This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts.
Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.
The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.
This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.
The ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts
I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only needs use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.
Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.
This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).
Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.
There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.
Crazy good market segmentation by Apple here - it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad, and still have to upgrade to a "real" laptop post-grad.
Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.
Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.
Only if you want to take notes with a pen and prefer digital over paper. For me that's terrible, but some kids swear by it. I think if I grew up on it, it'd be different.
Homework for things like algebra and later calculus definitely is interesting to do on an iPad, as the ratio of time spent thinking:writing is high while you're learning.
But pure notetaking where the thinking:writing ratio is very low? I'd much prefer to type than write on a screen.
I have spent most of my life in a lazy couch posture and a laptop and keyboard doesn’t fit that lifestyle choice. I need to make more apps for people with my lifestyle choice, like IPad IDEs for development.
iPad + voice, this seems like my new lifestyle choice and it looks like it’s going to work out too.
I think human beings need to move away from sitting at the typewriter like it’s 1930. We’re more than this.
I used to use both...laptop for quick typing, and then the iPad for hand-written notes or annotation.
The OneNote app sync is quick enough that I could type lecture notes on the laptop, and then quickly switch to the same document on my iPad to sketch out a diagram. It was overkill for sure, but very useful
I mean at this point with the latest ones, an iPad Pro with it's keyboard/trackpad accessory and a pencil could probably manage both for you pretty damn well.
In theory yes, but in reality barely any developer (at least the mainstream ones) make their app available on MacOS, and nobody enjoys interacting with a touch-screen optimized app with mouse/trackpad
That's an odd choice (for said developers), given in most cases it's a matter of checking a box. The second half of your comment is a generalization though.
iPads are pretty common in education for the drawing capabilities. You can take notes by typing for most things, but when you get diagram/math heavy, you just cannot beat the pencil. I think it's probably pretty poor value of the small ability you gain to cost, relative to other things you could do (I like paper/pencil personally) but I see the use case, if limited.
This. My daughter is a high-school junior, and she's been asking for a laptop going into her senior year/college. This is exactly who Apple is going after.
Apparently the two USB-C ports are different specs [1]
- USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support
- USB 2.0 480 Mbps
Both support charging but only one supports higher speeds and DisplayPort (A18 Pro limitation, as Apple probably doesn't dedicate much silicon to USB I/O).
Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)
Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...
Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.
Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.
As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.
Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.
Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.
The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.
Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.
But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.
Yeah I think there are a couple of advantages of a Macbook versus a Dell mobile workstation. it is definitely lighter and more pleasant got general use. I'm only concerned that modern apps usually take amount of RAMs that are close to or north of 500MB, so if you have say a word processor plus 10+ Chrome tabs you quickly run out of RAMs (I tend to have way more on my personal gig but I'm a developer). But maybe swapping is not a big issue on the Mac as both comments said.
RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.
I have one of those, it's perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn't a lot, but I've never run into issues with it not being enough.
The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.
$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.
These are probably gonna have a decent resell value. Macbook products have a very higher resell value compared to say chromebooks/normal laptops.
I can imagine schools buying them for their students and then taking them after the semester is over and then giving to next but also reselling it at a very nice value if they might want the next line of product at a decent price.
Also this not only applies to school but normal people who buy the Macbook Neo too
The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!
It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!
I had the 11” dual core i7 and I wouldn’t even call it slow (for its time). Loved that little machine and I keep longing for that form factor but with modern specs.
I was thinking yesterday while reading the Thinkpad repairability story that I would pay an unreasonable amount for basically this laptop in the chassis of an X220, with a 7 row keyboard and Mac touchpad.
This is a 13" 16:9 screen. A little smaller than the current 13.6" 16:10 MacBook Air in display size but not really any more portable. Weight is the same as the 13.6" MacBook Air.
This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
“If you see anybody [building electron apps] in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere!” - a reasonable person, probably
How anyone could think their chat app or text editor should be able to bring a 32GB 8-core machine to a crawl is beyond me. I can have about 200 browser tabs open, but one discord chat open in the background and I’m stuttering. It’s offensive.
Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.
Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.
> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.
That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.
The performance gap between Apple’s flash and a typical aftermarket NVMe drive in a Windows laptop is more attributable to controller design and integration than to trace length.
If by basic you mean running a simple Python script then sure; but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter.
The relationship between coding ability and memory requirement is nonlinear, right? Just a short Python code and an ide? Probably fine. Some complex ide with all sorts of agentic stuff? Need more ram. True enlightenment? Vim even with some unnecessary extensions will run on megabytes.
> but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter
I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.
On the other hand, Apple pushes Xcode & iPhone development quite heavily to students (and not say Python or JS), so it’s definitely something they care about.
There can be different cohorts of students. If a student is at the point where they can start exploring iOS development they can perhaps have a swing at it with this machine. In reality, they'll have been using this machine, know enough about the limitations, and be thinking of upgrading.
Kids already are well aware of iPhone upgrades. Parents will get them this machine. They'll get going and soon enough be badgering their parents for an upgrade to a more competent machine. That is all by design while being an affordance for people who can only get in at the cheap end.
