>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)."
Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications.
This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
As opposed to years of garbage Windows laptops at the $600 price point, which you seem to expect will remain viable longer than the Neo ... ?
If any legislation comes out of this, it will simply be because of Apple's high profile. They were content to let e-rot fill the shelves for years before the Neo.
That would be a wild argument to make for a consumer protection regulation. Consumer protections almost exclusively judge a product as-delivered in the way laypeople would use it.
Are you sure that’s not based on stale information? The M series of laptops by all accounts from the ASAHI developers were written specifically to make it easier to install alternative OSes and ASAHI is no more difficult to install than Linux on a Windows machine.
Asahi Linux is only able to be installed on an M2. They basically take 2 years per new chip, when Apple releases one yearly. At this point, they'll never catch up.
No. Nothing about MacOS prevents users from installing alternative OSes. Even with Apple's custom chips, that remains true. It's only that it's a smaller target that limits options as fewer people are writing software for that hardware than for x86.
See Asahi to verify[0]. I've been a donor since the week they opened a Patreon account.
HN is completely out of touch with this laptop. No one cares about any of this analysis they just want a cheap Mac. This has sold so much that the A19 processor is having problems to being sourced .
I replaced my 10 years old macbook with a 10 years old macbook. 8 gigs. Good battery. A screen that is not broken. 80 bucks! I really don't see why I should upgrade. Need more compute? Rent a machine on vast.ai. Also I still use my old mac via screen sharing to run servers/databases/etc that tend to eat up RAM.
M1 air, 16gb, second hand, 200 bucks, 200+ tabs in brave, photoshop, illustrator and premiere and kicad and sublime and chrome with one tab watching a youtube live stream. Plus text edit, notes and prolly some more apps. Works fine, zero hitch.. maybe too good for my own good.
When I spec'd a M1 air for my partner back in the day, even though she didn't really need it, I made sure to get the 16gb model for the longevity. Devices shouldn't be disposable toys. Apparently I had better foresight than expected...
My Mac is currently using 9GB of RAM including 6.5GB of cached files with Safari and a few other apps opened. They likely forgot to subtract the cache from the used memory.
My Neo is currently sitting at 5.79 GB Used, 2.15 GB cached, thus 3.64 GB while Safari is open in the background and Activity Monitor is open in the foreground.
Now that RAM is getting more expensive, I hope the OS builders will rethink how they use so much memory. An OS that's lighter weight lets us save money on RAM.
I think this reasoning is just disconnected from reality.
Reality is, the iphone 16 sharing the same chipset is perfectly functional for many more years to come, running similar workloads (for the same target audience): mainly web browsing.
If the iphone 16 can have the usual 3-6 years of useful life, then the macbook neo has the same -- FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE.
And I wrote this because I did actually get the macbook neo and I'm using it daily for the intended purpose (mostly web browsing) and it's just fine.
(if anybody is wondering: i have a large machine with 16c/32t and 128gb memory that i use remotely via ssh to do the "heavy stuff")
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
That legislation is at least ten years late but apple is absolutely not the worst offender. There is the entire market of cheap android phones (and tablets) that barely last a year or two, and have essentially no guaranteed software upgrade. That should have triggered the legislation in the first place.
iOS takes a very different approach to managing app memory though. And the intended purpose of a phone isn't quite the same as that of a laptop either, especially not for people who don't have an extra 128GB memory machine lying around. I'm not sure the comparison makes a whole lot of sense.
The Neo not only exposes functionality that would prove limiting on the iPhone too, but it’s mostly used that way. First thing that comes to mind is true multi-window multitasking. The apps are standard Mac apps that don’t assume a RAM limited system, not dedicated “made for Neo” apps like the iPhone has.
Overall this limitation has the potential to be much more visible on the Neo and Apple must make real sure that the OS stays lean because we all know average app devs don’t care about this.
Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the Earth in back in mac os Mojave) caking on, at some point I just gave up on trying to fix it with continuously reinstalling and balancing it. My current portable has quarter the amount of workmem and is just incredibly snappy esp. compared to that mac book. And I don't even use portables for anything too heavy, I have an actual PC for that.
The stress tests with multiple Youtube windows open simultaneously, editing 4K video, and doing heavy duty image editing tasks, in some cases doing stuff like that all at the same time have been very impressive. It does have to fall back on swap, but even then seems to soldier on really well considering. Are you better off with more memory? Absolutely, but it still seems perfectly capable of managing even many low to medium duty pro workloads if you don't mind a performance hit.
MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.
A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.
> Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P
That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity?
Either way, I agree with them, FWIW.
> I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.
In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory thanks to a misbehaving app that was taking 70 GB out of 64 GB physical RAM. Overall, almost 120 GB were used, most of it was compressed and a lot of it was swapped. It had absolutely zero effect on how useable the computer was, there was no unusual lag. Either Windows or Linux would have shat the bed long before that point.
And here's yet another four-lowercase-letter-name for you, then. Dunno about the other two, but I've been using this handle for over twenty years, it was originally the auto-generated username I got assigned on one of my university's servers (generated from my initials).
Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.
One is a four letter set of characters without a vowel, the other spells a word with 5 letters. And so what?
I’ll add on that the change to Apple silicon was an amazing improvement, even in the same OS version. Maybe these anecdotes mean your experience in this regard is dated. (I say this as someone who came reluctantly to Mac, and looks forward to returning to Linux)
Have you used any of the Apple silicon machines? In discussions about modern Apple devices and RAM, I don't know that pre-Apple-silicon experiences are all that relevant?
My first was underspec'ed and I used Resolve, Lightroom and Photoshop on top of the usual other stuff and it was quite impressive. The relationship of performance to RAM for earlier machines felt incomparable.
Unfortunately Linux is pretty damn bad under memory pressure, I think you'd get an objectively better experience on macOS. I say this as someone running Asahi right now.
But then, you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things (for me with 32-128 GB depending on machine it's C++ builds using all cores and of course local LLMs). I guess a bunch of Electron apps would also do it for 8 GB.
Linux is pretty bad at handling out of memory. In my old thinkpad T14 with Mint everything came to a halt when webpack gobbled up my 16GB of ram. Couldnt even move the cursor, stuff just got stuck hard
I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school.
It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.
I've been on my M1 Air, 16GB, since a few weeks after launch, more than six years now. I still use it daily with lots of Docker containers, VS Code, tons of Electron apps, a small macOS arm VM, and lots of browser tabs simultaneously. Recently, Claude's VM environment is getting exercised simultaneously. Usually the memory pressure is into yellow, but responsiveness is still far higher than any Mac from the Intel days, and far more usable than any Windows laptop that I have the misfortune to experience when borrowing somebody else's computer. And despite all that memory pressure, my SSD isn't getting worn out by swapping, I'm at only "3%" of SSD wear, if those stats on the CLI are to be trusted.
I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality.
Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.
Same with the iPad Air m1, handles everything you throw at it, does video editing, office, etc. Connected to an external display and keyboard feels like a full laptop, on the couch is the best consumption device. And with Claude it can handle your coding sessions.
There are terminal/ssh apps (a-shell, blink [shonky business model, sadly] etc) for remote coding, at least one git client (Working Copy), plenty of text editors.
Remote makes it way more useful, but bashing out well-formatted code on the road is trivial in Textastic, for instance.
For years my favorite hackathon kit has been a tablet + cheap bluetooth mouse + cheap bluetooth keyboard. It could be an iPad or an Amazon Fire tablet so long as it can run an RDP client and I can log into my home computer or a big cloud machine.
a bit of an aside but what's amazing is that Docker's recent beta VM for Mac (I think released a couple of months ago now) has dramatically improved the performance you get out of your CPU.
Using a macbook air, even a recent one, before this Docker was definitely usable but noticably slower. Probably still worth it but a noticable tradeoff using it as a dev machine Vs a pro. Now that tradeoff has basically gone away.
Still baffles the mind that Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago, and others _still_ haven't. I remember being basically surrounded by jet engines running Word in school.
A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the workday).
Even a 2015 MacBook for me ran the fan hard almost constantly. First Apple silicon MacBook was silent. Now using an M1 Max MBP from 2021 and external hard drives are the thing making noise on my desk.
I have a number of passively-cooled silent machines, from metal-chassis rugged subnotebooks popular with the military and field-service techs, to plastic cheapies intended for the student market.
They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.
But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.
A fanless CPU needs more, lower-clocked cores to have the same multi-thread performance as an actively cooled CPU with fewer cores, and higher core count CPUs cost more. So you only get a fanless CPU if you either a) get a low multi-thread performance CPU or b) pay for a high-performance CPU and then get only medium performance out of it by running it fanless. Notice that even Apple's highest performance laptops have fans; fanless there isn't a thing.
But Apple's fanless machines do b) and then they just charge you the premium. There are a few fanless PC laptops that do the same thing, but most people don't want that, because they'd rather save a significant amount of money by getting the same performance out of a less expensive CPU with a fan.
This is oversimplified. It is sustained multithreaded performance that brings throttling with fanless cpu. Anything for a short enough amount of time is fine, and sustained single threaded stuff is also fine. Bursts are also fine. A lot of work that people do on a computer is fine. Fanless doesn't really hurt unless you process large amounts of data in parallel for some time. Performance in a cpu does not only show in this kind of tasks.
I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Of course one could say that ~having~ using the fan is always optional anyway (like the older 13" macbook pro was mostly an air with a fan) and in these types of tasks you may barely hear it. But still I prefer the peace of not ever hearing a fan for my to-go laptop.
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
5W Phone CPUs of today are faster than 105W workstation CPUs of ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a matter of whether it can do real work, of course it can. The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise? That's the trade off, and most people pick saving time and money over silence, so that's what most vendors offer.
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it. They do make them. There are AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W and fanless laptops that have them. They're just not as popular when you give people the choice.
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Can confirm. I used an Air for a couple of years as a bit of an experiment at work. Ultimately we did go back to Pros, specifically discounted M3 Max ones, just because I did start hitting bottlenecks running Xcode + Android Studio + Firefox + Slack + Telegram + god knows what else, I did FINALLY find the thermal throttling at the end and we ended up going with more expensive machines. That was over a year ago and I purchased the Air I had been using for my wife, who is using it today. It meets and exceeds all her needs and she loves the thing.
Ultimately I did have to cave and get a bigger Mac for work, but that was more out of convenience than necessity. I could've made the Air work if I wanted to, but ultimately I wanted a larger screen and more displays.
Apple silicon is only been around for 5+ years, but people tend to forget how bad Intel macs overheated, throttled and hand tons of other thermal related issues.
I did forget, because a silent laptop is now table stakes for me. I can't imagine buying anything with an audible fan again. I'd rather stay on the hardware I have.
I wouldn’t want a fan on a Windows laptop, for sure. On Linux they are fine as long as the lowest speed is “off,” since they’ll only kick on if you explicitly ask the computer to do something crunchy.
When the M5 Mac Mini Pro 64GB RAM and more release, I'd like to seamlessly mesh the Neo to the Mini the way Plan 9 imagined. And, a payment would be all that you need to expand on the cloud.
Happy to see Gerbil Scheme occupies 4GB RAM use on the Neo while building.
So what? The right amount of performance is what allows you to do what you have to do quickly enough. Anything beyond that is useless. It’s not like you have to use 100% of the theoretical performance of a computer all the time.
I got the 8 GB version of the M1 Mac Book air for a freelance stuff where I had to ship stuff for iOS as well. Really wish I had gone for the 16 GB version, since I had no idea just how bad the memory situation would eventually get. That said, it’s at least a good little computer for me being on the move!
I can't stand Apple, but it's the truth. I used one sporadically to build my stuff for Mac. Going back to my Windows workstation after that always felt like travelling 15 years back in time. I recommended M1 Air to everyone whose workflow was compatible with a Mac. Most of the people who acted on that recommendation still use it and don't really think about upgrading.
I had a ton of issues with my Macbook pro M1 16GB, memory pressure would be in the yellow always and into red frequently which caused sound stutter and all sorts of issues.
My M1 air (I think 8GB?) had similar issues
My M2 24gb was amazing - especially since it allowed dual monitors.
I recently upgraded to the M4 32GB and it is my "do everything" computer and is absolutely awesome.
My personal experience with the m-series is that get as memory as possible. I do feel the M1 had issues based on the couple I owned.
EDIT: Even on 32GB my memory pressure is constantly in the yellow, but have not seen it go to red
Memory pressure sort-of means something sort-of doesn't. It's certainly possible that critical pressure could cause audio issues, but it could also be impossible to ever notice.
