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MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

337 points by tosh 6mo ago

havaloc 6mo ago
I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.
- interludead 6mo ago
  As an out-of-the-house computer, or a second/hand-me-down laptop, that tradeoff makes a lot more sense
  - havaloc 6mo ago
    I use it more and more as a primary, and it doesn't feel like I've made many tradeoffs at all. I even like the keys better, they aren't transparent, so the plastic feels different, but in a good way.
- criddell 6mo ago
  The article says the CPU costs Apple less than $50. Why aren't these types of chips for laptops more popular in the Windows and Linux world? Where are the Dell and Framework laptops that can compete with this thing on price, quality, and performance?
  - sowbug 6mo ago
    That price is even more wholesale than wholesale. Apple designed the chip and manufactures it with TSMC, as one of TSMC's best customers (currently #2 to Nvidia). Qualcomm offers the Snapdragon X series, which in theory could be competitive on price and performance. But Qualcomm is in the business of selling chipsets, not building ecosystems, so once a Qualcomm chip is out the door, they tend to forget about it. This makes it harder for manufacturers to continue providing software updates that require an up-to-date BSP (board support package). This has historically reduced the long-term value of a Qualcomm-based phone (unsure about other products). It's why, for example, Google developed their Tensor chipset, which is Qualcomm-free, and which allows Google to offer a 7-year update guarantee on the latest Pixel phones. Disclaimer: I've been out of this part of the industry for years, and I hope the dynamics have improved since then.
    - criddell 6mo ago
      When I saw the Googlebook announcement this week I was super excited until I saw that the hardware will be made by the usual crew of under-performers - HP, ASUS, Dell, etc... Google could (I think) do a lot of it in house like Apple does and make a killer product. They've done it before with the original Pixelbook. This time I was hoping they were going to essentially clone the Neo, put their software on it, and ship an inexpensive, high quality computer.
briandw 6mo ago
We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.
- sgt 6mo ago
  I've had many MacBook Pros but never thought about that. I guess mine has too. How do I use it? I just tap lightly to click.
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    pretty much the only time I use it is to lookup the definition of a word by highlighting it and force clicking. Can't do that with the magic mouse.
    - sgt 6mo ago
      Interesting. I find it easier just to CTRL-click it and pressing down on a flat surface.
- codazoda 6mo ago
  I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
  - mmoustafa 6mo ago
    how do you select text?
    - pashky 6mo ago
      Three finger drag. That was the best and unique thing about apple touchpads since, like, early 2000s, but then it was buried deep down the menus and forgotten for some reason. But seriously - try it, you might never go back.
nicoburns 6mo ago
The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.
- baal80spam 6mo ago
  > if they do a second generation with A19 Pro I'm pretty sure it's a "when", not "if".
  - nicoburns 6mo ago
    Probably true. I hope they do it next year, but I suspect it might the following one.
  - adastra22 6mo ago
    Idk, I think they are regretting the unit economics of the Neo, and it is likely cannibalizing the Air sales.
    - QuadmasterXLII 6mo ago
      intentionally cannibalizing their own sales is iirc the official apple policy: iphone destroyed ipod and was one of the best business mives of all time
      - adastra22 6mo ago
        iPhones were more expensive than iPods though
      - SecretDreams 6mo ago
        I miss the iPod right now lol. Give me a nano!
    - tracker1 6mo ago
      Maybe some... but they're likely picking up a lot of people that would have gone with a $500-700 windows laptop instead.. and the margins are similar, so they're probably well ahead.
armanj 6mo ago
for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.
- weezing 6mo ago
  Do people really do that when out in the wild?
  - jlokier 6mo ago
    It's one of the nicest things to do if you love computers, and great for your health compared with staying indoors. > Could one actually work like this, typing and everything? After my “heart-rate discovery” I decided I had to try it. I thought I’d have to build something myself, but actually one can just buy “walking desks”, and so I did. And after minor modifications, I discovered that I could walk and type perfectly well with it, even for a couple of hours. I was embarrassed I hadn’t figured out such a simple solution 20 years ago. But starting last fall—whenever the weather’s been good—I’ve tried to spend a couple of hours of each day walking outside like this https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/#:~:text=Could%20one,this,-%3A https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod... https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-working-outside-lowers-his-resting-heart-rate/ https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-workin...
