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.

> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961

> 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?

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...

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8650702

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

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/mac-benchmarks

and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.

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!

Nope. It is mechanical.

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.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/courage/

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

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!