 GB is the only issue I have but everything else is such a good compromise for the price.
Looks pretty cool. I feel they got some features right for their target demographics:
- 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!
Is the screen supposed to read MAC? The C is misshapen if it's supposed to be 3 bars per letter.
(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.)
I'd be glad to try one (either blue or piss colored). If it really comes at 600€. Though it would already be 100€ too much unless it gets liberated to run linux at some point.
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)
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.
I’m still on an M1 Air for my personal laptop and probably will be for another couple years. It doesn’t feel “slow” and I feel no urge to start browsing newer models.
My understanding is this laptop matches or exceeds the M1 Air’s performance, so it should be pretty damn nice for most people.
So really this appears to be a replacement for the M1 MacBook Air that they were still selling at Walmart.
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 the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me.
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.
Phones contain 3+ cameras, OLED displays, FaceID, wireless charging, and cellular modems. Plus there is a price to be paid for the latest and greatest in miniaturization, machining, and packaging.
Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.
Unless the "leftovers" in question are "leverover capacity on the previous process node that doesn't have pricing competition, so Apple's able to continue to demand all of the supply at their desired price point"
The same way that Apple can sell a low end iPad with cellular for $479 that has a larger screen and larger battery. If the iPhone wasn’t heavily subsidized and/or available on installment plans, Apple would have to lower prices.
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
It's possible that they are selling it close to cost to get more young people into the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem. If you can translate each one of these into a "Pro" device sale down the line then it's a win for Apple.
probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it's not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.
because all those prices are artificial, Apple is charging what they think they can get away with and also betting on making more money in the long run with subscriptions to iCloud and their other services.
You're confusing the sales price with the manufacturing cost. They will continue to set whatever prices people will pay because it's a walled garden and there's no other company building Apple (MacOS) compatible laptops.
I can totally see many, many students and parents use that machine for daily tasks. Yes, base specs are pretty low: 8Gb RAM, 256 Gb drive - but the price tag is also low in the Apple world. I assume the trackpad will be excellent and the promise that the battery lasts all day is probably true (all day = 6-7h max). Good move from Apple, for once.
I also know many professionals who have a work computer and just want a personal device for occasional things like personal web browsing/shopping/occasionally watching videos -- things that would be inappropriate on a work computer and inelegant on a phone. These people already basically use their phone for everything -- many of them have never upgraded from their college laptop, which is now obsolete. They'd value a well-built (design, feel, screen) computer but have no performance needs.
A 2011 MBP is likely a better a general purpose PC, those early models had some great engineering. Wait for the reviews and benchmarks but the M1/M2 based MBPs are still great daily drivers.
Those old 2011 machines aren't really getting macOS security updates anymore, and compatible apps are dropping; I wouldn't recommend using anything but Linux on them. And even with a non-15-year-old battery, you'll be lucky to get half the battery life of Apple Silicon with a 2nd gen Core i5 CPU.
This explicitly says "Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control and support for gestures", so at most it's the clicking action that is mechanical (rather than the click being faked with haptic feedback, as it is on the current models)
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...
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.
Until today if they had less than around $800 to spend my answer would be "Don't buy a new MacBook from Apple" because there isn't one that cheap. Maybe look for a used or refurbished M1-M2 model.
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
I'm now a 15'' Air user after always being pro. I notice no difference in performance but enjoy the lighter form factor and damn does it run cool compared to the pro.
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.
When Steve came back Apple was months from bankruptcy; their product lineup was full of duds.
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.
Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.
However, with the recent Macbook Neo. I actually went ahead and recommended Neo. Especially to a friend of mine whose going into college soon and has asked me what they should buy.
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)
People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.
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.
MacBook Air - mid range mid price, good quality, basically as functional as the Pro now.
The price of the Neo is very compelling if they want it for light duty work though.
And obviously high end is high end but those people know who they are
Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.
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.
I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)
Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.
Run a Linux VM (basically no performance impact) and you have a killer quality Linux laptop. Sure it’s not the same as a dedicated Linux system but with these specs you’re going to do lighter work away from your desk anyway.
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.
It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
It looks like a good value if you can get by with 8 GB of RAM. This is a market niche that will sell, but it doesn’t replace the Air. The Air has 16GB standard and can be ordered with up to 32. I’m also curious about the benchmarks between the A18 Pro and the M5, although for a lot of people that’s going to be less important than the RAM.
Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.
It’s great if you run max two “web apps” at a time. More, and it’s heading into “may be a problem” territory.
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.
I'm still working on an 8GB M1 Pro. It's just about ok. VS Code plus podman plus Teams plus Slack plus Firefox and it hits the limits; usually Slack is the thing to get killed.
I’m on a 16GB M1 Pro. Slack, Zoom, then browser tabs for Jira, PagerDuty, GMail, Confluence, and a Google doc and it’s swapping like mad. It’s that fast SSD and the integrated memory, so it swaps quickly. Swapping is still swapping though.
This is perfect for folks looking to buy a brand new laptop.
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.
I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series.
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.
The target user doesn't read hacker news. The target user is typing up papers for their history class. This absolutely kills the lower end of the market. I do not know why anyone who needs Safari and MS Office would buy anything else.
I think they very intentionally assume folks are not running VMs or doing much more than "every day" tasks. Given the pre-packaged E-Waste sold at most retailers for a similar price (or more) I think this is a really fantastic market move by Apple. This is doubly true as I read weirder and weirder things that Microsoft is doing with respect to Windows 12 and, well, in general.
Don't get me wrong it's a fantastic product and great price point, but the only thing it makes me think of is the complete failure of iPadOS. Ultra portable MacBook with is A18 with 8G of ram is infinitely more useful to me (for non-pen input) than full M4/M5 chip with more ram that's completely wasted due to needless OS restrictions.
I completely understand that as a cheap one, it has to be worse than macbook air in some aspect to make the product line work. However I'm genuinely curious why it's thicker and no lighter than the Macbook Air, while at the same time has shorter battery life, less ports, no keyboard light, and a smaller chip? Do they put dead weight inside it or something?
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.
Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.
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.
I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?
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 know, but that doesn't mean there aren't people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone/Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.
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.
First thing I did was search the page for "touch" as in touch screen. Still no touch screen. I've gotten so used to a touch screen with my X1 yoga that every time I use my Mac for work I get pissed off at it because I can't touch it. Just simple things like scrolling or multiple check boxes etc
Looks like the best display you can get in laptops at this price: 2408x1506 resolution, 500 nits, antireflective coating (!). And bonus points for no silly notch.
I wonder if this is a way for them to take a situation like the RAM shortage and spin it into a way to sell more products with little memory to mask the expensive price of memory by bundling it with the outer shell of the laptop rather than try to sell a few PRO laptops whose price is now very jacked up because of the expensive memory.
I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.
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.
It's not a replacement, it's an addition. My Air is stationary and it doesn't leave my desk due to lots of cables plugged in and I want something that I can take with me around the house if I decide to chill elsewhere for a bit. I was looking at Windows laptops for a long time and it was either a Chromebook or £1k+ which I couldn't justify.
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.
I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.
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?
It's like the Netbook is back, but done well. This is really exciting, I have to admit. Superb execution of hardware of course, but the secret sauce is the OS. Can't wait to try one.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up being really popular with families. Parents with iPhones are (I’d imagine) far more likely to get their kids iPhones, and with Messages and FindMy I bet it’ll be the same here. Apple also has screen time and parental controls, so for parents wanting to get their kid a computer but worried about unrestricted Internet access, the MacBook Neo may be the most seamless option.
I wish more would be done on weight. The 12 inch Macbook was very lightweight, just 2 pounds. Today there's no Apple product that gets close to that: an iPad with the added accessories weighs more and it's still an iPad. The Macbook "Air" is not airy, this Macbook Neo weighs the same as an Air.
That machine's form factor was so great, it was just saddles with that awful hot-running Intel CPU. I was hoping this device would be essentially the MB12, finally with the right chip. I guess they were going for target price, not target weight.
I find it really fascinating that this is priced identically to an iPhone 17e. Speaks to it essentially being a big iPad with a keyboard attached running macOS.
On the one hand I feel like 8GB is low these days, but my iPhone 12 Pro only had 6GB of RAM, so maybe for light usage this is fine. I do feel like 16GB is the new "8GB" minimum of the 2010s. Especially on windows, 32GB feels like Windows just chews through it no problem.
Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
A18 Pro offers 44% better single thread performance and similar multi-thread performance as the M1 processor.
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.
They don't have a "macOS Lite", and if these were running anything less than full macOS, you can be sure Apple would be positioning them as a new product (or part of the iPad line) rather than as a Mac.
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...
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.
No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.
VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.
The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although it is possible that Apple decided against enabling it (to segment the market).
Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...
Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
Funny; for me, a backlit keyboard is one of the most unnecessary features I can think of. Even for those who can't touch type, the keyboard is just inches away from the bright screen which sort of illuminates them.
I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.
I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.
Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.
Hip kids were doing bad type since Photoshop 3/illustrator* gave them the ability to do so. Apple boldly ignored their fanbase and did type right.
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.
More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.
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.
Apple: here's an affordable laptop. This comment: but the poor kids are going to feel inferior to the rich kids with this affordable laptop! Of course the poor kids are going to get cheaper & slower computers, cheaper clothes, etc. And they won't feel great about it because being poor isn't great.
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.
Not if their goal is to make money on repairs/upgrades!
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.
Honestly I am still wondering why tf they brought magsafe back. I thought Apple had turned the corner on proprietary connectors. I charge my M2 air with a usb-c cable.
Two advantages for me: It's nice that you don't break the connector if you trip over the cable or put the laptop down on a soft surface, and it's nice being able to charge while still using both USB-C ports (although I guess 3x USB-C would also solve that).
I don't really see any downside to a proprietary connector if you also have the option to charge over USB-C as well.
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.
It's less stress on a frequently used port. I've got an early M1 MacBook Air where the USB-C port I always used for charging is starting to get flaky, presumably because it's been used so much and because of the weight of the cord + dongle hanging off the side of the machine.
Replacement port for M1 Air can be bought for around $10 off Amazon and installation take like 10 minutes for total newbie like me. All you need is right screwdriver.
I can't understand why they ever moved away from it.
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.
Right? also, where's the thunderbolt ports? and it needs about another inch? maybe half inch on the screen. And really, 16gb is the new minimum. There's a whole bunch of acceleration and co processing features in the m series missing from the a series, so they really should put an m5 in there instead...
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.
Its wild watching Apple change. They lost their luxury brand and have pivoted to general population.
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..
Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?
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.
>it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?
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.
yesterday I wrote in a group slack that today I would get to decide whether:
* 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.
The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs
Looks like they're using some new variant of branding font for this. Inspect Element shows it as SF Pro Display, but it's actually just being masked over with an image
No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.
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.
I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.
Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.
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.
I'm sure these will sell very well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the M1. I'm sure Asahi linux folks are really excited about an extra chip set to support.
That's a bit... uninformed, there are and historically have been plenty of non-chromebook laptops with 8 GB of memory in that price bracket (HP, Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS, etc).
But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.
Yeah it comes with a compromise.
Tbh, if it was an option I would sacrifice a tiny bit of my screen to not have the notch while keeping a uniform bezel.
So I guess they must have fully depreciated the gigantic fleet of CNC routers they use to cut the aluminum cases. Making a cheap laptop seems better than throwing them away.
This proves macOS should/could just be an iOS app that you can run when docked. It has great suspend and resume, the phones/tables would just need more ram and storage. Maybe we'll see it in the future
All I want is a MacBook Pro with a funky color like citrus.
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.
Woah. A burner laptop for travel? I might need to rethink what personal computing is for me soon. Mac Studio + Studio Display, plus a Neo/iPad might be the right combination instead of having to buy an expensive laptop which has hinges and can get stolen.
Anyone think you'll actually be able to do anything on a Mac with only 8gb of RAM? I had a Macbook Pro before with 16gb of RAM and it was constantly running out of RAM and showing me the Force Quit Applications dialog. Constantly...
I am using a M1 Mac Mini 8GB as a home server/desktop, and it works just fine. It can run games and a Minecraft server in the background while serving video and home automation, and I've never had anything force quit because of it. I agree with the people who are saying 8GB should be kept as a target spec for the low end. It's really only bloated software that has made it necessary to get so much RAM, and now that prices have gone up, if Apple forces developers to do more with less for a segment of their market, I'm all for it.
There are millions of people using 8GB or RAM with MacOS without issue right now. I would bet 80% of all MacBooks in use right now have 16GB or less of RAM.
Wondering how it decided to show the force exit program dialog. I used to use 8g macbook for development. But instead warning on serious memory exhaustion, it just decided to lag and suicide with everything freezed (including the restart button).
This seems like a great price to have an actual MacBook with you anywhere for things that don't require a lot of resources, like if you're running some tmux/Tailscale solution at home and just need to SSH into it to do work with [whatever terminal agent you're using].
I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.
This is an excellent addition to the lineup and changes the list of reasons for why the average person would go for a Windows laptop from “cost” to practically nothing, but from a consumer perspective, is there any reason to buy this over M1 MBA which can be purchased new for less than the education discounted version of the MB Neo?