Atleast on Linux, I have been able to do almost everything in 8gb without any concern but I have the macbook air which has 16 gb and this can also do everything pretty much.
So IMO in 8GB most types of coding is possible actually.
But regarding Xcode+Iphone simulator, I am not sure if that's possible tho. It's possible to run android simulator on Linux 8 GB with waydroid while being pretty smooth. So theoretically could be possible but I am not familiar with building with Xcode/Iphone simulator.
I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.
Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…
Thread’s been hijacked by Apple simps and Linux command-line purists, all trying to outdo each other in a kind of poverty Olympics. 8GB or RAM is not fine, and if it is you don't need laptop.
Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.
I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.
12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
That's true, but I just know a bunch of people looking at this will have that lingering thought at the back of their minds on how that extra 50% gets you just enough little improvements across the board to make them second guess.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.
There is no sense getting anything but these sorts of Macs, or the maxed-out top of the line ones even considering the hilarious prices. Either get the entry level or go hard.
I've done both with success: am still riding a maxed out M1 Ultra Mac Studio which hasn't lost a step, no matter what I ask it to do. For a daily driver that doesn't try to do the most extreme things (think: able to edit your 6K videos but not scrub them, and media storage space can't live on the actual machine but only on some outboard storage) the base models of these will be a breath of fresh air. This is of course assuming the liquid-glassification of the OS doesn't ramp up, rendering the system unusable to actual Mac users.
I really want this to work for me too, just because of those colors, but the RAM is really the only issue. Oh well, at least this forces every other budget laptop to compete harder.
It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.
I really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e
The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.
This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.
I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.
First at simple tech spec glance they're below the entry level Neo except they both have larger displays, but obviously as Neo costs $250 more.
But the question then is what do you get for that $250 more. I think once you take into consideration the finish, keyboard, webcam/mic, speakers, display, and even Apple's support which can be sometimes pretty decent, you're looking at a pretty strong contender.
The problem I expect though is that people tend not to be educated consumers and don't look into the other aspects outside of specs or cost, so Apple is really selling on branding, word of mouth, and probably through their salespeople at the stores. But also, if we start seeing these one the shelves of JB-Hifi, Officeworks, etc. (for US your local Best Buy I guess), then it could penetrate the market well.
Assuming the Neo embodies Apple's signature quality and reliability, I hope it does well for first time laptop users / early education market.
I think branding and reputation basically encapsulates all the build quality and support and stuff you mentioned. Non-technical consumers will see this, decide that it's probably better than a Chromebook, and be right.
There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.
Anyone think you'll actually be able to do anything on a Mac with only 8gb of RAM? I had a Macbook Pro before with 16gb of RAM and it was constantly running out of RAM and showing me the Force Quit Applications dialog. Constantly...
8GB RAM was actually pretty workable for lightweight work… until they shipped Tahoe. Now macOS is just a slog doing even the most basic things unless you’re at 16GB. Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.
My M1 8GB Air did great before Tahoe; even medium complexity Xcode projects ran fine on it with other apps running. Since I made the mistake of upgrading it to Tahoe, it’s too painful to work in those projects.
It chugs if I launch a node server yes but that's an outlying use case for an 8gb air.
AI is so good these days I am using the laptop for quick changes more often, as I just push every change. I rarely need to fiddle. The general experience of using my desktop and laptop are converging.
Tahoe is a massive regression in my personal experience (16GB here). So many random bugs and menu bar pop-up slowdowns (how is the system menu bar this unresponsive?).
Spotlight has gotten so bad, I can literally count the time it takes between typing the app name and the result showing up in the dropdown. Ended up switching Spotlight to Tuna.
Oh my god, yes. Spotlight on Tahoe is a joke. Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal? You’d think those would be in an always available cache guaranteed to always show up instantly? So many questions.
> Why will it so often not display any results at all, even for system apps like Safari or Terminal?
I've experienced this too, even after giving spotlight multiple shots months apart. For your sanity, I say just stop using spotlight. Don't let Apple steal your valuable waking hours with their crap QA.
It would be sensible/wonderful for Apple to release a deliberately lighter version of MacOS for these laptops; but their intransigence and (e.g.) willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back year after year suggests they won’t.
Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.
Honestly, we’re not the target market for this. I’m pretty sure at this price point though, it will sell like hotcakes. Once people get slightly into the ecosystem, it’s usually a big win for Apple since their stickiness is from my experience of people around me undeniable once you get one product
I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.
As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.
However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.
The Neo is definitely a response to Chromebooks. Apple bet on the iPad for the education market and lost that bet for obvious reasons. This was already obvious 10 years ago when I was working in edtech.
They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that?
Chromebooks are much more secure for enterprise and education.
macOS is awful to manage on an enterprise and education level. This will always be Apple’s achilles heel in truly breaking into this market. Admins will push back.
Google has Security down to a science. ChromeOS has little to no malware. Google is constantly reporting malware and exploits to Apple so they can patch active vulns.
