2009 Me would've LOVED this! I'm so glad Apple released this.
Back in 2013/14 Guillermo Rauch (CEO Vercel) shared a brilliant insight -- develop software on a weak machine and optimize it to work well on it so that when it's used on a powerful machine, it's going to fly. This'll force macOS developers to consider these resource constraints.
as someone who likes bold colors, the citrus is nice.
MacBook Neo is cheaper and weaker than a MacBook Air, yet shares the same price and single-app mindset as an iPad. It uses a phone chip similar to an iPad Pro, but gets multi-user support and a keyboard.
I struggle to run Tahoe on my 16GB M2 Air and somewhat I have to believe running it on a 8GB phone chip is gonna be alright, which if true have me thinking what exactly is the role of iPadOS anyway.
Ultimately, it feels like iPadOS and Tahoe are on a crash course for a middle ground that nobody asked for.
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...
* No MagSafe
* One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s
* No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.
* “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air
* Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color
* No True Tone
* 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage
* No camera notch
* Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air
* Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods
* Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air
* The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones
* No keyboard backlighting
* Touch ID not included on base model
* Trackpad does not support Force Touch
* Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7
* No fast charging
* The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma...
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.
My high school required students to bring their own laptops to school when I started in 2010. Their shopping list suggested a MacBook Pro 13" with a case - I looked up "MacBook Pro price" for the first time in my life and just about walked into traffic. I didn't have a laptop to bring, I didn't want to bring the wrong kind of laptop and get double-screwed, so I bit the bullet and brought my car savings to the Apple store at the mall. A tremendously thoughtful sales rep told me "that's crazy, what school requires a MacBook Pro for 9th graders?", led me to the white unibody MacBooks on the side, and showed me that if I was buying it for school, I would get a discount on the laptop, a free inkjet printer (with ink!), and a free iPod Touch. This blew my mind. I thought it was a scam.
If I recall, that model of MacBook compared admirably against the same year's base model MacBook Pro 13 on a stat sheet but felt worse in hand. The MacBook Neo might actually bring up the rear on fit and finish at the expense of I/O and like, the questionable idea of running an A-series chip in a laptop running Tahoe and Chrome. I'm thrilled with this release.
- 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).[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...
The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026.
The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have.
It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps")
People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!
$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 :)
- 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.
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
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.
But hey the colors are cute.
Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.
I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.
Really great to see.
Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.
And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.
Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
–––
edit: just to clarify, currently Apple's lineup includes the "What's a computer?" iPad – $349+, iPad Mini - $500+, iPad Pro – $999+ and iPad Air – $599+.
These come with a pencil and a magic keyboard. Also some of them are more powerful than the A18 Macbook Neo.
Then there's the Macbook Neo - $600+, 13" Macbook Air - $1,099+, 15" Macbook Air – $1,299+, 14" Macbook Pro – $1,699+, 16" Macbook Pro - $2,699+.
Who are all of these things for? Why does the iPad Air exist with the magic keyboard alongside the Macbook Neo? That's the same keyboard attached to a less powerful processor and a touchless display for a spitting-distance price.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby
Neo:
Height: 0.50 inch (1.27 cm)
Width: 11.71 inches (29.75 cm)
Depth: 8.12 inches (20.64 cm)
Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)
Air: Height: 0.44 inch (1.13 cm)
Width: 11.97 inches (30.41 cm)
Depth: 8.46 inches (21.5 cm)
Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)however for the common person out there, unless they're buying for status -- this will meet most of their needs
office workers, hospital workers, stay-at-home parents - who just wanna fill forms occasionally, write emails, browse the web - design a few posters on canva for a funeral, special event etc
so yeah to those people they don't give a shit about M-series, as long it has enough memory and can do what they want without freezing.
well done to apple
Obviously just so many reasons why this won't happen. Or would happen on iPad first. But dare we dream?
- 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!
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.
- M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377
- M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712
- A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288
So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster single core speed.
(I'm being facetious, if the hardware was open, someone would have already written a custom boot loader for this :P)
Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves
Well, I see this as a very positive thing.
With builds running on big build servers.
Why? Lots of companies sell Windows Laptops for under $200 (a 1/3rd the price of this). Personally I'd expect Apple's costs to be lower. Plus, Apple gets services money (iCloud, AppleTV+, ...)
I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.
The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.
Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.
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.
Good on them for bringing back bright colors, and for including a 3.55mm audio jack on their new lowest end laptop.
> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.
> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.
I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.
I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).
So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).
Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.
Now, if only Asahi was more complete.
Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.
I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.
I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.
The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)
The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.
8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps
Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.
Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.
The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.
For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk.
But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare.
Weight is the same incidentally.
I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)
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.
Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
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).
A Chromebook with 8Gb ram and stock ChromeOS gets 10 hours doing real work. And with real work I mean full local dev with containers, vscode, Vivado, and 100+ chrome tabs open. And even running small VMs from time to time.
Apple doesn't sell anything where they're taking a bath; their margins have been high 30's to low 40's for many years. All of the technology in the Neo already existed; they didn't have to create anything new.
Depending on their budget and needs, a Neo, Air, or Pro.
I used an M1 Air with 8GB as my main software development machine for a year during Covid. It was fine.
I suppose we'll find out pretty soon, supporting virtualization would be important if they wanted to sell these to CS students that need eg. Docker.
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
No it doesn't - no iOS device has ever shipped with an M series chip...
> Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?
Yes to A, no to B.