With every new device Apple releases the split between iPadOS and macOS gets more awkward.
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.
This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty
This is an absolutely solid buy I think. My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.
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 want one for all my kids. I love it. I just wish it had more ram. Personally though this direction is good. I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'
Anyone know how this would compare to an original M1 Air? Both in terms of performance and also capability. My primary use case for my air is web browsing and similar. But I do use other things at times. I know they're both arm processors, but are there things that ne can do an M1 that won't work on this?
The A18 Pro is roughly 30% faster in single-thread, and about equal in multi-core performance compared to the M1. The iGPU is also superior, and for AI it has 38 TOPS vs 11 in the M1. The A18 Pro should also be a lot more power efficient.
This comparinson might not be fair, since we are talking about an iPhone and a Macbook. We need to wait for Neo's benchmarks. A lot of things can change from the phone factor to the laptop factor, from power supply, to thermals, to dedicated data lanes
Sure but it's very unlikely that it would perform worse in a laptop than in a phone, thermals are better, power supplies are beefier, batteries much larger, &c.
Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]
The only difference the laptop would make is slightly better cooling; although with the effort Apple puts into iPhone/iPad thermals, I doubt it'll be exceptionally better. At most, maybe a 2-4% increase in multicore, from being able to sustain burst frequencies longer before thermal throttling.
the market segmentation is nice, it'll do well with the colors and all -- but the unified memory thing is the literal only reason to want to dip a toe in apple whatsoever; with these numbers id rather just spend ~300 on a Chuwi or equivalent white label 'ultrabook' with double the specs.
although it IS hillarious to read a group of enthusiasts in 2026 screaming "8GB IS FINE!" -- meanwhile people want more ram on their RPis..
That's around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.
That's only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.
edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750
Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.
Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.
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.
I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.
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.
I don't think they would; I'm sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.
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.
Haven't they? I can download iOS apps from the app store, sign them again with my own keys for MacOS, run them natively on my MacBook without any issues. Same binaries, same APIs. It all just works.
From what I've seen people have mostly been asking for Mac OS features on the iPad, not phone apps on the Mac.
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.
all of apple’s devices with displays down to the watch run OS X with a form factor appropriate UI layer on top. iphone and mac are more unified than google’s android/chromeos
Tahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.
I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.
edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port
So the biggest difference I see with the new Air is that you get sRGB only in the display, with less brightness. Also it is has 8GiB of RAM, which shouldn’t be an issue for the intended use.
Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
Dont bother. Even when works iPhone mirroring is unreliable and buggy experience, often asks to unlock iPhone again and sync gets broken at random and you have to go over enabling it again even though phone was next to the Mac mini all the time.
One of the worst supported features Apple has shipped. Idea was good though.
Seriously. I mainly want to use iPhone mirroring for when my iPhone isn't sitting right next to me. It then nearly always asks me to unlock my iPhone first before I can use it....
I guess it’s to be expected, but i’m sad there’s no 16gb RAM upgrade option. $699 for a brand new Mac is nice and 8gb will work for the netbook/student audience but i’d personally want a teensy bit more.
I agree that it's gone downhill, but have you been on a Windows 11 machine? It's just a cacophony of ads, jank, and slop. The computing equivalent of sitting on a lawn chair in Times Square
I imagine this will be popular in other countries too. Such an incredible product for the price. Does anyone have benchmarks comparing the A18 to an M1 say?
For the same price, Walmart is selling the HP Omnibook 5. It has a better CPU, 16 GB RAM (double), and 1 TB SSD (double).
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.
I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.
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.
Maybe, but having wires coming out of the same side as the pointing device is annoying. For cost reasons you have to pick one side. So put it where it causes less issues.
I would first check the iPad + keyboard is actually lighter than the Macbook Air. As far as I know the keyboard weighs quite a bit, though coincidentally Apple's website doesn't specify the weight.
Wow! Over 600 grams for the 11” Air keyboard. That is almost as much as a mechanical keyboard. I had no idea the total combination would be near a MacBook in weight.
It's macOS. Yes, absolutely positively more than enough for web browsing plus a whole lot more, simultaneously.
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.
~~Haven't yet seen anyone comment on the apparent lack of Apple Intelligence. Makes sense due to the low amount of memory but wonder how many people won't notice that until after they buy this laptop.~~
edit: somehow missed it has Apple Intelligence - whoops
There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.
I have one from the original rollout. I keep thinking about upgrading, but then I realize I'm just doing that because I want to buy something new, not because I need anything more powerful.
Interesting that it only comes with 8GB of RAM. My Macbook Pro on Tahoe uses around that just when booting up, before I start anything. I wonder if they have some memory optimisations planned?
Commodity hubs, especially USB2, come with lots of ports; it's up to how many connectors you can reasonably fit on the chassis. But running a trace across the board for USB isn't a great sell. Getting a second board on the other side isn't a great sell, especially for budget computers like this one. So we end up with "unbalanced" ports.
USB-C is the bane of my existence. Everything looks the same, but certain cables won't charge certain devices for seemingly no reason, and other cables won't transfer data, and there's no easy way (AFAIK) to tell the difference
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.
It's probably a problem with my devices. I've never seen these problems with more expensive devices, but my cheap bluetooth speakers will only charge with certain cables.
I also have cheap cables that don't seem able to do data transfer. Guessing it's not actually following the USB-C spec.
Are your bluetooth speakers connected over a C-to-C cable or is there any legacy USB in the mix (type-A and/or microusb)? The reason I ask is legacy USB expected 5 volts to be supplied by default, whereas in type-C you have to specifically request any current. So some C-to-A / A-to-C adapters/cables include the resistors to request the current whereas others do not, leading to legacy USB devices not getting power through some adapters/cables.
There it is! Very interesting offering. It's nice that it's running full mac os with "root access" (whatever that means on macs in current year) I was afraid they'd introduce some bastardised version of iPadOS for this device. This seems like the type of device I'd want my kids to use instead of an iPad or other touch & app based device and just let them figure things out like I did.
> 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.
I just looked over the specs [1] and it's pretty good for the price. My only quibble is that there's only one USB3 port and that's also the charging port. So if you want to use an external display, you need some form of dock to also charge it. The other USB port is only USB2 so you can't use that as an external display connector.
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.
IMO the biggest sell for Chromebooks in the education market (which is where they shine) is the software. It's a locked down OS with a cloud login that means when you encounter the slightest hardware issue you can swap out for another device seamlessly. macOS doesn't have anything comparable to that.
And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much. Sure it's touchscreen but at end of the day If I am "keyboarding" it I am not "touching" it much.
I think Apple has a winner on it's hand. This is perfect, for large number of people who don't do much on their laptop anyway. Even for me as a developer, I want something small and light that I can carry around and I can connect to my bigger machine from.
I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.
That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.
I think most are going to pass on this. I'm not sure Apple has ever figured out how to sell anything to the price conscious consumer since the iPod Shuffle.
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.
They sell hundreds of millions of iPhones every year. The iPhone installed base is in the billions.
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.
Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.
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.
You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They've really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.
> MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.
> [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.
Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.
Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.
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.
The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.
I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.
My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.
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.
FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.
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 thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.
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.
1. Gawd damn, scrolling through that page full of all those bright colors with their saturation cranked up to 11, feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode. No other page from Apple is like that. wtf
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.
2: I'd say it's about the same, same RAM/SSD sizes, maybe an M1 chip is faster than A18 but limitations will come from running out of ram/disk Had an intern working with us, basically couldn't have an browser running together with Figma due to ram shortage making it slow down to a crawl.
That doesn't make much sense. They do lean/JIT manufacturing, so it's unlikely that they have too many iPhone boards. Also, the tooling for a completely new alu unibody size for just selling a few iPhone boards does not make much sense.
This is very clearly targeted at Chromebooks in education, where the iPad is not doing too great:
Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?
For a bit over half the price of the Air, you get the iPhone 16 Pro SoC (minus one GPU core, so somewhere between the 16 and 16 Pro, actually) in a laptop chassis that's all around a bit less premium than the Air.
This could be useful as a remote-access device for something that has a decent amount of RAM, I suppose, but how can anyone do anything outside of light-duty work with 8GB? At some point a Pi + battery/screen case is legitimately better.
Yeah, I see your $599 price tag, Apple. I also remember the hype behind your Mac Mini that was a sub $500 computer. And, how long did that last? The answer is: not long.
I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they'll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.
I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
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.
Reality distortion field at its fullest. I want one!
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 is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts.
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 was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.
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.
Microsoft's build quality is largely equivalent, but the press has already noticed that the value proposition at Microsoft is now lacking.
> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961
It really isn’t. The track pad on surface is terrible compared to Mac. The surface has some weird edges and other spots to get caught on. I’ve seen a few with serious damage from typical daily use. The surface I have is barely hanging together, the charger is extremely finicky and will stop charging randomly. It takes effort to get the charger to “sit” in the slot and make contact.
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.
telling that this is flagged 1 minute into submission.
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.
>Microsoft's build quality is largely equivalent
I will have some of what you are smoking please.
You get free AI slop and mass-surveillance advertisements in your Start menu. Who would not like that!
This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.
I am in education and speak to others at the (US) national level on a near-daily basis. This doesn't compete with Chromebooks in schools at all.
- 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.
I saw this today: https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1rk3t...
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
Not just durability, but ergonomics. My kids have crappy screens, literally the worst trackpad I’ve ever used, and awful keys that hurt my hands minutes after typing (but I go all day on my personal computer).
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).
> Not just durability, but ergonomics.
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.
> Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves?
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.)
I think my school solves this by telling the parents to buy ‘something’ for the kids, as long as it has a webbrowser and keyboard.
Chromebooks don’t have a durability problem. I doubt the MacBook is any more durable, even with an all metal construction - if anything, that probably makes it worse at absorbing impact than nice soft bendy plastic.
This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.
Kids are given those for free, so there's no responsibility for them to keep them in good condition. It would take a restructuring of laptops within the school system to kids/families having a joint ownership over the laptop to stop them intentionally destroying them. Even then, there are complications like kids that will absolutely destroy anothers' for fun.
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 kids have (insanely shitty) chromebooks from school and we are absolutely responsible for the cost if they break. We have to sign a release at the beginning of the year. Whether or not they’d be able to collect from the vast majority of families is a different question, granted. But the responsibility is there.
In practice, there's a huge difference in responsibility between buying and sending your kid with a laptop and signing a paper that says you're responsible if it breaks. I'd also guess it depends on where you go to school.
My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.
Who pays for the laptop when the school bully pours water on a kid's backpack? Or a kid has their bag in a seat and someone sits on it accidentally?
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.
I don't think institutions will care much about the enhanced durability since they treat laptops as disposable units anyway. Apple can only complete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.
No, we really care about durability. The amount of damage is crazy. So many units are damaged that it would be cost-prohibitive to dispose and replace them.
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 worked in my High Schools repair room in Junior year, and the Jawa shop is an apt description haha
Can confirm Apple gave up on education. If they really cared you'd be able to have multiple accounts/profiles on iPad, and that's still not a thing that exists.
I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.
Even so I imagine your average person needing something for education would consider both. The Neo may cost more but from my past experience of Apple stuff they will likely be better made.
Certainly possible. But, in the US consider that Google and "one-to-one" Chromebooks are generally dominating and the curriculum more or less requires extensions and setting.
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.
So what segment does it target in your opinion? The "surface" market is minuscule and compared to the edu market irrelevant, the "vendor lock in" angle with the google logins can easily change over night as it did with microsoft.
> So what segment does it target in your opinion?
- 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.
If the school is wealthy enough to provide free laptops, then you're right they're going to go for the cheapest option. But if the school expects the parents to provide laptops, then the parents are more likely to choose this.
How long do those chrome books last though?
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.
> Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer.
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.
Physical durability will play a major factor here. If schools are expected to provide the Chromebooks then it will all boil down to the level of abuse/neglect the hardware can handle.
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.
somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).
Not to disagree too much with your assessment, one point stands out:
> 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.
Not having to make a Google login would be a big benefit to me. Google is getting their data early
The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!
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.
A Chromebook at the same price point will get you similar if not better specs, 14" 16:10 FHD IPS display, convertible with touchscreen and pen input, backlit keyboard and 10h+ battery runtime.
Chromebooks are the SaaS of hardware where the user is not the buyer. No one says “I would love to have a Chromebook at home” any more than they desire to run Salesforce at home.
The build quality of a $300 Chromebook is laughable.
Not every school is cash limited. Many schools have lots of money to invest in technology.
Some schools will gladly pay more.
Truth. I've seen some of them with carts full of MacBook Pros. But these schools are a small fraction of the overall population.
It should also be noted that Washington state schools are still generally heavily Microsoft and Windows, despite Google's dominance.
Similar to how MS helps their local schools, I think Apple does for schools in California.
At this point the Macbook Neo is in competition with Chromebooks, Microsoft and the third party market for older Macbook Airs with M1s
This is not competing against Chromebooks, which have very little reach outside of institutions. The Macbook Neo will likely have very widespread appeal for anyone looking for what used to be a netbook.