I’m not sure about that. Physical build quality on chromebooks is poor. My kids school switched off because the kids were always breaking them.
iPads a Macs stand up to much more abuse by students.
MacOS has very little malware even though users have more access to do things.
All google data is used to train AI and advertise. I’d like to not have that near my kids. Would rather have Apple’s “make money off hardware” from a data privacy standpoint.
I never talked about build quality. There are in fact nice quality ChromeOS devices, it’s just arguably never worth the added expense.
The argument with Chromebooks is you can usually buy 4 of them at the cost of a single Mac.
My point is device management and security. This is what enterprise and education cares about and scopes around.
macOS is not nearly as robust or secure to manage as ChromeOS, and Windows flys above both with almost every single feature being manageable at a domain level.
Also your AI point is moot. Enterprise and Education have much different terms than consumers.
You think Apple is letting Google, Slack, and Zoom use their internal company data for training?
Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook / education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.
So really this appears to be a replacement for the M1 MacBook Air that they were still selling at Walmart.
But now more colorful and official.
I’m pretty interested in benchmarks. We haven’t had a phone chip and a desktop chip running the same OS so we could compare them better with benchmarks since the original Apple Silicon dev kits.
Also it’s $499 to start for students, which is impressive.
But the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me. Having that is such a huge improvement over having to type passwords constantly.
Phones contain 3+ cameras, OLED displays, FaceID, wireless charging, and cellular modems. Plus there is a price to be paid for the latest and greatest in miniaturization, machining, and packaging.
Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.
Unless the "leftovers" in question are "leverover capacity on the previous process node that doesn't have pricing competition, so Apple's able to continue to demand all of the supply at their desired price point"
It's possible that they are selling it close to cost to get more young people into the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem. If you can translate each one of these into a "Pro" device sale down the line then it's a win for Apple.
The same way that Apple can sell a low end iPad with cellular for $479 that has a larger screen and larger battery. If the iPhone wasn’t heavily subsidized and/or available on installment plans, Apple would have to lower prices.
On the other hand, the iPhone is water proof, made of sturdier materials to survive falls, has cellular, and the high end ones have more memory
because all those prices are artificial, Apple is charging what they think they can get away with and also betting on making more money in the long run with subscriptions to iCloud and their other services.
probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it's not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.
You're confusing the sales price with the manufacturing cost. They will continue to set whatever prices people will pay because it's a walled garden and there's no other company building Apple (MacOS) compatible laptops.
I completely understand that as a cheap one, it has to be worse than macbook air in some aspect to make the product line work. However I'm genuinely curious why it's thicker and no lighter than the Macbook Air, while at the same time has shorter battery life, less ports, no keyboard light, and a smaller chip? Do they put dead weight inside it or something?
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...
Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.
And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.
Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
Until today if they had less than around $800 to spend my answer would be "Don't buy a new MacBook from Apple" because there isn't one that cheap. Maybe look for a used or refurbished M1-M2 model.
Today it's the MacBook Neo unless you have a higher budget and want a nicer screen and more power. Then it's the MacBook Air, unless you do serious photography, video, audio, or development work then it's a MacBook Pro.
It's still a pretty simple, linear progression up the line.
Steve Jobs presided over an era where they were selling:
- A white plastic 13" MacBook
- An aluminum 13" MacBook
- 13", 15", and 17" Macbook Pro
- A high end 13" MacBook Air that thermally throttled and was more expensive than most of their other laptops
I'm now a 15'' Air user after always being pro. I notice no difference in performance but enjoy the lighter form factor and damn does it run cool compared to the pro.
Replacing my iPhone was a nothing burger of choice, on paper the iPhone 15 pro was the best feature set for value vs buying a new iPhone 17, but Apple know that so don't sell the older models directly when the new models come out.
There's really limited impactful innovation when you get into the details.
When Steve came back Apple was months from bankruptcy; their product lineup was full of duds.
Today Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and every product line is ruthlessly optimized/scrutinized to maximize their revenue/supply chain use/suss out consumer needs for the next cycle.
There isn’t a world where Apple has a $4T market cap and where their notebook offering fits in a neat 2x2.
Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.
However, with the recent Macbook Neo. I actually went ahead and recommended Neo. Especially to a friend of mine whose going into college soon and has asked me what they should buy.
Now the 8gb can be concern to some but not to many IMO. And I am also feeling just a bit optimistic that Apple will realize that the largest criticism of this product can be that it doesn't have 16GB otherwise even more people can buy so in the future, I expect 16 GB to be possible too (When Ram bubble finally bursts)
People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.
Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.
With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.
I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.
MacBook Air - mid range mid price, good quality, basically as functional as the Pro now.
The price of the Neo is very compelling if they want it for light duty work though.
And obviously high end is high end but those people know who they are
I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)
Run a Linux VM (basically no performance impact) and you have a killer quality Linux laptop. Sure it’s not the same as a dedicated Linux system but with these specs you’re going to do lighter work away from your desk anyway.
Or perhaps this will be the perfect machine for the Asahi team to focus on…lots of demand at this price point, and a lean Linux install would make this machine fly.