    - phainopepla2 6mo ago
      How do you deal with screen glare?
      - gib444 6mo ago
        Moving to the UK is one option. It's been cloudy for about 7 months!
      - Exoristos 6mo ago
trollied 6mo ago
The “8gb gamble” could be seen as a misleading headline. The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.
fragmede 6mo ago
The question thus, is how does the Neo perform if I put it on top of an ice pack?
- orliesaurus 6mo ago
  Yup, was wondering the same, that would be a great follow up article by author
- Applejinx 6mo ago
  Or mod it so it burns your junk but makes you the heatsink :D
  - tracker1 6mo ago
    A lot of people have used a thermal pad to bridge the CPU to the case.. it doesn't really get that hot, and you get a >5% performance bump.
headcanon 6mo ago
My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it. It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.
- crazygringo 6mo ago
  It might be more likely that it cannibalizes used Macbook Air sales.
  - Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
    which seem to be out of stock in any case, so probably not a loss for apple. https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - GeekyBear 6mo ago
    After years of incremental upgrades to the Airs, a new entry level M5 Air gives you double the RAM, double the storage, and double the CPU and GPU performance of an M1 Air. Hopefully used Airs will come up for sale more frequently, as they remain a step up from the Neo.
    - adastra22 6mo ago
      At double the price.
      - GeekyBear 6mo ago
        Sure. Used M1 Airs are selling for roughly half the price of a new Neo.
RubberShoes 6mo ago
I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.
- sysworld 6mo ago
  You tried arstechnica? they do pretty good reviews. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-review-can-a-mac-get-by-with-an-iphones-processor-inside/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...
rebekkamikkoa 6mo ago
[flagged]
notfried 6mo ago
Why is the author considering Claude Code a "real developer workflow"? Unless you're doing complex tool calling, is CC really resource-heavy?
- xnx 6mo ago
  Why does a "real developer workflow" need to be resource-heavy?
  - sannysanoff 6mo ago
    IDE written in Java indexing 10K files, compiling + running spring boot apps that take 30 seconds to start on the M4, or C++ compilation, or rust compilation.. Or maybe you were sarcastic?
  - jujube3 6mo ago
    I am heavy developer guy.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      and this is my developer. She consumes one hundred fifty gigabytes and runs two hundred thousand dollar, custom-tooled GPUs at ten thousand tokens per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to develop…for twelve seconds.” [Laughs] “Oh my Claude, who touched settings.json? Alright…Who touched my LLM!?”
- fastball 6mo ago
  Yes, Claude Code can use a lot of RAM.
khernandezrt 6mo ago
Id pay an extra $150 for the haptic trackpad tbh
- deely3 6mo ago
  How about $299?
  - zeroq 6mo ago
    let's make it $1099 and we'll throw a monitor stand for free
lifestyleguru 6mo ago
I already have half dozen over decade old laptops with 4-8GB of RAM in the drawer, don't need any more.
caycep 6mo ago
it also looks really nice. at the Apple Store, the chassis seems well machined. the "cheaper" apple logo insert also clearly also incurred some expense as it fit into the lid perfectly. Hinge, keyboard and trackpad felt good. Design team clearly took time to telegraph craft and quality in their product.
orliesaurus 6mo ago
What if you cool the chassis really really well??? Does throttling go away?
- timpera 6mo ago
  https://youtu.be/lswbpVtAhrc?si=N_z_g0aZmoOUz_Cs https://youtu.be/lswbpVtAhrc?si=N_z_g0aZmoOUz_Cs > tl;dw Copper shim mod (using laptop bottom as heatsink) leads to 2x performance over stock.
  - system7rocks 6mo ago
    I may buy a Neo just to do this. Intrigued.
justin66 6mo ago
> Yes, 8GB of RAM is a real limitation. But give it a year and the next version will almost certainly ship with 12GB and a modest CPU bump. We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?
- simonh 6mo ago
  According to some reviews I’ve seen, it tops out at around 60.
- mmaniac 6mo ago
  You can have as many as you like, but Safari will kill them when you're not looking.
guideamigo 6mo ago
This might win big in emerging markets where there is a desire for a high-quality laptop for non-programmers.
wlesieutre 6mo ago
> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port. You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.