I'm not sure that's true given that Chromebooks can be had for one third the price.
It might be aimed at Chromebooks, but it’s also a low-end Surface killer.
The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.
It needs a touch screen for elementary schools kids. Fine for older kids.
We started using computers with keyboards in class in grade 2-3.
Current school laptops also have touchscreens for drawing and other activities. It’s a cheap feature.
Pen input is the one factor that forced one of my kids to a Windows laptop for school (a Surface Pro). It was a required feature for his school. Seeing how much he uses it for note taking, I get it. So yes, drawing is a key feature for schools.
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.
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
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.
The Surface is garbage. My last work-issued one caught fire.
I've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.
This is really well put.
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.
The surface laptop is a competitor to the MacBook Air, the cheaper Surface Laptop Go was the low cost attempt from MS.
Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.
"good laptops" yes. But I haven't seen a "great" one in a very long time. The Windows market is asleep at the wheel and a copilot button is not going to resuscitate it.
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 think the 2 laptops you mentioned are targeting different markets.
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
MacOS is crazy efficient and can overcommit quite a lot.
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
Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me. 8GB RAM is truly pathetic in 2022.
Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.
Do you actually have a problem with Slack and Outlook open at the same time on an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB of memory? Or are you assuming?
I was replying to someone that made that claim from apparent experience.
Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM. People care about what you can actually do with the machine. The spec numbers are nothing more than numbers when a computer never works as it is supposed to. It's like having a 500HP car, but it can actually not drive.
Indeed, 8gb is plenty, even for serious work and coding, if you use the machine well.
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.
I literally just ran into this myself with my spouse. She is ready to upgrade her M1 MacBook Air and thinks she doesn’t need more RAM because everything is “in the cloud”. Hopefully 8GB is enough RAM for the next 5 years or so...
> Nobody except people on HN cares about RAM.
They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"
Tell them to buy a Mac and they'll never have to call for tech support again.
Is it hard for you to imagine that people who'll buy the Neo don't care about specs at all?
I mean, look at the colors!
Not just Microsoft. Dell and HP must be having emergency meetings right about now...
Their challenge is, how do we halve the price and yet deliver twice the quality? I think they are going to realize they can't. Some of them will left the market.
I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad
Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves
> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts
200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.
Not if you move windows between screens with different scaling, or launch apps that don't support the scaling stuff out of the box, or launch apps via X11 forwarding in WSL.
All of this works much worse on macOS: Scaling sucks, as it's integer-upscaled rendering + fractional downscaling in a shader. Windows can't span screens either.
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 have the Lenovo X1 and I'm very happy with it, though obviously that's in a very different price category than the Yoga, Surface, or Macbook Neo.
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 ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
the surface laptop has an excellent screen (2880x1920 i believe), and the macbook neo is lower resolution than apple's made in years, however.
Not true.
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.
The Neo’s display is 219 pixels per inch, which is virtually the same as the Air’s 224 ppi.
What about color quality? I've used high resolution laptops with shitty washed out colors, but one thing I've always appreciated about Apple's displays is their vibrance.
> The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones.
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.
“hardware is slower” single core is significantly faster than the M2 Ultra chip. And when you're browsing the web, single core is all that matters.
Doesn't the surface have a touch screen?
I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.
I have a Windows laptop with a touch screen. The only time I touch the screen is when I take a screenshot using the Snipping Tool and want to circle something.
In the year that I had a Surface, I can count on 2 hands the number of times that I used the touch screen. Out of all those times that I used touch screen functionality, the majority of the times were done inadvertently when I was trying to get something off the screen. I'm willing to bet a lot of people won't/don't care about the touch screen, they just want something cheap.
> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts
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.
I think macOS applications feel like they have mostly updated to use the native resolution, so arbitrary scaling works great now. My comparative experience with a new Windows laptop is how I remember macOS felt when they first made high density screens many years ago: lots of render bugs all over, and every program has to be re-opened when I plug in an external screen to be usable at the new resolution
Most macOS applications now support rendering at 1x and 2x. And arbitrary scaling is done by the OS not by apps.
That’s the ideal. Apps shouldn’t concern themselves with pixels. It’s the OSs job to know the hardware the machine uses.
This leads to visible moire patterns at non-integer scalings, though
Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.
The Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise
Not really, because Surface isn't what most folks buying PCs get.
And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.
Surface Laptop is 1099€ vs 699€ for the Macbook Neo in Germany.
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.
Except most Germans don't buy Surface Laptops, and there are much cheaper options with 8 GB, naturally they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.
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.
The Apple logo is on the wrong side of the screen to be concerned about. Apple's OS and user experience is miles ahead of the competition and so are the displays they use.
Yes, this should convince people who cannot afford to pay for Apple brand to buy it.
The post that I commented on was arguing that what sets the Mac apart from other options with 8 GB RAM, and what makes them more expensive, is that they are seen as a status symbol. I made a point against that mentioning two areas in which Macs are truly superior.
What exacltly is your point?
"With 8GB". 8GB on Apple Silicon acts more like 16GB on a PC.
> they lack a glowing apple to show off at Starbucks.
If your MacBook has a glowing apple, you might be running Snow Leopard. You need to upgrade like now.
Thankfully I don't own any, I rather have computers with replaceable parts, more environment friendly, thus not something I need to worry about.
all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.
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.
Oh man I'd pay premium for a sleek device like this that CAN'T run Windows or Mac OS. Just a mere thought of being able to run pure Linux on that sweet sweet apple silicon with full driver support makes my juices flowing.
I’m not sure that many people want Windows badly enough they would get an Apple device and remove the original OS so they could run Windows.
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.
The games industry remains a hotbed of people that vehemently hate Apple, even those that have never touched a Mac.
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.
Apple leaves gamers alone, it does not even attempt to be a nontrivial gaming platform and makes no promises. Why would gamers and gamedevs hate it? It just doesn't exist in their market.
Don't have to remove anything. This used to be possible on Macs with bootcamp as they called it.
Bootcamp was a hedge when Apple was a lot less dominant than it is now.
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.
wine already runs on Mac so really they would just need something like dxvk to have a package similar to proton
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
I believe you’re being downvoted because your logic is from 20+ years ago when Windows compatibility was important.
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.
Who cares about Windows anymore?
Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices
Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases
many people do. i work for Microsoft and don't have option to use mac os
Well, last I checked most people don't work for MS so I reckon their experience might be a bit different
I assume you’re downvoted because Microsoft has to want that.
>Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world
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!
The experience I have had with Thinkpads, both current-gen and old during my childhood, did not warm me up to the line. They are not particularly better in feel, thermals and screen quality against its cheaper alternatives including those from Lenovo themselves. The only good thing was its keyboard, but then most Lenovo laptops in general have good keyboards. Its popular acclaim is weird to me.
> 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).
8gb of ram is not performance.
A decked out Mac mini is actually a beast for its size
Thinkpads are tanks, but most of the time you’d be perfectly well served by a BMW series 3.
If this makes people develop stuff under the assumption that the user only has 8 GB of memory, I am happy for where we are going :-)
Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
8Gb mac os runs great for the vast majority of people. You can even do some light development on it.
I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.
Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.
While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.
egacs: Eight Gigs And Constantly Swapping
Unless you do something unusual like open a web browser. The number of times I “fix” my wife’s computer by just closing some pages…
Apple is people, my friend!
> id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram.
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
> Teams
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.
Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.
I don't see too many students running Teams.
Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?
Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.
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.
> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors.
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.)
Clearly not Apple's.
I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.
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.
I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.
I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).
16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.
I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.
Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.
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.
It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.
Adobe is plague anywhere, of the bloated Hutt clan as Windows and other Microsoft stuff.
Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.
> Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.
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.
I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)
It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.
That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.
They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.
NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.
With builds running on big build servers.
The worst memory hogs today are websites.
There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.
Joke's on you; Swift has no garbage collector.
I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
That's what happens when we collectively stop making optimized, native apps and just go "eh, javascript is good enough for everything" and make everything using electron.
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.
This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.
Where are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.
I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
While I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right.
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
Particularly when paying for more RAM means buying a completely new computer.
Crazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad.
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.
> it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad
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).
Only if you want to take notes with a pen and prefer digital over paper. For me that's terrible, but some kids swear by it. I think if I grew up on it, it'd be different.
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.
That's a lot of money for a small amount of use cases, get a $70 Wacom.
iPads are pretty common in education for the drawing capabilities. You can take notes by typing for most things, but when you get diagram/math heavy, you just cannot beat the pencil. I think it's probably pretty poor value of the small ability you gain to cost, relative to other things you could do (I like paper/pencil personally) but I see the use case, if limited.
Have iPads really replaced paper in college? I haven’t been on campus in a decade so I wouldn’t know
I haven't been on campus in a few years but even then paper was basically absent on campus. A class where a professor wouldn't allow tablets or laptops to take notes would be an aberration and a PITA. I remember I had to write like a paper check once and I had to physically go buy a pen since neither I nor anyone around me had a regular writing utensil on hand.
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
> Why would you want an iPad?
At this point, there are more people taking notes on an iPad + Apple Pencil than on physical notebooks in my lectures
I used to use both...laptop for quick typing, and then the iPad for hand-written notes or annotation.
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 mean at this point with the latest ones, an iPad Pro with it's keyboard/trackpad accessory and a pencil could probably manage both for you pretty damn well.
I just wish they'd let us run MacOS on iPads.
That's fair...actually totally slipped my mind that today this would be much more feasible to do on a single device.
> The Neo can run iPad apps
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
That's an odd choice (for said developers), given in most cases it's a matter of checking a box. The second half of your comment is a generalization though.
It makes it easier to pirate your app if you enable that checkbox. macOS attempts to disable iOS apps when SIP is disabled to prevent this but it's not difficult to bypass. I don't agree with it but this probably does factor into their decision process.
That couldn’t be the reason. 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of consumables from games. This came out in the Epic trial.
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
The iPad is vastly better for reading and highlighting (with Pencil) class materials.
Reading whole books on a laptop tends to produce a ton of neck strain.
An eink display is vastly better for reading though. I only use the iPad for reading PDFs because Kindles are too small for that.
Why would reading on a laptop produce neck strain? Just sit comfortably.
The laptop is better in many situations as the screen stands on its own.
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.
>Why would you want an iPad?
Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.
when working?
What's a computer?
I have spent most of my life in a lazy couch posture and a laptop and keyboard doesn’t fit that lifestyle choice. I need to make more apps for people with my lifestyle choice, like IPad IDEs for development.
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.
Laptop is way nicer for lazy couch work. I can sit there with it on my lap with my arms crossed and I don’t have to waste a hand just holding the damn thing up the entire time I use it. It is the ipad that is actually the nonlazy choice.
> I need to make more apps for people with my lifestyle choice, like IPad IDEs for development.
blink code to codeserver
https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code
Ty!
This. My daughter is a high-school junior, and she's been asking for a laptop going into her senior year/college. This is exactly who Apple is going after.
I convinced my parents to get me a 2017 MBP for college, yes it was overkill for the day-to-day classes, but I ended up getting into iOS app development and was so fortunate to have a beefier-system. However, for a liberal-arts student the MBN appears to be a sweet spot.
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.
Apparently the two USB-C ports are different specs [1]
Both support charging but only one supports higher speeds and DisplayPort (A18 Pro limitation, as Apple probably doesn't dedicate much silicon to USB I/O).[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...
Makes sense, the iphone has only one port after all. Interesting that it supported a second one though, or maybe that's the Pro revision designed for this use case?
The second port is likely necessary for USB hubs that rely on both ports. I had one for my M1 Air. I assume it'd still work with the 2 different speeds, but I'd be curious to try it.
I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.
Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)
I don't think this is intentional to cut cost. I simply think that the chip was primarily made for devices with one port (iPhone, iPad) and this is a bit of an afterthought.
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.
This is going to be a primary complaint people have (even if it's not terribly important) - hopefully they have some circuitry that warns you if you're plugging something into the wrong port (e.g. a USB 3 device into USB 2 at slow speeds).
If they want to get these things into schools it would be insane to expect the schools to also supply everyone with AirPods or some other kind of wireless headphones.
It's a mobile CPU. They did not modify it. Mobile devices run with a single USB port.
Hey, it took courage to remove that headphone jack.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/
This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
Im surprised that they’re doing DP and not thunderbolt?
IIRC it's because the iPhone chip doesn't have thunderbolt
this new macbook does not have Thunderbolt
$599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID
$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 :)
Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.
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.
Apple Watch costs half this thing, but then again maybe there's a large percentage of phone/watch only users.
> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID
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.
My experience with the Apple Watch is that Touch ID is faster to unlock my Mac. The “unlocking with Apple Watch…” thing takes too much time and by the time it would have completed my finger already reached the Touch ID and unlocked it.
$499 for education which a lot of target group would qualify.
A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!
I have one of those, it's perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn't a lot, but I've never run into issues with it not being enough.
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.
> Apple cares more about AI than I do.