Also, you're completely leaving out scale and cost. Apple has already made (ok, had TSMC make) hundreds of millions of A18 chips, so throwing an A18 pro in their least expensive laptop ever makes a lot of sense.
iPhone’s are more expensive than this laptop anyways and Apple could upsell all the docks and accessories with sky high margins. It’s a mystery why they haven’t done this already.
Apple customers forgot about the golden trophy real quick, huh? https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.
I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.
Which thinkpad? Typing on a loaded P16s currently; it's not metal like old MBP or even my travel surface pro, but it feels... fine.
Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren't getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.
The lack of upgradability is directly what provides a lot of benefits that I expect the average consumer vastly prefers: better performance with soldered memory and better battery life. It's not just to shaft you on prices (though that's definitely a big factor).
I'd like to run the external display plus an external SSD at USB 3 speeds, so I'd be waiting for experience reports on whether the one port can handle both without constraining the filesystem transfer speeds.
This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
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.
A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!
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.
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
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.
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 said, my surface is pretty old so maybe some of these design flaws have been fixed.
But from my experience, the build quality of the MacBook is in a different league than the surface.
They'll continue to sell it, because it's effectively free surveillance for them, but they certainly aren't focusing on the consumer market as a target demographic.
And with less and less windows-specific apps now a days, there's very little reason for the average user to buy a Windows laptop, especially over this new macbook.
That's far, far from my experience. What bugs are you talking about that make it "unusable"? I've been on Win11 for years and it's been no problem at all. No bugs that I can think of.
The metal is more "luxury", though.
One thing to bear in mind is bezels are a lot thinner than they were a few years ago.
~7 years ago, my daily driver was a Latitude E7270 - a 12.5 inch ultrabook with dimensions of 215.15 mm x 310.5 mm x 18.30 mm, 1.24 kg, 14.8 inch body diagonal
Today, an XPS 14 has dimensions 209.71 mm x 309.52 mm x 15.20mm, 1.36 kg, 14.7 body diagonal - and a 14-inch screen.
The 12.5 inch segment hasn't disappeared - it's just turned into the 14-inch segment.
1 - https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.
This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.
They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.
And no, Apple is not soldering memory to the main board on most of their computers these days. All of the M series computers have the memory on package with the CPU, because there are latency issues with putting it any further away. The A18 Pro that this laptop uses is package-on-package, the DRAM is directly on top of the SoC.
There are no socketed standards for LPDDR anyway.
For contrast, I used a Surface Book throughout college and within weeks of the warranty expiring I ran into serious issues with the battery, then the charging port, display backlight, fan. I loved it to death so I kept it on life support and changed my usage patterns until I gave up on it. And yes, my next device was a used Thinkpad, and I was able to fix most issues I ran into. But I'd
I am NOT a fan of the measures Apple takes to monopolize the maintenance and repair of their devices.
Memory would be in the SoC no?
opens in new window
PRESS RELEASE March 4, 2026
CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today unveiled MacBook Neo, an all-new laptop that delivers the magic of the Mac at a breakthrough price, making it even more accessible to millions of people around the world. MacBook Neo starts with a beautiful Apple design, featuring a durable aluminum enclosure in an array of gorgeous colors — blush, indigo, silver, and a fresh new citrus. Its stunning 13-inch Liquid Retina display brings websites, photos, videos, and apps to life with high resolution and brightness, and support for 1 billion colors. Powered by A18 Pro, MacBook Neo can fly through everyday tasks, from browsing the web and streaming content, to editing photos, exploring creative hobbies, or using AI capabilities across apps. In fact, it’s up to 50 percent faster for everyday tasks like web browsing,1 and up to 3x faster when running on-device AI workloads like applying advanced effects to photos,2 compared to the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5. Providing up to 16 hours of battery life, MacBook Neo allows users to go all day on a single charge.3 A 1080p FaceTime HD camera and dual mics make it easy to look and sound great, and the dual side-firing speakers with Spatial Audio deliver crisp, immersive sound. MacBook Neo also features Apple’s renowned Magic Keyboard for comfortable and precise typing, and a large Multi-Touch trackpad with support for intuitive gestures, enabling smooth and precise control. Completing the MacBook Neo experience is macOS Tahoe, with powerful built-in apps like Messages, Pages, Calendar, and Safari; seamless integration with iPhone; Apple Intelligence; as well as broad compatibility with third-party apps. And starting at just $599 and $499 for education, MacBook Neo is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever, providing an unprecedented combination of quality and value. MacBook Neo is available to pre-order starting today, with availability beginning Wednesday, March 11.
At the heart of MacBook Neo is A18 Pro, enabling users to power through things they do every day, like browsing the web, creating documents, streaming content, editing photos, and taking advantage of AI. Users can seamlessly work between their favorite apps, like Messages, WhatsApp, Canva, Excel, Safari, and more. MacBook Neo with A18 Pro is up to 50 percent faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5.1 And for more demanding activities, it’s up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads2 and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing.4 The integrated 5-core GPU brings graphics to life while playing action-packed games or exploring creative hobbies. And a 16-core Neural Engine supports fast on-device Apple Intelligence features and everyday AI tasks like summarizing notes in Bear or using the Clean Up tool in the Photos app, while ensuring user data stays private and secure. MacBook Neo is also fanless, so it runs completely silent.
A user creates a presentation titled “Sticky Science” on their blush MacBook Neo.
A user answers emails and browses the web on their citrus MacBook Neo.
A person multitasks between apps on their indigo MacBook Neo.