More importantly you shouldn't be experiencing audio stalls, so complain in the feedback app if you do.
That sound bug being there for so long would be pretty embarrassing for Apple if they haven't lost the ability to get embarrassed about the shitshow that OS X... i mean, macOS has become a long time ago..
Low memory handling is better that what Linux does, we can all at least agree on that :)
My concern with the Neo is that it may have the same "feels impossible for the price" quality early on, but the 8GB ceiling gives it much less room to become the kind of absurd long-lived machine your Air turned into
I bought a 8gb m1 air just a few days ago to use as a travel laptop. The 8gb gives me memory anxiety coming from my 48gb m4, but it did force me to turn off some settings I never liked (siri, spotlight indexing) and I also discovered zed, ghostty, and orbstack to replace vscode, iterm, and docker desktop.
The memory limit is probably in my head now, it does pretty well as long as I'm not obsessing over activity monitor.
Same. Recently bought myself a M2 Air as a birthday gift for myself. 8GB, chucked OpenBSD on it and couldn't be happier. It does what I need, battery lasts long and easy to chuck around.
99% of the time I run dwm + emacs, most of the browsing in eww. The occasional 1% that I run a browser is negligible. The scrolling lag doesn't bother me too much. I basically run it as a distraction free machine with long battery life.
No temptation to open Youtube or other distractions.
Just an emacs session with code and notes. Forcing myself to read the man-pages first before googling anything.
I used mine for 5 years as my personal laptop and it was fine, even for development work. I even ran docker on it. I'm sure it had to swap at times, but SSDs are so fast now that I didn't even notice.
I don't get the hate on the base model / 8GB. If it's not enough for you, don't buy it.
I wouldn't be embarrassed, Apple computers hold their value and performance for a remarkable amount of time, and that was even before Apple Silicon, which, as I'm still running an M1 Pro machine, will last quite a while, another several years yet.
Mine M1 Air display just failed after 5+ years out of the blue like worked at night and stopped in morning and even pre-used LCD assembly cost $200-300. So repairing makes no financial sense.
Yet considering the price I've paid for it like $0.5 per day and used it daily for 10-16 hours a day. Pretty much like phones I use except I use them much less and drop them often unlike a macbook.
Had a similar issue - some of the display was garbled for more than a year. Had a replacement screen from aliexpress lying around that cost 126$ two and half years ago, got to do the replacement a few weeks ago, as the kid needed a laptop for school.
Turns out the replacement screen resolution was not the same as the original, but it still works fine, took ~1 hour for the replacement.
So for me it did make sense to repair - it costs less than a new laptop, at least
I guess for $126 you mean just display itself? Not complete assembly?
If so this is like an option for like super skilled 1% of 1% of us who repair their devices.
I obviously checked repair videos and just disassembling top part almost impossible without destroying everything except for aluminum cover. Doing it properly on first try is well beyond my skills.
On top of it there is always risk of getting damaged part considering how super fragile it is.
Complete assembly.
Wouldn't call it trivial, but not super hard either.
I wouldn't dream of doing this without the complete assembly, not worth the hassle.
You run the risk of ruining something, but for me the reasoning was that worst case I'd still have a conputer I can attach to an external monitor.
Replacement itself is mostly removing screws and cables carefully - followed the ifixit guide.
I have the same model and have been using it as my personal laptop all along just fine. Doing my day job on it is a bit of a headache but I can do it in a pinch.
People who say it’s impossible to use a 8gb MacBook are being obtuse
Similar story here, I used the original M1 Air 8GB for for years, still in same great condition without any flaws. I did get a M4 Air last year because I just needed more than one display and wanted to work in a docked mode, and I have similar feelings with this machine too.
I bought a 2019 Intel MBP and that was by far the worst laptop I've ever had. After just a year of use it was constantly overheating and running out of memory and disk space, barely able to open a terminal. It was so bad that I hesitated to buy the Apple silicon versions, but the good reviews convinced me and it has been going strong ever since.
I also got a M1 Air 8gb, bought 2021 and it's good but there's been various hardware go wrong - screen packed up, usb ports packed up, speakers knackered, battery says service. I think 10 years use would require quite a lot of fixing on mine.
Since the M1, macbooks pretty much hit "good enough". I've got a 2021 macbook and a top of the line 2025 model from work as well. But the experience using them is pretty much exactly the same, the newer one is many multiples the performance, but my old one does everything instantly. So I can't tell the difference just using it normally.
I bumped up to 16gb ram and more storage... it's still running great for when I use it, which is not much tbf... I mostly use my desktop because my vision has gotten exceedingly bad the past few years and my 45" desktop displays are significantly easier for me to read and use... I can kind of manage with the M1 display set to max size/scale... but many apps and sites are problematic.
I haven't... Should probably look into it. I always hated Windows full screen zoom... But I regularly use the triple tap zoom in Android. I'll look into it next time.
I had an M1 pro with the touchbar thing that I bought used for <$1000 after I had to give my work one back when I changed jobs. It was the best upgrade I ever made. I cracked the screen and bought a M4 air on black friday for $750 or something which I'm using now.
I have a 2017 MacBook Air that's still going strong and will certainly hit 10 years. It definitely won't hit another 9 years after that, though... The keyboard doesn't have that much life left in it, and I won't be repairing it.
I think 8GB is harder to defend in 2026 than it was in 2020, but maybe Apple's low-end machines may be staying useful long after the spec sheet says they shouldn't...
Ram is massively more expensive in 2026 than it was in 2020. And the tasks the average person does hasn't changed in that time. I think it could be a good thing that Apple is setting a baseline that your apps should run with 8gb, there isn't a good reason you couldn't work with that amount.
I bought one just to have Mac around (I haven't daily driven MacOS since the PowerPC days) and to help debug MacOS specific dev environment issues my team has.
While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client, I've ended up using the Neo more than any of my other machines.
My Windows and Fedora machines have 2-4x the RAM but the Neo is just as responsive when juggling 20 Firefox tabs and a few other apps (mostly electron eg. Slack).
> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port.
You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around
It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
I’m waiting for the first A chip designed after the Neo decision - it’ll be interesting to see what they do knowing it’ll end up in a laptop. The obvious thing is “fixing” the USB problem.
This feels like a dumb question, but is there nothing to distinguish the USB 2 port from the USB 3 port? I think there is an alert to tell people if they are using a fast device in the slow port, but I wonder whether their target market will read the manual and know which is which. I feel they will be surprised when that pop-up appears.
The Apple Take a tour of [the] MacBook Neo page describes the ports by location only:
"The left port can support one external display and transfers data at USB 3 speeds (up to 10 GB/s). The right port transfers data at USB 2 speeds (up to 480 MB/s). You can charge your MacBook Neo and connect accessories using either port."
...and...
"Tip: As a best practice, charge your MacBook Neo using the right port (USB 2), which leaves the left port (USB 3) available for a display or for connecting accessories that can take advantage of the higher speeds."
The target market rarely connects anything to their laptop besides the charger. The most commonly connected would be crappy flash drives or a mouse. A few might connect to present on a TV/projector but those are already frustrating to connect to.
It’s not functionally useless, it supports a mouse, keyboard, printer or even an iPhone (non pro) perfectly fine at full speed. It also probably has enough speed for the average cheap terrible quality USB drive that the buyer of a $600 PC might have.
This is a Silicon Valley tech geek take not a real world one.
"genuinely" is an AI tell now as well as doing things in physical world that don't make sense like walking to the car wash to wash your car if it's close, or maybe not using USB ports in the way they were designed...
Yeah, but that USB 3 port has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It 's also the only video out port making decent dongles a necessity. On a $600 PC it's not uncommon to have USB A (at 3.0 speeds), HDMI in addition to USB C and maybe even Ethernet.
I used a macbook air all throughout school, I never once owned a dongle or even plugged the thing in to an external monitor. My requirements were something that could run photoshop/illustrator and chrome. If I ever transfered something over USB it was a 300kb docx file or something else that would have copied instantly at 2.0 speeds.
I think there's a huge problem of tech enthusiasts projecting their own requirements on to a device that is designed for a very different person, and then declaring it unfit for use. Apple prioritized things that actually matter to students like battery life, lightness, price, and hinges that don't snap after the first year. Rather than tons of super fast IO and 32gb ram.
I went to school too. Sometimes at school we would do presentations using a projector connected by HDMI, maybe you could get away with the room computer but that only had USB A ports being some ancient desktop. Sometimes we did group projects and rather than huddle around one tiny 13" or 15" laptop screen we used one of the big ass TVs in the rentable group study rooms.
It's not tons of super fast IO. It's pretty basic IO.
Even then the problem can be solved by a cheap usb a + c flash drive. At least in offices every meeting room I’ve used for a while now has a usb c dongle for the TV.
HDMI has been less common than usb c on laptops for quite a long time now.
Also, a large fraction of students these days use Google Docs. I don’t have first-hand experience, but I imagine they would either share presentations with the account the shared computer is logged into, or log into their own account on the shared computer. No hardware involved either way.
This cheap laptop is not for people with external displays. Almost everyone buying this would have no desire for an external display, they wouldn’t even feel this as a limitation.
If you want a separate display or super fast data transfers, more usb ports or more than 8MB of RAM buy one of the more expensive laptops.
Yes, but it is uncommon for a $600 PC to have a beautiful screen, great trackpad, metal case, and top notch build quality. Also, the neo performs really really well.
A multi-port USB-C hub is about ten dollars on Amazon. If a Neo owner really needs additional ports they're a few bucks. For a vast majority of Neo owners the lack of ports is a non-issue and for the others that occasionally need the extra ports they're cheap.
I doubt there's many Neo buyers that really needed multiple Thunderbolt ports but decided to pick up the $600 entry level machine instead.
Sometimes on HN while this is technically correct I wonder if Mac users will truly notice. This is probably a limitation of the A19 chip. Many people just see the price tag and buy.
The author clearly had some involvement in the article, I wish they could have written it themselves. It reads like they gave Claude some benchmark data and got it to write the rest of the article.
AI or not, it's such a bad article that constantly repeats itself and spends more time (and words) promising the upcoming sections and "deep insights" than it does on actually writing any of those facts.
This kind of breathless hyperbole is spreading everywhere. "The thing nobody's talking about" is basically never an appropriate phrase for a deeply technical article. But it's everywhere now.
I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying.
But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace.
Apple makes unbelievably good hardware and software that just lasts and just works. Until it’s 7 years old. After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser.
I wish once you bought an Apple computer it was truly yours for as long as you wanted it instead of it being dictated by Apple.
My 2019 MacBook Pro (the last year of Intel) is now 7 years old and runs "frustratingly" well ("frustrating" in the sense that I can't justify replacing it yet, despite how badly I want to get a new one!)
It is yours for as long as you want it, and it (mostly) runs all the software it was compatible with when you first bought it (there are some quirks around software you had access to but didn't install, like Garageband, where you may no longer be able to access the original version). Stuff doesn't just 'stop working', as a rule, but the rest of the world does move on. I'm not sure what you think should be done about that? All software should always be backwards compatible with older versions forever?
As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely, although with a different set of software to what you got the laptop with. 2026 is the year of the Linux Desktop!1! (in all seriousness though, it is actually quite good by now).
> After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser.
But I don't think the lines were particularly far apart.
> Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
M1 was six years ago, M2 was four, both within the seven years OP was talking about.
You can run Linux inside a VM on any Apple Silicon Mac already, even if there is no progress on native Linux on Apple Silicon.
You can still get plenty of use out of them if you adjust expectations accordingly. I don't expect my 2013 iMac to do everything a brand new one can, but I do expect it to sit on my bench and function as a control station for my 3d printer... which it does fine, and will likely continue to do in perpetuity.
I bought a 2015 iMac last year for 100 euros at a thrift store. It’s a bit slow but works fine for YouTube etc. And the computer itself basically looks good as new - the screen is really beautiful.
Thinking I’ll try and install Linux on it at some point.
I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
The article says the CPU costs Apple less than $50. Why aren't these types of chips for laptops more popular in the Windows and Linux world? Where are the Dell and Framework laptops that can compete with this thing on price, quality, and performance?
I use it more and more as a primary, and it doesn't feel like I've made many tradeoffs at all. I even like the keys better, they aren't transparent, so the plastic feels different, but in a good way.
My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
After years of incremental upgrades to the Airs, a new entry level M5 Air gives you double the RAM, double the storage, and double the CPU and GPU performance of an M1 Air.
Hopefully used Airs will come up for sale more frequently, as they remain a step up from the Neo.
