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$599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID $699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch ID Honestly pretty fantastic product and price. This is clearly targeted towards educatio
by opjjf 7mo ago
$599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID
$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 :)
- baal80spam 7mo agoMy thoughts as well. 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.
- epolanski 7mo ago> Noone is going to develop on this after all. 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.
- gyomu 7mo agoUsers like you have money and Apple wants them buying a MacBook Air for that use case :)
- epolanski 7mo agoUsers like me have employers which every 3 years will send a new machine I can't decide.
- stetrain 7mo agoThe MacBook Air is the same weight and thinner, so for a mobile machine I think that still wins out. 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.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago> Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine Even as a main machine for most people. Heck I could probably even get away with it. I have my work laptop that's technically my "main" machine as I spend 8+ hours a day on it, and it's sufficiently beefy. I hardly do much on a personal computer (not counting my gaming desktop), this neo would be more than enough for my non-work needs. Granted, I don't currently have a need for it as I have my own MBA and an iPad pro, but if I had neither this would definitely be a no brainer and I could confidently recommend this over pretty much any off-the-shelf budget windows laptop to anyone who asks me "What laptop should I buy?"
- mschuster91 7mo ago> 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.
- gyomu 7mo agoIf 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.
- mcphage 7mo ago> 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.
- gyomu 7mo agoThe specs definitely agree with you. 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.
- zerkten 7mo agoThere 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.
- ehutch79 7mo agoDepends what you're developing. You could build a pretty powerful webapp as long as you don't fall into 'i need my blog running in kubernetes' trap. 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....
- jen20 7mo agoThis 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.
- jonhohle 7mo ago> the electron people “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.
- skydhash 7mo ago> Noone is going to develop on this after all. 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.
- throawayonthe 7mo agomost of us mere mortals are using bloated software :)
- skydhash 7mo agoIn the workplace, it does not matter as it’s not your device anyway (or buy something powerful if it’s a consultancy). For most utilitarian uses, you only have to endure a few. But I would expect you have more choice if it’s a personal computer, including paying the additional cost in memory and performance if the final choice is bloated software.
- iberator 7mo agoyou must be joking sir. those gonna be paperweight in 2 years. 16 is usable minimum for music making, grpahics and web browsing
- prepend 7mo agoMy daily laptop is a 2017 MacBook Air with intel and 8GB. Web browsing, finance, and civilization 5. These things will be running in 5-10 years.
- grvbck 7mo agoMy 2010 Macbook Pro with 8GB works still. Not a daily driver anymore, but Word, Excel, Lightroom, Garageband, MainStage etc work just fine. Youtube videos up to 1080p play without stuttering in Floorp. It's not quick, but it is useable.
- Applejinx 7mo agoI'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…
- Citizen_Lame 7mo ago[flagged]
- SenHeng 7mo agoI've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came. I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.
- geerlingguy 7mo agoI still wish they would give back the 11" Air dimensions with Apple Silicon. 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.
- wpm 7mo agoThat 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!
- gyomu 7mo agoA revival of the 12” MacBook would be amazing, but give it to me as a premium device - not an educational market positioning. I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.
- ulfw 7mo agoExactly. This with an M5, OLED, today's keyboard/trackpad combo, 16GB/24GB RAM, 2-4TB of SSD and it would be an instant buy
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoThey make something like that, but it costs a bit more.
- ulfw 7mo agoThey aren't making this as described
- retired 7mo agoI still remember when the Air lineup was all about being small and light.
- rancar2 7mo ago8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.
- geon 7mo agoNot true, but good riddance if it was.
- oneeyedpigeon 7mo agoI 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.
- mervz 7mo ago[dead]
- elzbardico 7mo agoNo. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB
- danvayn 7mo agoDefine fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”. I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoThis is the cheapest MacBook available new - you are already compromising. Do you expect an economy car to outrun a Porsche?
- 7mo ago
- mohsen1 7mo ago$499 for education which a lot of target group would qualify. A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!
- imranq 7mo agoI think it might be 2020 when the M1 was released since I remember i had bought a mac book in 2019 and it was still intel
- pwthornton 7mo ago$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.
- adgjlsfhk1 7mo agoI doubt schools will be getting this much cheaper. This is already a really aggressively priced product.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoThese 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
- kotaKat 7mo ago$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.
- nicman23 7mo agonah 8gb of ram is laughable
- hoppp 7mo agoThe price is fantastic but 8GB RAM feels like going backwards again, but oh well, ram shortage and beggars can't be chosers
- whizzter 7mo ago1: Education market 2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoApple has always ignored cannibalism because they would rather cannibalize their own products than have someone else do it.
- pwthornton 7mo agoI do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that. Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
- weikju 7mo agoThe A18 Pro chip has 8B of ram and no option to change it.
- icedchai 7mo agoIt 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.
- elxr 7mo agoIt'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
- pwthornton 7mo agoThe 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.
- xp84 7mo agoLol, that'll never happen. And it's still 2x a Chromebook, while being far more fragile because Apple doesn't believe in plastic. If this is ever bought by a school, it'll be bought for teachers, or maybe in a very rich district.
- ferguess_k 7mo agoDo 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- basch 7mo agoRAM 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. RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-costs-doubled-to-35-percent-of-pc-build-materials-in-one-quarter https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
- kstrauser 7mo agoMy 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.
- ferguess_k 7mo agoYeah 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.
- elxr 7mo agoVery 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.
- basch 7mo ago300*500 kids is 150k and the difference between a school choosing chromebooks again. This is priced against the $450 Chromebook.
- elxr 7mo agoAgreed. 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.
- asadotzler 7mo agoFrom someone in this thread with actual experience: >Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit. >For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks.
- basch 7mo agoand an aluminum case may last 30% longer than plastic.
- 4fterd4rk 7mo agoThis is a 600 buck machine. "Just $300-350 more" is a 50% price hike!
- elxr 7mo agoThat'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.
- gizajob 7mo agoYeah 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.
- adolph 7mo ago> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.
- noname120 7mo agoMy experience with the Apple Watch is that Touch ID is faster to unlock my Mac. The “unlocking with Apple Watch…” thing takes too much time and by the time it would have completed my finger already reached the Touch ID and unlocked it.
- gizajob 7mo agoDepends if you can win the race between it unlocking with the Apple Watch and you typing in your password.
- adolph 7mo agoBetween touch and watch for machine login and 1Password everywhere else, it is a rare day that I actually type in a password. On those rare occasions, I feel some gratitude to be forced to type it so that I don't forget it entirely.
- jazzyjackson 7mo agoWhat’s wrong with your M1 air?
- qingcharles 7mo agoHow much of that 256GB is eaten by the factory install of MacOS? What's the CPU performance like compared to an M1?
- NetMageSCW 7mo agoCPU performance is about equal to the M1 multicore and a bit better single core.
- arppacket 7mo agoI believe the single core performance of the a18 pro is a 50% boost, but the multi core performance is about the same as the m1. I'm sure you're already taking the ram limitations into account for longevity.
- nickstinemates 7mo agoYeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.
- fallenchromium 7mo agoI would say that the look and feel of M1 MacBook Air is better, and you aren't getting an upgrade in performance department either, so is it really an "upgrade"? Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren't getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.