I’m not sure they do. They love their AI chip, but that might be where the live ends.
$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.
I doubt schools will be getting this much cheaper. This is already a really aggressively priced product.
These are probably gonna have a decent resell value. Macbook products have a very higher resell value compared to say chromebooks/normal laptops.
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
My understanding is that students are very hard on school provided laptops, I don’t think many of them that have been in use for a year will be in good resale condition.
My mother is a teacher and the idea there is that if students break/damage the school provided (tablets in that case), the students have to pay the fine.
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.
Only the smallest or independent schools are bellying up to the Apple Store to buy 250 laptops on educational discounts; almost all of them go through companies that handle the details; and it can be structured as a lease or a purchase, depending on where they want to allocate capital and expense.
I think it might be 2020 when the M1 was released since I remember i had bought a mac book in 2019 and it was still intel
It was Christmas gift. so maybe 2020... not super positive about this
November 2020
M1 came out Nov 2020.
I still wish they would give back the 11" Air dimensions with Apple Silicon.
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.
They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.
Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm
11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.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.
What are the weight measurements? kg?
Yes, that's in kg
The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
Yup. The MBA11 is probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's my daily driver. I have 4 of those now, running MacOS and Linux Mint.
I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.
That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!
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!
A revival of the 12” MacBook would be amazing, but give it to me as a premium device - not an educational market positioning.
I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.
Like the little buff 12” PowerBook https://www.macworld.com/article/225194/ode-to-the-12-inch-p...
Somewhere on my list of projects is "Gut a 12" Powerbook and put the guts of a modern M series Macbook in it". The chassis is so spacious and the Macbook Air logic boards are so small, physics is not going to be a problem. Just hooking up screens, the keyboard and trackpad (using the original, natch), and ports. There's already a high-res display swap you can do in that chassis to get to 1400x1050.
I still remember when the Air lineup was all about being small and light.
Exactly. This with an M5, OLED, today's keyboard/trackpad combo, 16GB/24GB RAM, 2-4TB of SSD and it would be an instant buy
That would cannibalize their ipad lineup
That's basically what this is, no?
13" is not 11" As someone who used their 11" for years, it was a workhorse. A slow workhorse, but I still yearn for that size.
I think the bezels are so much smaller that this may be almost exactly the size of the old 11" MBA.
I had the 11” dual core i7 and I wouldn’t even call it slow (for its time). Loved that little machine and I keep longing for that form factor but with modern specs.
I was thinking yesterday while reading the Thinkpad repairability story that I would pay an unreasonable amount for basically this laptop in the chassis of an X220, with a 7 row keyboard and Mac touchpad.
This is a 13" 16:9 screen. A little smaller than the current 13.6" 16:10 MacBook Air in display size but not really any more portable. Weight is the same as the 13.6" MacBook Air.
Don't think it's 16:9, just lower PPI than the air -- Neo: 2408x1506, Air: 2560x1664.
Yep, you're right.
Yes. I think Air is a better buy if you are going to have a "laptop". I wish it was lot lighter if I am losing features against MacBook Air.
Yes, this is spiritually more of a successor to the old plastic MacBook or iBook lines. Not a successor to the premium ultra-portable 12" MacBook.
That seems like a product they could also potentially revive with Apple Silicon.
It's a 13" and is ~2.5x as heavy.
No it isn't. It's 1.08kg vs 1.23kg, or 13% heavier.
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.
My thoughts as well.
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.
Depends what you're developing. You could build a pretty powerful webapp as long as you don't fall into 'i need my blog running in kubernetes' trap.
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....
This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
> the electron people
“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've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.
I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.
> Noone is going to develop on this after all.
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.
most of us mere mortals are using bloated software :)
In the workplace, it does not matter as it’s not your device anyway (or buy something powerful if it’s a consultancy). For most utilitarian uses, you only have to endure a few.
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.
> Noone is going to develop on this after all.
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 MacBook Air is the same weight and thinner, so for a mobile machine I think that still wins out.
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.
Users like you have money and Apple wants them buying a MacBook Air for that use case :)
Users like me have employers which every 3 years will send a new machine I can't decide.
> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
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.
The performance gap between Apple’s flash and a typical aftermarket NVMe drive in a Windows laptop is more attributable to controller design and integration than to trace length.
If by basic you mean running a simple Python script then sure; but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter.
The relationship between coding ability and memory requirement is nonlinear, right? Just a short Python code and an ide? Probably fine. Some complex ide with all sorts of agentic stuff? Need more ram. True enlightenment? Vim even with some unnecessary extensions will run on megabytes.
I do that on my 8GB M1 Air on Tahoe. It works fine?
I do and it doesn’t? Frequent waits/stutters just cmd-tabbing from Xcode to Simulator on fairly small projects.
> but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter
I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.
The specs definitely agree with you.
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.
There can be different cohorts of students. If a student is at the point where they can start exploring iOS development they can perhaps have a swing at it with this machine. In reality, they'll have been using this machine, know enough about the limitations, and be thinking of upgrading.
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.
Atleast on Linux, I have been able to do almost everything in 8gb without any concern but I have the macbook air which has 16 gb and this can also do everything pretty much.
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.
i suspect the 256 gig model is going to have a single nand flash chip so it won't be thaaat fast
you must be joking sir. those gonna be paperweight in 2 years. 16 is usable minimum for music making, grpahics and web browsing
My daily laptop is a 2017 MacBook Air with intel and 8GB. Web browsing, finance, and civilization 5.
These things will be running in 5-10 years.
My 2010 Macbook Pro with 8GB works still. Not a daily driver anymore, but Word, Excel, Lightroom, Garageband, MainStage etc work just fine. Youtube videos up to 1080p play without stuttering in Floorp. It's not quick, but it is useable.
I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.
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…
Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.
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.
Yeah I think there are a couple of advantages of a Macbook versus a Dell mobile workstation. it is definitely lighter and more pleasant got general use. I'm only concerned that modern apps usually take amount of RAMs that are close to or north of 500MB, so if you have say a word processor plus 10+ Chrome tabs you quickly run out of RAMs (I tend to have way more on my personal gig but I'm a developer). But maybe swapping is not a big issue on the Mac as both comments said.
Swapping isn't a big issue on the apple silicon macs, the storage is generally fast enough.
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.
I feel like the 8GB limit is partially market segmentation. If they had a 12GB or 16GB model, everyone would buy that instead of the Air/Pro and they would lose money
Chrome’s kind of a hog. I wouldn’t think twice about having Pages and dozens of Safari tabs open side by side on an iPad. I’m confident this could zoom through the same workload.
RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.
RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.
The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.
Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.
I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.
12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
This is a 600 buck machine. "Just $300-350 more" is a 50% price hike!
That's true, but I just know a bunch of people looking at this will have that lingering thought at the back of their minds on how that extra 50% gets you just enough little improvements across the board to make them second guess.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.
There is no sense getting anything but these sorts of Macs, or the maxed-out top of the line ones even considering the hilarious prices. Either get the entry level or go hard.
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.
300*500 kids is 150k and the difference between a school choosing chromebooks again. This is priced against the $450 Chromebook.
Agreed.
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.
The price is fantastic but 8GB RAM feels like going backwards again, but oh well, ram shortage and beggars can't be chosers
Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.
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.
It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.
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
I do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that.
Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
The A18 Pro chip has 8B of ram and no option to change it.
1: Education market 2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products
The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.
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.
What’s wrong with your M1 air?
$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.
8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.
I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.
Not true, but good riddance if it was.
It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.
No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB
Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.
I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.
nah 8gb of ram is laughable
For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors.
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!
You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.
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!
So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
This is wrong.
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.
Yes, it can -- to all questions.
Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.
"Education customers can purchase it for $499."
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.
This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.
Yeah, but K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.
true, which is why chromebooks are almost ubiquitous in k-12, at least in the US. a mac, even for only $500, is still 2x the price
I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
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.
I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.
There are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want.
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.
> and to never do anything that other people than the owner want
Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.
There's a few really great OSs that have even less ads, telemetry and AI slop than even macOS (and yes, it has all those things just less than Windows 11). Those OSs will run on the Acer today. They might maybe someday run on the MacBook Neo, but not right now.
Looks like it's aimed squarely at students.
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.
My son went to college with his Mac. But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software. So we had to get him a PC as well.
Everything, as I understand it, is moving to the Web. Google Docs, Canvas…
Yeah.
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.
What software being taught in colleges today (outside of highly specialised niches) requires Windows?
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.
Student at a US Uni here. They still do very much own the space for both tablets and laptops, especially in CS
Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
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.
My local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through high school.
My kids' district gives them iPads in middle school (5th through 8th) and MacBook Airs in high school.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
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.
My old Highschool, as well as many other schools I've seen since, mandate Chromebooks.
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.
This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.
That's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.
The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
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.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
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.
Why not? They’re the same core OS.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
Isn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway?
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.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
iPhone SoCs are very powerful. MacBook SoCs are built on them.
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.
No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
They were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence.
8 GB M1 MacBook Air does support Apple Intelligence.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
I'll get one for my mom who uses facebook and pinterest and the occasional recipe website. I'm sure it'll be enough power for the average user.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
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.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
I used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
ChromeOS and macos aren't close to the same.
> The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable
C'mon, man.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop.
Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
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.
Honestly 128MB might be too much...
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
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.
There are schools where close to 100% of the kids are qualified low income.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
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.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.
Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.
I'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...
call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?
Yea if you can find one for $500 new on sale.
Maybe a slightly used one as well.
But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
doesn't need to be new, but maybe the m1s wont last another 4 years for college so maybe it makes sense...
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
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.
> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
Apparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...
A very old article, and if you follow any of their links, they are sold out. So it's not so apparent after all
I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
Walmart shows new as currently out of stock, they only have restored.
Is it a better deal? A18 Pro seems to be somewhat more capable than an M1.
Maybe but It has worse screen, worse battery and worse connectivity.
Noted, but I’d still pick the better CPU.
This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used/older models.
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.
What part(s) of the "full experience" are missing in this machine?
Smaller screen with less colors(sRGB instead of P3), shorter battery life(16 instead of 18), USB-3 and USB-2 Type-C ports instead of thunderbolt.
Press release touts "built with the environment mind", but is silent on repairability.
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.
Non-Socketed memory and storage is more of an upgrade friendly feature rather than a repairability feature. They don’t often fail. And most people do not attempt to upgrade their devices anyway, especially the type of people who are not power users, and are buying low end devices. For most people, upgrades are no longer a purchasing consideration, and they will buy the laptop that’s five dollars cheaper and has more attractive packaging.
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.
Socketed RAM is fine, but what do you mean by storage doesn’t fail often? It’s usually the first part that fails on any computer.
Not since we got rid of spinning rust. Most common failures are batteries, and the parts of the computer subject to direct abuse by the user: keyboard, connectors, the display, etc.
Yeah, but what happens when you drop your laptop on the ground and it breaks? Good look recovering data without having to pay a recovery firm a $1000.
Personally, I restore my Time Machine back up. I’m sure some people might restore their files from iCloud or elsewhere.
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.
You're out of date; Apple is soldering the memory to the CPU directly. I mean are you complaining that you can't swap your L2 cache or replace the math coprocessor? The history of computing is one of the CPU absorbing every single discrete component over time. Apple is at a point where the CPU has to absorb the RAM to maintain their performance lead. I'm happy I get a super fast computer.
And the battery or SSD?
I expect the customer of this product is not worried about repairability: to them, it's just an iPad with a keyboard. You're also citing 3x higher costs, so they're really not comparable.
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).
How’s screen, keyboard and cooling in those? Still garbage matrix with flimsy keyboard and jet loud cooling system?
No reviews out yet.
I like the keyboard on my gen1 T14, did it change later on?
> Apple I imagine is still soldering their storage and memory to the motherboard.
Memory would be in the SoC no?
Its package-on-package for the a18 pro.
Apple's idea of that is to shred old stuff and reuse the material.
That's the tradeoff with making something small and light. I don't have a big problem with it.
that ifixit article is an AI slop puff piece.
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.
8GB RAM was actually pretty workable for lightweight work… until they shipped Tahoe. Now macOS is just a slog doing even the most basic things unless you’re at 16GB. Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.
But hey the colors are cute.
I'm typing this on an 8gb MacBook and Tahoe. it's mostly fine
You must not be doing much else then.
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.
It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.
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.
Let me ensure I understand you.
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.
That's very interesting to hear. I didn't know that.
It used to feel way better, that's the issue.
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.
Oh my god, yes. Spotlight on Tahoe is a joke. Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal? You’d think those would be in an always available cache guaranteed to always show up instantly? So many questions.
> Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal?
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.
what to use instead to launch apps and find stuff?
I ended up downgrading to Sequoia. Day and night difference! My air m2 16GB is snappy again!
And settings app does actually work!
How did you type this from the lock screen?
> Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.
Ditto for iOS 26. They need some Snow Leopard action, for real.
Please use the correct names, despite whatever apple says.
It's Mac OS Vista. This is the proper name for this abomination Apple calls Tahoe.