My M1 Air display just failed on me after 5 and half years of daily 10-16 hours of use. Considered how non repairable some parts in MacBooks are I'd rather recommend people buy more expensive new one. E.g you can find very good offers on new M2 M3 etc.
I am running Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and Docker Desktop on a last generation Intel Air, that admittedly has 12 GB RAM. One has to be a bit careful with more apps. But I look forward to an upgrade. Maybe a Neo, but more likely a second hand M.
I can top that (he said bitterly). My wife is still gorgeous after 30+ years of marriage and is a 10x programmer. But she was happy when given the choice not to work when we married, and hasn’t touched a compiler in decades.
I did well in business, but the family joke is that I’d be a billionaire if I could have monetized her.
Macbook Neo is amazing, so impressed what Apple can deliver for so little.
That said, my sister this morning asked if she should buy a Macbook Neo. I pointed her to a refurb M2 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM for the same price. I feel like that's the right call? Slower single-core performance but better multi-core and I think for 90% of normal people use cases the RAM is the limit before the CPU.
I think I would cut the line at M3 or above. I think M2 uses an older architecture and it doesn't have WiFi 6E in it, and of course single core is a bit lower. Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
> Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.
It depends on the benchmark/workload. There isn't much of a difference per core between the M1 (3.7k) and A18 pro (4k) based on passmark, but I'm sure the A18 does much better in AI/similar stuff.
M2 Air with 16GB is the logical choice, especially if she doesn't have a habit of breaking/dropping laptops because probably she won't get apple care with a user air.
The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.
Maybe some... but they're likely picking up a lot of people that would have gone with a $500-700 windows laptop instead.. and the margins are similar, so they're probably well ahead.
intentionally cannibalizing their own sales is iirc the official apple policy: iphone destroyed ipod and was one of the best business mives of all time
If they can use this product to lock more people into their ecosystem it'll work. As a lifelong windows/android user, I've been eyeing up the neo.
Also, the Neo is just cheap enough that it's a product I'd consider buying that I don't need. I'm not in the market for a new laptop and certainly not an Air. So I'm a demographic considering this product that is not going to cannibalize their existing sales. There's gotta be at least a dozen people like me!
Do it. I've used Windows, Linux, and macOS over the years. Apple may be walled garden, but damn do they take care of their garden. It's worth trying out.
I do this with my old 2017 MacBook Air and while the case gets pretty hot, it reduces throttling on the old Intel processor a lot. It felt like a new computer after replacing the thermal paste and adding that pad.
> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.
Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.
Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.
Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?
I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.
That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.
It's not really using it for much text, though. It's mostly buttons and controls, which GDI, QuickDraw, and Motif did much better back then and newer toolkits like GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, DWM, Cocoa, etc are great at today.
I occasionally port software I make to MacOS, while mainly being a Linux user, and I settled on a base model, 8 GB M2 Mac Mini for this as well. If it's zippy there, it'll be zippy on the larger models.
On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.
The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)
It’s 8GB because they want to sell you a 16GB model for the same price when the dram crisis is over.
That way the marketing can be: double the memory for the same price. Apple has done this again and again, the more time people are spending talking about one single deficiency in your product, the less time they are spending on any other product. Then you solve that single issue in the next cycle.
I understand the premise and it might be cool, but it does feel weird when your 6 year old playstation has more RAM than your laptop. Heck, even Nintendo Switch 2 has more RAM.
Depends what you're browsing and what's in your sheets? You can't play games on this computer then? How about a phone then? My 3 year old phone has 50% more RAM.
We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.
I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
Three finger drag. That was the best and unique thing about apple touchpads since, like, early 2000s, but then it was buried deep down the menus and forgotten for some reason. But seriously - try it, you might never go back.
I wish the author had toned down the chatgpt style of the writing. e.g. headers that say "What You’re Getting for $599". Another example: "Read those numbers again. The same chip that posts 3,569 single-core when cold delivers 476 after five minutes of sustained load. That is an 87% reduction in single-core performance on the same hardware, running the same benchmark, separated by nothing but heat."
That second phrase did not feel too ChatGPT-like to me. The throttling behavior really does feel quite extreme and unprecedented as described, more typical of a mobile phone than a traditional PC. By analogy, even the crappiest and cheapest mobile PCs will not go as far as throttling the processor from a nominal 3.6 GHz to 480 MHz after five minutes of CPU-intensive load.
I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
While I got me a 16GB Macbook Air, I appreciate that Apple continues to make 8GB devices. This indicates for me also a commitment for not bloating up the OS (like Windows did) too much and caring about memory efficiency.
I don't understand this logic. You can live with 8 GB but there is nothing to "appreciate". It's enough for some stuff but totally short for other stuff.
I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.
I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.
It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised.
I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day.
For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.
it also looks really nice. at the Apple Store, the chassis seems well machined. the "cheaper" apple logo insert also clearly also incurred some expense as it fit into the lid perfectly. Hinge, keyboard and trackpad felt good. Design team clearly took time to telegraph craft and quality in their product.
The M-series all have chargers with a USB-C socket on them that the cable is plugged in to, so you would have been able to use the PSU from any M-series MacBook - even if they were the models prior to magsafe being re-introduced.
The magsafe in the M-series is not the same as magsafe 1 or 2, so they are not compatible and you would have needed to buy an adapter (and I have no idea if Apple has even made a first party version of this.) So you'd need a new adapter.
On the other hand, any USB-C charger that delivers the right voltage will charge the Neo.
i bought this for my girlfriend as an entrypoint laptop considering she is coming from Windows - and overall satisfied. the battery though could be improved especially considering for a couple of hundred bucks more we could have gotten a used macBook air
Recently dived into mac world (air) too after decades of win/linux.
Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed.
Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?
The cmd+q is the "quit" command. And the convention in single-window apps (or ones that have a single unambiguous main window) is that the window only closes when the app is quit. So this is command you have to give.
For "document-based" apps (think almost anything where you open multiple files), the application can stay running even if there are no open windows. So you have both cmd+q and cmd+w available to you.
You can probably come up with some apps that don't cleanly fit these two, but that is what Apple has.
As to screen shot commands, it is a three-key chord because it is system-wide, and they did not want to step on any toes that the apps might have. And there are a few versions:
shift-command-3 takes the entire screen
shift-command-4 takes either a window or a section (press space bar to switch between them)
shift-command-5 opens a more menu-based system that includes a timer
Why 3, 4, and 5 (and not 1 or 2)... I don't know. Maybe there was something in those spots at some point.
Command - Shift - 1 was "Eject Floppy Disk in Drive 1" and Command - Shift - 2 was "Eject Floppy Disk in Drive 2". I kid you not, that's how old these keyboard shortcuts are, they date back to the 80's.
> keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed
You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app). You don't even need to memorize them.
When I first switched to Mac after using Ubuntu for 4 years before that, I didn't expect this level of customization. It's misunderstood because Apple doesn't advertise this.
>You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app)
That's actually my other complaint. "Fixing" problems with the OS with mystery apps.
Connected an external mouse. Mouse wheel is inverted...weird? Google it. Yeah you can toggle it. Thank goodness. Apple knew people use mice. Oh but that inverts the trackpad too. WHAT? You're joking. I need to pick between a sane trackpad and sane mouse? I own both and need both to work to work in a not upside down manner.
Climb onto an AI and ask it what to do because this is insanity like surely not this can't be how it is. LLM goes yeah no that's just macos you need to install a mystery app to unfuck it.
Don't get me wrong my overall experience is positive and there has been the expected learning curve which is fine ofc, but also a fair bit of "what the actual F how are people OK with this".
This one was shocking to me too. I get the argument around the upside down trackpad, but inverting the mouse wheel with no built in open is insane. I also have a mystery app who's only just is to correct this stupid behavior.
One thing that helped me make the transition to nearly full time with the Mac was remapping Command. I remapped Command to Control, and put Control on the Meta / Windows key (I mostly use an external kb).
This kept my decades of muscle memory almost intact since I'm so used to Control being the primary modifier in Linux and Windows. And, weirdly enough, it helped me learn the new MacOS shortcuts since the patterns were now centered on Control instead of the Command key.
You can make the switch without having to use 3rd party software. The Keyboard section of Settings will let you adjust the modifier keys on a per keyboard basis. With different settings for internal, external, etc. if you wish. And it will let you remap Caps Lock if you prefer that to be something else.
cmd-W closes windows and cmd-Q quits the App. That Apps can stay open without having a Window is actually useful (at least it makes sense to me).
@screenshot
Mac has always been kind of amazing for the granular options you get to take screenshots out of the box.
• Command - Shift - 3 | Takes a fullscreen pic of the entire display. Loads a preview in the bottom right corner. Click to expand, and from there edit, share, save, delete, etc.
• Command - Shift - 4 | Turns your mouse cursor into a crosshair. Drag to create a rectangular window. Takes a capture of the contents when done. Escape or right-click to cancel. Preview loads the same as above.
• Command - Shift - 5 | Brings up a rectangular section that can be moved around and resized.
But any shortcut can be remapped:
Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Screenshots
Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
That's 3 different apps made by apple and preinstalled by apple...three different behaviours
I'm so used to macos now that I don't even realize that this is confusing. What OS did you use before, windows? is there no distinction between quiting an app and closing a window on windows?
>Command Q quits the currently active application.
Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
>Command W closes the current window
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
That's 3 different apps made by apple and preinstalled by apple...three different behaviours
>standard behavior
It isn't and its a tribute to human adaptability to chaos that mac crowd thinks this is standardization
That actually makes sense, because you cannot quit Finder. I haven't used macs for a couple years now but I'm taking your word for it. Finder hasn't been quittable for as long as i can remember, so you stop trying to quit it.
> Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
You can’t quit finder - it’s a fundamental part of the hi that always has to run.
> Safari
Multiple tabs in a window are intended to be treated the same as multiple windows. This has been the case since macOS made tabbed interface components a standard part of the OS.
>You can’t quit finder - it’s a fundamental part of the hi that always has to run.
That's what google told me after I set out to discover what rules are behind the inconsistency. The solution to inconsistent shortcuts is apparently memorizing which parts of the software that is PREINSTALLED is considered part of the OS and which parts are not.
>Which apps?
Not apps small a...Apps big A...the thing apple macs ship with on the dock and literally entitled "Apps". That baked into the default install window just behaves differently from both finder style built in OS things and Safari also built in but different built in not part of OS. Why? I don't fuckin know. Neither Q nor W make it go away. OK so hit esc. Does that make the window go away? It turns it into a smaller window that now performs a different function?!?!? Spotlight. OK so now i need to memorize what is an preinstalled OS window, preinstalled not os window, preinstalled not os window not app window but some sort of launcher I guess?
So a new user is basically guessing which of THREE keys combos may or may not make the window go away or possible do nothing or do something else entirely (close tab).
I feel like I'm being gaslight by all the hn users telling me yeah that makes sense
That's a fancy spotlight search modal, not an application or window...
> Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window.
No it doesn't, it closes the window. Look at your dock - minimized windows show up on the other side of the | divider with a mini representation of their contents.
> I feel like I'm being gaslight by all the hn users telling me yeah that makes sense
It feels more like you're willfully railing against the way macOS is because you're not used to it. If you remove your preconceptions about how things should be (and keep in mind that macOS defined most of the things we're talking about 30+ years ago, so it's not like there was a standard to follow), it really does make sense. CMD-W closes the current doc/tab/window, CMD-Q quits the application.
The only time that doesn't work is when the application writer intentionally breaks it (and the macOS community typically rages about that - looking at you chrome!), or you're not dealing with a normal application/app/program (ie you can't close a system prompt with a command targeted at applications).
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
As an outsider it boggles my mind that apple crowd doesn't notice how all over the place macos shortcuts are.
for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.
It's one of the nicest things to do if you love computers, and great for your health compared with staying indoors.
> Could one actually work like this, typing and everything? After my “heart-rate discovery” I decided I had to try it. I thought I’d have to build something myself, but actually one can just buy “walking desks”, and so I did. And after minor modifications, I discovered that I could walk and type perfectly well with it, even for a couple of hours. I was embarrassed I hadn’t figured out such a simple solution 20 years ago. But starting last fall—whenever the weather’s been good—I’ve tried to spend a couple of hours of each day walking outside like this
You get an Apple product. At least, for me it was that simple. The ThinkPad I had was pretty high end, and I was using polarized glasses and even a sun shade to work at the park while the girls played. Bought a MacBook and the screen seems to crisply outshine even the sunniest days -- I haven't had to worry about outdoor use since, to my recollection.