It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
Looks pretty cool. I feel they got some features right for their target demographics:
- 2 fun colors + 2 regular
- The Magic Keyboard looks like it has a decent amount of travel and should hold up well
- Headphone port, recognizing that wired headphones are way more durable in a classroom setting
- Decent price and display, though I wonder about performance w/ Tahoe
I don't currently have a modern macOS machine, so a basic machine like this could be useful to have around even though I daily drive Linux now. Maybe it'll get Asahi support!
the market segmentation is nice, it'll do well with the colors and all -- but the unified memory thing is the literal only reason to want to dip a toe in apple whatsoever; with these numbers id rather just spend ~300 on a Chuwi or equivalent white label 'ultrabook' with double the specs.
although it IS hillarious to read a group of enthusiasts in 2026 screaming "8GB IS FINE!" -- meanwhile people want more ram on their RPis..
I have an M4 Air and I just pre-ordered 3 Neos. One for myself, one for my niece as a present and one for my parents to replace their Windows laptop.
I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.
I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.
This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
All I want is a MacBook Pro with a funky color like citrus.
I always buy the new color option from Apple when getting a phone, it helps me keep my device generations apart. But Macs have been sadly boring in recent years. "Starlight" is barely different from silver... I loved the rose gold they had for the M1 Air, that was a great computer.
On the one hand I feel like 8GB is low these days, but my iPhone 12 Pro only had 6GB of RAM, so maybe for light usage this is fine. I do feel like 16GB is the new "8GB" minimum of the 2010s. Especially on windows, 32GB feels like Windows just chews through it no problem.
Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
This seems like a great price to have an actual MacBook with you anywhere for things that don't require a lot of resources, like if you're running some tmux/Tailscale solution at home and just need to SSH into it to do work with [whatever terminal agent you're using].
I think 8GB with Tahoe will lead to a lot of griping in a month or two, but I've bought one for family use. We have some old iMacs with various issues issues and this ticks all the boxes for basic family use. Plus, the sickly color will hopefully mean no-one will hog the machine or take it outdoors.
Reality distortion field at its fullest. I want one!
I swear to god they can transmit virtual ecstasy through their website, it's so incredibly impressive you want to buy one even if you don't need it. Everything is so perfectly presented, it has speakers! it has USB-C! WOW! No I am not being sarcastic, I am just expressing how joyful it feels watching marketing to its fullest. Just watch the videos.
Apple should be studied for centuries to come not for what they sold but for how they sold it. Pure genius. Beautiful up to every detail.
I'm sure these will sell very well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the M1. I'm sure Asahi linux folks are really excited about an extra chip set to support.
This is going to be a huge success and to me makes so much sense as a product. I’m always amazed at the range of opinions people have on these topics. Might even pick one up for myself to use on the go, I had been thinking about an Air but I don’t need much by the way of power in all honesty
No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.
And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.
Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.
The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.
And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much. Sure it's touchscreen but at end of the day If I am "keyboarding" it I am not "touching" it much.
That's a bit... uninformed, there are and historically have been plenty of non-chromebook laptops with 8 GB of memory in that price bracket (HP, Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS, etc).
I want one for all my kids. I love it. I just wish it had more ram. Personally though this direction is good. I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'
Wait did I read that correctly? There's no backlit keyboard? I don't recall any Mac laptop not having a backlight keyboard since the 2011. And they're marketing it to students -- they are always going to be working in the dark on their beds during the exams...
Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
That's around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.
That's only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.
edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750
Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.
Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.
Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.
I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.
Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.
Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.
The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.
I don't think they would; I'm sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.
Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.
Haven't they? I can download iOS apps from the app store, sign them again with my own keys for MacOS, run them natively on my MacBook without any issues. Same binaries, same APIs. It all just works.
From what I've seen people have mostly been asking for Mac OS features on the iPad, not phone apps on the Mac.
The increased compatibility is great and kind of obvious given the switch to ARM, but if it went both ways then the M4 chip in iPads would be a lot less bored.
all of apple’s devices with displays down to the watch run OS X with a form factor appropriate UI layer on top. iphone and mac are more unified than google’s android/chromeos
Tahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.
So the biggest difference I see with the new Air is that you get sRGB only in the display, with less brightness. Also it is has 8GiB of RAM, which shouldn’t be an issue for the intended use.
Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
This could be useful as a remote-access device for something that has a decent amount of RAM, I suppose, but how can anyone do anything outside of light-duty work with 8GB? At some point a Pi + battery/screen case is legitimately better.
I guess it’s to be expected, but i’m sad there’s no 16gb RAM upgrade option. $699 for a brand new Mac is nice and 8gb will work for the netbook/student audience but i’d personally want a teensy bit more.
I imagine this will be popular in other countries too. Such an incredible product for the price. Does anyone have benchmarks comparing the A18 to an M1 say?
I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.
I would first check the iPad + keyboard is actually lighter than the Macbook Air. As far as I know the keyboard weighs quite a bit, though coincidentally Apple's website doesn't specify the weight.