- stirlo 6mo ago
  It’s a bizarre take. It’s not functionally useless, it supports a mouse, keyboard, printer or even an iPhone (non pro) perfectly fine at full speed. It also probably has enough speed for the average cheap terrible quality USB drive that the buyer of a $600 PC might have. This is a Silicon Valley tech geek take not a real world one.
  - retired 6mo ago
    The assortment of cheap USB sticks I have do not surpass 400mbit/sec. Not even the ones labeled USB3.0 or High Speed.
    - mycall 6mo ago
      That is good enough speed for plenty of use cases.
  - sixhobbits 6mo ago
    "genuinely" is an AI tell now as well as doing things in physical world that don't make sense like walking to the car wash to wash your car if it's close, or maybe not using USB ports in the way they were designed...
- washingupliquid 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - 6mo ago
darkteflon 6mo ago
I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school. It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.
- epistasis 6mo ago
  I've been on my M1 Air, 16GB, since a few weeks after launch, more than six years now. I still use it daily with lots of Docker containers, VS Code, tons of Electron apps, a small macOS arm VM, and lots of browser tabs simultaneously. Recently, Claude's VM environment is getting exercised simultaneously. Usually the memory pressure is into yellow, but responsiveness is still far higher than any Mac from the Intel days, and far more usable than any Windows laptop that I have the misfortune to experience when borrowing somebody else's computer. And despite all that memory pressure, my SSD isn't getting worn out by swapping, I'm at only "3%" of SSD wear, if those stats on the CLI are to be trusted. I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality. Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.
  - davnicwil 6mo ago
    a bit of an aside but what's amazing is that Docker's recent beta VM for Mac (I think released a couple of months ago now) has dramatically improved the performance you get out of your CPU. Using a macbook air, even a recent one, before this Docker was definitely usable but noticably slower. Probably still worth it but a noticable tradeoff using it as a dev machine Vs a pro. Now that tradeoff has basically gone away.
  - wiseowise 6mo ago
    And you forgot the best part: it is completely silent.
conception 6mo ago
I think the only gap I’ve come across is that trying to drive two monitors through a display link dock it doesn’t really have the GPU to not have that be laggy.
karmakaze 6mo ago
> Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.
- avidruntime 6mo ago
  Apple's throttling was an undisclosed optimization that was controversial because it was not disclosed. The optimization itself was not controversial. It was not premature either. If the battery's measurable levels (impedance, current, voltage, etc.) fell out of nominal range, then throttling occurred. FWIW I somewhat resent having to 'defend' Apple here, but your narrative frame here has too much speculation for a situation finalized in fact in 2017, almost 10 years ago.
  - astrange 6mo ago
    It wasn't an "optimization", it's because aging batteries have unstable voltage and the phone was likely to shut down otherwise.
    - bigfudge 6mo ago
      That is an optimisation for stability of the phone over its lifetime.
sbinnee 6mo ago
12gb bump soon? I don’t see that happening. It’s Apple.
- happyopossum 6mo ago
  $600 laptop? I don’t see that happening. It’s Apple.
- teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
  The A19 Pro has 12GB. I would bet on an upgrade to that 2 years after release, but a one year update is possible.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    I’ve heard rumors that they’ve run out of A18s and had to pay special for more, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle this going forward.
Havoc 6mo ago
Recently dived into mac world (air) too after decades of win/linux. Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed. Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?
- afzalive 6mo ago
  > keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app). You don't even need to memorize them. When I first switched to Mac after using Ubuntu for 4 years before that, I didn't expect this level of customization. It's misunderstood because Apple doesn't advertise this.
  - Havoc 6mo ago
    >You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app) That's actually my other complaint. "Fixing" problems with the OS with mystery apps. Connected an external mouse. Mouse wheel is inverted...weird? Google it. Yeah you can toggle it. Thank goodness. Apple knew people use mice. Oh but that inverts the trackpad too. WHAT? You're joking. I need to pick between a sane trackpad and sane mouse? I own both and need both to work to work in a not upside down manner. Climb onto an AI and ask it what to do because this is insanity like surely not this can't be how it is. LLM goes yeah no that's just macos you need to install a mystery app to unfuck it. Don't get me wrong my overall experience is positive and there has been the expected learning curve which is fine ofc, but also a fair bit of "what the actual F how are people OK with this".