Back when I did much work outside, I used a laptop that had accidental transflective characteristics. In bright sunlight, the LCD actually become quite clear monochrome, with some pixels acting as mirrors and others not, but I don't think they designed the LCD to do that.
I'm not OP but I work outside and use light mode. Macs are generally fairly bright as long as you aren't in direct sunlight. Solarized light mode for the win though.
How fast can it recharge is probably the main limiting factor. I’m used to finding power wherever I can from the bad old days, but the M1 laptops have spoiled me.
I take Max Neo as a toy computer. Maybe a good choice for those non-tech users, cuz it's enough for they daily use: writing docs, watching videos, etc. A good marketing product.
I think the only gap I’ve come across is that trying to drive two monitors through a display link dock it doesn’t really have the GPU to not have that be laggy.
and this is my developer. She consumes one hundred fifty gigabytes and runs two hundred thousand dollar, custom-tooled GPUs at ten thousand tokens per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to develop…for twelve seconds.”
[Laughs]
“Oh my Claude, who touched settings.json? Alright…Who touched my LLM!?”
IDE written in Java indexing 10K files, compiling + running spring boot apps that take 30 seconds to start on the M4, or C++ compilation, or rust compilation.. Or maybe you were sarcastic?
> Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.
Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.
Apple's throttling was an undisclosed optimization that was controversial because it was not disclosed. The optimization itself was not controversial. It was not premature either. If the battery's measurable levels (impedance, current, voltage, etc.) fell out of nominal range, then throttling occurred. FWIW I somewhat resent having to 'defend' Apple here, but your narrative frame here has too much speculation for a situation finalized in fact in 2017, almost 10 years ago.
I wanted to ask "hm is 8GB that bad for coding? I don't use that much anyway" and now I look at my Activity Monitor and I somehow use 22GB, I don't know why.
Why is Rust Analyzer running and taking 2GB? I don't even write in Rust. Each Electron app takes 300-400MB and for some reason Ghostty takes 400 MB... ok I take it back, I couldn't use 8GB.
I bought an Indigo Neo last week. I am utterly in love with machine. It's honestly exceeded all my expectations.
I have a more powerful Mac for "serious" development work, so I figured the Neo would practical to buy for travel purposes. Honestly, there is something really reassuring about traveling/running around town with a $499.99 + tax laptop. I do not treat it poorly, but if something spills on it, I drop it, etc. stomaching the damage is much easier than a $2.5k MBP.
Seriously what is this ugly engagement optimized LLM slop of an article doing here yet again on the HN front page?
I love the Neo as much as any other enthusiast, so yes, the subject matter is subjectively “cool”.
But this “article” is indigestible. Not only it regurgitates the same thing over and over (and it has links to other articles on the same page where they already did the same), on top of that the writing style, content, intentionality does not exist in the slightest. I feel like having been offered chocolate, but having received artificial cocoa flavored petrochemicals.
The author appears to have done actual measurements and put in the work. I agree that the article probably has been run through an LLM, but as long as there's actual new (for me!) information, i don't really care
The most interesting part of this is the 8GB RAM decision. Soldered 8GB in 2026 is the sort of compromise that looks fine on day one and painful in year three
It's not "soldered". It's literally part of SOC package as it's comes out of TSMC lines. Using exactly the same iPhone chip is kind a the only reason they can target this price target.
Hate to defend Apple here, but there are so many more garbage laptops out there for the same price tag that can as well just go directly into landfill. Apple at least have the volume to make sure Mac software actually works on said 8GB.
If Apple manage to decrease market share of other e-waste manufacturers it's good on me. At least these laptops will live 5-7 years as we browser machines.
There is massive percent of population whose needs will be 200% covered with Neo performance. Most people just need a laptop for web browser, watching videos, occasional app use.
Problem with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is not performance, but horrific build quality, displays, webcams, audio and keyboards. This is something Apple have solved. Also there is no Windows which solves a lot of problems.
I was doing gamedev for years on M1 Air with 16GB / 256GB and some other software engineering too FFS. Surely non-power-users can live with less.
How locked down macOS is these days? Is it still possible to use OS without account and freely "sideload" software applications? Is homebrew still a thing?
>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)."
Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications.
This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
As opposed to years of garbage Windows laptops at the $600 price point, which you seem to expect will remain viable longer than the Neo ... ?
If any legislation comes out of this, it will simply be because of Apple's high profile. They were content to let e-rot fill the shelves for years before the Neo.
There could be an arguments that you can install a lighter OS on these machines. That's not as easy with MacOS.
That would be a wild argument to make for a consumer protection regulation. Consumer protections almost exclusively judge a product as-delivered in the way laypeople would use it.
Are you sure that’s not based on stale information? The M series of laptops by all accounts from the ASAHI developers were written specifically to make it easier to install alternative OSes and ASAHI is no more difficult to install than Linux on a Windows machine.
Asahi Linux is only able to be installed on an M2. They basically take 2 years per new chip, when Apple releases one yearly. At this point, they'll never catch up.
M3 is taking longer than 2 years now. That came out late 2023.
No. Nothing about MacOS prevents users from installing alternative OSes. Even with Apple's custom chips, that remains true. It's only that it's a smaller target that limits options as fewer people are writing software for that hardware than for x86.
See Asahi to verify[0]. I've been a donor since the week they opened a Patreon account.
0. https://asahilinux.org/fedora/
At Asahi's pace, the A18 Pro will be able to install Linux in about 8 years.
HN is completely out of touch with this laptop. No one cares about any of this analysis they just want a cheap Mac. This has sold so much that the A19 processor is having problems to being sourced .
Also 8gb is good enough for the target market.
I replaced my 10 years old macbook with a 10 years old macbook. 8 gigs. Good battery. A screen that is not broken. 80 bucks! I really don't see why I should upgrade. Need more compute? Rent a machine on vast.ai. Also I still use my old mac via screen sharing to run servers/databases/etc that tend to eat up RAM.
80 bucks!
M4 24gb screen broke after just 6 months.
Back to m1, just 8gb*. It sometimes hang for a second or two, but you know what. I'm happy with it.
That's when I have 38 tabs, two IDEs and try to grep some text on VS code.
M1 air, 16gb, second hand, 200 bucks, 200+ tabs in brave, photoshop, illustrator and premiere and kicad and sublime and chrome with one tab watching a youtube live stream. Plus text edit, notes and prolly some more apps. Works fine, zero hitch.. maybe too good for my own good.
When I spec'd a M1 air for my partner back in the day, even though she didn't really need it, I made sure to get the 16gb model for the longevity. Devices shouldn't be disposable toys. Apparently I had better foresight than expected...
The figure is likely wrong.
My Mac is currently using 9GB of RAM including 6.5GB of cached files with Safari and a few other apps opened. They likely forgot to subtract the cache from the used memory.
That's impressive on an 8GB system!
90 would've been impressive. 9 out of 8 is rookie numbers.
My Neo is currently sitting at 5.79 GB Used, 2.15 GB cached, thus 3.64 GB while Safari is open in the background and Activity Monitor is open in the foreground.
I have been using an 8GB Macbook Air M1 for non-development work, and it has been fantastic.
Macos really excels at managing memory very well.
I used an M1 Air for developing iPhone Apps for years and it worked great. Not "wow" fast but I never had a complaint about it.
Heck, on Windows it would be 4GB if you're lucky.
Now that RAM is getting more expensive, I hope the OS builders will rethink how they use so much memory. An OS that's lighter weight lets us save money on RAM.
I think this reasoning is just disconnected from reality.
Reality is, the iphone 16 sharing the same chipset is perfectly functional for many more years to come, running similar workloads (for the same target audience): mainly web browsing.
If the iphone 16 can have the usual 3-6 years of useful life, then the macbook neo has the same -- FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE.
And I wrote this because I did actually get the macbook neo and I'm using it daily for the intended purpose (mostly web browsing) and it's just fine.
(if anybody is wondering: i have a large machine with 16c/32t and 128gb memory that i use remotely via ssh to do the "heavy stuff")
> This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
That legislation is at least ten years late but apple is absolutely not the worst offender. There is the entire market of cheap android phones (and tablets) that barely last a year or two, and have essentially no guaranteed software upgrade. That should have triggered the legislation in the first place.
iOS takes a very different approach to managing app memory though. And the intended purpose of a phone isn't quite the same as that of a laptop either, especially not for people who don't have an extra 128GB memory machine lying around. I'm not sure the comparison makes a whole lot of sense.
The Neo not only exposes functionality that would prove limiting on the iPhone too, but it’s mostly used that way. First thing that comes to mind is true multi-window multitasking. The apps are standard Mac apps that don’t assume a RAM limited system, not dedicated “made for Neo” apps like the iPhone has.
Overall this limitation has the potential to be much more visible on the Neo and Apple must make real sure that the OS stays lean because we all know average app devs don’t care about this.
> might trigger planned obsolescence legislation
then i welcome it
i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management
Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the Earth in back in mac os Mojave) caking on, at some point I just gave up on trying to fix it with continuously reinstalling and balancing it. My current portable has quarter the amount of workmem and is just incredibly snappy esp. compared to that mac book. And I don't even use portables for anything too heavy, I have an actual PC for that.
The stress tests with multiple Youtube windows open simultaneously, editing 4K video, and doing heavy duty image editing tasks, in some cases doing stuff like that all at the same time have been very impressive. It does have to fall back on swap, but even then seems to soldier on really well considering. Are you better off with more memory? Absolutely, but it still seems perfectly capable of managing even many low to medium duty pro workloads if you don't mind a performance hit.
MacOS has had memory compression since Mavericks in 2013, but the M series chips also introduced a wider memory bus that makes for faster swap, and hardware accelerated memory compression/decompression.
A lot of this tech is inherited from the work done on iOS and the A-series SOCs to maximise performance and minimise resource utilisation for the phones. And of course the Neo uses an A-series phone SOC.
https://box.co.uk/blog/macbook-air-memory-usage-macos
I used a Mac mini M1 with 8GB of RAM for a while. It was fine; much better than Intel Macs or any other setup with low RAM.
Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P
Either way, I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
> Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P
That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity?
Either way, I agree with them, FWIW.
> I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.
Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.
In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory thanks to a misbehaving app that was taking 70 GB out of 64 GB physical RAM. Overall, almost 120 GB were used, most of it was compressed and a lot of it was swapped. It had absolutely zero effect on how useable the computer was, there was no unusual lag. Either Windows or Linux would have shat the bed long before that point.
> four random letter names
So probably very old accounts
And here's yet another four-lowercase-letter-name for you, then. Dunno about the other two, but I've been using this handle for over twenty years, it was originally the auto-generated username I got assigned on one of my university's servers (generated from my initials).
Low character count handles are a scarce resource, and are often highly-sought after (people were paying crazy amounts for some names on twitter in its heyday). Almost any 2-, 3-, or 4-character sequence is going to be either a word or an abbreviation of something that's meaningful to someone out there.
One is a four letter set of characters without a vowel, the other spells a word with 5 letters. And so what?
I’ll add on that the change to Apple silicon was an amazing improvement, even in the same OS version. Maybe these anecdotes mean your experience in this regard is dated. (I say this as someone who came reluctantly to Mac, and looks forward to returning to Linux)
Have you used any of the Apple silicon machines? In discussions about modern Apple devices and RAM, I don't know that pre-Apple-silicon experiences are all that relevant?
My first was underspec'ed and I used Resolve, Lightroom and Photoshop on top of the usual other stuff and it was quite impressive. The relationship of performance to RAM for earlier machines felt incomparable.
With a 2015, is that a HDD or SSD?
> Source…?
Real life?
My macbook neo with 8gb memory is faster and snappier than my shit-tier thinkpad X13G1 even when the X13 is not swapping at all.
I have 8c/16t Ryzen 7 along with 32GB ram over there, running GNU/Linux.
And somehow my macbook neo running a phone chip is much more usable (and battery lasts longer, and suspend actually works).
Compared to Windows or Android, sure. Hopefully the Asahi folks will get around to supporting this device so we can run a proper lightweight OS on it.
Unfortunately Linux is pretty damn bad under memory pressure, I think you'd get an objectively better experience on macOS. I say this as someone running Asahi right now.
But then, you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things (for me with 32-128 GB depending on machine it's C++ builds using all cores and of course local LLMs). I guess a bunch of Electron apps would also do it for 8 GB.
> you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things
Like using Chrome…
Use Firefox then
Linux is pretty bad at handling out of memory. In my old thinkpad T14 with Mint everything came to a halt when webpack gobbled up my 16GB of ram. Couldnt even move the cursor, stuff just got stuck hard
I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school.
