I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.
My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
I am running Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and Docker Desktop on a last generation Intel Air, that admittedly has 12 GB RAM. One has to be a bit careful with more apps. But I look forward to an upgrade. Maybe a Neo, but more likely a second hand M.
I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.
I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.
I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.
> if they do a second generation with A19 Pro
I'm pretty sure it's a "when", not "if".
My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
I am running Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and Docker Desktop on a last generation Intel Air, that admittedly has 12 GB RAM. One has to be a bit careful with more apps. But I look forward to an upgrade. Maybe a Neo, but more likely a second hand M.
It might be more likely that it cannibalizes used Macbook Air sales.
I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
I already have half dozen over decade old laptops with 4-8GB of RAM in the drawer, don't need any more.
We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.
I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
I've had many MacBook Pros but never thought about that. I guess mine has too. How do I use it? I just tap lightly to click.
pretty much the only time I use it is to lookup the definition of a word by highlighting it and force clicking. Can't do that with the magic mouse.
Why is the author considering Claude Code a "real developer workflow"? Unless you're doing complex tool calling, is CC really resource-heavy?
Why does a "real developer workflow" need to be resource-heavy?
The “8gb gamble” could be seen as a misleading headline.
The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.
Id pay an extra $150 for the haptic trackpad tbh
for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.
Do people really do that when out in the wild?
It's one of the nicest things to do if you love computers, and great for your health compared with staying indoors.
> Stephen Wolfram Finds Working Outside Lowers His Resting Heart Rate https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-workin...
The question thus, is how does the Neo perform if I put it on top of an ice pack?