A student uses their citrus MacBook Neo in a classroom setting.
A person lounges in bed using MacBook Neo while listening to music on AirPods Max.
A person uses their silver MacBook Neo in an auditorium-like setting.
macOS is Apple’s powerful and intuitive operating system for Mac.6 With incredible features and built-in apps like Safari, Photos, Messages, and FaceTime, macOS enables users to get started right out of the box. Apple Intelligence features like Writing Tools, Live Translation, and more are deeply integrated across macOS, elevating the user experience by bringing intelligence to the apps users rely on every day.7 Advanced privacy and security also come standard, featuring industry‑leading encryption, robust virus protections, and automatic free security updates to help keep users protected.
Customers can pre-order the new MacBook Neo starting today at apple.com/store and in the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions, including the U.S. It will begin arriving to customers, and will be in Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Resellers, starting Wednesday, March 11.
MacBook Neo starts at $599 (U.S.) and $499 (U.S.) for education. It is available in four colors — blush, indigo, silver, and citrus. Additional technical specifications, configure-to-order options, and accessories are available at apple.com/mac.
With Apple Trade In, customers can trade in their current computer and get credit toward a new Mac. Customers can visit apple.com/shop/trade-in to see what their device is worth.
AppleCare delivers exceptional service and support, with flexible options for Apple users. Customers can choose AppleCare+ to cover their new Mac, or in the U.S., AppleCare One to protect multiple products in one simple plan. Both plans include coverage for accidents like drops and spills, theft and loss protection on eligible products, battery replacement service, and 24/7 support from Apple Experts. For more information, visit apple.com/applecare.
Every customer who buys directly from Apple Retail gets access to Personal Setup. In these guided online sessions, a Specialist can walk them through setup, or focus on features that help them make the most of their new device. Customers can also learn more about getting started and going further with their new device with a Today at Apple session at their nearest Apple Store.
Customers in the U.S. who shop at Apple using Apple Card can pay monthly at 0 percent APR when they choose to check out with Apple Card Monthly Installments, and they’ll get 3 percent Daily Cash back — all up front. More information — including details on eligibility, exclusions, and Apple Card terms — is available at apple.com/apple-card/monthly-installments.
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But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.
I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.
For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.
For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.
Ditto for iOS 26. They need some Snow Leopard action, for real.
It's Mac OS Vista. This is the proper name for this abomination Apple calls Tahoe.
The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.
You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.
Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.
The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!
- 2.7 lb on the 13" neo and 13.6" air
does that 2/3 lb difference really matter in a ~10–15 lb backpack?
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.
Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.
With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.
There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.
(Honestly I can't see Apple doing that either though since it'd cannibalize their other product lines. But c'mon, Apple!)
That'd be the dream
Which everyone on HN already says, but Apple seems to have its own idea what the iPad is for.
But that's the point. If you're super price conscious and a student, it's only $499! Typing a password is not a big deal compared to $100 for some people.
But if you want convenience, it's $599. Which helps subsidize the $499 price.
Product differentiation like this is what enables the cheaper price to begin with.
It’s still the fastest computer I’ve ever used. (No Tahoe for me)
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
The only thing I don’t like is the 8GB memory. And it could have the black keyboards of the other Apples.
I mean, look at the colors!
I think the Surface is as close to great as you can get. I'm not saying that I know the whole market of laptops, you probably know better. But the Surface is pretty good, which is weird because it seems like Microsoft isn't really focusing on it or even backing away from it.
I agree with the parent, that Macbooks are way ahead in terms of usability, polish and charm for a laptop. And the performance is outright stellar.
* Only one external display
* No haptic trackpad
The common complaint in this thread about the 8GB of RAM is "But chrome..." well I think I see the problem then.
That's why I try to support native whenever I can. Even if a web app might do something better, I'd rather pay for a native app from an indie dev when I can than have yet another chrome tab I have to have open all the time.
macOS at least still has somewhat of a native-app first culture and dev base, so I try to support it when I can.
In undergrad my iPad was far and away my favorite note-taking device. Digital pen-and-"paper" beats laptop for 99% of note taking.
He’s off to university in Fall ‘26, and I’m waffling between getting him an Air and keeping his current iPad, or getting a neo and new iPad. Probably go the former because of the long term cost effectiveness of the Air.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
When forced to use macOS, a Linux VM provides a very convenient experience.
I’ve seen a Gmail tab eat 2.5Gb of memory all on its own… just sitting there. And you need some headroom for content and file caching and such to keep things feeling snappy.
MacBook Neo is A18 Pro and if you look at benchmarks, the A18 Pro single core performance is 50% faster than the M1...
And I am quite happy with Sonama.
Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:
TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.
Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.
This is for people who want the cheapest MacBook possible, with the edu discount it's only 499$.
You drop it being silly, cool that's only 500$.
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
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.
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?
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.
My understanding is this laptop matches or exceeds the M1 Air’s performance, so it should be pretty damn nice for most people.
Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.
It also probably doesn't have a ~60% margin.
- 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.
Damn. I was at IBM in the early 2000s and for many decades you used to be able to beat people to death with IBM hardware, including Thinkpad laptops and model M keyboards.
- 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've never had any complaint's about Asus' laptops, though I've only used their Zenbook and Zephyrus lines.
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
I used an M1 Pro for a couple years to work. 8GB of ram but routinely using 12GB including swap.
Now, I couldn’t keep slack and outlook open so there were limitations but I was able to work. People are underestimating the usefulness of 8GB of RAM.