It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.
I've been on my M1 Air, 16GB, since a few weeks after launch, more than six years now. I still use it daily with lots of Docker containers, VS Code, tons of Electron apps, a small macOS arm VM, and lots of browser tabs simultaneously. Recently, Claude's VM environment is getting exercised simultaneously. Usually the memory pressure is into yellow, but responsiveness is still far higher than any Mac from the Intel days, and far more usable than any Windows laptop that I have the misfortune to experience when borrowing somebody else's computer. And despite all that memory pressure, my SSD isn't getting worn out by swapping, I'm at only "3%" of SSD wear, if those stats on the CLI are to be trusted.
I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality.
Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.
Same with the iPad Air m1, handles everything you throw at it, does video editing, office, etc. Connected to an external display and keyboard feels like a full laptop, on the couch is the best consumption device. And with Claude it can handle your coding sessions.
How do you use iPad for coding?
There are terminal/ssh apps (a-shell, blink [shonky business model, sadly] etc) for remote coding, at least one git client (Working Copy), plenty of text editors.
Remote makes it way more useful, but bashing out well-formatted code on the road is trivial in Textastic, for instance.
For years my favorite hackathon kit has been a tablet + cheap bluetooth mouse + cheap bluetooth keyboard. It could be an iPad or an Amazon Fire tablet so long as it can run an RDP client and I can log into my home computer or a big cloud machine.
a bit of an aside but what's amazing is that Docker's recent beta VM for Mac (I think released a couple of months ago now) has dramatically improved the performance you get out of your CPU.
Using a macbook air, even a recent one, before this Docker was definitely usable but noticably slower. Probably still worth it but a noticable tradeoff using it as a dev machine Vs a pro. Now that tradeoff has basically gone away.
And you forgot the best part: it is completely silent.
The quiet isn’t even the best part of passive cooling. It’s that the cooling will never stop working due to dust clogging fans.
Surely the thermal paste will degrade at some point, right?
well it's really difficult to get internal temperature even to 70 celsius...
Still baffles the mind that Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago, and others _still_ haven't. I remember being basically surrounded by jet engines running Word in school.
A few years ago in an old job I got a monster-specced Dell laptop, and it would still roar if I opened anything. I had to pull all the nerf tricks through the BIOS to at least keep it somewhat tolerable in low-load scenarios (i.e. most of the workday).
> Apple solved this issue some 20+ years ago
All the i7/i9 Macbook pros that I used back in the day were obnoxiously load. Even when not under particularly heavy load.
Even a 2015 MacBook for me ran the fan hard almost constantly. First Apple silicon MacBook was silent. Now using an M1 Max MBP from 2021 and external hard drives are the thing making noise on my desk.
I have a number of passively-cooled silent machines, from metal-chassis rugged subnotebooks popular with the military and field-service techs, to plastic cheapies intended for the student market.
They're all fairly low-spec in absolute terms, but even 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC is adequate to run Win10 and office apps, at least, it was before all the Copilot bloat. And you can buy them as an individual, if you search them out explicitly.
But that's not what the mass market buys when they go shopping. Partly because that's not what Best Buy puts on the shelf, and partly because Microsoft sternly warns that such machines aren't recommended for the AI-encumbered future. Gotta push 40 TOPS and have at least 16GB to get Microsoft's blessing, which I think is the single largest driving force behind the hardware upgrade cycle.
A fanless CPU needs more, lower-clocked cores to have the same multi-thread performance as an actively cooled CPU with fewer cores, and higher core count CPUs cost more. So you only get a fanless CPU if you either a) get a low multi-thread performance CPU or b) pay for a high-performance CPU and then get only medium performance out of it by running it fanless. Notice that even Apple's highest performance laptops have fans; fanless there isn't a thing.
But Apple's fanless machines do b) and then they just charge you the premium. There are a few fanless PC laptops that do the same thing, but most people don't want that, because they'd rather save a significant amount of money by getting the same performance out of a less expensive CPU with a fan.
This is oversimplified. It is sustained multithreaded performance that brings throttling with fanless cpu. Anything for a short enough amount of time is fine, and sustained single threaded stuff is also fine. Bursts are also fine. A lot of work that people do on a computer is fine. Fanless doesn't really hurt unless you process large amounts of data in parallel for some time. Performance in a cpu does not only show in this kind of tasks.
I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Of course one could say that ~having~ using the fan is always optional anyway (like the older 13" macbook pro was mostly an air with a fan) and in these types of tasks you may barely hear it. But still I prefer the peace of not ever hearing a fan for my to-go laptop.
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
5W Phone CPUs of today are faster than 105W workstation CPUs of ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a matter of whether it can do real work, of course it can. The question is, in the instances when you still have to wait for the machine, would you rather wait noticeably longer or pay significantly more money in order to avoid white noise? That's the trade off, and most people pick saving time and money over silence, so that's what most vendors offer.
It's not that they can't figure out how to do it. They do make them. There are AMD chips with TDP configurable down to ~15W and fanless laptops that have them. They're just not as popular when you give people the choice.
> I have used both airs and the max versions of macbooks, and the airs are embarrassingly on par for too many things. I understand it may be hard to believe, but one can do actual, serious work on a macbook air.
Can confirm. I used an Air for a couple of years as a bit of an experiment at work. Ultimately we did go back to Pros, specifically discounted M3 Max ones, just because I did start hitting bottlenecks running Xcode + Android Studio + Firefox + Slack + Telegram + god knows what else, I did FINALLY find the thermal throttling at the end and we ended up going with more expensive machines. That was over a year ago and I purchased the Air I had been using for my wife, who is using it today. It meets and exceeds all her needs and she loves the thing.
Ultimately I did have to cave and get a bigger Mac for work, but that was more out of convenience than necessity. I could've made the Air work if I wanted to, but ultimately I wanted a larger screen and more displays.
I wish I lived in the reality. My 2014 MBP and 2019 MBP’s fans come on quick and loud
Apple silicon is only been around for 5+ years, but people tend to forget how bad Intel macs overheated, throttled and hand tons of other thermal related issues.
Totally. I had an Intel Mac until 2 years ago and it was loud. Not worse than other laptops from the same year. But far from silent.
I did forget, because a silent laptop is now table stakes for me. I can't imagine buying anything with an audible fan again. I'd rather stay on the hardware I have.
I wouldn’t want a fan on a Windows laptop, for sure. On Linux they are fine as long as the lowest speed is “off,” since they’ll only kick on if you explicitly ask the computer to do something crunchy.
I appreciate a light whoosh from a laptop.
No fan = leaving performance on the table due to lacking thermal headroom.
If I wanted maximum performance I would use a desktop.
When the M5 Mac Mini Pro 64GB RAM and more release, I'd like to seamlessly mesh the Neo to the Mini the way Plan 9 imagined. And, a payment would be all that you need to expand on the cloud.
Happy to see Gerbil Scheme occupies 4GB RAM use on the Neo while building.
So what? The right amount of performance is what allows you to do what you have to do quickly enough. Anything beyond that is useless. It’s not like you have to use 100% of the theoretical performance of a computer all the time.
I have no problem if it is the occasional spin up, but it is rare to have system that can do just that.
My Thinkpads seem to only use the fan occasionally but then my work load is very light.
I got the 8 GB version of the M1 Mac Book air for a freelance stuff where I had to ship stuff for iOS as well. Really wish I had gone for the 16 GB version, since I had no idea just how bad the memory situation would eventually get. That said, it’s at least a good little computer for me being on the move!
Entry-spec M1 Air is the best computer ever made.
I can't stand Apple, but it's the truth. I used one sporadically to build my stuff for Mac. Going back to my Windows workstation after that always felt like travelling 15 years back in time. I recommended M1 Air to everyone whose workflow was compatible with a Mac. Most of the people who acted on that recommendation still use it and don't really think about upgrading.
I had a ton of issues with my Macbook pro M1 16GB, memory pressure would be in the yellow always and into red frequently which caused sound stutter and all sorts of issues.
My M1 air (I think 8GB?) had similar issues My M2 24gb was amazing - especially since it allowed dual monitors. I recently upgraded to the M4 32GB and it is my "do everything" computer and is absolutely awesome.
My personal experience with the m-series is that get as memory as possible. I do feel the M1 had issues based on the couple I owned.
EDIT: Even on 32GB my memory pressure is constantly in the yellow, but have not seen it go to red
Memory pressure sort-of means something sort-of doesn't. It's certainly possible that critical pressure could cause audio issues, but it could also be impossible to ever notice.
More importantly you shouldn't be experiencing audio stalls, so complain in the feedback app if you do.
That sound bug being there for so long would be pretty embarrassing for Apple if they haven't lost the ability to get embarrassed about the shitshow that OS X... i mean, macOS has become a long time ago..
Low memory handling is better that what Linux does, we can all at least agree on that :)
My concern with the Neo is that it may have the same "feels impossible for the price" quality early on, but the 8GB ceiling gives it much less room to become the kind of absurd long-lived machine your Air turned into
You can't change the RAM, so using it as a student, and then use it as a reliable sub pc in the future might make it last long.
I bought a 8gb m1 air just a few days ago to use as a travel laptop. The 8gb gives me memory anxiety coming from my 48gb m4, but it did force me to turn off some settings I never liked (siri, spotlight indexing) and I also discovered zed, ghostty, and orbstack to replace vscode, iterm, and docker desktop.
The memory limit is probably in my head now, it does pretty well as long as I'm not obsessing over activity monitor.
Same. Recently bought myself a M2 Air as a birthday gift for myself. 8GB, chucked OpenBSD on it and couldn't be happier. It does what I need, battery lasts long and easy to chuck around.
TIL you can run OpenBSD on apple silicon. With how much effort has gone into Asahi Linux, I'm surprised.
OpenBSD has had support for a bit over four years (v7.1, though the earlier v7.0 had /some/ support).
OpenBSD 7.1, 2022-04-21 -- https://www.openbsd.org/71.html
R/AsahiLinux posting from around that time, only one comment -- https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/u8rb2o/openbsd_...
Running anything on Apple Silicon is result of Asahi Linux effort.
Only M1 and M2 machines though. M3 and up is still missing.
It has no graphics acceleration, right? Doesn’t windowing feel sluggish?
99% of the time I run dwm + emacs, most of the browsing in eww. The occasional 1% that I run a browser is negligible. The scrolling lag doesn't bother me too much. I basically run it as a distraction free machine with long battery life.
No temptation to open Youtube or other distractions.
Just an emacs session with code and notes. Forcing myself to read the man-pages first before googling anything.
I used mine for 5 years as my personal laptop and it was fine, even for development work. I even ran docker on it. I'm sure it had to swap at times, but SSDs are so fast now that I didn't even notice.
I don't get the hate on the base model / 8GB. If it's not enough for you, don't buy it.
I wouldn't be embarrassed, Apple computers hold their value and performance for a remarkable amount of time, and that was even before Apple Silicon, which, as I'm still running an M1 Pro machine, will last quite a while, another several years yet.
I have m1 pro mbp with 32gig ram too. I've never thought to upgrade my laptop and still.
Mine M1 Air display just failed after 5+ years out of the blue like worked at night and stopped in morning and even pre-used LCD assembly cost $200-300. So repairing makes no financial sense.
Yet considering the price I've paid for it like $0.5 per day and used it daily for 10-16 hours a day. Pretty much like phones I use except I use them much less and drop them often unlike a macbook.
Had a similar issue - some of the display was garbled for more than a year. Had a replacement screen from aliexpress lying around that cost 126$ two and half years ago, got to do the replacement a few weeks ago, as the kid needed a laptop for school. Turns out the replacement screen resolution was not the same as the original, but it still works fine, took ~1 hour for the replacement.
So for me it did make sense to repair - it costs less than a new laptop, at least
I guess for $126 you mean just display itself? Not complete assembly?
If so this is like an option for like super skilled 1% of 1% of us who repair their devices.
I obviously checked repair videos and just disassembling top part almost impossible without destroying everything except for aluminum cover. Doing it properly on first try is well beyond my skills.
On top of it there is always risk of getting damaged part considering how super fragile it is.
Complete assembly. Wouldn't call it trivial, but not super hard either. I wouldn't dream of doing this without the complete assembly, not worth the hassle. You run the risk of ruining something, but for me the reasoning was that worst case I'd still have a conputer I can attach to an external monitor. Replacement itself is mostly removing screws and cables carefully - followed the ifixit guide.