It would be sensible/wonderful for Apple to release a deliberately lighter version of MacOS for these laptops; but their intransigence and (e.g.) willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back year after year suggests they won’t.
> willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back
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.
> what exactly are you looking for?
File management that doesn't suck, incl. better handling of external drives.
The ability to install any software would be nice…
This is the reason why I am not going to Tahoe. I have heard its very buggy at times and resource intensive.
And I am quite happy with Sonama.
Frankly... I see no difference on my M1 air. Maybe Jetbrains IDEs are not resource intensive enough ?
Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.
> dead on arrival for anyone doing real work
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
It's perfectly adequate for most office work: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, web browsing / research. The vast majority of users are not doing software development and never will.
This is not for "serious work". It's for users who spend most of their time in a browser and/or using lightweight apps.
Why would anyone doing “real work” want this?
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.
People doing real work have money to spend and Apple wants them buying Airs/Pros.
If only we could get fun colors for those…
“real work” != “development”.
This, coupled with the nightmare fuel that Windows has become as of 2026, means no one sane should buy a Windows computer. It's more expensive, more intrusive, and Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.
A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
Depends what you consider luxury feeling. It's so stripped down.
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.
It is still miles ahead of plastic garbage other vendors sell.
It's $600, unless you're a school.
Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.
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).
EDIT: With education discount, in Canada, it's good price: $679 for base, $849 for Touch ID + 512 SSD.
--
$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.
You can't kill Chromebook with hardware. Apple needs software if they want more share of that market.
What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.
You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.
Can you say more about what software? (I'm sure the Neo runs Chrome perfectly fine)
Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.
For those wondering: Geekbench CPU single/multi and GPU Metal scores.
- 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.
A18 Pro is generations ahead of M1 and M2 on single thread if these scores are true. Are you saying we had this incredibly overpowered silicon shipped on millions of Instagram machines?
I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.
Yea the iphone chips are hilariously overpowered for what most people use them for
It's even worse, the os is too restricted for doing anything more.
Mobile devices, to give you good battery life, operate in a “race to sleep” mode. Good performance is necessary not to compute a lot of things, but to finish your computation quickly and shut down the power hungry processors. So do not worry, the performance is not being left on the table. It is there so that your phone lasts throughout the day.
Single thread performance is 50% faster, which is more important for most ordinary tasks.
It's ironic that one of the product shots includes a child using a $599 laptop while wearing $549 headphones.
The ideal kind of Apple customers, https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Mac-Leander-Kahney/dp/1593271220...
Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...
macOS has been running on A series chips since the beginning of the transition to Apple Silicon. The original developer Macs had an "A12Z" CPU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit
TIL, very cool!
IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!
When Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 he said it was running OSX but what that actually means is anybody's guess. iOS is closer to macOS in functionality today than the iPhone's first OS.
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.
It's a shame it isn't the A19 series with MIE.
$599 and available in a range of colors. My bet is this is going to be a hit with high schoolers and college students everywhere.
Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby
Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook / education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.
I wish they had the green from the iMac lineup. I like that color a lot. Still this is a nice device at an excellent price.
Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.
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.
8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.
I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
What's so special about this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?
I'm not sure. I think it does swap more aggressively. I think the disk is also just really fast and has a higher speed connection to memory.
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.
I’ve used a computer with 4 gigs for the last 15 years and it still does emails, recipes, and YouTube. I.e. 100% of my computer needs.
It's mostly for people who need to edit some documents, a few photos here and there and other things like that. 8GB of RAM is going to be enough for the average user.
it is quite forward thinking, but for Apple, they are thinking you will need to upgrade.
Assuming nothing really bad comes out of the reviews, this looks like the best computer for like 99% of users. I really can't imagine buying some plastic-fantastic Acer unit when this is on the market.
This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.
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$.
The thing is you could use it for 6 to 8 years if all your doing is editing documents and other tasks like that. No one is buying this to play games on or code massive AI powered applications, it's literally the "Well I need a computer sometimes may as well get the one that matches my phone"
> This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.
Why not? I would.
Uhm but you do realize that $500 is actually a lot of money for people that aren't living in SF and hop between startups every second tuesday, right?
There is no "only". It's $500.
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.
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.
Neither.
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.
It can be a decent sized purchase if you were buying it outright, but $500 is just not a lot of money in America for the vast majority of citizens.
Though I agree with you completely regarding the "oops I dropped it".
When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.
That is a correct statement, but "whoopsie, dropped it, but no biggie, it's just $500" is not.
I think 90% of people will be fine with just an iPad. Some will need a small bump for laptop OS but not necessarily the specs which is where the Neo comes in, then the Air is for medium workflows and Pro is for if you do anything long running and intensive. It's quite a good ladder actually small steps that just add what each tier needs.
From the marketing it’s obvious that this is built for students, so I doubt they intend for the useful life to be greater than 3-4 years.
I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.
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.
The Neo is definitely a response to Chromebooks. Apple bet on the iPad for the education market and lost that bet for obvious reasons. This was already obvious 10 years ago when I was working in edtech.
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?
My last tablet was a Nexus 7, so I wouldn’t know ;)
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.
The problem with competing against Chromebooks is that Chromebooks + GSuite and Google’s managed offerings for schools.
Chromebooks are much more secure for enterprise and education.
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.
I’m not sure about that. Physical build quality on chromebooks is poor. My kids school switched off because the kids were always breaking them.
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.
I never talked about build quality. There are in fact nice quality ChromeOS devices, it’s just arguably never worth the added expense.
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?
At my last company the support staff for the Macs was one fifth the size of that supporting the PCs (almost the same quantities of Macs and PCs)
Apple absolutely needs a management layer, both for school and for family. Apple family controls are sorely broken.
The counter however is that lots of schools are on 365, which doesn’t work so well on a Chromebook but works great on a mac.
its quite common for schools to issue windows laptops to staff (who use MS 365) and chromebooks to students (who use Google Classroom). The windows laptops also have no problem with google classroom of course.
My kids' school uses iPads with GSuite. It seems like a common config.
With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.
So in Australia this is $749 after education discounts.
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.
I think branding and reputation basically encapsulates all the build quality and support and stuff you mentioned. Non-technical consumers will see this, decide that it's probably better than a Chromebook, and be right.
There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.
Just not having a Celeron level chip is worth the difference...
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.
Thankfully you don't have that problem with ChromeOS.
Resale value. You practically have to pay someone to take an open box chromebook. The secondary market for apple products lasts longer than apple’s software support.
Yeah, just rub in the fact that an A series chip is capable of running a real OS.
I don’t ever wanna hear a word about how my iPad Pro isn’t good enough to run macOS, so that’s why Apple won’t let me have a Terminal.app on it.
Apple isn't good enough at software design to make macOS work on touch screens. Plus, they don't want to compete with themselves. Why sell an iPad running macOS when they can sell you a Macbook and an iPad instead?
Because now, at this price, there’s not a situation where I’d buy an iPad Pro over this. Although it’s marketed as a “pro”, device, a keyboard plus professional apps minus a touch screen is more pro than the same device minus keyboard minus apps plus touch screen.
why wouldn't it be? I'm running real OSs on ancient TI ARM chips that are probably 50 times slower.
8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life.
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.
Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.
This sounds great, but it pains me that I can't dual-boot my iPhone 15 Pro as a lightweight Mac. Would be great with an HDMI connector & BT keyboard/mouse.
Geekbench CPU single/multi and GPU Metal scores.
- 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.
For daily use the single core speed is the most important. Web browsing, UI render, etc., is still single threaded mostly.
Single core is close to M4, even.
I’m using a used M1 air as my daily for editing tens of thousands of photos, tons of 4K video editing, web and light dev work.
It’s still the fastest computer I’ve ever used. (No Tahoe for me)
Outside of college students, I think this also unlocks the Mac to rest of the world. Now $599 allows most of the world to buy/lock into the Apple ecosystem. 8 GB is the only issue I have but everything else is such a good compromise for the price.
Looks pretty cool. I feel they got some features right for their target demographics:
- 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!
I wonder, if Asahi get's ported to this, would that potentially open the door for Asahi on an A18 powered iPhone? Or are those secure-booted too hard?
iPhones would require an exploit.
Is the screen supposed to read MAC? The C is misshapen if it's supposed to be 3 bars per letter.
(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.)
I'd be glad to try one (either blue or piss colored). If it really comes at 600€. Though it would already be 100€ too much unless it gets liberated to run linux at some point.
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)
For NL €699 and €799 (512Gb) at apple store. Will likely only be closer to 600 at big stores that do discounts.
The M2 air supports asahi Linux and used ones can be had for 600ish
The Neo runs on the same chip as iPad so fat chance unlocking the bootloader
I know this is a heavily tech circle.
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
I’m still on an M1 Air for my personal laptop and probably will be for another couple years. It doesn’t feel “slow” and I feel no urge to start browsing newer models.
My understanding is this laptop matches or exceeds the M1 Air’s performance, so it should be pretty damn nice for most people.
So really this appears to be a replacement for the M1 MacBook Air that they were still selling at Walmart.
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 the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me.
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.
I'd probably go for a $50 Yubikey over a $100 Touch ID upgrade.
How is it Apple can make a whole laptop cheaper than the phones they sell? Phones are costing more while laptops are going down in price.
Phones contain 3+ cameras, OLED displays, FaceID, wireless charging, and cellular modems. Plus there is a price to be paid for the latest and greatest in miniaturization, machining, and packaging.
Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.
$100 AUD less than the base iPhone 17e here
Because this is probably using a bunch of old parts that didn't get sold and are very cheap now (the a18 from last year's iPhones, etc).
It also probably doesn't have a ~60% margin.
If they plan to sell any volume, they can't rely on leftovers.
Unless the "leftovers" in question are "leverover capacity on the previous process node that doesn't have pricing competition, so Apple's able to continue to demand all of the supply at their desired price point"
What counts as "meaningful volume" is probably very different for laptops than for smartphones.
The same way that Apple can sell a low end iPad with cellular for $479 that has a larger screen and larger battery. If the iPhone wasn’t heavily subsidized and/or available on installment plans, Apple would have to lower prices.
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
It's possible that they are selling it close to cost to get more young people into the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem. If you can translate each one of these into a "Pro" device sale down the line then it's a win for Apple.
To name a few components:
- 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.
First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.
Besides the phone CPU, they’re using less apple custom silicon: MediaTek wifi/bluetooth, no cellular modem, generic 1080p camera.
There are bunch of expensive components in a phone that aren't in this. The modem and camera system come to mind.
probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it's not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.
For starters, no royalties to pay Qualcomm.
Don't the new iPhones have Apple's own modem in them?
because all those prices are artificial, Apple is charging what they think they can get away with and also betting on making more money in the long run with subscriptions to iCloud and their other services.
The MacBook Neo starts at the same price as the new iPhone 17e!
I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.
Interesting. In Canada the 17e starts at $899, and the Neo starts at $799.
Good question... I wonder if the 5G chipset adds significantly to the price? IP licensing?
Maybe it's cheaper to make something that doesn't have be small as an iphone.
You're confusing the sales price with the manufacturing cost. They will continue to set whatever prices people will pay because it's a walled garden and there's no other company building Apple (MacOS) compatible laptops.
I can totally see many, many students and parents use that machine for daily tasks. Yes, base specs are pretty low: 8Gb RAM, 256 Gb drive - but the price tag is also low in the Apple world. I assume the trackpad will be excellent and the promise that the battery lasts all day is probably true (all day = 6-7h max). Good move from Apple, for once.
I also know many professionals who have a work computer and just want a personal device for occasional things like personal web browsing/shopping/occasionally watching videos -- things that would be inappropriate on a work computer and inelegant on a phone. These people already basically use their phone for everything -- many of them have never upgraded from their college laptop, which is now obsolete. They'd value a well-built (design, feel, screen) computer but have no performance needs.
It looks like a perfect replacement for my 2011 MBP. I always figured I’d get a Chromebook when it croaked but this is a viable contender
A 2011 MBP is likely a better a general purpose PC, those early models had some great engineering. Wait for the reviews and benchmarks but the M1/M2 based MBPs are still great daily drivers.
Those old 2011 machines aren't really getting macOS security updates anymore, and compatible apps are dropping; I wouldn't recommend using anything but Linux on them. And even with a non-15-year-old battery, you'll be lucky to get half the battery life of Apple Silicon with a 2nd gen Core i5 CPU.
2011 is 15 years ago -- MacOs will not support that device, so it is a real security risk to use online.
This new offering seems comparable to the price of a refurbished M1/M2.
I thought Apple's RAM architecture/speed lets more than 8 GB be addressed, effectively letting it have 50-100% more operating capacity?
Doesn't stop it from shitting the bed when you try to run anything like Fusion or Docker
> the trackpad will be excellent
Nope. It is mechanical.
The mechanical trackpad of my 2007 Macbook (the first unibody) is still better than any PC trackpad I've ever used.
What do you mean, "mechanical"?
A mechanical trackpad is like an unpowered treadmill iirc. Sometimes they ship with a gimbal mount so you can scroll more than one direction.