I guess it is also worth saying that I do my work by connecting to a remote server where I do the actual development and everything else. The Mac itself being a web browser and ssh machine
Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."
I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.
i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):
| device | cpu | single core score | multi core score |
|:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3708 | 14698 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarksand 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.
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?
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.
Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.
It means people who need the cheapest computer can get it, and people who want to upgrade pay a small amount and get all the upgrades in a package without jumping up to the MacBook Air, etc. for much more.
But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.
Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-introduces-colorful...
Single Core performance: the A18 Pro is faster than an M3!
Multi Core performance: The A18 Pro is essentially the same as an M1.
This balance seems right for the target market of a $599 laptop.
This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon
My body is the heatsink
At 14", thin-and-light gaming computers like Asus G14 or Razer Blade 14 look decent, or some of the workstation models from Lenovo or HP.
Still, for me, at 13/14", portability and battery are most important, so I am going with Thinkpad X1 Carbon atm (next gen should again allow 64GiB of RAM).
My experience is that they are more focused on finding the right product for your needs. I've been there more than once where they happily downsell a customer.
I'm going to get a Neo for my wife once it's available in my country.
As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...
I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.
RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.
Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.
You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.
I like the keyboard on my gen1 T14, did it change later on?
2020 called, you're going to want to stock up on toilet paper.
For general browsing and webapps and writing papers and watching Netflix and whatever, this is great.
Honestly, we’re not the target market for this. I’m pretty sure at this price point though, it will sell like hotcakes. Once people get slightly into the ecosystem, it’s usually a big win for Apple since their stickiness ( from my experience of people around me) is undeniable once you get one product
If you’re doing “real work” then 16gb won’t be sufficient, either. My “real work” machine has 96 and I sometimes wish it had more.
If only we could get fun colors for those…
* 86 million (27%) are under 21 and most of those are students. * Those people have parents, assume 2 parents per 2 children = 86 million parents (27%)
That means 55% of the US population is eligible for the cheaper rate before you even account for people getting secondary degrees, educators, and yes - the schools themselves.
Also these days Apple actually allows sales and discounts at retailers. I bet this will be on sale for $499 at Amazon or BestBuy before the end of the year.
--
$799 in Canada for the base model & $999 for the one with touchID & 512 GB ssd.
Looks like both models only come with 8gb ram.
Why not? I would.
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.
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)
But on a more serious note yes, I agree with you. Tablets - absolutely great for the use cases you mentioned, for everything else I want a proper keyboard, etc.
With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.
Used to own Yubikey before fingerprint scanners were a thing. I don't see the appeal now, to be honest. I considered it now that I use Asahi on my M1 with no support for TouchID, but still just type in the password because I couldn't be bothered with Yubikey.
Or I'm missing something?
Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.
Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.
I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.
Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.
Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.
It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".
On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.
Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
My friend, just imagine: Slide screen out of laptop, it's a standalone tablet. Connect some wires to it and you have an oscilloscope. Do some diag. Connect USB buses to it, and read some codes. Carry it around in your garage and take photos of your stuff, the images get recognized by AI and you've updated your garage inventory, it's uploaded to your Homebox running on a mac mini in a shelf somewhere. It has a built in cellular and you can be out in a park taking a picture of a baby owl, mark it with GPS, upload.
When you are done roaming the world loading in data and snapping pics, sit back down, connect the tablet to a keyboard, or even a thunderbird cable for your external display and peripherals, and write up some code or a report. Then in the evening, go play some games, all on the same computer.
It's awesome!
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.
At this point, there are more people taking notes on an iPad + Apple Pencil than on physical notebooks in my lectures
Reading whole books on a laptop tends to produce a ton of neck strain.
In theory yes, but in reality barely any developer (at least the mainstream ones) make their app available on MacOS, and nobody enjoys interacting with a touch-screen optimized app with mouse/trackpad
The 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
Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.
I've also returned Apple products multiple times, once (recently) without the packaging, and once several days past the return window. They refunded me every time, no questions asked.
This makes me wonder if it's part of their training?
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.
its investment into next generation of loyal apple users, they more likely be selling it at loss.
My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.
I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.
Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:
- PostgreSQL (server)
- TablePlus (db client)
- Docker
- Slack
- Chrome
- Safari
- Zed
- Claude native
- ChatGPT native
- Zoom
- Codex
- Numbers
- Calendar
- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)
With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).
I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.
My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.
Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.
Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.
I don't think an apple watch would help there?
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
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.
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!
Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).
For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).
So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.
Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...
The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).
My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.
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.
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.
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.
I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).
I personally liked iOS and macOS being separate things because making a desktop OS also work on a touchscreen has wider implications than it sounds. That's why these days everything in Windows is blown up like Fisher Price software and way bigger than necessary for a mouse cursor. Seems like that's the direction Apple is headed in anyway with Tahoe.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
There is no "only". It's $500.
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.
There are some practical issues with having to make sure you have the screen and keyboard access (in practice the all-in-one of a laptop is pretty handy - though I guess you could still have this form factor in a much lighter shell minus the compute) but for a lot of cases like home <-> office this would be the dream, just carry your computer in your pocket.
- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?
- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?
- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?
If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions
I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.
Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.
This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).
You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.
Where is exactly the premium quality?
If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.
I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.
In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"
Most cool. Is it an M1?
I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
*edit
https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...
I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
I can configure my Snapdragon plastic laptop such that the fan doesn't turn on, so the body being metal isn't a requirement for not turning on the fan...