I have the same model and have been using it as my personal laptop all along just fine. Doing my day job on it is a bit of a headache but I can do it in a pinch.
People who say it’s impossible to use a 8gb MacBook are being obtuse
Similar story here, I used the original M1 Air 8GB for for years, still in same great condition without any flaws. I did get a M4 Air last year because I just needed more than one display and wanted to work in a docked mode, and I have similar feelings with this machine too.
Same, the Apple silicon chips have been huge.
I bought a 2019 Intel MBP and that was by far the worst laptop I've ever had. After just a year of use it was constantly overheating and running out of memory and disk space, barely able to open a terminal. It was so bad that I hesitated to buy the Apple silicon versions, but the good reviews convinced me and it has been going strong ever since.
I also got a M1 Air 8gb, bought 2021 and it's good but there's been various hardware go wrong - screen packed up, usb ports packed up, speakers knackered, battery says service. I think 10 years use would require quite a lot of fixing on mine.
Since the M1, macbooks pretty much hit "good enough". I've got a 2021 macbook and a top of the line 2025 model from work as well. But the experience using them is pretty much exactly the same, the newer one is many multiples the performance, but my old one does everything instantly. So I can't tell the difference just using it normally.
I was in a similar boat with my M1 Pro. I have an M4 Pro for work but rarely notice the difference.
Unfortunately the display in my M1 has failed and a replacement is £500-700. Very frustrating.
I bumped up to 16gb ram and more storage... it's still running great for when I use it, which is not much tbf... I mostly use my desktop because my vision has gotten exceedingly bad the past few years and my 45" desktop displays are significantly easier for me to read and use... I can kind of manage with the M1 display set to max size/scale... but many apps and sites are problematic.
Have you tried the screen zoom in accessibility settings? The responsiveness is great with the trackpad gestures.
I haven't... Should probably look into it. I always hated Windows full screen zoom... But I regularly use the triple tap zoom in Android. I'll look into it next time.
I had an M1 pro with the touchbar thing that I bought used for <$1000 after I had to give my work one back when I changed jobs. It was the best upgrade I ever made. I cracked the screen and bought a M4 air on black friday for $750 or something which I'm using now.
I have a 2017 MacBook Air that's still going strong and will certainly hit 10 years. It definitely won't hit another 9 years after that, though... The keyboard doesn't have that much life left in it, and I won't be repairing it.
I think 8GB is harder to defend in 2026 than it was in 2020, but maybe Apple's low-end machines may be staying useful long after the spec sheet says they shouldn't...
Ram is massively more expensive in 2026 than it was in 2020. And the tasks the average person does hasn't changed in that time. I think it could be a good thing that Apple is setting a baseline that your apps should run with 8gb, there isn't a good reason you couldn't work with that amount.
it was not massively more expensive in the first half of 2025.
apps are less problematic... the browser though...
> And the tasks the average person does hasn't changed in that time.
Absolutely untrue. Your 2020 CV makes you completely unemployable in 2026.
I bought one just to have Mac around (I haven't daily driven MacOS since the PowerPC days) and to help debug MacOS specific dev environment issues my team has.
While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client, I've ended up using the Neo more than any of my other machines.
My Windows and Fedora machines have 2-4x the RAM but the Neo is just as responsive when juggling 20 Firefox tabs and a few other apps (mostly electron eg. Slack).
> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port.
You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around
It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy.
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
Both 10Gb/s and 8GB RAM limit come from iPhone 16 Pro chip limitations used in Neo. Next year's should have 12GB of RAM.
If they can maintain the same price tag for A19 based Macbook Neo with 12GB of RAM, I genuinely do not know how other companies can compete.
I’m waiting for the first A chip designed after the Neo decision - it’ll be interesting to see what they do knowing it’ll end up in a laptop. The obvious thing is “fixing” the USB problem.
They compete by not being a Mac.
This feels like a dumb question, but is there nothing to distinguish the USB 2 port from the USB 3 port? I think there is an alert to tell people if they are using a fast device in the slow port, but I wonder whether their target market will read the manual and know which is which. I feel they will be surprised when that pop-up appears.
The Apple Take a tour of [the] MacBook Neo page describes the ports by location only:
"The left port can support one external display and transfers data at USB 3 speeds (up to 10 GB/s). The right port transfers data at USB 2 speeds (up to 480 MB/s). You can charge your MacBook Neo and connect accessories using either port."
...and...
"Tip: As a best practice, charge your MacBook Neo using the right port (USB 2), which leaves the left port (USB 3) available for a display or for connecting accessories that can take advantage of the higher speeds."
The target market rarely connects anything to their laptop besides the charger. The most commonly connected would be crappy flash drives or a mouse. A few might connect to present on a TV/projector but those are already frustrating to connect to.
It’s a bizarre take.
It’s not functionally useless, it supports a mouse, keyboard, printer or even an iPhone (non pro) perfectly fine at full speed. It also probably has enough speed for the average cheap terrible quality USB drive that the buyer of a $600 PC might have.
This is a Silicon Valley tech geek take not a real world one.
The assortment of cheap USB sticks I have do not surpass 400mbit/sec. Not even the ones labeled USB3.0 or High Speed.
That is good enough speed for plenty of use cases.
"genuinely" is an AI tell now as well as doing things in physical world that don't make sense like walking to the car wash to wash your car if it's close, or maybe not using USB ports in the way they were designed...
Yeah, but that USB 3 port has to do a lot of heavy lifting. It 's also the only video out port making decent dongles a necessity. On a $600 PC it's not uncommon to have USB A (at 3.0 speeds), HDMI in addition to USB C and maybe even Ethernet.
>making decent dongles a necessity
I used a macbook air all throughout school, I never once owned a dongle or even plugged the thing in to an external monitor. My requirements were something that could run photoshop/illustrator and chrome. If I ever transfered something over USB it was a 300kb docx file or something else that would have copied instantly at 2.0 speeds.
I think there's a huge problem of tech enthusiasts projecting their own requirements on to a device that is designed for a very different person, and then declaring it unfit for use. Apple prioritized things that actually matter to students like battery life, lightness, price, and hinges that don't snap after the first year. Rather than tons of super fast IO and 32gb ram.
I went to school too. Sometimes at school we would do presentations using a projector connected by HDMI, maybe you could get away with the room computer but that only had USB A ports being some ancient desktop. Sometimes we did group projects and rather than huddle around one tiny 13" or 15" laptop screen we used one of the big ass TVs in the rentable group study rooms.
It's not tons of super fast IO. It's pretty basic IO.
Even then the problem can be solved by a cheap usb a + c flash drive. At least in offices every meeting room I’ve used for a while now has a usb c dongle for the TV.
HDMI has been less common than usb c on laptops for quite a long time now.
Also, a large fraction of students these days use Google Docs. I don’t have first-hand experience, but I imagine they would either share presentations with the account the shared computer is logged into, or log into their own account on the shared computer. No hardware involved either way.
The 2020 MBP wasn't much better in terms of IO and it was wildly successful as a $1200+ laptop.
I suspect the majority of $600 laptops live their entire functional life without anyone plugging anything other than a charger into them.
This cheap laptop is not for people with external displays. Almost everyone buying this would have no desire for an external display, they wouldn’t even feel this as a limitation.
If you want a separate display or super fast data transfers, more usb ports or more than 8MB of RAM buy one of the more expensive laptops.
> On a $600 PC
Yes, but it is uncommon for a $600 PC to have a beautiful screen, great trackpad, metal case, and top notch build quality. Also, the neo performs really really well.
A multi-port USB-C hub is about ten dollars on Amazon. If a Neo owner really needs additional ports they're a few bucks. For a vast majority of Neo owners the lack of ports is a non-issue and for the others that occasionally need the extra ports they're cheap.
I doubt there's many Neo buyers that really needed multiple Thunderbolt ports but decided to pick up the $600 entry level machine instead.
Sometimes on HN while this is technically correct I wonder if Mac users will truly notice. This is probably a limitation of the A19 chip. Many people just see the price tag and buy.
Yep. For me it was a perfect gift to replace moms 10+ year old Intel based MacBook Air.
USB 2.0 speeds are still fine for 99% of my USB transfer needs.
I agree that for the actual target market, 10Gb/s is probably not the thing that will make the machine feel limited
The author clearly had some involvement in the article, I wish they could have written it themselves. It reads like they gave Claude some benchmark data and got it to write the rest of the article.
AI or not, it's such a bad article that constantly repeats itself and spends more time (and words) promising the upcoming sections and "deep insights" than it does on actually writing any of those facts.
That is a hallmark of AI writing. It constantly thinks it has some deep insight.
This kind of breathless hyperbole is spreading everywhere. "The thing nobody's talking about" is basically never an appropriate phrase for a deeply technical article. But it's everywhere now.
I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying.
But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace.
The cats out the bag though. What can we do?
Yeah I noped out of that slop after "Bottom line:" and "Here's the math."
Shame because they clearly put a fair bit of work into it.
Apple makes unbelievably good hardware and software that just lasts and just works. Until it’s 7 years old. After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser.
I wish once you bought an Apple computer it was truly yours for as long as you wanted it instead of it being dictated by Apple.
Still Great computers though.
My 2019 MacBook Pro (the last year of Intel) is now 7 years old and runs "frustratingly" well ("frustrating" in the sense that I can't justify replacing it yet, despite how badly I want to get a new one!)
It is yours for as long as you want it, and it (mostly) runs all the software it was compatible with when you first bought it (there are some quirks around software you had access to but didn't install, like Garageband, where you may no longer be able to access the original version). Stuff doesn't just 'stop working', as a rule, but the rest of the world does move on. I'm not sure what you think should be done about that? All software should always be backwards compatible with older versions forever?
As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely, although with a different set of software to what you got the laptop with. 2026 is the year of the Linux Desktop!1! (in all seriousness though, it is actually quite good by now).
> Stuff doesn't just 'stop working'
They didn't say that. In fact they said the total opposite
> As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely
Somewhat true for Intel
Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
I did read between the lines here:
> After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser.
But I don't think the lines were particularly far apart.
> Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
M1 was six years ago, M2 was four, both within the seven years OP was talking about.
You can run Linux inside a VM on any Apple Silicon Mac already, even if there is no progress on native Linux on Apple Silicon.
The absolute contortions in logic
You can still get plenty of use out of them if you adjust expectations accordingly. I don't expect my 2013 iMac to do everything a brand new one can, but I do expect it to sit on my bench and function as a control station for my 3d printer... which it does fine, and will likely continue to do in perpetuity.
I bought a 2015 iMac last year for 100 euros at a thrift store. It’s a bit slow but works fine for YouTube etc. And the computer itself basically looks good as new - the screen is really beautiful.
Thinking I’ll try and install Linux on it at some point.
hardware? yes.
software? macos is a disaster after disaster, worse each year. currently deferring upgrade to tahoe for as long as corporate IT lets me.
Complete hogwash, of course. Tahoe is running just fine for me and for nearly hundred of my co-workers.
People complain about the strangest things too, like the corners of windows. I am resizing a hundred times a day and it works fine.
Fruit Construction Inc. makes great houses. Wish you could own them, but really great houses.
As a data point: Chromebooks get 10 years of updates.
I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
The article says the CPU costs Apple less than $50. Why aren't these types of chips for laptops more popular in the Windows and Linux world? Where are the Dell and Framework laptops that can compete with this thing on price, quality, and performance?
As an out-of-the-house computer, or a second/hand-me-down laptop, that tradeoff makes a lot more sense
I use it more and more as a primary, and it doesn't feel like I've made many tradeoffs at all. I even like the keys better, they aren't transparent, so the plastic feels different, but in a good way.
My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it.
It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
It might be more likely that it cannibalizes used Macbook Air sales.
After years of incremental upgrades to the Airs, a new entry level M5 Air gives you double the RAM, double the storage, and double the CPU and GPU performance of an M1 Air.
Hopefully used Airs will come up for sale more frequently, as they remain a step up from the Neo.
At double the price.
I'm in no way Apple fan, but M5 air with 512GB SSD and 32GB RAM costs $1500. Compared to M1 and 256GB and 16GB at $1200.
Adjusted for inflation it pretty much the same.
A refurbished M1 16GB RAM 256GB storage MacBook Air sells for $400 right now.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/356717541241
What's your point?
My M1 Air display just failed on me after 5 and half years of daily 10-16 hours of use. Considered how non repairable some parts in MacBooks are I'd rather recommend people buy more expensive new one. E.g you can find very good offers on new M2 M3 etc.
Sure.