Wow! Over 600 grams for the 11” Air keyboard. That is almost as much as a mechanical keyboard. I had no idea the total combination would be near a MacBook in weight.
There it is! Very interesting offering. It's nice that it's running full mac os with "root access" (whatever that means on macs in current year) I was afraid they'd introduce some bastardised version of iPadOS for this device. This seems like the type of device I'd want my kids to use instead of an iPad or other touch & app based device and just let them figure things out like I did.
> Apple also pointed out that the MacBook Neo is Apple's lowest-carbon Mac. It features 60% recycled materials, more than any other Apple product. This includes 90% recycled aluminum and 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.
I think Apple has a winner on it's hand. This is perfect, for large number of people who don't do much on their laptop anyway. Even for me as a developer, I want something small and light that I can carry around and I can connect to my bigger machine from.
I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.
IMO the biggest sell for Chromebooks in the education market (which is where they shine) is the software. It's a locked down OS with a cloud login that means when you encounter the slightest hardware issue you can swap out for another device seamlessly. macOS doesn't have anything comparable to that.
We don't know that yet, it all depends whether it can be put in what's technically called "based and Red Pilled" mode first. It may just be pure Blue Pill junk like iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
I think most are going to pass on this. I'm not sure Apple has ever figured out how to sell anything to the price conscious consumer since the iPod Shuffle.
As always, you can get a more performant laptop for the price. Price sensitive consumers have shown time and time again they will put up with all the little annoyances of a cheap laptop if it means more performance. I'm not saying those details Apple puts into their products aren't nice, but yeah this is barking up the wrong tree. For those people, any laptop purchase is going to be their one and only device that isn't their phone.
Those who absolutely need MacOS and have this budget will just get a Mac Mini.
They sell hundreds of millions of iPhones every year. The iPhone installed base is in the billions.
I think there are many users who will be interested in an inexpensive laptop that neatly integrates with their iPhone. Same as there were many users who were interested in Airpods and a Watch.
Let's hope that in the future, When ram prices come down (if that's a concern to apple right now) then we can have 16 gb ram as well.
I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)
Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.
I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.
> MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports for connecting accessories or an external display[5]. Both ports can be used for charging. MacBook Neo also includes a headphone jack for wired audio.
> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.
So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.
You can now officially get a device with mutli-user support for only $100 more than the base model iPad. They've really got to throw us a bone with what the iPad is capable of.
8GB memory is pathetic. But that doesn't matter for most users yet.
In fact, it may not matter at all. If the hardware limitations push us to have several machines, a well-built entry laptop becomes a terminal (you won't run things in it, you'll connect to things). For that, 8GB might be enough.
Yeah, I see your $599 price tag, Apple. I also remember the hype behind your Mac Mini that was a sub $500 computer. And, how long did that last? The answer is: not long.
This is an absolutely solid buy I think. My wife's macbook is no longer receiving MacOS (and as a result Safari) updates, and all she needs it for is "big laptop tasks" and occasional video calls. This is the absolute perfect purchase for her.
A return to 8GB laptops would be a good thing overall, so if this becomes a "target" for electron based apps, it would be a total game changer. The iPhone 17 has 8GB RAM, and honestly for the workloads we're doing it should be enough. I think there was a big jump when we jumped to 1080 screens on laptops about a decade ago (seriously...) but most of the resource usgae growth there has been needless since.
Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard.
The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt...
I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…
And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.
I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only needs use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.
How is it not already? MBAs with 8 GB of RAM run great. Macs are incredibly good with memory management.
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity do everything I need and float like a feather.
This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).
Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.
Personally this looks really compelling for students - I did something similar, dinky 4GB ram 2 core laptop with crazy good battery life - because I don't care about specs at all, LMS's and note-taking apps in school are not heavy. I just NEED to be able to work all day long, when lecture halls lack outlets. If I needed development weight I would just use an IDE plugin to remote to a desktop in my dorm.
Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life? My impression is the market around ARM laptops is pretty small. If so this is a standout for this use case.
Why would you want an iPad?
The Neo can run iPad apps and it's small enough that it can be used in most situations where you'd typically use a tablet (bed, couch, etc).
Homework for things like algebra and later calculus definitely is interesting to do on an iPad, as the ratio of time spent thinking:writing is high while you're learning.
But pure notetaking where the thinking:writing ratio is very low? I'd much prefer to type than write on a screen.
iPad + voice, this seems like my new lifestyle choice and it looks like it’s going to work out too.
I think human beings need to move away from sitting at the typewriter like it’s 1930. We’re more than this.
blink code to codeserver
https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code
The OneNote app sync is quick enough that I could type lecture notes on the laptop, and then quickly switch to the same document on my iPad to sketch out a diagram. It was overkill for sure, but very useful
I just wish they'd let us run MacOS on iPads.
In theory yes, but in reality barely any developer (at least the mainstream ones) make their app available on MacOS, and nobody enjoys interacting with a touch-screen optimized app with mouse/trackpad
Talk to Gen Z some time. They prefer tablet devices to laptops.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/04/macbook-neo-features-tw...