    - gumby271 6mo ago
      This one was shocking to me too. I get the argument around the upside down trackpad, but inverting the mouse wheel with no built in open is insane. I also have a mystery app who's only just is to correct this stupid behavior.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
dickywad 6mo ago
[dead]
adastra22 6mo ago
> If Apple had branded the A18 Pro as “M4 Lite,” nobody would have blinked. Apple fumbled the ball here. They should have called it the "M4 Mini", and this device the "MacBook mini". Also, OP: Have you considered doing this professionally? I'd read this as the next AnandTech.
- josephg 6mo ago
  "Mini" usually denotes physical size. Is the neo physically smaller than the air?
  - adastra22 6mo ago
    Smaller, yes. Not thinner.
habosa 6mo ago
Macbook Neo is amazing, so impressed what Apple can deliver for so little. That said, my sister this morning asked if she should buy a Macbook Neo. I pointed her to a refurb M2 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM for the same price. I feel like that's the right call? Slower single-core performance but better multi-core and I think for 90% of normal people use cases the RAM is the limit before the CPU. Are others making the same calculation?
- bombcar 6mo ago
  If the used ones are out there the more RAM is probably the way to go - but colors! The reality is nobody is noticing differences between the M1 and anything afterwards, really - those that do will know enough to pick their laptop.
- havaloc 6mo ago
  I think I would cut the line at M3 or above. I think M2 uses an older architecture and it doesn't have WiFi 6E in it, and of course single core is a bit lower. Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6mo ago
    It depends on the benchmark/workload. There isn't much of a difference per core between the M1 (3.7k) and A18 pro (4k) based on passmark, but I'm sure the A18 does much better in AI/similar stuff.
  - Scrounger 6mo ago
    > Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery. My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.
- alirezaxdehghan 6mo ago
  M2 Air with 16GB is the logical choice, especially if she doesn't have a habit of breaking/dropping laptops because probably she won't get apple care with a user air.
kristianp 6mo ago
I wish the author had toned down the chatgpt style of the writing. e.g. headers that say "What You’re Getting for $599". Another example: "Read those numbers again. The same chip that posts 3,569 single-core when cold delivers 476 after five minutes of sustained load. That is an 87% reduction in single-core performance on the same hardware, running the same benchmark, separated by nothing but heat."
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  That second phrase did not feel too ChatGPT-like to me. The throttling behavior really does feel quite extreme and unprecedented as described, more typical of a mobile phone than a traditional PC. By analogy, even the crappiest and cheapest mobile PCs will not go as far as throttling the processor from a nominal 3.6 GHz to 480 MHz after five minutes of CPU-intensive load.
  - a96 6mo ago
    Yes. That was the clearest and most sensible part of the article. It literally falls off a (figurative) cliff and that's exactly what a writer would have pointed out 30 years ago.
p0w3n3d 6mo ago
[dead]
Fannon 6mo ago
While I got me a 16GB Macbook Air, I appreciate that Apple continues to make 8GB devices. This indicates for me also a commitment for not bloating up the OS (like Windows did) too much and caring about memory efficiency.
- majorbugger 6mo ago
  I don't understand this logic. You can live with 8 GB but there is nothing to "appreciate". It's enough for some stuff but totally short for other stuff.
interludead 6mo ago
The most interesting part of this is the 8GB RAM decision. Soldered 8GB in 2026 is the sort of compromise that looks fine on day one and painful in year three
- SXX 6mo ago
  It's not "soldered". It's literally part of SOC package as it's comes out of TSMC lines. Using exactly the same iPhone chip is kind a the only reason they can target this price target. Hate to defend Apple here, but there are so many more garbage laptops out there for the same price tag that can as well just go directly into landfill. Apple at least have the volume to make sure Mac software actually works on said 8GB. If Apple manage to decrease market share of other e-waste manufacturers it's good on me. At least these laptops will live 5-7 years as we browser machines.
  - lifestyleguru 6mo ago
    Yes they will reduce but for a start you have to buy yet another low end laptop. This time will be different.
