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"Education customers can purchase it for $499." That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
by r0fl 7mo ago
"Education customers can purchase it for $499."
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
- pcurve 7mo agoThat's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.
- amelius 7mo agoThe 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.
- akmarinov 7mo agoNo Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still
- jasongill 7mo agoIt supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
- nateb2022 7mo agoThey were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence.
- dchest 7mo ago8 GB M1 MacBook Air does support Apple Intelligence.
- nateb2022 7mo agoYes it does. I was clarifying what the commenter was saying; not making his statement myself. akmarinov said their M1 doesn't support apple intelligence but they still think it's plenty usable; jasongill thought akmarinov was referring to the Neo and responded that the Macbook Neo does in fact support Apple intelligence; and I clarified what I think akmarinov intended to say.
- jasongill 7mo agocorrect, I thought he meant that the Neo does not support it, since his M1 Macbook does support Apple Intelligence but perhaps he's not aware of that or hasn't updated yet.
- akmarinov 7mo agoYou are correct i indeed thought that you need at least 16 GB to support Apple Intelligence and I thought Neo doesn’t support it. I stand corrected.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- stevenhubertron 7mo agoMy M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.
- DaSHacka 7mo agoThe majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts. I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
- qn9n 7mo agoI use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
- turtlebits 7mo agoI used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoMaybe you should try a MacOS device.
- DaSHacka 7mo agoI already have, that's why I don't use them lol
- ezfe 7mo agoBruh if 32GB of RAM feels insufficient your computer is broken.
- baal80spam 7mo ago> The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable C'mon, man.
- fartfeatures 7mo agoI've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
- tw04 7mo agoFortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop. Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
- qn9n 7mo agoHonestly 128MB might be too much...
- fartfeatures 7mo agoIt was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone? Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
- nateb2022 7mo ago> I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient. Guessing based on your comments about 8GB of RAM that you have a lot more RAM than that. You should be aware that when you have a lot of unused RAM, many programs will cache data in RAM, and the OS won't really "clean up" paged memory, since there's very little memory pressure. In modern OS architecture, "free RAM is wasted RAM." If you have 32GB of RAM for example, macOS will allow processes to keep decorative assets, pre-fetched data, and UI buffers in memory indefinitely because there’s no reason to flush them. This makes the system feel snappier. The metric that actually matters isn't "Used RAM," but Memory Pressure. A system can have 0GB of "Free" memory but still be performing perfectly because the OS is ready to reallocate that cached data the millisecond another app needs it. Judging efficiency based on usage in a low-pressure environment is like complaining that a gas tank is "inefficient" just because it’s full.
- r0fl 7mo agoI'll get one for my mom who uses facebook and pinterest and the occasional recipe website. I'm sure it'll be enough power for the average user.
- qn9n 7mo agoThis! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
- no_op 7mo agoIt's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
- jsheard 7mo ago> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
- dagmx 7mo agoWhy not? They’re the same core OS.
- jsheard 7mo agoBecause software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
- qn9n 7mo agoThey are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
- dagmx 7mo agoIsn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway? Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too. People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.
- drnick1 7mo agoMaybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
- qn9n 7mo agoFor the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
- tw04 7mo agoHuh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
- browningstreet 7mo agoChromeOS and macos aren't close to the same.
- unethical_ban 7mo ago8GB will run chat, web browsing and word processors just fine. Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.
- uni_baconcat 7mo agoFor people browsing HN or following any tech YouTube channel, 8GB is barely usable. But for anyone else, 8GB is still ‘okay’.
- mrtksn 7mo agoI'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices. Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
- lm28469 7mo ago> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices. Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
- mrtksn 7mo agoApparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chip-599-at-walmart/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...
- dylan604 7mo agoA very old article, and if you follow any of their links, they are sold out. So it's not so apparent after all
- mrtksn 7mo agoI don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
- exitb 7mo agoIs it a better deal? A18 Pro seems to be somewhat more capable than an M1.
- mrtksn 7mo ago
- jp_nc 7mo agoIf they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
- tw04 7mo ago> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement. There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
- panzagl 7mo agoThere are schools where close to 100% of the kids are qualified low income.
- tw04 7mo agoAnd I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will. It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
- panzagl 7mo agoWell, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
- microtonal 7mo agoIt must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration. This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
- collabs 7mo agoI bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025. The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product. I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
- moolcool 7mo agoI would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.
- adrian_b 7mo agoThere are people for whom the first condition that must be satisfied by a computer is to do whatever their owner wants and only that, and to never do anything that other people than the owner want. Such people would always take any laptop Acer makes (or from many other brands), over anything made by Apple. I have grown up in a country occupied by communists, and one of the most frustrating things was that the right of owning various kinds of things was denied to the majority of the population (including computers). After eventually no longer being subjected to such oppressive laws, in recent years I find astonishing how easily people in countries like USA are willing nowadays to accept severe limitations to their rights of ownership over the things they buy, while in other places people have died in the hope to obtain such rights.
- 7mo ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoLooks like it's aimed squarely at students. Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore. They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.
- robinhood 7mo agoHave you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.
- organsnyder 7mo agoMy kids' district gives them iPads in middle school (5th through 8th) and MacBook Airs in high school.
- snowwrestler 7mo agoMy local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through high school.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoNot in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients. Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons. A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'." It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
- DaSHacka 7mo agoMy old Highschool, as well as many other schools I've seen since, mandate Chromebooks. I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
- itake 7mo agocall me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?
- aurareturn 7mo agoYea if you can find one for $500 new on sale. Maybe a slightly used one as well. But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
- itake 7mo agodoesn't need to be new, but maybe the m1s wont last another 4 years for college so maybe it makes sense... in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
- asadotzler 7mo agoWalmart sells a brand new M1 Air for ~$650 and refurbished for ~$500
- SirMaster 7mo agoI'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...
- happyopossum 7mo agoA refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in 'fair' condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck. How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?
- nsteel 7mo agoDoesn't that M1 Air have a much, much slower CPU?
- nsteel 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256032 M1 Air single core is 2347 and multicore is 8342. Plus, the A18 pro chip in the Neo will likely perform better with the improved thermal environment.
- evanjrowley 7mo agoNever has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.
- lern_too_spel 7mo agoI've bought several touchscreen Chromebooks for that price.
- therealdrag0 7mo agoGrowing up in the 90s all my elementary school computers were Macs. They seemed to get more Windows as I got older. Not sure the current state.
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoWould be great deal in 5 years to buy those post-lease if Asahi/others Linux catch up.
- hellweaver666 7mo agoMy kids school has been giving every kid in the upper school an m1 macbook air and they have to replace a LOT of them. Everything they do is in the cloud (Google classroom, docs etc) so they don't need powerful machines. The school was considering moving to chromebooks but I can see them choosing this instead just to keep their current provisioning workflows etc.