$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch ID
Honestly pretty fantastic product and price.
This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)
Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.
As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.
Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.
Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.
The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.
RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!
The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.
I can imagine schools buying them for their students and then taking them after the semester is over and then giving to next but also reselling it at a very nice value if they might want the next line of product at a decent price.
Also this not only applies to school but normal people who buy the Macbook Neo too
IMO that form factor was perfect for a small, low end laptop, it just needed a more power efficient chip, and a screen with smaller bezels.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!
I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.
That seems like a product they could also potentially revive with Apple Silicon.
8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Fantastic value for money.
Honestly what I am (pleasantly) surprised by is the minijack.
For a couple months I was on an 8gb m1 air, it was perfectly fine, even with docker containers. As long as i didn't launch teams....
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
“If you see anybody [building electron apps] in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere!” - a reasonable person, probably
How anyone could think their chat app or text editor should be able to bring a 32GB 8-core machine to a crawl is beyond me. I can have about 200 browser tabs open, but one discord chat open in the background and I’m stuttering. It’s offensive.
Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.
The last gen MacBook Air (M4, 16GB, 256GB) was down to $749 with retailer discounts last year. Currently $759 on Apple's certified refurbished site.
Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.
Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.
That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.
I don't think that's what this machine is designed for.
On the other hand, Apple pushes Xcode & iPhone development quite heavily to students (and not say Python or JS), so it’s definitely something they care about.
Kids already are well aware of iPhone upgrades. Parents will get them this machine. They'll get going and soon enough be badgering their parents for an upgrade to a more competent machine. That is all by design while being an affordance for people who can only get in at the cheap end.
So IMO in 8GB most types of coding is possible actually.
But regarding Xcode+Iphone simulator, I am not sure if that's possible tho. It's possible to run android simulator on Linux 8 GB with waydroid while being pretty smooth. So theoretically could be possible but I am not familiar with building with Xcode/Iphone simulator.
These things will be running in 5-10 years.
Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…
I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.
12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.
I've done both with success: am still riding a maxed out M1 Ultra Mac Studio which hasn't lost a step, no matter what I ask it to do. For a daily driver that doesn't try to do the most extreme things (think: able to edit your 6K videos but not scrub them, and media storage space can't live on the actual machine but only on some outboard storage) the base models of these will be a breath of fresh air. This is of course assuming the liquid-glassification of the OS doesn't ramp up, rendering the system unusable to actual Mac users.
This is really nice for schools.
I really want this to work for me too, just because of those colors, but the RAM is really the only issue. Oh well, at least this forces every other budget laptop to compete harder.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
I really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e
Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.
I looked at OfficeWorks and I found some really cheap Chromebooks at the $300-500 level.
I picked two $500 Chromebooks:
- HP 14" Chromebook N200 8/128GB with usb-c + usb-a (quad-core).
- Lenovo IdeaPad 3i 15.6" Chromebook Laptop 8/128GB Celeron.
Looks like both are 1080p displays.
First at simple tech spec glance they're below the entry level Neo except they both have larger displays, but obviously as Neo costs $250 more.
But the question then is what do you get for that $250 more. I think once you take into consideration the finish, keyboard, webcam/mic, speakers, display, and even Apple's support which can be sometimes pretty decent, you're looking at a pretty strong contender.
The problem I expect though is that people tend not to be educated consumers and don't look into the other aspects outside of specs or cost, so Apple is really selling on branding, word of mouth, and probably through their salespeople at the stores. But also, if we start seeing these one the shelves of JB-Hifi, Officeworks, etc. (for US your local Best Buy I guess), then it could penetrate the market well.
Assuming the Neo embodies Apple's signature quality and reliability, I hope it does well for first time laptop users / early education market.
There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.
Windows update on a Celeron chip makes it 100% utilisation with full boost.
I would actually rather but an Android phone than a laptop with a Celeron chip for the same price.
But hey the colors are cute.
My M1 8GB Air did great before Tahoe; even medium complexity Xcode projects ran fine on it with other apps running. Since I made the mistake of upgrading it to Tahoe, it’s too painful to work in those projects.
AI is so good these days I am using the laptop for quick changes more often, as I just push every change. I rarely need to fiddle. The general experience of using my desktop and laptop are converging.
Running a node.js server on Tahoe makes your macbook sluggish and you feel like Tahoe is fine performance wise?
May I reminded you that 10 years ago people also ran chrome and node js webservers and this was not a problem in any way with 8GB of ram.
Tahoe is a massive regression in my personal experience (16GB here). So many random bugs and menu bar pop-up slowdowns (how is the system menu bar this unresponsive?).
Spotlight has gotten so bad, I can literally count the time it takes between typing the app name and the result showing up in the dropdown. Ended up switching Spotlight to Tuna.
I've experienced this too, even after giving spotlight multiple shots months apart. For your sanity, I say just stop using spotlight. Don't let Apple steal your valuable waking hours with their crap QA.
And settings app does actually work!
And I am quite happy with Sonama.