I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.
13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)
15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)
See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...
Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)
Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.
Maybe a slightly used one as well.
But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
blink code to codeserver
I just wish they'd let us run MacOS on iPads.
I don't know MacOS, but comming from Linux customizability was mostly okay. Obviously there was also some getting used to. The desktop environment has decent window management and support for virtual desktops which I use heavily.
Can be a little annoying (an employee actively tried to downsell my partner, even though they knew what they wanted), but overall it’s a nice practice.
Compared to pre-Apple silicon I was getting company exemptions to upgrade before I was technically allowed.
M series Macs are just amazing devices.
Incentives matter more than training.
... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.
You can authorize via Apple Watch everything you can authorize via Touch ID. You get the notification on the Watch, and you need to press the button twice to auth.
I don't remember if it works every time, or only when MacBook is closed and connected to external display/keyboard.
This is the A18 Pro, specifically, which should have a faster GPU than the M1?
I’m not sure they do. They love their AI chip, but that might be where the live ends.
I am clearly not the target audience for the iPad. Being restricted to apps and what they allow you to do while asking for money at every corner is not my cup of tea.
It was great, very simple to use but still had all the features you needed.
They were acquired by Apple who then promptly killed the product.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising?I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.
https://hothardware.com/news/make-your-m1-macbook-air-perfor...
The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.
Even as a main machine for most people. Heck I could probably even get away with it. I have my work laptop that's technically my "main" machine as I spend 8+ hours a day on it, and it's sufficiently beefy.
I hardly do much on a personal computer (not counting my gaming desktop), this neo would be more than enough for my non-work needs.
Granted, I don't currently have a need for it as I have my own MBA and an iPad pro, but if I had neither this would definitely be a no brainer and I could confidently recommend this over pretty much any off-the-shelf budget windows laptop to anyone who asks me "What laptop should I buy?"
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.
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
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…
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.
It didn't happen to me, but of the 4 people in direct team that had them, 2 had battery issues where the battery expanded making the laptop unusable. *Edit: This was covered under warranty, thankfully
This is from approximately 2 years of daily use for work. I no longer use my surface.
I typically care for my laptops very diligently. I still use my MBP from 2012 and it works like a champ. I don't have a windows laptop anymore, but my main desktop is windows. I'm not a Mac fanboy.
And settings app does actually work!
File management that doesn't suck, incl. better handling of external drives.
Though I agree with you completely regarding the "oops I dropped it".
The RAM shortage is only starting to hit but I think this could potentially start to be more appealing if it lasts too long and gets too bad.
This new offering seems comparable to the price of a refurbished M1/M2.
Standard issue for field agents in the corporate acquisitions and consulting divisions.
(Hey, Eric!)
As an example, my kids try to do school work on one of the house Macs, but there's too many roadblocks so they just use their Chromebooks.
I used to buy my kids Chromebooks for school, but, since the pandemic, the school issues them, so I haven't bought any since.
> Apple stuff they will likely be better made
It depends on what you mean. Apple uses higher quality parts and is more sleek.
Chromebooks are more durable, take more abuse, are very repairable, and parts are cheap and plentiful. These are keys to schools. We're at a point where schools cycle out old models and either keep a bunch around, or strip parts from them, because some parts are interchangeable between generations.
- Low end consumer
- College students
- People who have a desktop computer, but want a cheap portable for on-the-go.
> The "surface" market is minuscule
Probably so, but then again, I see a lot of Surface devices out and about and they are fairly popular with non-teacher education staff. While they aren't competing with Chromebooks or Apple on volume, I'd bet they're doing well.
So I unplugged it, at which point I noticed the smoke was increasing. So we doused it in CO2 (maybe N2, idk, some cheap gas we had lying around for the wetlab), pried the computer part off of the base, and then IT handled sending it back to M$.
Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.
Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.
Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.
Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.
I also had around 200 tabs open on the regular
Now I wouldn’t tell you it was a good experience because it wasn’t. But it was usable even pushing the hardware to the max.
I read this as how bad software quality has gone down, that a mail program and a chat program don't fit in 8GB of RAM.
I've got 32GB and often work with legacy .NET Winform/WPF applications on a Macbook. That means spinning up a Windows 11 ARM distro virtual machine and running Microsoft Visual Studio. The VM has 8GB of ram allocated to it, and based on qemu-system memory pressure, it hovers around ~4-6GB of that.
I also do a lot of colorgrading and video editing with longform 4K videos using Davinci Resolve - scrubbing in an uncompressed format would absolutely thrash the hell out of your swap with only 8GB.
Well, sure, because the beachball means the main thread is hung, and that can happen for many reasons unrelated to memory pressure.
The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.
the keywords here are "depending on the workload".
edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
Data Units Read : 1267900331 (649.16 TB)
Data Units Written : 904681650 (463.20 TB)
power_cycles : 667
power_on_hours : 9611
and yet it's still only:
available_spare : 100%
available_spare_threshold : 99%
percentage_used : 16%
I don't expect it to fail anytime soon.
The SSD is difficult to replace because Apple uses storage chips with no controller; the SSD controller is in their CPU. So you can't put in any M.2 in there even if you wanted. Some small companies have managed to offer upgrade parts for the Mac Mini, which has socketed storage chips.
As time marches on and PC manufacturers stay still, Apple manages to simplify its logic boards by reducing the number of connectors and parts, lowering the price to make a computer. Apple, which has never really offered anything below 1000$, has entered a new market with a bang.