    - SXX 6mo ago
      There is massive percent of population whose needs will be 200% covered with Neo performance. Most people just need a laptop for web browser, watching videos, occasional app use. Problem with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is not performance, but horrific build quality, displays, webcams, audio and keyboards. This is something Apple have solved. Also there is no Windows which solves a lot of problems. I was doing gamedev for years on M1 Air with 16GB / 256GB and some other software engineering too FFS. Surely non-power-users can live with less.
charpit 6mo ago
[dead]
quietthrow 6mo ago
Apple makes unbelievably good hardware and software that just lasts and just works. Until it’s 7 years old. After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser. I wish once you bought an Apple computer it was truly yours for as long as you wanted it instead of it being dictated by Apple. Still Great computers though.
- d1sxeyes 6mo ago
  It is yours for as long as you want it, and it (mostly) runs all the software it was compatible with when you first bought it (there are some quirks around software you had access to but didn't install, like Garageband, where you may no longer be able to access the original version). Stuff doesn't just 'stop working', as a rule, but the rest of the world does move on. I'm not sure what you think should be done about that? All software should always be backwards compatible with older versions forever? As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely, although with a different set of software to what you got the laptop with. 2026 is the year of the Linux Desktop!1! (in all seriousness though, it is actually quite good by now).
  - gib444 6mo ago
    > Stuff doesn't just 'stop working' They didn't say that. In fact they said the total opposite > As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely Somewhat true for Intel Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
    - d1sxeyes 6mo ago
      I did read between the lines here: > After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser. But I don't think the lines were particularly far apart. > Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?) M1 was six years ago, M2 was four, both within the seven years OP was talking about. You can run Linux inside a VM on any Apple Silicon Mac already, even if there is no progress on native Linux on Apple Silicon.
jorisw 6mo ago
> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Love this
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties. Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
  - HPsquared 6mo ago
    Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.
    - Affric 6mo ago
      Tragic
      - nwienert 6mo ago
        If you decry bloated web apps and use Chrome on their Mac... there's Safari. It's far more efficient and has a far snappier UI.
        dlcarrier 6mo ago
        There's also Epiphany web browser for cross-platform desktop support and the Fulguris browser for Android. It is noticeably faster, but Chrome is the new Internet Explorer in more ways than one, and many web pages don't work in WebKit browsers.
isaisabella 6mo ago
I take Max Neo as a toy computer. Maybe a good choice for those non-tech users, cuz it's enough for they daily use: writing docs, watching videos, etc. A good marketing product.
Keyframe 6mo ago
I understand the premise and it might be cool, but it does feel weird when your 6 year old playstation has more RAM than your laptop. Heck, even Nintendo Switch 2 has more RAM.
- palata 6mo ago
  Does it? If you browse the web and run Excel, it makes sense to me that you wouldn't need the same specs as when running video games? IMO developers should be forced to run on such computers, such that they would care a little bit about optimisation.
  - Keyframe 6mo ago
    Depends what you're browsing and what's in your sheets? You can't play games on this computer then? How about a phone then? My 3 year old phone has 50% more RAM.
lynguist 6mo ago
Seriously what is this ugly engagement optimized LLM slop of an article doing here yet again on the HN front page? I love the Neo as much as any other enthusiast, so yes, the subject matter is subjectively “cool”. But this “article” is indigestible. Not only it regurgitates the same thing over and over (and it has links to other articles on the same page where they already did the same), on top of that the writing style, content, intentionality does not exist in the slightest. I feel like having been offered chocolate, but having received artificial cocoa flavored petrochemicals.
- yokoprime 6mo ago
  The author appears to have done actual measurements and put in the work. I agree that the article probably has been run through an LLM, but as long as there's actual new (for me!) information, i don't really care
tobyhinloopen 6mo ago
This article feels written by Claude
- mmoustafa 6mo ago
  [flagged]
pantulis 6mo ago
Love how the post begins praising Anandtech, then proceeds to write the rest of the content as if it was written by Anand himself. Great nod!
revengerwizard 6mo ago
Was it really necessary to cut out Magsafe? I feel like I end up stumbling on the charging cable at least one or two times. Plus, I wouldn't be able to re-use the old Macbook charger I have :(
- iknowstuff 6mo ago
  Just buy a magnetic usb-c cable if it’s very important to you
  - revengerwizard 6mo ago
    The USB-C standard doesn't allow for a magnetic attachment. Besides, those are notoriously unsafe and probably even dangerous to use.
