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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 needs 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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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.
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, small VMs and 100+ chrome tabs open.
I think anything compiled against the M1 (-march=apple-m1) will work on an A18 Pro ( ARMv8.4-A and ARMv9.2-A), and Apple doesn't have any Intel-like instruction differences in parts, right?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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…
Thread’s been hijacked by Apple simps and Linux command-line purists, all trying to outdo each other in a kind of poverty Olympics. 8GB or RAM is not fine, and if it is you don't need laptop.
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.
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.
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.
I have never had to force quit calculator.app before Tahoe. It was so bad I was using Excel because at least that wouldn't freeze every 2-3 calculations. 26.3 was definitely an improvement, but it still happens occasionally on my machine (32 GB RAM).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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"
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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)
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)
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
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?
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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'm not sure that's true given that Chromebooks can be had for one third the price.
It needs a touch screen for elementary schools kids. Fine for older kids.
> 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.
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.
>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 Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise
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.
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.
Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.
> 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 needs 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
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.
all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.
Who cares about Windows anymore?
Kids are happy with iOS/Android devices
Google docs solves 90% of Office use cases
I assume you’re downvoted because Microsoft has to want that.
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.
> 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.
Yes Chrome easily eats up 5+ gb ram when having the azure admin portal open in a tab. Whose fault is that though?
Chrome runs on 8 GB perfectly fine, like a dream.
I don't see too many students running Teams.
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).
I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.
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.
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.
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.
That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.
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.
NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.
With builds running on big build servers.
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.”
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.
[delayed]
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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
>Why would you want an iPad?
Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.
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.
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, small VMs and 100+ chrome tabs open.
I think anything compiled against the M1 (-march=apple-m1) will work on an A18 Pro ( ARMv8.4-A and ARMv9.2-A), and Apple doesn't have any Intel-like instruction differences in parts, right?
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...
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.
Hey, it took courage to remove that headphone jack.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/
It's a mobile CPU. They did not modify it. Mobile devices run with a single USB port.
$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.
> 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.
$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.
$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.
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.
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!
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...
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 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.
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.
Don't think it's 16:9, just lower PPI than the air -- Neo: 2408x1506, Air: 2560x1664.
Yep, you're right.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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…
Thread’s been hijacked by Apple simps and Linux command-line purists, all trying to outdo each other in a kind of poverty Olympics. 8GB or RAM is not fine, and if it is you don't need laptop.
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.
$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.
nah 8gb of ram is laughable
8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.
No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB
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.
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.
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.
I have never had to force quit calculator.app before Tahoe. It was so bad I was using Excel because at least that wouldn't freeze every 2-3 calculations. 26.3 was definitely an improvement, but it still happens occasionally on my machine (32 GB RAM).
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
The ability to install any software would be nice…
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
$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
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.
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.
compatable with polishing cloth https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2029206219802722595?s=46
Apple is second to none in supporting legacy products.
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...
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.
with 8 GB of RAM?
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.
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!
Yeah, just rub in the fact that an A series chip is capable of running a real OS.
why wouldn't it be? I'm running real OSs on ancient TI ARM chips that are probably 50 times slower.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Besides the phone CPU, they’re using less apple custom silicon: MediaTek wifi/bluetooth, no cellular modem, generic 1080p camera.
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.
There are bunch of expensive components in a phone that aren't in this. The modem and camera system come to mind.
First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.
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.
The MacBook Neo starts at the same price as the new iPhone 17e!
I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.
Good question... I wonder if the 5G chipset adds significantly to the price? IP licensing?
For starters, no royalties to pay Qualcomm.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I'd probably go for a $50 Yubikey over a $100 Touch ID upgrade.
> 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 $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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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)
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)
> 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.
When Jobs took over Apple he didn’t have a device in a quarter of the world’s pocket.
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
Reminds me of when every college kid had those plastic Macbooks. Quite a smart product.
Mom is getting a new laptop
This A18 processor, how does it compare to the M series?
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?
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.
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 was really hoping for 11inch version, but I am just that weird.
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.
Ideal computer for our mom.
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..
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.
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.
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..
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.
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].
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.
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.
Neo will at least help in ensuring that macOS doesn’t become too heavy for a few 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
So Apple is finally "admitting" an iPad is not the right device for certain users/situations.
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.
IMO it’s not that big of a feature. People touch type.
I mean, they could turn on a lamp no?
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.
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.
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% :)
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.
cute netbook, I appreciate the no notch design
Too bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.
that's a wild price point for a mac, impressive
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.
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 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
This is basically the most efficient way to work with agentic tools in my opinion.
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
I don’t even have to look at the specs to tell you : “insufficient ram”
We are back to colors! https://appleclamshell.wordpress.com/color-guide/
Will it run linux?
I just want a colourful fun pro laptop :(
first thing i thought when i saw the citrus version - give me that in a 16" M5 Pro machine!
put a skin or case on ur favorite boring-colored pro laptop
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=...
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
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.
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.
Is A18 fully compatible with M series chips apps?
Came here to ask this - seems like the most important question.
would it be crazy to use this as a more casual macbook alongside my mbp? it seems light, cheap, and fun.
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?
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.
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.
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
they do it so that you'll buy a MacBook Pro
Would love to see an 11inch version of this.
This is a very smart move and I love it! Absolutely the best device I can get for my parents.
The specs are similar to what Google Pixelbooks had in 2017, except for the CPU.
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”.
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.
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.
Can't seem to find what is the processor on this thing?
It has the A18 Pro, same as the iPhone 16 Pro (2024).
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.
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.
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.
Interested to see how 8gb of ram holds up here.
I see a lot of young people on that page.
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.
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.
I am quite happy with my Thinkpads, and their replaceable components.
Well, Apple decimating competitors with this offering.
Now give us a 17-inch laptop, please!
Does it run Linux?
Others covered specs etc, but just came here to say the intro video is so much fun! I really enjoyed that.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There’s now a gaping 500 dollar hole in the lineup between this and the macbook air.
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.
The ipad pro with keyboard is $1300, more than 2x the price of the Neo. Definitely not the same product category.
Because this way they sell two for the price of two.
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.
Because of course there's no magsafe.
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.
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.