I expect a computer in 20 years to look like the system-on-a-chip that Apple makes for its watches. I don't know why people are adamant that we need more controllers and chips on our machines, not less.
It’s a pretty bad idea to keep valuable documents on a mobile device. You can’t recover the data from socketed storage if it’s lost or stolen.
I don't see too many students running Teams.
Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.
I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".
On the other hand, I've seen more professors — especially in the humanities, but also upper div CS — start banning devices in lecture partially or altogether. Complete distraction (scrolling Instagram, etc.) during lecture is extremely prevalent, and they keep citing noticeable improvements in engagement after banning devices. This also coincides with a shift back to less take-home assignments and more exam-style assessment since they want greater assurance people aren't completely offloading their cognition to LLMs.
The exception was when people were taking orgo or a diagram heavy class. For that semester not everyone would have a tablet and some people would have pens and pencils. Or writing classes that still required a handwritten essay for the final exam
I don’t know anyone who uses any other tablet besides an iPad, they’ve basically conquered the market.
iPads are better when you need to be constantly highlighting and making notes, like for school. And for PDF's you need to be panning and zooming.
When reading in bed I use a stand to hold my Kindle at the best position. I would need a much heavier stand to be able to do that with my iPad.
To the major point of can it (Neo 8GB) run multiple programs at the same time, my experience would say it would have no issues doing so given what one can do in 16GB on lesser Mac hardware. (Maybe I am wrong and MacOS takes all 8GB for itself, but that seems far-fetched.)
The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up.
It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count.
Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost.
Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.
“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.
These things will be running in 5-10 years.
If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.
I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the 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.
Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?
The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.
My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
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.
Not that i’m a fan of it, but meh it exists.
I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.
This is just how students treat laptops, and a more expensive unit only makes the problem worse.
If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care by subjecting kids to hardware that causes long term physical issues, they would have wished they would spend a little more (it amortizes to about $20/student year difference the way our school district does it).
And knowing how laptop makers treat keyboard repairs, the keyboard switches are easy to damage beyond repair and expensive to replace, making them a target for "problem" kids in school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.
Younger students on the other hand, Chromebooks remain the way to go. Most of the time, kids'll win in a race between their destructive tendencies and crappy hardware giving out.
An iPhone Pro is 3 times more expensive than an average Android phone too. If you buy Android flagships after 2022, they also last 4-6 years.
"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs
Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Replacing a low-resale value $250 Chromebook that is equally sensitive to being dropped, exposed to liquids, or having debris get into hinges and keyboards will be heavily favored over a $500 MB Neo. The Neo’s processor and storage may have better lifetime but it doesn’t mean anything if the equipment ends up bricked.
Schools in affluent areas may favor these for reasons you state. Judging on how students treat textbooks though should demonstrate how short the lifespan would turn out to be.
What are modern operating systems and applications doing?
But if it's for serious work, this is not the device. 'Managing' the software to 'use the machine well' to get serious work done is unacceptable in 2026. It needs to just work and disappear into the background. I have enough to think about and micro managing the software running is out of the question.
Sure, might be ambitious to do that sort of workload on a budget conscious laptop, but it'd be nice y'know?
On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%.
You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice.
In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)
Stats software is cross-platform or open-source.
Art programs are cross-platform or open-source.
Office suites are cross-platform or browser-based.
Unless you're specifically trying to learn Windows development, dev tools are cross-platform and open source.
15 years ago, what you describe was probably quite common. Today, it's almost completely disappeared.
I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
You’re already sad if your using Teams, suffering is part the experience.
Last week I met someone who likes Teams. That’s a first for me.
iPads/Kindles are better because they're smaller and lighter so you can position them with far greater flexibility.
But they don't. And won't.
No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.
I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...
Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.
I 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
If digital version is important, there are probably some scanning apps.
(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)
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.
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.
EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.
The footprint of the Air was 11.8" x 7.56". The Neo is 11.71" x 8.12". If you liked the size of that one, you'll like this.
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.
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.
May I ask if you have many 3rd party apps installed? What apps do you usually keep open at a time? Because 8GB should be more than fine for a node server.
Is it an Apple Silicon Air, or an older Intel model?
Qualitatively I'm running way more things in the background than I could on Linux and Windows machines with double the RAM, with far fewer hiccups.
I haven't tried a modern Surface or other high-end Windows laptop so maybe their swapping is comparable, but given the shocked reactions of non-Mac users at 8 GB of memory, I don't think so.
I would like the bubble that is this website's "community" to pop, crash down back to earth and see them struggle living like normal people again.
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?
They need to move to having the students ID under both their parents and the school, detachable from the school when a kid moves.
The devices need to be enrolled to the org and then act as thin clients so any kid can log onto any laptop, not have the laptop locked down to a specific kid.
Apple Parental controls are either controllable on the kids device or one parents device but not both at the same time and definitely not two parents at the same time. Whose bright idea was it not to allow two parents to see and manage a kids settings from their own devices, at the same time. That’s a lot of the world that doesn’t appear to anticipate two parents wanting to manage a kid from separate accounts, but Apple should know better.
Very often they aren't (the school devices are in-school resources that aren't given to the kids any more than their desks are) and anything the kids have out of school is bought by the parents (and even if they are given the computers by the school, usually the replacement costs is on the parents if there is damage). But, either way, grade school kids are, on average, irresponsible as a matter of cognitive development (its a big part of why children are treated differently than adults legally.)
> school districts with a dysfunctional penal system.