    - iknowstuff 6mo ago
      TIL thx
    - a96 6mo ago
      Also the port you plug an adapter in will still be just as fragile and just as taken up by a charger.
- memsom 6mo ago
  This makes no actual sense as a complaint. The M-series all have chargers with a USB-C socket on them that the cable is plugged in to, so you would have been able to use the PSU from any M-series MacBook - even if they were the models prior to magsafe being re-introduced. The magsafe in the M-series is not the same as magsafe 1 or 2, so they are not compatible and you would have needed to buy an adapter (and I have no idea if Apple has even made a first party version of this.) So you'd need a new adapter. On the other hand, any USB-C charger that delivers the right voltage will charge the Neo.
karel-3d 6mo ago
I wanted to ask "hm is 8GB that bad for coding? I don't use that much anyway" and now I look at my Activity Monitor and I somehow use 22GB, I don't know why. Why is Rust Analyzer running and taking 2GB? I don't even write in Rust. Each Electron app takes 300-400MB and for some reason Ghostty takes 400 MB... ok I take it back, I couldn't use 8GB.
xelaboi 6mo ago
The author clearly had some involvement in the article, I wish they could have written it themselves. It reads like they gave Claude some benchmark data and got it to write the rest of the article.
- Aerolfos 6mo ago
  AI or not, it's such a bad article that constantly repeats itself and spends more time (and words) promising the upcoming sections and "deep insights" than it does on actually writing any of those facts.
  - IshKebab 6mo ago
    That is a hallmark of AI writing. It constantly thinks it has some deep insight.
    - leoedin 6mo ago
      This kind of breathless hyperbole is spreading everywhere. "The thing nobody's talking about" is basically never an appropriate phrase for a deeply technical article. But it's everywhere now. I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying. But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace. The cats out the bag though. What can we do?
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  Yeah I noped out of that slop after "Bottom line:" and "Here's the math." Shame because they clearly put a fair bit of work into it.
beloch 6mo ago
>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)." Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications. This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.
- throawayonthe 6mo ago
  i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management
  - zozbot234 6mo ago
    Compared to Windows or Android, sure. Hopefully the Asahi folks will get around to supporting this device so we can run a proper lightweight OS on it.
    - Retr0id 6mo ago
      Unfortunately Linux is pretty damn bad under memory pressure, I think you'd get an objectively better experience on macOS. I say this as someone running Asahi right now.
      - ahartmetz 6mo ago
        But then, you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things (for me with 32-128 GB depending on machine it's C++ builds using all cores and of course local LLMs). I guess a bunch of Electron apps would also do it for 8 GB.
        kergonath 6mo ago
        > you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things Like using Chrome…
roody15 6mo ago
One good thing about the 8gig Neo means that I think Apple will at least work to support M1 8gig for a few more years!!
phyzix5761 6mo ago
I'll be impressed when Apple can make a charger that can stay in the wall.
nottorp 6mo ago
Hmm besides the 8 Gb being there mostly for market segmentation... Does this mean the Neo/Air aren't useful for lightweight gaming at all? Lightweight as in indie-ish games, not as in session length.
- a96 6mo ago
  8 GB (not bits) should be fine for light games. Was on the M1 mini at least. But that thermal cliff might come up surprisingly quick with modern graphics on even something that looks simple on the surface.
  - nottorp 6mo ago
    Well… ever since Unity came out indie games have been hard on your hardware. Anecdata: the first x-com reboot was nicer on my laptop battery at the time than random indies at the same time. Also it definitely had way more poligons.
wvh 6mo ago
I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production. I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.
- criddell 6mo ago
  Buy one and try it. Apple returns are hassle free in my experience.
- feisty0630 6mo ago
  It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised. I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day. For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.
- a96 6mo ago
  Essentially anything is lighter than a web browser.
fooker 6mo ago
It’s 8GB because they want to sell you a 16GB model for the same price when the dram crisis is over. That way the marketing can be: double the memory for the same price. Apple has done this again and again, the more time people are spending talking about one single deficiency in your product, the less time they are spending on any other product. Then you solve that single issue in the next cycle.