Honestly, we’re not the target market for this. I’m pretty sure at this price point though, it will sell like hotcakes. Once people get slightly into the ecosystem, it’s usually a big win for Apple since their stickiness is from my experience of people around me undeniable once you get one product
If you’re doing “real work” then 16gb won’t be sufficient, either. My “real work” machine has 96 and I sometimes wish it had more.
If only we could get fun colors for those…
As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.
However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.
They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that?
macOS is awful to manage on an enterprise and education level. This will always be Apple’s achilles heel in truly breaking into this market. Admins will push back.
Google has Security down to a science. ChromeOS has little to no malware. Google is constantly reporting malware and exploits to Apple so they can patch active vulns.
iPads a Macs stand up to much more abuse by students.
MacOS has very little malware even though users have more access to do things.
All google data is used to train AI and advertise. I’d like to not have that near my kids. Would rather have Apple’s “make money off hardware” from a data privacy standpoint.
The argument with Chromebooks is you can usually buy 4 of them at the cost of a single Mac.
My point is device management and security. This is what enterprise and education cares about and scopes around.
macOS is not nearly as robust or secure to manage as ChromeOS, and Windows flys above both with almost every single feature being manageable at a domain level.
Also your AI point is moot. Enterprise and Education have much different terms than consumers.
You think Apple is letting Google, Slack, and Zoom use their internal company data for training?
With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.
Reminds me of the Technicolor iPod mini of my college days. The 2000s are back, baby
- M1: 2,347 / 8,342 / 32,377
- M2: 2,587 / 9,669 / 44,712
- A18Pro: 3,539 / 8,772 / 32,288
So Neo is really comparable with the M1, although it has quite faster in single core speed.
But now more colorful and official.
I’m pretty interested in benchmarks. We haven’t had a phone chip and a desktop chip running the same OS so we could compare them better with benchmarks since the original Apple Silicon dev kits.
Also it’s $499 to start for students, which is impressive.
But the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me. Having that is such a huge improvement over having to type passwords constantly.
Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.
It also probably doesn't have a ~60% margin.
On the other hand, the iPhone is water proof, made of sturdier materials to survive falls, has cellular, and the high end ones have more memory
- Older chip (and with fewer thermal constraints)
- Only one camera (and much cheaper)
- Less RAM than 17pro and Air
- No cell modem, FaceID, ProMotion, MagSafe, etc.
I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.
Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.
And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.
Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
Today it's the MacBook Neo unless you have a higher budget and want a nicer screen and more power. Then it's the MacBook Air, unless you do serious photography, video, audio, or development work then it's a MacBook Pro.
It's still a pretty simple, linear progression up the line.
Steve Jobs presided over an era where they were selling:
- A white plastic 13" MacBook
- An aluminum 13" MacBook
- 13", 15", and 17" Macbook Pro
- A high end 13" MacBook Air that thermally throttled and was more expensive than most of their other laptops
Replacing my iPhone was a nothing burger of choice, on paper the iPhone 15 pro was the best feature set for value vs buying a new iPhone 17, but Apple know that so don't sell the older models directly when the new models come out.
There's really limited impactful innovation when you get into the details.
Today Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and every product line is ruthlessly optimized/scrutinized to maximize their revenue/supply chain use/suss out consumer needs for the next cycle.
There isn’t a world where Apple has a $4T market cap and where their notebook offering fits in a neat 2x2.
Well first I would ask them what they are planning to use the Macbook for.
Then I would make the recommendation. There is Macbook Neo for basic stuff. Macbook Air for regular stuff and Macbook Pro for gangsta stuff.
It seems there is still good differentiation between the Macbook lines.
Now the 8gb can be concern to some but not to many IMO. And I am also feeling just a bit optimistic that Apple will realize that the largest criticism of this product can be that it doesn't have 16GB otherwise even more people can buy so in the future, I expect 16 GB to be possible too (When Ram bubble finally bursts)
Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.
With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.
Depending on their budget and needs, a Neo, Air, or Pro.
Or perhaps this will be the perfect machine for the Asahi team to focus on…lots of demand at this price point, and a lean Linux install would make this machine fly.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
- 2 fun colors + 2 regular
- The Magic Keyboard looks like it has a decent amount of travel and should hold up well
- Headphone port, recognizing that wired headphones are way more durable in a classroom setting
- Decent price and display, though I wonder about performance w/ Tahoe
I don't currently have a modern macOS machine, so a basic machine like this could be useful to have around even though I daily drive Linux now. Maybe it'll get Asahi support!
although it IS hillarious to read a group of enthusiasts in 2026 screaming "8GB IS FINE!" -- meanwhile people want more ram on their RPis..
I honestly don't understand people who complain about the lack of M5 Pro specs and features on a £599 Macbook. "Oh no, it's 1/3rd of the price of a Pro but I want the Pro specs on it." People seriously need to do think twice before pressing the submit button. And nobody in the right mind would buy a used Macbook for the same price, just because it's more powerful.