A school district that can be described as having a “penal system” is, ipso facto, dysfunctional.
100% agreed. My statements weren't meant to indicate the Neo wasn't viable. They were meant to state that the Neo isn't going to replace Chromebooks in schools (as far as being District-purchased).
> The high school I attended distributed a Chromebook to each student and hardware faults were far more common than student inflicted damage. Low build quality in everything from the hinges to the logic boards.
Build quality has been steadily improving over the years. It's all still budget (target ~$290), but is more and more durable with each new generation.
Another school uses iPads with keyboards for the same purpose, so I'm not sure where the school market is for these. Maybe only older kids, but a lot of edu-tech is expecting some kind of touch/pen input.
Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
The hardware lasts but they usually stop getting software updates after a few years, especially if they're not high-end models.
Last month, Apple released an update for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X [1]. The iPhone 8 was released September 2017. I seriously doubt 9-year old Android phones, even flagship models, are still getting software updates.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/02/apple-releases-ios-16-7...
That's why programmers put their stuff into Kubernetes which go into virtual machines, which go into eleven layers of javascript abstraction which go into twelve thousand node packages, which go into something else to end up with something with very basic functionality, which usually doesn't work very well.
Other pro computer users are focused on the results, so they use professional office software, calendars, communications, photo and video editing and effects, photo-realistic 3D editors, studio level audio and music editing software. All which lives perfectly fine on 8GB of RAM.
And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow.
The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p
Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.
However by default almost every college curriculum I've seen (unless it's in CS or IT combined field like bioinformatics) is still taught Windows-first, be it sociology, biochemistry or economics. In many you also have strong presence of MS Office suite, which is probably the first software that any university will buy license packs for for their students.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
Also most "professional" CAD software is Windows-only, which is going to affect a big chunk of engineering majors.
Memory is the bottleneck with all Apple products. I have zero issues in terms of compute with the iPhone 12 Mini and could use it for years to come if the SoC were the bottleneck, but it can't even hold two apps in memory.
This would be a very competent computer if it came with 16 GB.
Essentially the bottom cover of the MacBook Air becomes one large heatsink
Anyway, the author claims:
you are the type that likes to work with the MacBook Air on your lap it will be quite a bit more toasty than before.
Does toasty mean extremely hot?
The Apple M4 CPU is, if I recall correctly, capable of converting 20 watts of electrical energy in to heat, at full throttle.
Is that likely to bring the back plate or a MBA above 45 degrees?
You’re probably right, with sustained workloads it could.
Everything’s a trade off.
I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.
I had an M1 Air w/ 8GB when it first came out, and although I haven't used Tahoe on it, it handled anything I threw at it no problem while swapping. Tons of Chrome tabs, mail, music, terminal, VSCode all open without so much as a hiccup. macOS also has really good memory compression compared to Windows.
Trying to do the same on an 8GB Windows machine would be an effort in frustration.
I do wish it had 12GB, but AFAIK Apple didn't make an A18 Pro with 12GB. I suspect if they refresh it in a couple years with the A19 Pro, it'll have 12GB of RAM.
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.
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.
The metal construction is what prompted me to switch over to macbook pro's back in the day. The plastic dell laptops i used to use couldn't handle the abuse that it took during all of the travel i was doing at the time (cases kept cracking). I switched to a pro and was rewarded later with it surviving a 5 foot fall from a car rental counter. It bent part of the corner, but the screen was still in tact and it continued to work well enough to get me through the trip. I suspect the plastic alternative would have been toast.
Having kids today and seeing how rough they are with their toys, I'm not confident that a plastic laptop would survive them long.
Somehow while spending the most per capita of any nation on the planet, American schools are in a perpetual budget crunch. It's about getting internet access not whether the trackpad is good. You think a chromepad is crappy - have you ever tried to do something in Blackboard?
> If schools are found to be neglecting a minimum standard of care
They won't be. Pizza sauce is considered a vegetable.
An aside: Why do school board super-intendants and administration make more money than teachers themselves? I believe they shouldn't.
What happens when a kid's laptop is broken, regardless of the reason, and the family is unable to afford to repair it? Are we going to run into a similar situation that we had when kids couldn't pay for school lunch? Do teachers write "pay for a new laptop" in sharpie on the kid's arm for the parent?
A child's educational environment is a lot more chaotic, violent, and uncontrolled compared to an office environment. If you're issuing my child a $600 laptop and making me responsible for any damages, guess what's going to be kept at home in a secure location?
Making a child responsible for securing a laptop in an insecure environment isn't accountability, it's just a form of imprisonment.
The screenshot in that Reddit post more or less looks like ours. Schools generally repair these, if they have the technicians. And everyone is cannibalizing parts out of last generation models. It's like a Jawa shop.
> Apple can only compete if they provide bulk deals which bring the overall cost in line with chromebooks.
I've never seen, nor heard of Apple providing competitive prices, even in quantities of ~10,000 units. They haven't even gotten close and they've largely given up on the idea of Macs as a standard K12 school device. ~$250 iPads are still strong in low primary grades and special education, though.
> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.
I agree, I just don't think the rush to get more and more RAM and storage is the root of the problem.
Why on earth does a browser need more than 10 GB to display web pages?? Why does macOS keep piling/hiding trash that should be deleted in "System Data"?
And, if you need to keep device backups, put them on an external drive; that's what those things are for.
Wait what? How did you manage that?
Rust exists. If you insist on using (or need to use) languages with horrendous build architectures like C++, then you probably need a proper build server then anyways.