Used M1 Airs are selling for roughly half the price of a new Neo.
which seem to be out of stock in any case, so probably not a loss for apple.
https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac
I am running Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex and Docker Desktop on a last generation Intel Air, that admittedly has 12 GB RAM. One has to be a bit careful with more apps. But I look forward to an upgrade. Maybe a Neo, but more likely a second hand M.
Whatever you do, do not try one out before you’re ready to buy.
How on Earth did you find a wife who codes? Asking for a friend.
GP expressly said the wife does not code: she uses claude.
I can top that (he said bitterly). My wife is still gorgeous after 30+ years of marriage and is a 10x programmer. But she was happy when given the choice not to work when we married, and hasn’t touched a compiler in decades.
I did well in business, but the family joke is that I’d be a billionaire if I could have monetized her.
Macbook Neo is amazing, so impressed what Apple can deliver for so little.
That said, my sister this morning asked if she should buy a Macbook Neo. I pointed her to a refurb M2 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM for the same price. I feel like that's the right call? Slower single-core performance but better multi-core and I think for 90% of normal people use cases the RAM is the limit before the CPU.
Are others making the same calculation?
I think I would cut the line at M3 or above. I think M2 uses an older architecture and it doesn't have WiFi 6E in it, and of course single core is a bit lower. Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
> Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.
It depends on the benchmark/workload. There isn't much of a difference per core between the M1 (3.7k) and A18 pro (4k) based on passmark, but I'm sure the A18 does much better in AI/similar stuff.
M2 Air with 16GB is the logical choice, especially if she doesn't have a habit of breaking/dropping laptops because probably she won't get apple care with a user air.
If the used ones are out there the more RAM is probably the way to go - but colors!
The reality is nobody is noticing differences between the M1 and anything afterwards, really - those that do will know enough to pick their laptop.
The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.
> if they do a second generation with A19 Pro
I'm pretty sure it's a "when", not "if".
Probably true. I hope they do it next year, but I suspect it might the following one.
Idk, I think they are regretting the unit economics of the Neo, and it is likely cannibalizing the Air sales.
Maybe some... but they're likely picking up a lot of people that would have gone with a $500-700 windows laptop instead.. and the margins are similar, so they're probably well ahead.
intentionally cannibalizing their own sales is iirc the official apple policy: iphone destroyed ipod and was one of the best business mives of all time
iPhones were more expensive than iPods though
I miss the iPod right now lol. Give me a nano!
If they can use this product to lock more people into their ecosystem it'll work. As a lifelong windows/android user, I've been eyeing up the neo.
Also, the Neo is just cheap enough that it's a product I'd consider buying that I don't need. I'm not in the market for a new laptop and certainly not an Air. So I'm a demographic considering this product that is not going to cannibalize their existing sales. There's gotta be at least a dozen people like me!
Do it. I've used Windows, Linux, and macOS over the years. Apple may be walled garden, but damn do they take care of their garden. It's worth trying out.
It’s a nice hardware. But that garden is full of bugs, not much less than if you have open windows.
You can use a small thermal pad on the current Neo to bridge to the case, which helps with temps quite a bit.
I do this with my old 2017 MacBook Air and while the case gets pretty hot, it reduces throttling on the old Intel processor a lot. It felt like a new computer after replacing the thermal paste and adding that pad.
Apparently the neo doesn't really get hot enough to really notice to the touch with the pad to the case.
if not half of the hn audience wouldnt have build bloated (react or others) websites, sure we wouldnt need more than 8gb memory just for browsing...
> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.
Love this
Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties.
Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.
Tragic
If you decry bloated web apps and use Chrome on their Mac... there's Safari. It's far more efficient and has a far snappier UI.
There's also Epiphany web browser for cross-platform desktop support and the Fulguris browser for Android.
It is noticeably faster, but Chrome is the new Internet Explorer in more ways than one, and many web pages don't work in WebKit browsers.
Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?
I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.
Chrome is the most advanced browsers on each platform. For example I have hundreds of tabs And chrome is the best at saving up RAM in the backgrouns
It's just closing the older tabs and re-rendering them from cache, when returned to. WebKit does the same thing.
Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
That reminds me of Microsoft's Active Desktop in Windows 98, when the desktop had widgets that were web pages and would show webpage-related errors when something went wrong. We've really gone full circle over the last three decades.
It's not so much "full circle" as we never came up with a better way to render general purpose rich text content than html/css to begin with
It's not really using it for much text, though. It's mostly buttons and controls, which GDI, QuickDraw, and Motif did much better back then and newer toolkits like GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, DWM, Cocoa, etc are great at today.
Web browsers come preinstalled and come embedded throughout the os.
But, webkit is much better than chrome in memory usage. If only we could force slack and vs code to use the engine better suited for the job.
Isn't Slack just mIRC with a skin? /s
I occasionally port software I make to MacOS, while mainly being a Linux user, and I settled on a base model, 8 GB M2 Mac Mini for this as well. If it's zippy there, it'll be zippy on the larger models.
On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.
The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)
Meanwhile GitHub tab in Firefox/Chrome eats 6GB RAM alone.
because they decided that running elasticsearch on your machine is a great idea!
GitHub, GitHub…where else have I seen that name recently?
It’s 8GB because they want to sell you a 16GB model for the same price when the dram crisis is over.
That way the marketing can be: double the memory for the same price. Apple has done this again and again, the more time people are spending talking about one single deficiency in your product, the less time they are spending on any other product. Then you solve that single issue in the next cycle.
> when the dram crisis is over.
When it's over, Neo will be long obsolete.
I give it six months to a year.
All the current fabs are trying to balance current production with building next gen scaled up facilities. Can’t have both.
More like 5 to 10 years.
I understand the premise and it might be cool, but it does feel weird when your 6 year old playstation has more RAM than your laptop. Heck, even Nintendo Switch 2 has more RAM.
Does it? If you browse the web and run Excel, it makes sense to me that you wouldn't need the same specs as when running video games?
IMO developers should be forced to run on such computers, such that they would care a little bit about optimisation.
Depends what you're browsing and what's in your sheets? You can't play games on this computer then? How about a phone then? My 3 year old phone has 50% more RAM.
We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.
I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
how do you select text?
Three finger drag. That was the best and unique thing about apple touchpads since, like, early 2000s, but then it was buried deep down the menus and forgotten for some reason. But seriously - try it, you might never go back.
The trackpads on the old (pre-force-touch MacBooks) were really good. The force-touch is (IMO) slightly better, but it's a slight difference.
I'll agree they were all great, but I liked the change to force-touch more.
The uni-body pre force-touch trackpads clicked on a hinge from the top and you would need to press much harder in that area.
It’s certainly better than most trackpads on non Macs, especially because it “clicks” ok even on the top part.
I've had many MacBook Pros but never thought about that. I guess mine has too. How do I use it? I just tap lightly to click.
pretty much the only time I use it is to lookup the definition of a word by highlighting it and force clicking. Can't do that with the magic mouse.
Interesting. I find it easier just to CTRL-click it and pressing down on a flat surface.
I wish the author had toned down the chatgpt style of the writing. e.g. headers that say "What You’re Getting for $599". Another example: "Read those numbers again. The same chip that posts 3,569 single-core when cold delivers 476 after five minutes of sustained load. That is an 87% reduction in single-core performance on the same hardware, running the same benchmark, separated by nothing but heat."
That second phrase did not feel too ChatGPT-like to me. The throttling behavior really does feel quite extreme and unprecedented as described, more typical of a mobile phone than a traditional PC. By analogy, even the crappiest and cheapest mobile PCs will not go as far as throttling the processor from a nominal 3.6 GHz to 480 MHz after five minutes of CPU-intensive load.
I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
You tried arstechnica? they do pretty good reviews.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...
While I got me a 16GB Macbook Air, I appreciate that Apple continues to make 8GB devices. This indicates for me also a commitment for not bloating up the OS (like Windows did) too much and caring about memory efficiency.
I don't understand this logic. You can live with 8 GB but there is nothing to "appreciate". It's enough for some stuff but totally short for other stuff.
I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.
I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.
It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised.
I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day.
For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.
Buy one and try it. Apple returns are hassle free in my experience.
it also looks really nice. at the Apple Store, the chassis seems well machined. the "cheaper" apple logo insert also clearly also incurred some expense as it fit into the lid perfectly. Hinge, keyboard and trackpad felt good. Design team clearly took time to telegraph craft and quality in their product.
Was it really necessary to cut out Magsafe?
I feel like I end up stumbling on the charging cable at least one or two times. Plus, I wouldn't be able to re-use the old Macbook charger I have :(
This makes no actual sense as a complaint.
The M-series all have chargers with a USB-C socket on them that the cable is plugged in to, so you would have been able to use the PSU from any M-series MacBook - even if they were the models prior to magsafe being re-introduced.
The magsafe in the M-series is not the same as magsafe 1 or 2, so they are not compatible and you would have needed to buy an adapter (and I have no idea if Apple has even made a first party version of this.) So you'd need a new adapter.
On the other hand, any USB-C charger that delivers the right voltage will charge the Neo.
Just buy a magnetic usb-c cable if it’s very important to you
The USB-C standard doesn't allow for a magnetic attachment. Besides, those are notoriously unsafe and probably even dangerous to use.
i bought this for my girlfriend as an entrypoint laptop considering she is coming from Windows - and overall satisfied. the battery though could be improved especially considering for a couple of hundred bucks more we could have gotten a used macBook air
Battery issues perhaps? I haven't charged my Neo since I bought it 8 days ago. It came with a 78% battery charge and is now at 53%.
Hmm besides the 8 Gb being there mostly for market segmentation...
Does this mean the Neo/Air aren't useful for lightweight gaming at all? Lightweight as in indie-ish games, not as in session length.
> If Apple had branded the A18 Pro as “M4 Lite,” nobody would have blinked.
Apple fumbled the ball here. They should have called it the "M4 Mini", and this device the "MacBook mini".
Also, OP: Have you considered doing this professionally? I'd read this as the next AnandTech.
"Mini" usually denotes physical size. Is the neo physically smaller than the air?
Smaller, yes. Not thinner.
Recently dived into mac world (air) too after decades of win/linux.
Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed.
Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?
The cmd+q is the "quit" command. And the convention in single-window apps (or ones that have a single unambiguous main window) is that the window only closes when the app is quit. So this is command you have to give.
For "document-based" apps (think almost anything where you open multiple files), the application can stay running even if there are no open windows. So you have both cmd+q and cmd+w available to you.
You can probably come up with some apps that don't cleanly fit these two, but that is what Apple has.
As to screen shot commands, it is a three-key chord because it is system-wide, and they did not want to step on any toes that the apps might have. And there are a few versions: shift-command-3 takes the entire screen shift-command-4 takes either a window or a section (press space bar to switch between them) shift-command-5 opens a more menu-based system that includes a timer
Why 3, 4, and 5 (and not 1 or 2)... I don't know. Maybe there was something in those spots at some point.
Command - Shift - 1 was "Eject Floppy Disk in Drive 1" and Command - Shift - 2 was "Eject Floppy Disk in Drive 2". I kid you not, that's how old these keyboard shortcuts are, they date back to the 80's.
> keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed
You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app). You don't even need to memorize them.
When I first switched to Mac after using Ubuntu for 4 years before that, I didn't expect this level of customization. It's misunderstood because Apple doesn't advertise this.
>You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app)
That's actually my other complaint. "Fixing" problems with the OS with mystery apps.
Connected an external mouse. Mouse wheel is inverted...weird? Google it. Yeah you can toggle it. Thank goodness. Apple knew people use mice. Oh but that inverts the trackpad too. WHAT? You're joking. I need to pick between a sane trackpad and sane mouse? I own both and need both to work to work in a not upside down manner.
Climb onto an AI and ask it what to do because this is insanity like surely not this can't be how it is. LLM goes yeah no that's just macos you need to install a mystery app to unfuck it.
Don't get me wrong my overall experience is positive and there has been the expected learning curve which is fine ofc, but also a fair bit of "what the actual F how are people OK with this".
This one was shocking to me too. I get the argument around the upside down trackpad, but inverting the mouse wheel with no built in open is insane. I also have a mystery app who's only just is to correct this stupid behavior.
One thing that helped me make the transition to nearly full time with the Mac was remapping Command. I remapped Command to Control, and put Control on the Meta / Windows key (I mostly use an external kb).
This kept my decades of muscle memory almost intact since I'm so used to Control being the primary modifier in Linux and Windows. And, weirdly enough, it helped me learn the new MacOS shortcuts since the patterns were now centered on Control instead of the Command key.