I have an 8G M2 at work and it's more than enough and I have two browsers running with 20+ tabs, Teams, Outlook, Figma, VScode... If you are a power user buy a Macbook Pro, you can't reasonable expect Pro performance out of a device that costs a third.
This Neo is going to sell like crazy because it's an amazing product for the price. That's how much Chromebooks cost but you actually get a full desktop OS rather than a web browser. And for students to buy a new Macbook for £499 come on, some of these comments are just ridiculous.
I always buy the new color option from Apple when getting a phone, it helps me keep my device generations apart. But Macs have been sadly boring in recent years. "Starlight" is barely different from silver... I loved the rose gold they had for the M1 Air, that was a great computer.
Overall, I might pick one of these up at some point.
I swear to god they can transmit virtual ecstasy through their website, it's so incredibly impressive you want to buy one even if you don't need it. Everything is so perfectly presented, it has speakers! it has USB-C! WOW! No I am not being sarcastic, I am just expressing how joyful it feels watching marketing to its fullest. Just watch the videos.
Apple should be studied for centuries to come not for what they sold but for how they sold it. Pure genius. Beautiful up to every detail.
That assumes Apple dev teams use one in their test suites.
One downside to the 11" Air when it was still sold is so much software that would be slightly broken on the vertically-constrained display.
And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.
The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.
Software has gotten shittier tho, but I think it is an overall trend and not just Apple.
I think something like that is in the works, but you could leverage Claude or ChatGPT or a similar service, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(3rd_generation)
Or will they keep doing this with "neu", "nouveau", "nuevo" etc?
It's a subtle distinction, but I think the general connotation is more like "hyper-modern" or "reinvention/reinterpretation."
People won't see "MacBook Neo" and think "oh there's just a new MacBook."
Probably when they update it, if they decide to keep the product line going.
Forget memory - this is like the more major loss in terms feature set.
With state sales tax of 8% where I live, the base would cost me $648.
So not a huge difference.
edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750
Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.
Too bad their software is total garbage now, I could never resign myself to that.
Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.
Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.
The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.
The M-chip with that balance is the A-chip.
Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.
Also, the chip used has no impact on the viability of merging macOS and iOS anyway.
M1 evolved from the A cpu line.
The increased compatibility is great and kind of obvious given the switch to ARM, but if it went both ways then the M4 chip in iPads would be a lot less bored.
Tahoe made all the touch targets on macOS bigger, we may get a touch macbook pro this year.
Same weight. You lose a bit on the speakers, microphone, and webcam. Not sure how noticeable this will be.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16858435?baseli...
you’re essentially getting an m1 macbook air with a worse keyboard
a quality used m1 air on ebay is about $400 w 256gb storage https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1+macbook+air&_trksid=...
That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
It feels like one of the only Apple products where the name is completely divorced from its intended usage (or defining feature)
- Phone
- Watch
- Pro
- Studio
- Mini
- Vision
- Air
- Neo???
> Apple also pointed out that the MacBook Neo is Apple's lowest-carbon Mac. It features 60% recycled materials, more than any other Apple product. This includes 90% recycled aluminum and 100% recycled cobalt in the battery.
This is _incredibly_ cool.
I wish they went for 12" but I am not complaining. It is affordable and pretty.
As always, you can get a more performant laptop for the price. Price sensitive consumers have shown time and time again they will put up with all the little annoyances of a cheap laptop if it means more performance. I'm not saying those details Apple puts into their products aren't nice, but yeah this is barking up the wrong tree. For those people, any laptop purchase is going to be their one and only device that isn't their phone.
Those who absolutely need MacOS and have this budget will just get a Mac Mini.
I think there are many users who will be interested in an inexpensive laptop that neatly integrates with their iPhone. Same as there were many users who were interested in Airpods and a Watch.
I do think that 8 gb is fine for most cases, even development. I used to use a PC with 8 GB ram and it worked perfectly fine and honestly depending on the workflow if you need more, a VPS can always be your good friend (I really love using zed on a VPS with cloudflare tunnels or perhaps tailscale)
Looks pretty good to me. There have been two wins in just these couple of days. This Macbook Neo and The grapheneos+Motorola phone both seem to make decent options available for the market.
I might have to go recommend this to a friend of mine who had once asked me what laptop they should pick when they get into college.
> [5] MacBook Neo features two USB-C ports — USB 3 (left) and USB 2 (right). External display connectivity supported on left USB 3 port only.
So, 1 display. Note that there’s probably already $100 of dongles on top of a Mac price, but at least this one would be an excellent fit for my father.
8GB memory is pathetic. But that doesn't matter for most users yet.
In fact, it may not matter at all. If the hardware limitations push us to have several machines, a well-built entry laptop becomes a terminal (you won't run things in it, you'll connect to things). For that, 8GB might be enough.
A return to 8GB laptops would be a good thing overall, so if this becomes a "target" for electron based apps, it would be a total game changer. The iPhone 17 has 8GB RAM, and honestly for the workloads we're doing it should be enough. I think there was a big jump when we jumped to 1080 screens on laptops about a decade ago (seriously...) but most of the resource usgae growth there has been needless since.