I don't have XCode on my Macbook and have resolved not to do iOS development any time soon (although ideally I'd have wanted to dabble in it sometimes), because I've accepted I don't want to run the rat race of always needing beefier and beefier machines to keep up with Apple's bad habit of bloating it up for each version up for no good reason.
I don't run local LLMs on my machine, since even with 100s of GB of RAM, I hear the performance you can expect is abysmal.
I think it is a good idea to put pressure on hardware and software vendors to make their products more efficient.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers).
After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
I'd need to seem some evidence for that - cheap chromebooks break very easily. Talk to any school IT person who handles device repair/replacement and you will hear nightmares of 50+% loss rates...
I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand.
I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive.
FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.
The rest of the most use apps are front end for services where the app is free. There are very very few one time app purchases on iOS where pirating would make sense
USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).
You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.
With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.
I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.
It will definitely be used to justify spending $300-1500 more for a better laptop.
e.g. using hypothetical numbers: if base MacOS/typical GPU usage requires 4 GB, then the 8GB model would have 4GB available for running apps (but multiplied by memory compression/swap to fast SSD). Whereas the 16GB would have a much more comfortable 12 GB for multi-tasking in that scenario especially with the multiplier effect of compression/fast swap on top.
So it still feels like a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as far as what an 8 GB model could handle in real usage. I have a friend who does light dev work on an M1 Macbook Air so I don't think an average user would have issues on the Neo day to day, but using the 16 GB as a yardstick doesn't seem that useful.
Is LLM driving the RAM shortage or is it hacker news commenters convinced they can't run a single git client without 20gb to free memory.
I am a web dev doing what I'd consider light dev work and the biggest memory hog running for me right now is 2gb for Figma.
That seems like a product they could also potentially revive with Apple Silicon.
Linux powers the entire world. Billions if not tens of billions of devices. It doesn't "break all the time like a kit car". I switched my wife's desktop from Ubuntu to Debian about a year ago and I haven't heard a single complain. Not a single crash. She hardly reboots her computer. The thing is just rock solid and it needs to be: she works from home and she spends 8 hours+ on her (Linux) computer.
https://arslan.io/2025/06/14/fujifilm-x-half-is-it-the-perfe...
And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.
Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.
I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...
The more and less cynical explanations (and both play a role, IMO):
(1) Because individuals in those roles have closer relationships to the people that set the salaries than do individual teachers, and
(2) Because otherwise people with experience in education would continue as teachers and not seek roles as superintendents or other administrators (or seek the advanced degrees sought for those roles whose only financial payoff is greater competitiveness for those higher paying roles.)
My child's school provided Chromebook was broken from the beginning, so clearly they're not paying that much attention.
I could go on, and on...
Globally, Android has had about 70% to 75% market share, and Apple has always had a much smaller slice of the total. iPhones are not as popular as you seem to think they are. You don't have to believe me, the data proves it:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...
Images, complicated CSS, JavaScript ads, they can all use lots of memory!
I can use a build server when I want one, but that's not always appropriate. Local builds are useful.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM."
If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it.
Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
Plus on macOS you can easily use note taking apps with the Wacom touchpad that then digitize the text to make it searchable.
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.
I did a major PTA fundraiser to buy iPads for our classrooms and they were pretty much never used because of this.
Windows 11 is full of ads, telemetry, and AI slop, much of which is impossible to disable. Very few owners want this.
Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)
It's smaller, it's lighter, it's by definition just way more flexible to use ergonomically. You can position it in lots of ways you can't position a larger 13" horizontal laptop.
Sure, but, by the numbers I'm seeing, their much heavier load than mine would be waaaay into swap territory for them and is still doing just fine. That's really my point. That's why I think it's actually pretty reasonable to look at half their load and say "man, even half their load is a pretty heavy load for most people, so half their RAM will almost certainly be more than plenty for the target market".
Also, just for the info, my Activity Monitor says that the non-purgeable OS RAM (wired) usage is around 3GB on Tahoe 26.3.
Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.
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.
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.
It's a night and day difference compared to the pile of garbage Spotlight.
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/shared-ipad-overv...
It does exist, it just requires the iPad to be managed via MDM, which most schools would have (and should implement if they don't have it). JamF, Mosyle, Business Essentials, InTune and probably any other MDM can put an iPad into shared iPad mode with multiple profiles.
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
TIL: iPhone backups on computers stopped including full ipa’s back in 2017…
For the Neo, it's:
+ $100 -> $699 Macbook Neo (well, I probably want Touch ID like my iPad...)
+ $100 + $400 -> $1099 M5 Macbook Air (8 GB feels a little tight, but this new Air has 16GB plus a better CPU...)
For iPhones, currently the 120Hz vs 60 Hz "ProMotion" being locked to higher models, better camera sensors, Face ID etc. iPads also with screen variations, Pencil variants, Face ID, etc. The matrix of available options always have "holes" in the lower models that force you to bundle something you don't care as much about to get a specific missing feature/option at a higher price.akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.
People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.
The original WSL for instance was a very NT answer to the problem of Linux compatibility: NT already had a personality that looked like Windows 95, just make one that looks like Linux. It worked great with the exception of the slow file operations which I think was seen as a crisis over Redmond because many software developers couldn’t or wouldn’t use WSL because of the slow file operations affecting many build systems. So we got the rather ugly WSL2 which uses a real Linux filesystem so the files perform like files on Linux.
Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.