This explicitly says "Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control and support for gestures", so at most it's the clicking action that is mechanical (rather than the click being faked with haptic feedback, as it is on the current models)
Their mechanical trackpads were excellent too. It's only their keyboard which they messed entirely up.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...
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.
Until today if they had less than around $800 to spend my answer would be "Don't buy a new MacBook from Apple" because there isn't one that cheap. Maybe look for a used or refurbished M1-M2 model.
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
I'm now a 15'' Air user after always being pro. I notice no difference in performance but enjoy the lighter form factor and damn does it run cool compared to the pro.
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.
Yah I think this actually competes with used Airs and older MBPs.
When Steve came back Apple was months from bankruptcy; their product lineup was full of duds.
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.
Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
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.
I guess I'm just an OG to Apple. Macbook pro every damn time.
$1700 is a lot for most people, and they don't have their entire jobs on it.
Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.
However, with the recent Macbook Neo. I actually went ahead and recommended Neo. Especially to a friend of mine whose going into college soon and has asked me what they should buy.
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)
People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.
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.
MacBook Air - mid range mid price, good quality, basically as functional as the Pro now. The price of the Neo is very compelling if they want it for light duty work though. And obviously high end is high end but those people know who they are
Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.
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.
I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)
When Jobs took over Apple he didn’t have a device in a quarter of the world’s pocket.
> Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy!
Depending on their budget and needs, a Neo, Air, or Pro.
In case anyone else is wondering -
Neo:
Air:Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.
Nah it's on there.
Run a Linux VM (basically no performance impact) and you have a killer quality Linux laptop. Sure it’s not the same as a dedicated Linux system but with these specs you’re going to do lighter work away from your desk anyway.
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.
Why would you spin up a linux vm for development when you are already running a unix os?
with 8 GB of RAM?
A Chromebook with 8gb ram and stock ChromeOS runs the Linux Dev VM perfectly fine while having 100+ chrome tabs open.
It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
A terminal isn’t enough for everything, especially developers. I use lots of windows at the same time and plenty of non-terminal applications.
When forced to use macOS, a Linux VM provides a very convenient experience.
As well, if you run an aarch64 VM with virtualization there is essentially no lag. It runs great. I have an Alpine Linux one on my M2 Macbook Pro.
It looks like a good value if you can get by with 8 GB of RAM. This is a market niche that will sell, but it doesn’t replace the Air. The Air has 16GB standard and can be ordered with up to 32. I’m also curious about the benchmarks between the A18 Pro and the M5, although for a lot of people that’s going to be less important than the RAM.
Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.
8gb was standard not that long ago and was just fine for most people.
It’s great if you run max two “web apps” at a time. More, and it’s heading into “may be a problem” territory.
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.
I'm still working on an 8GB M1 Pro. It's just about ok. VS Code plus podman plus Teams plus Slack plus Firefox and it hits the limits; usually Slack is the thing to get killed.
I’m on a 16GB M1 Pro. Slack, Zoom, then browser tabs for Jira, PagerDuty, GMail, Confluence, and a Google doc and it’s swapping like mad. It’s that fast SSD and the integrated memory, so it swaps quickly. Swapping is still swapping though.
This is perfect for folks looking to buy a brand new laptop.
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...
I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series.
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.
The target user doesn't read hacker news. The target user is typing up papers for their history class. This absolutely kills the lower end of the market. I do not know why anyone who needs Safari and MS Office would buy anything else.
I think they very intentionally assume folks are not running VMs or doing much more than "every day" tasks. Given the pre-packaged E-Waste sold at most retailers for a similar price (or more) I think this is a really fantastic market move by Apple. This is doubly true as I read weirder and weirder things that Microsoft is doing with respect to Windows 12 and, well, in general.
It’s $599. The target audience for this won’t need more. Anyone who knows what a VM is is not the target audience.
I used an M1 Air with 8GB as my main software development machine for a year during Covid. It was fine.
Can the Macbook Neo run Rosetta 2?
compatable with polishing cloth https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2029206219802722595?s=46
Apple is second to none in supporting legacy products.
Don't get me wrong it's a fantastic product and great price point, but the only thing it makes me think of is the complete failure of iPadOS. Ultra portable MacBook with is A18 with 8G of ram is infinitely more useful to me (for non-pen input) than full M4/M5 chip with more ram that's completely wasted due to needless OS restrictions.
You're right. This is actually an implicit admission of the failure of the iPad for general purpose computing.
Which everyone on HN already says, but Apple seems to have its own idea what the iPad is for.
Your “failure” is billions of dollars to them.
I completely understand that as a cheap one, it has to be worse than macbook air in some aspect to make the product line work. However I'm genuinely curious why it's thicker and no lighter than the Macbook Air, while at the same time has shorter battery life, less ports, no keyboard light, and a smaller chip? Do they put dead weight inside it or something?
Product Positioning...
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.
8GB RAM, no apparent upgrade option. Regardless, these will be insanely popular. Apple has finally made a play for the budget laptop market.
Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.
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.
>M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18.
MacBook Neo is A18 Pro and if you look at benchmarks, the A18 Pro single core performance is 50% faster than the M1...
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8650702
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020
There's a nice graph in this Six Colors article:
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.
That’s great, maybe someone will finally start optimizing their shitware.
Bit of a strange choice of name if I may say so!
Neo will at least help in ensuring that macOS doesn’t become too heavy for a few years.
Exactly, this is good news, it'll force them to keep 8gb in mind. It essentially restarts the clock on 8GB machines for the next five to seven years.
...hopefully.
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.
Didn't we agree that calling your product "new" is poor planning? Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(3rd_generation)
Or will they keep doing this with "neu", "nouveau", "nuevo" etc?
I honestly don't think "neo" invokes thoughts of "new" to most people (despite the Greek etymology, of which I'm well aware).
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."
It's a product category name at least, not a release name, so the next release can be Neo 2
> Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?
Probably when they update it, if they decide to keep the product line going.
This could be amazing for running Asahi Linux one day. Probably will be quite a while before Asahi works on it though.
Mom is getting a new laptop
I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?
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.
Pro = Business/serious = Boring colors.
I know, but that doesn't mean there aren't people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone/Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.
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.
First thing I did was search the page for "touch" as in touch screen. Still no touch screen. I've gotten so used to a touch screen with my X1 yoga that every time I use my Mac for work I get pissed off at it because I can't touch it. Just simple things like scrolling or multiple check boxes etc
The finger prints would drive me crazy.
Reminds me of when every college kid had those plastic Macbooks. Quite a smart product.
Looks like the best display you can get in laptops at this price: 2408x1506 resolution, 500 nits, antireflective coating (!). And bonus points for no silly notch.
Really want Apple to launch the Mac Mini version of this (yes, I really want an updated Apple TV)
Mac Mini is already the Mac Mini version of this. How much lower in price can it realistically get?
I wonder if this is a way for them to take a situation like the RAM shortage and spin it into a way to sell more products with little memory to mask the expensive price of memory by bundling it with the outer shell of the laptop rather than try to sell a few PRO laptops whose price is now very jacked up because of the expensive memory.
I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.
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.
A Chromebook with stock ChromeOS runs the Linux Dev VM just fine and you can do real work with it
M4 air to Neo is a huge downgrade, what’s the motivation?
It's not a replacement, it's an addition. My Air is stationary and it doesn't leave my desk due to lots of cables plugged in and I want something that I can take with me around the house if I decide to chill elsewhere for a bit. I was looking at Windows laptops for a long time and it was either a Chromebook or £1k+ which I couldn't justify.
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.
i think a mac mini (m4, 16gb, $599) for the desk is what i’d buy in your situation but ofc i don’t know the specifics
I wonder if this means a Mac Nano with an A-series chip is on the table now. Essentially a beefed up Apple TV that runs macOS.
I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.
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?
The body, size, weight, shape of the Neo is almost exactly the same as the current Macbook Air. What are you talking about?
'What are you talking about' aside: exactly. What is the Neo, if not an Air? What is the Air, then? What is the product segmentation?
Once upon a time, there was the white MacBook. Maybe this is trying to be the new plain MacBook?
An iPhone in a laptop body to be an Apple "Chromebook", I can only imagine this will be pretty popular.
The 2015~2017 MacBook (I own one and love it) was a similar thing, but with a passively-cooled Intel chip. With Apple Silicon this will be amazing.
It's like the Netbook is back, but done well. This is really exciting, I have to admit. Superb execution of hardware of course, but the secret sauce is the OS. Can't wait to try one.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this ends up being really popular with families. Parents with iPhones are (I’d imagine) far more likely to get their kids iPhones, and with Messages and FindMy I bet it’ll be the same here. Apple also has screen time and parental controls, so for parents wanting to get their kid a computer but worried about unrestricted Internet access, the MacBook Neo may be the most seamless option.
I wish more would be done on weight. The 12 inch Macbook was very lightweight, just 2 pounds. Today there's no Apple product that gets close to that: an iPad with the added accessories weighs more and it's still an iPad. The Macbook "Air" is not airy, this Macbook Neo weighs the same as an Air.
That machine's form factor was so great, it was just saddles with that awful hot-running Intel CPU. I was hoping this device would be essentially the MB12, finally with the right chip. I guess they were going for target price, not target weight.
I find it really fascinating that this is priced identically to an iPhone 17e. Speaks to it essentially being a big iPad with a keyboard attached running macOS.
In Canada they don't seem to be priced the same - Neo starts at $899, and 17e at $799.
It's still almost three pounds....
Whatever they did with the 11" macbook air was magical. It doesn't seem like they can pull it off twice.
On the one hand I feel like 8GB is low these days, but my iPhone 12 Pro only had 6GB of RAM, so maybe for light usage this is fine. I do feel like 16GB is the new "8GB" minimum of the 2010s. Especially on windows, 32GB feels like Windows just chews through it no problem.
Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
Will it be true macOS or will they use this excuse of using an “iPhone chip” to lock down everything like they do on iPads/iPhones?
A18 Pro offers 44% better single thread performance and similar multi-thread performance as the M1 processor.
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.
Was this meant to respond to a different comment?
Seems responsive to me.
They don't have a "macOS Lite", and if these were running anything less than full macOS, you can be sure Apple would be positioning them as a new product (or part of the iPad line) rather than as a Mac.
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...
Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.
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.
No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.
Macbook Nano will probably be supported with security updates for a lot longer.
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.
Average user doesn't know to look at refurb, the M1 Air will slowly drift out of manufacturing due to component sourcing etc.
Where can you buy these reliably?
VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686
The refurb M4 Air are on Apple website.
The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although it is possible that Apple decided against enabling it (to segment the market).
Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...
Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
Funny; for me, a backlit keyboard is one of the most unnecessary features I can think of. Even for those who can't touch type, the keyboard is just inches away from the bright screen which sort of illuminates them.
IMO it’s not that big of a feature. People touch type.
I mean, they could turn on a lamp no?
I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.
I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.
Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.
Hip kids were doing bad type since Photoshop 3/illustrator* gave them the ability to do so. Apple boldly ignored their fanbase and did type right.
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.
More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.
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.
Poor kid would definitely feel superior rocking shitty, plastic Windows tombstone that won’t survive for 2 hours without power supply.
Apple: here's an affordable laptop. This comment: but the poor kids are going to feel inferior to the rich kids with this affordable laptop! Of course the poor kids are going to get cheaper & slower computers, cheaper clothes, etc. And they won't feel great about it because being poor isn't great.
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.
It will be a nice step to the "Blue bubble" lifegoal for them.
No magsafe seems like a bad idea given the target demographic.
Not if their goal is to make money on repairs/upgrades!
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.
Honestly I am still wondering why tf they brought magsafe back. I thought Apple had turned the corner on proprietary connectors. I charge my M2 air with a usb-c cable.
Two advantages for me: It's nice that you don't break the connector if you trip over the cable or put the laptop down on a soft surface, and it's nice being able to charge while still using both USB-C ports (although I guess 3x USB-C would also solve that).
I don't really see any downside to a proprietary connector if you also have the option to charge over USB-C as well.
I wonder how people would feel about:
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.
MagSafe’s great because nobody in your house will run off with your cable to charge their phone or tablet or Switch controller or whatever.
It's less stress on a frequently used port. I've got an early M1 MacBook Air where the USB-C port I always used for charging is starting to get flaky, presumably because it's been used so much and because of the weight of the cord + dongle hanging off the side of the machine.
Replacement port for M1 Air can be bought for around $10 off Amazon and installation take like 10 minutes for total newbie like me. All you need is right screwdriver.
Just look for a2337 usb-c port replacement.
I can't understand why they ever moved away from it.
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.
If only we could get a MagSafe data cable! I'd kill for a MagSafe equivalent of a thunderbolt dock
They brought it back because it's a fantastic feature for clumsy people like me.
It's a big selling point for the slice of laptop buyers that are replacing a machine they just broke by tripping over the power cord.
My wife does, too, but only because the dog ate the magsafe.
The day I tripped over the cord and smashed my netbook I suddenly appreciated MagSafe a lot more.