You can make the switch without having to use 3rd party software. The Keyboard section of Settings will let you adjust the modifier keys on a per keyboard basis. With different settings for internal, external, etc. if you wish. And it will let you remap Caps Lock if you prefer that to be something else.
cmd-W closes windows and cmd-Q quits the App. That Apps can stay open without having a Window is actually useful (at least it makes sense to me).
@screenshot
Mac has always been kind of amazing for the granular options you get to take screenshots out of the box.
• Command - Shift - 3 | Takes a fullscreen pic of the entire display. Loads a preview in the bottom right corner. Click to expand, and from there edit, share, save, delete, etc.
• Command - Shift - 4 | Turns your mouse cursor into a crosshair. Drag to create a rectangular window. Takes a capture of the contents when done. Escape or right-click to cancel. Preview loads the same as above.
• Command - Shift - 5 | Brings up a rectangular section that can be moved around and resized.
But any shortcut can be remapped:
Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Screenshots
>cmd-W closes windows and cmd-Q quits the App.
Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
That's 3 different apps made by apple and preinstalled by apple...three different behaviours
Cmd-W closes the current *document*. In tabbed apps, the document is the tab.
It is true that Finder is always running, you can’t quit it or kill it.
I'm so used to macos now that I don't even realize that this is confusing. What OS did you use before, windows? is there no distinction between quiting an app and closing a window on windows?
The standard behavior is that:
Command Q quits the currently active application.
Command W closes the current window without quitting the active application.
>Command Q quits the currently active application.
Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
>Command W closes the current window
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
That's 3 different apps made by apple and preinstalled by apple...three different behaviours
>standard behavior
It isn't and its a tribute to human adaptability to chaos that mac crowd thinks this is standardization
That actually makes sense, because you cannot quit Finder. I haven't used macs for a couple years now but I'm taking your word for it. Finder hasn't been quittable for as long as i can remember, so you stop trying to quit it.
> Open Finder. cmd+Q. Does it quit anything? Nope nothing happens.
You can’t quit finder - it’s a fundamental part of the hi that always has to run.
> Safari
Multiple tabs in a window are intended to be treated the same as multiple windows. This has been the case since macOS made tabbed interface components a standard part of the OS.
> Open Apps
What do you mean? Which apps?
>You can’t quit finder - it’s a fundamental part of the hi that always has to run.
That's what google told me after I set out to discover what rules are behind the inconsistency. The solution to inconsistent shortcuts is apparently memorizing which parts of the software that is PREINSTALLED is considered part of the OS and which parts are not.
>Which apps?
Not apps small a...Apps big A...the thing apple macs ship with on the dock and literally entitled "Apps". That baked into the default install window just behaves differently from both finder style built in OS things and Safari also built in but different built in not part of OS. Why? I don't fuckin know. Neither Q nor W make it go away. OK so hit esc. Does that make the window go away? It turns it into a smaller window that now performs a different function?!?!? Spotlight. OK so now i need to memorize what is an preinstalled OS window, preinstalled not os window, preinstalled not os window not app window but some sort of launcher I guess?
So a new user is basically guessing which of THREE keys combos may or may not make the window go away or possible do nothing or do something else entirely (close tab).
I feel like I'm being gaslight by all the hn users telling me yeah that makes sense
> Not apps small a...Apps big A.
That's a fancy spotlight search modal, not an application or window...
> Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window.
No it doesn't, it closes the window. Look at your dock - minimized windows show up on the other side of the | divider with a mini representation of their contents.
> I feel like I'm being gaslight by all the hn users telling me yeah that makes sense
It feels more like you're willfully railing against the way macOS is because you're not used to it. If you remove your preconceptions about how things should be (and keep in mind that macOS defined most of the things we're talking about 30+ years ago, so it's not like there was a standard to follow), it really does make sense. CMD-W closes the current doc/tab/window, CMD-Q quits the application.
The only time that doesn't work is when the application writer intentionally breaks it (and the macOS community typically rages about that - looking at you chrome!), or you're not dealing with a normal application/app/program (ie you can't close a system prompt with a command targeted at applications).
What app doesn’t support cmd-w?
Some apps close window. Some apps close tabs. Some apps can close tab or window. Some apps require double press (chrome)
That’s chrome being a dick - it chrome has an option to undo that (and it’s cmd-q they dickified, not cmd-w).
Open apple TV. cmd+w -> minimizes window. Open Safari. same keys - cmd+w. Closes current window? Nope. Closes tab. Open Apps. Cmd+w. Does it close window? Close Tab? Nope...third option...does fucking nothing.
As an outsider it boggles my mind that apple crowd doesn't notice how all over the place macos shortcuts are.
The “8gb gamble” could be seen as a misleading headline.
The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.
One good thing about the 8gig Neo means that I think Apple will at least work to support M1 8gig for a few more years!!
for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.
Do people really do that when out in the wild?
It's one of the nicest things to do if you love computers, and great for your health compared with staying indoors.
> Could one actually work like this, typing and everything? After my “heart-rate discovery” I decided I had to try it. I thought I’d have to build something myself, but actually one can just buy “walking desks”, and so I did. And after minor modifications, I discovered that I could walk and type perfectly well with it, even for a couple of hours. I was embarrassed I hadn’t figured out such a simple solution 20 years ago. But starting last fall—whenever the weather’s been good—I’ve tried to spend a couple of hours of each day walking outside like this
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-workin...
How do you deal with screen glare?
You get an Apple product. At least, for me it was that simple. The ThinkPad I had was pretty high end, and I was using polarized glasses and even a sun shade to work at the park while the girls played. Bought a MacBook and the screen seems to crisply outshine even the sunniest days -- I haven't had to worry about outdoor use since, to my recollection.
+1 to this. Those screens are great in ways that specs just don't show you.
Back when I did much work outside, I used a laptop that had accidental transflective characteristics. In bright sunlight, the LCD actually become quite clear monochrome, with some pixels acting as mirrors and others not, but I don't think they designed the LCD to do that.
I'm not OP but I work outside and use light mode. Macs are generally fairly bright as long as you aren't in direct sunlight. Solarized light mode for the win though.
Moving to the UK is one option. It's been cloudy for about 7 months!
LLM addicts do. The AI overlord said to touch grass, because it is beneficial, but they've glanced over the main part of "disconnect from everything".
It can't run LLMs very well, you'll be limited to tiny models with no coding ability and they'll be slow.
i assumed you're connected to internet and using codex/claude code
I'm pretty disappointed in the Neo's battery life though, it limits a lot how much you can do on the go.
How fast can it recharge is probably the main limiting factor. I’m used to finding power wherever I can from the bad old days, but the M1 laptops have spoiled me.
Love how the post begins praising Anandtech, then proceeds to write the rest of the content as if it was written by Anand himself. Great nod!
I'll be impressed when Apple can make a charger that can stay in the wall.
I take Max Neo as a toy computer. Maybe a good choice for those non-tech users, cuz it's enough for they daily use: writing docs, watching videos, etc. A good marketing product.
This article feels written by Claude
Id pay an extra $150 for the haptic trackpad tbh
How about $299?
let's make it $1099 and we'll throw a monitor stand for free
keep in mind that installing thermal pad will void warranty.
Source: apple store staff
What if you cool the chassis really really well??? Does throttling go away?
https://youtu.be/lswbpVtAhrc?si=N_z_g0aZmoOUz_Cs
> tl;dw Copper shim mod (using laptop bottom as heatsink) leads to 2x performance over stock.
I may buy a Neo just to do this. Intrigued.
I think the only gap I’ve come across is that trying to drive two monitors through a display link dock it doesn’t really have the GPU to not have that be laggy.
12gb bump soon? I don’t see that happening. It’s Apple.
$600 laptop? I don’t see that happening. It’s Apple.
The A19 Pro has 12GB. I would bet on an upgrade to that 2 years after release, but a one year update is possible.
I’ve heard rumors that they’ve run out of A18s and had to pay special for more, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle this going forward.
Why is the author considering Claude Code a "real developer workflow"? Unless you're doing complex tool calling, is CC really resource-heavy?
Why does a "real developer workflow" need to be resource-heavy?
I am heavy developer guy.
and this is my developer. She consumes one hundred fifty gigabytes and runs two hundred thousand dollar, custom-tooled GPUs at ten thousand tokens per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to develop…for twelve seconds.”
[Laughs]
“Oh my Claude, who touched settings.json? Alright…Who touched my LLM!?”
IDE written in Java indexing 10K files, compiling + running spring boot apps that take 30 seconds to start on the M4, or C++ compilation, or rust compilation.. Or maybe you were sarcastic?
Yes, Claude Code can use a lot of RAM.
> Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that.
Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.
Apple's throttling was an undisclosed optimization that was controversial because it was not disclosed. The optimization itself was not controversial. It was not premature either. If the battery's measurable levels (impedance, current, voltage, etc.) fell out of nominal range, then throttling occurred. FWIW I somewhat resent having to 'defend' Apple here, but your narrative frame here has too much speculation for a situation finalized in fact in 2017, almost 10 years ago.
It wasn't an "optimization", it's because aging batteries have unstable voltage and the phone was likely to shut down otherwise.
That is an optimisation for stability of the phone over its lifetime.
This might win big in emerging markets where there is a desire for a high-quality laptop for non-programmers.
I wanted to ask "hm is 8GB that bad for coding? I don't use that much anyway" and now I look at my Activity Monitor and I somehow use 22GB, I don't know why.
Why is Rust Analyzer running and taking 2GB? I don't even write in Rust. Each Electron app takes 300-400MB and for some reason Ghostty takes 400 MB... ok I take it back, I couldn't use 8GB.
I bought an Indigo Neo last week. I am utterly in love with machine. It's honestly exceeded all my expectations.
I have a more powerful Mac for "serious" development work, so I figured the Neo would practical to buy for travel purposes. Honestly, there is something really reassuring about traveling/running around town with a $499.99 + tax laptop. I do not treat it poorly, but if something spills on it, I drop it, etc. stomaching the damage is much easier than a $2.5k MBP.
Seriously what is this ugly engagement optimized LLM slop of an article doing here yet again on the HN front page?
I love the Neo as much as any other enthusiast, so yes, the subject matter is subjectively “cool”.
But this “article” is indigestible. Not only it regurgitates the same thing over and over (and it has links to other articles on the same page where they already did the same), on top of that the writing style, content, intentionality does not exist in the slightest. I feel like having been offered chocolate, but having received artificial cocoa flavored petrochemicals.
The author appears to have done actual measurements and put in the work. I agree that the article probably has been run through an LLM, but as long as there's actual new (for me!) information, i don't really care
The question thus, is how does the Neo perform if I put it on top of an ice pack?
Yup, was wondering the same, that would be a great follow up article by author
Or mod it so it burns your junk but makes you the heatsink :D
A lot of people have used a thermal pad to bridge the CPU to the case.. it doesn't really get that hot, and you get a >5% performance bump.
I already have half dozen over decade old laptops with 4-8GB of RAM in the drawer, don't need any more.
The most interesting part of this is the 8GB RAM decision. Soldered 8GB in 2026 is the sort of compromise that looks fine on day one and painful in year three
It's not "soldered". It's literally part of SOC package as it's comes out of TSMC lines. Using exactly the same iPhone chip is kind a the only reason they can target this price target.
Hate to defend Apple here, but there are so many more garbage laptops out there for the same price tag that can as well just go directly into landfill. Apple at least have the volume to make sure Mac software actually works on said 8GB.
If Apple manage to decrease market share of other e-waste manufacturers it's good on me. At least these laptops will live 5-7 years as we browser machines.
Yes they will reduce but for a start you have to buy yet another low end laptop. This time will be different.
There is massive percent of population whose needs will be 200% covered with Neo performance. Most people just need a laptop for web browser, watching videos, occasional app use.
Problem with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is not performance, but horrific build quality, displays, webcams, audio and keyboards. This is something Apple have solved. Also there is no Windows which solves a lot of problems.
I was doing gamedev for years on M1 Air with 16GB / 256GB and some other software engineering too FFS. Surely non-power-users can live with less.
> Yes, 8GB of RAM is a real limitation. But give it a year and the next version will almost certainly ship with 12GB and a modest CPU bump.
We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?
According to some reviews I’ve seen, it tops out at around 60.
You can have as many as you like, but Safari will kill them when you're not looking.
How locked down macOS is these days? Is it still possible to use OS without account and freely "sideload" software applications? Is homebrew still a thing?
Yes, yes, and yes.