Right? also, where's the thunderbolt ports? and it needs about another inch? maybe half inch on the screen. And really, 16gb is the new minimum. There's a whole bunch of acceleration and co processing features in the m series missing from the a series, so they really should put an m5 in there instead...
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.
I was really hoping for 11inch version, but I am just that weird.
Its wild watching Apple change. They lost their luxury brand and have pivoted to general population.
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..
Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?
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.
>it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?
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.
They tricked you. $40/month over two years is still $960 - definitely still luxury.
You are living in pre-inflation mindset.
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.
yesterday I wrote in a group slack that today I would get to decide whether:
* 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?
It's interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was
- 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.
Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
The M1 Air didn’t have MagSafe, but yeah agreed
The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs
You are totally right. Also, I think it's basically to avoid only one port to charge and use for connectivity.
How is this laptop cheaper than a basic iPhone???
Looks like they're using some new variant of branding font for this. Inspect Element shows it as SF Pro Display, but it's actually just being masked over with an image
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?
Cause kids will be happier with a Neo.
Because it's a new base MacBook? so MacBook Neo.
No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.
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.
I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.
Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.
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.
Not sure about the "cheap shit" part, there are no other laptops with the build quality of MacBooks. It is as premium as it gets.
Software has gotten shittier tho, but I think it is an overall trend and not just Apple.
I'm sure these will sell very well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the M1. I'm sure Asahi linux folks are really excited about an extra chip set to support.
8GB of ram places it in competition with cheap chromebooks but nothing more
That's a bit... uninformed, there are and historically have been plenty of non-chromebook laptops with 8 GB of memory in that price bracket (HP, Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS, etc).
And now they're digital waste
It's strange that the low-end machines get positioned as "every day task" devices when the biggest ram hogs by far are browsers and websites.
Well, why can’t my 17 Pro run macOS apps when connecting it to an external screen etc?
Hey Folks: no notch! This is beautiful!
But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.
Edit: Not 16x9 as originally stated.
Yeah it comes with a compromise. Tbh, if it was an option I would sacrifice a tiny bit of my screen to not have the notch while keeping a uniform bezel.
cute netbook, I appreciate the no notch design
Too bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.
So I guess they must have fully depreciated the gigantic fleet of CNC routers they use to cut the aluminum cases. Making a cheap laptop seems better than throwing them away.
This proves macOS should/could just be an iOS app that you can run when docked. It has great suspend and resume, the phones/tables would just need more ram and storage. Maybe we'll see it in the future
All I want is a MacBook Pro with a funky color like citrus.
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.
I've said for years now that if they make a purple one, I will instantly buy it.
Woah. A burner laptop for travel? I might need to rethink what personal computing is for me soon. Mac Studio + Studio Display, plus a Neo/iPad might be the right combination instead of having to buy an expensive laptop which has hinges and can get stolen.
Anyone think you'll actually be able to do anything on a Mac with only 8gb of RAM? I had a Macbook Pro before with 16gb of RAM and it was constantly running out of RAM and showing me the Force Quit Applications dialog. Constantly...
I am using a M1 Mac Mini 8GB as a home server/desktop, and it works just fine. It can run games and a Minecraft server in the background while serving video and home automation, and I've never had anything force quit because of it. I agree with the people who are saying 8GB should be kept as a target spec for the low end. It's really only bloated software that has made it necessary to get so much RAM, and now that prices have gone up, if Apple forces developers to do more with less for a segment of their market, I'm all for it.
There are millions of people using 8GB or RAM with MacOS without issue right now. I would bet 80% of all MacBooks in use right now have 16GB or less of RAM.
People run million dollar businesses out of 8GB MacBooks.
Wondering how it decided to show the force exit program dialog. I used to use 8g macbook for development. But instead warning on serious memory exhaustion, it just decided to lag and suicide with everything freezed (including the restart button).
This seems like a great price to have an actual MacBook with you anywhere for things that don't require a lot of resources, like if you're running some tmux/Tailscale solution at home and just need to SSH into it to do work with [whatever terminal agent you're using].
I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.
This is an excellent addition to the lineup and changes the list of reasons for why the average person would go for a Windows laptop from “cost” to practically nothing, but from a consumer perspective, is there any reason to buy this over M1 MBA which can be purchased new for less than the education discounted version of the MB Neo?
With every new device Apple releases the split between iPadOS and macOS gets more awkward.
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.
> just unify the two already
Yeah but some people buy both, and apple wants to keep it that way
This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty
This is an absolutely solid buy I think. My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.
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 want one for all my kids. I love it. I just wish it had more ram. Personally though this direction is good. I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'
> I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'
I think something like that is in the works, but you could leverage Claude or ChatGPT or a similar service, right?
Anyone know how this would compare to an original M1 Air? Both in terms of performance and also capability. My primary use case for my air is web browsing and similar. But I do use other things at times. I know they're both arm processors, but are there things that ne can do an M1 that won't work on this?
The A18 Pro is roughly 30% faster in single-thread, and about equal in multi-core performance compared to the M1. The iGPU is also superior, and for AI it has 38 TOPS vs 11 in the M1. The A18 Pro should also be a lot more power efficient.
a18 scores better than m1 in single thread benchmark and about the same in multi thread
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-16
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020
This comparinson might not be fair, since we are talking about an iPhone and a Macbook. We need to wait for Neo's benchmarks. A lot of things can change from the phone factor to the laptop factor, from power supply, to thermals, to dedicated data lanes
Sure but it's very unlikely that it would perform worse in a laptop than in a phone, thermals are better, power supplies are beefier, batteries much larger, &c.
Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
The A18 Pro has been around since September 2024, we have plenty of benchmarks.
Not on laptops no, we should expect much better numbers on a full fledged laptop
The only difference the laptop would make is slightly better cooling; although with the effort Apple puts into iPhone/iPad thermals, I doubt it'll be exceptionally better. At most, maybe a 2-4% increase in multicore, from being able to sustain burst frequencies longer before thermal throttling.
They're pretty much equivalent.
They are not. The A18 Pro has much better single threaded performance (similar multi-core performance).
Unless you are going to build software projects, a difference in single-threaded performance is going to be much more noticeable.
the market segmentation is nice, it'll do well with the colors and all -- but the unified memory thing is the literal only reason to want to dip a toe in apple whatsoever; with these numbers id rather just spend ~300 on a Chuwi or equivalent white label 'ultrabook' with double the specs.
although it IS hillarious to read a group of enthusiasts in 2026 screaming "8GB IS FINE!" -- meanwhile people want more ram on their RPis..
Ugh. Why is is so much more expensive in Denmark? Here it's DKK5499 for the 256 GB version. That's USD857.
That's around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.
That's only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.
edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750
Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.
With or without VAT? The USD price is without VAT.
The DKK5499 is with VAT. If I enter a San Francisco zip code, it still only comes out to about USD654.
Sales tax in the US is nowhere near 25% :)
It's the 25% VAT. Pre VAT, it's ~$685.
With state sales tax of 8% where I live, the base would cost me $648.
So not a huge difference.
The Danish version has two years of warranty.
Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.
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.
The US price doesn't include tax, Denmark price I assume does.
Interesting how it runs on the A18. I wonder if this means they will try to unify macOS and iOS within this decade.
I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.
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.
I don't think they would; I'm sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.
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.
Shipping macOS on iPads will near instantly vanish a very large cohort of their macbook users.
I think it's purely a pricing & supply chain thing. Certain iPads have M-series chips in them, now certain MacBooks have A-series chips in them.
Also, the chip used has no impact on the viability of merging macOS and iOS anyway.
Haven't they? I can download iOS apps from the app store, sign them again with my own keys for MacOS, run them natively on my MacBook without any issues. Same binaries, same APIs. It all just works.
From what I've seen people have mostly been asking for Mac OS features on the iPad, not phone apps on the Mac.
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.
Seeing as it's the A18, are there any concerns about third-party "desktop" software not running on this new platform?
no? it’s neck and neck with the M1 on benchmarks, plenty of people seem to still love their M1 airs
M1 evolved from the A cpu line.
Why would that mean that, when iPads have had A series and M series chips for ages now?
Hasn’t that been the discussion since the laptops/desktops went arm?
Yeah but macOS has never been ran on a “A” series chip before which makes it all more so interesting.
Technically, the Apple Developer Transition Kit Mac Mini from the Apple Silicon transition (just before the M1 release) ran on an A12Z.
The Developer Transition Kit (DTK) ran on the A12Z chip. I don't think this should be interpreted as a signal of iOS/macOS unification.
It is a given on Windows land, Apple is the one that rather sells two for the price of two.
in a competitive market they would have been unified a long time ago. google has been making slow steps at doing this apple wont until google does
all of apple’s devices with displays down to the watch run OS X with a form factor appropriate UI layer on top. iphone and mac are more unified than google’s android/chromeos
Tahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.
Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?
That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.
edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port
Because the motherboard is tiny and on the left?
So presumably the small headphone jack is on a daughter board which could just as easily carry a USB 2 signal.
plenty of laptops run cables internally to device ports.
they do it so that you'll buy a MacBook Pro
Built for Apple Intelligence. 8GB of RAM. It will be a struggle but I have no doubt it will sell really well.
So the biggest difference I see with the new Air is that you get sRGB only in the display, with less brightness. Also it is has 8GiB of RAM, which shouldn’t be an issue for the intended use.
Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
Anyone else find the naming odd? What’s the relevance of “Neo”?
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???
Neo as in New, as in "our customers can't afford our products anymore so this represents a potential major pivot for this company if it works"
Neon, and also “fun for kids”.
Looks super nice, but I don't regret getting the M1 Air for $599 at Walmart. No Touch ID in the base version is a bummer... otherwise it'd be perfect.
Wow thats a really good deal
I can open iphone on my macbook? Wish I had it working on my macbook pro, because I was supposed to be able to do that a long time ago (I'm in EU).
Dont bother. Even when works iPhone mirroring is unreliable and buggy experience, often asks to unlock iPhone again and sync gets broken at random and you have to go over enabling it again even though phone was next to the Mac mini all the time.
One of the worst supported features Apple has shipped. Idea was good though.
Seriously. I mainly want to use iPhone mirroring for when my iPhone isn't sitting right next to me. It then nearly always asks me to unlock my iPhone first before I can use it....
Interesting.
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?
oh man, I loved my little 10" netbook back in the day.
That mini pc trend was really something ! Thanks for the blast from the past.
Interesting that the headphone jack is on the left! Have there ever been any other MacBooks where this was the case (no pun intended)?
Hasn't this been the case for most Apple laptops?
Not my M2 MBA. Which ones are you thinking of?
Most MacBook Pros. Examples: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111955 https://support.apple.com/en-us/112586 https://support.apple.com/en-us/111946
Ah cool, my memory of laptop headphone jack placement doesn't go back that far. Anything before the butterfly keyboards is just a blur...
I guess it’s to be expected, but i’m sad there’s no 16gb RAM upgrade option. $699 for a brand new Mac is nice and 8gb will work for the netbook/student audience but i’d personally want a teensy bit more.
8GB RAM is fine for these
topping out at 512GB storage is lame though
Feeling glad I got a 2nd hand air M1 (16gb+512gb) for ~400 GBP last October, rather than waiting out for this.
No idea how the processors compare, but that RAM isn't a good sign
We are back to colors! https://appleclamshell.wordpress.com/color-guide/
The hoops Apple will jump through to not let me install/dual-boot macOS on my iPad Pro.
It’s all the same damn hardware. Just let me install an OS that isn’t purposefully gimped!!
So Apple is finally "admitting" an iPad is not the right device for certain users/situations.
Given how incredibly bloated OSX is now and that everything else is CEF, how can they possibly justify 8gb of ram? Even my ancient w7 box has 64gb
Mac manages memory significantly better than Windows. My 8 GB Air feels better at multitasking than my 20 GB Windows laptop.
I agree that it's gone downhill, but have you been on a Windows 11 machine? It's just a cacophony of ads, jank, and slop. The computing equivalent of sitting on a lawn chair in Times Square
For 800 euros, with 8 GB RAM, and a mobile GPU?!? No thanks.
599usd == 514eur
I suggest to look into the actual store prices, instead of fly by comments.
These start at 699€, at least here, VAT included.
I imagine this will be popular in other countries too. Such an incredible product for the price. Does anyone have benchmarks comparing the A18 to an M1 say?
A18 is ahead of M1 single core, slightly behind in multi core on Geekbench
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=...
I don’t even have to look at the specs to tell you : “insufficient ram”
How will the A chip fare for LLM-based use cases, compared the M series?
And will we have software compatibility issues because of A versus M issues?
I don't think LLM use cases are the target audience's chief concern here
I think this is a very niche product or a potential Chromebook competitor. This is good enough for students and kids.
For the same price, Walmart is selling the HP Omnibook 5. It has a better CPU, 16 GB RAM (double), and 1 TB SSD (double).
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.
This A18 processor, how does it compare to the M series?
That's a pretty slick video where the block of aluminum transforms into the finished MacBook in the presenter's hands.
I just want a colourful fun pro laptop :(
put a skin or case on ur favorite boring-colored pro laptop
first thing i thought when i saw the citrus version - give me that in a 16" M5 Pro machine!
Is A18 fully compatible with M series chips apps?
Came here to ask this - seems like the most important question.
Woah... a mobile processor and enormous bezels... definitely feels like Jobs would have never let this ship
wat? jobs shipped worse machines at twice the price with horrible thermally throttled intel cpus
Cool hardware but wake me up when I can install Linux on it.
Tiny, silly, no good, minor, tedious complaint: can you visibly tell which port is USB 3 vs. USB 2 or do you have to just remember?
I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.
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.
https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/
Looks like there isn't any indication in the photos.
What’s going on with Apple? Are they doing one-hardware-a-day week/month now?
ya they’ve been teasing a week of releases for a while
Would definitely consider for my next laptop. What’s the best solution for “Mac Subsystem for Linux”?
https://www.macports.org
It's UNIX, just open Terminal.app
https://brew.sh/
I was hoping they'll revamp the 12" MacBook. I liked a lot that design and form-factor.
What's that slot on the side? Antenna?
Speaker grilles, one on each side. Shame it's not an SD card slot.
But it shows USB ports on the other side?
The left side has two USB-C, a headphone jack, and a speaker. The right side just has a speaker.
Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?
That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
It's probably cheaper to squish everything into one small PCB on one side of the machine.
Most people use a mouse on the right so having a wire where a mouse will be can be annoying.
Yeah, but most people will also be using Bluetooth pointing devices.
That's the point. You don't want to be running your bluetooth mouse into whatever you plugged in on the right side.
That might be the reason, but the number of people that actually use a mouse these days is tiny.
Maybe, but having wires coming out of the same side as the pointing device is annoying. For cost reasons you have to pick one side. So put it where it causes less issues.
So people like you spend more
This is a very smart move and I love it! Absolutely the best device I can get for my parents.
Nail in the coffin for ChromeOS (or aluminiumOS) if they 8GB RAM variants are sold > $500.
Maybe. When a decent Chromebook is £697 (https://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-chromebook-14m9610-laptop-m...) it doesn't make economic sense to get one.
I was hoping for a sub 1kg laptop for travel. Might go for an iPad Air plus keyboard now.
I would first check the iPad + keyboard is actually lighter than the Macbook Air. As far as I know the keyboard weighs quite a bit, though coincidentally Apple's website doesn't specify the weight.
Wow! Over 600 grams for the 11” Air keyboard. That is almost as much as a mechanical keyboard. I had no idea the total combination would be near a MacBook in weight.
The specs are similar to what Google Pixelbooks had in 2017, except for the CPU.
Excellent! Was going to get a MacMini for my kids but I might just get this instead.
With only 8 GB of RAM would this be usable even for web browsing?
It's macOS. Yes, absolutely positively more than enough for web browsing plus a whole lot more, simultaneously.
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.
Whats "neo" about this compared to the last macbook they put out?
This is the first Mac to use an A-series (i.e. iPhone) processor, so it's a distinct class in their lineup.
~~Haven't yet seen anyone comment on the apparent lack of Apple Intelligence. Makes sense due to the low amount of memory but wonder how many people won't notice that until after they buy this laptop.~~
edit: somehow missed it has Apple Intelligence - whoops
They literally mention in the video that it contains Apple Intelligence.
Not sure how I missed that - was too fixated on tech specs. My bad.
Ideal computer for our mom.
would it be crazy to use this as a more casual macbook alongside my mbp? it seems light, cheap, and fun.
Would love to see an 11inch version of this.
Can't seem to find what is the processor on this thing?
It has the A18 Pro, same as the iPhone 16 Pro (2024).
Another nail in the coffin of iPad as a portable workstation. A18-powered $600 MacBook, but no MacOS-powered tablet.
Sounds like the Apple equivalent of a ChromeBook.
Seems like landfill fodder with the memory at 8gb.
You are so wrong. macOS manages memory much more successfully than whatever you are used to.
I assume it's not Linux, because things are pretty good there too (aside from the poor behaviour when you reach OOM).
There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.
I have one from the original rollout. I keep thinking about upgrading, but then I realize I'm just doing that because I want to buy something new, not because I need anything more powerful.
Interesting that it only comes with 8GB of RAM. My Macbook Pro on Tahoe uses around that just when booting up, before I start anything. I wonder if they have some memory optimisations planned?
i didn't even know usbc2 ports were a thing
The first USB type C device was a usb 2.0 device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N1
The USB-C ports are unbalanced. Should have one on the left and right, not side by side.
Unbalanced USB-C ports has become a common bad design in the laptop industry.
Commodity hubs, especially USB2, come with lots of ports; it's up to how many connectors you can reasonably fit on the chassis. But running a trace across the board for USB isn't a great sell. Getting a second board on the other side isn't a great sell, especially for budget computers like this one. So we end up with "unbalanced" ports.
Yup- if you put usb ports on both sides of the laptop you need a retimer chip as the traces are too long/suffer EMI. Which adds to BOM cost.
There are also USB-C 2 cables.
USB-C is the bane of my existence. Everything looks the same, but certain cables won't charge certain devices for seemingly no reason, and other cables won't transfer data, and there's no easy way (AFAIK) to tell the difference
> certain cables won't charge certain devices
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.
It's probably a problem with my devices. I've never seen these problems with more expensive devices, but my cheap bluetooth speakers will only charge with certain cables.
I also have cheap cables that don't seem able to do data transfer. Guessing it's not actually following the USB-C spec.
Are your bluetooth speakers connected over a C-to-C cable or is there any legacy USB in the mix (type-A and/or microusb)? The reason I ask is legacy USB expected 5 volts to be supplied by default, whereas in type-C you have to specifically request any current. So some C-to-A / A-to-C adapters/cables include the resistors to request the current whereas others do not, leading to legacy USB devices not getting power through some adapters/cables.
USB c cables aren’t merely wires and connectors but have some electronics embedded on them.
There it is! Very interesting offering. It's nice that it's running full mac os with "root access" (whatever that means on macs in current year) I was afraid they'd introduce some bastardised version of iPadOS for this device. This seems like the type of device I'd want my kids to use instead of an iPad or other touch & app based device and just let them figure things out like I did.
> 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.
There’s now a gaping 500 dollar hole in the lineup between this and the macbook air.
Does it run Linux?
Interested to see how 8gb of ram holds up here.
that's a wild price point for a mac, impressive
This is an incredible price. Lucky students.
Will it run linux?
I see a lot of young people on that page.
I just looked over the specs [1] and it's pretty good for the price. My only quibble is that there's only one USB3 port and that's also the charging port. So if you want to use an external display, you need some form of dock to also charge it. The other USB port is only USB2 so you can't use that as an external display connector.
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...
> Built for Apple Intelligence.
With 8GB RAM?
After Tahoe and Apple Intelligence what's going to be left for actual applications to use?
Same as the iPhone 16, when they started using that marketing phrase.
This is basically the most efficient way to work with agentic tools in my opinion.
Is this the end of chromebooks?
IMO the biggest sell for Chromebooks in the education market (which is where they shine) is the software. It's a locked down OS with a cloud login that means when you encounter the slightest hardware issue you can swap out for another device seamlessly. macOS doesn't have anything comparable to that.
Not only can you buy two and a half Chromebooks with this, they never had much uptake outside a few countries school system.
Chromebook’s are like $200
The problem with a $200 laptop is that you get a laptop that's worth $200.
But a lot of Chromebooks are bought by school districts so the end user doesn't have a choice
... with build quality to match. Apple outclasses everyone else when it comes to the build quality of their laptops.
Main customers for Chromebooks do not care avout build quality.
People, I get it, you love Apple, but get in touch with reality.
I am quite happy with my Thinkpads, and their replaceable components.
Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.
Who wants it? On my iPad I want an iPad OS, MacOS is not good for touch operation. MS tried merging two OS-es (surface) and see how it went.
I want the ability to run MacOS on my iPad and an iPhone FLIP
Because this way they sell two for the price of two.
The ipad pro with keyboard is $1300, more than 2x the price of the Neo. Definitely not the same product category.
And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much. Sure it's touchscreen but at end of the day If I am "keyboarding" it I am not "touching" it much.
It's an incredible value but a world of resource-hungry vibe-coded webapps and 8GB of RAM just does not feel compatible.
If you primarily use native Apple apps though this thing is awesome. $499 with student discount? This thing is going to do NUMBERS.
I think Apple has a winner on it's hand. This is perfect, for large number of people who don't do much on their laptop anyway. Even for me as a developer, I want something small and light that I can carry around and I can connect to my bigger machine from.
I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.
Holy shit thats a good deal
8gb ram is criminal. For $100 more Air is the one to buy.
That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.
how much money I have lost to this damn ladder
The newest entry-level Air is $1100, this is $600, or $500 difference. It's significant.
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.
I agree. Especially now, with the insane RAM prices.
How come my iPhone can't just run MacOS at this point?
So the new iBook. Great.
I think most are going to pass on this. I'm not sure Apple has ever figured out how to sell anything to the price conscious consumer since the iPod Shuffle.
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.
They sell hundreds of millions of iPhones every year. The iPhone installed base is in the billions.
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.
The low end iPad is $329 and usually found for $299
Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.
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.
You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They've really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.
> MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.
> [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.
If only there was an ~11inch one to replace the old 2012 model, possibly the most perfectly portable laptop created.
it's roughly the same physical size, just smaller bezels so bigger screen.
Others covered specs etc, but just came here to say the intro video is so much fun! I really enjoyed that.
256gb and 8gb of ram, here we go again. Old gen macbook air seems a better deal, isn't it?
Now give us a 17-inch laptop, please!
Well, Apple decimating competitors with this offering.
8Gb. Fuck off no chance.
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.
Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.
Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.
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.
The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.
I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.
They should all be native apps.
You cna use of all Teams, Outlook and Slack from an actual browser if you want to.
My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.
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.
FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
> 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world.
Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.
It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.
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.
Having used both... it's 100% true
I still use my M1 Air with 8gb as well. I don't do my daily dayjob work on it, but it's more than fine for everything else I do.
Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.
Stating the obvious - because keeping them separate means Apple gets to double-dip on people buying more or less the same hardware twice.
I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.
now the next macOS update being performance/bug fixed focused makes sense to me
This thing is going to sell a lot.
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.
Honestly a pretty interesting little thing but my god what a terrible name
1. Gawd damn, scrolling through that page full of all those bright colors with their saturation cranked up to 11, feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode. No other page from Apple is like that. wtf
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.
> 2.
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.
Definetly, my kids at different schools had iPad's and Chromebooks. The kid with the iPad was using an external keyboard most of the time iirc.
2: I'd say it's about the same, same RAM/SSD sizes, maybe an M1 chip is faster than A18 but limitations will come from running out of ram/disk Had an intern working with us, basically couldn't have an browser running together with Figma due to ram shortage making it slow down to a crawl.
> feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode.
This is by design, who do you think the target market for this Macbook is?
2. Apple would know best no? lol, this screams Cook. Too many iphone boards? Existing laptop tooling. Bam, revenue.
That doesn't make much sense. They do lean/JIT manufacturing, so it's unlikely that they have too many iPhone boards. Also, the tooling for a completely new alu unibody size for just selling a few iPhone boards does not make much sense.
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...
A used one probably has not-so-healthy battery and a bit worn keyboard. Maybe some scratches on the screen as well.
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.
256gb on a macbook should be illegal in 2026
Why?
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.
Absolutely ridiculous that they still offer this while macOS + Apple Intelligence already take ~30 GB
I wonder if the bootloader will be locked down, I hope not.
Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?
Apple has never locked down the bootloader on a Mac-series product before.
(But they have never not locked down a product with an A-series CPU - hence my concern)
They do allow you to run third party operating systems on Macs. For now.
Yes? This is a demonstrable fact?
Lay off the hater-ade for a second.
Uhh... you know when the Mac's were Intel they specifically made a tool for installing Windows on your Mac and shipped drivers for Windows.
Because of course there's no magsafe.
What on earth, at least they could have provided 16gb as base RAM. 8gb RAM in 2026 - what on earth were they thinking.
You would be shocked to learn that HP is able to sell plenty of $500 Chromebooks with 8GB of RAM.
How is this different from Macbook Air?
For a bit over half the price of the Air, you get the iPhone 16 Pro SoC (minus one GPU core, so somewhere between the 16 and 16 Pro, actually) in a laptop chassis that's all around a bit less premium than the Air.
This could be useful as a remote-access device for something that has a decent amount of RAM, I suppose, but how can anyone do anything outside of light-duty work with 8GB? At some point a Pi + battery/screen case is legitimately better.
Yeah, I see your $599 price tag, Apple. I also remember the hype behind your Mac Mini that was a sub $500 computer. And, how long did that last? The answer is: not long.
The baseline mini costs $499, so it seems to be going strong.
I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they'll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.
I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
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.
No. 8gb is fine for normal use.
Reality distortion field at its fullest. I want one!
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.
I agree.
This 3m49s "Hello, MacBook Neo" video is so insanely well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4