- varispeed 6mo ago
  > when the dram crisis is over. When it's over, Neo will be long obsolete.
  - fooker 6mo ago
    I give it six months to a year. All the current fabs are trying to balance current production with building next gen scaled up facilities. Can’t have both.
    - varispeed 6mo ago
      More like 5 to 10 years.
zeroq 6mo ago
keep in mind that installing thermal pad will void warranty. Source: apple store staff
- zeroq 6mo ago
  No idea why is this getting downvoted. I literally went to an Apple Store the other day after every influencer released their video on yt claiming that it's a great computer, you just have to install the pad in less than 3 minutes and it will work like a charm... So I asked the salesperson about that and they told I'm not allowed to tamper with the device and it will void the warranty.
  - a96 6mo ago
    It tastes funny with kool-aid.
frabonacci 6mo ago
i bought this for my girlfriend as an entrypoint laptop considering she is coming from Windows - and overall satisfied. the battery though could be improved especially considering for a couple of hundred bucks more we could have gotten a used macBook air
- hirvi74 6mo ago
  Battery issues perhaps? I haven't charged my Neo since I bought it 8 days ago. It came with a 78% battery charge and is now at 53%.
butz 6mo ago
How locked down macOS is these days? Is it still possible to use OS without account and freely "sideload" software applications? Is homebrew still a thing?
- crancher 6mo ago
  Yes, yes, and yes.
- a96 6mo ago
  My view so far: I haven't done a brand new install in a few years, but it's possible to run macos (not ios) without an account. You can't use the store, but it doesn't try to sell you things all the time either. Siri can be disabled. I don't think you can know how much it leaks and where. You can install real software pretty much freely, but some of it may pop up with a dialog saying it was downloaded from the internet (OMG!) or that it doesn't pass a signature check. First one is a warning, the second disables the program. There's a workaround. That'll work as long as it works. Brew still exists and is still terrible, but seems to still be the most common way and has a ton of things and updates pretty frequently. I think there's also Nix and some other things but I don't know how common "mac" software is on those. And you can run VM's with pretty full real environments if you like. Also the OS itself has come a long way since the first os X releases. Nearly usable apart from the GUI stuff. Installing a real OS instead only works on M1/M2 and there's no sign of things getting better. M chips and Retina screens (apart from the old 5k weirdo) are pretty damn nice.
hirvi74 6mo ago
I bought an Indigo Neo last week. I am utterly in love with machine. It's honestly exceeded all my expectations. I have a more powerful Mac for "serious" development work, so I figured the Neo would practical to buy for travel purposes. Honestly, there is something really reassuring about traveling/running around town with a $499.99 + tax laptop. I do not treat it poorly, but if something spills on it, I drop it, etc. stomaching the damage is much easier than a $2.5k MBP.
seabrookmx 6mo ago
I bought one just to have Mac around (I haven't daily driven MacOS since the PowerPC days) and to help debug MacOS specific dev environment issues my team has. While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client, I've ended up using the Neo more than any of my other machines. My Windows and Fedora machines have 2-4x the RAM but the Neo is just as responsive when juggling 20 Firefox tabs and a few other apps (mostly electron eg. Slack).
- viccis 6mo ago
  >While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client I plan on getting one for this use case. I do most dev work on servers via either something like VSCode remote or just through Vim. Tailscale and <pick your own VNC type tool> make it easy to use my Mac Mini from anywhere. I can get the Neo on an educational discount, making it $500 and a pretty easy choice. A while back I went into an Apple Store and opened up as many huge applications (Logic Pro, etc.) and like 50 browser tabs and the Neo still worked fine. I think it will be a good thin client.
  - seabrookmx 6mo ago
    Yeah I think with how efficient MacOS's memory compression is, the swap works _really_ well. You can have a lot of things open, as long as those things aren't active/too heavy it all works smoothly. Popping open Activity Monitor, when I have a lot open my swapfile regularly hits 6GB and memory pressure is yellow, but I'd have no idea otherwise. Not to say the rumoured 12GB in the next Neo wouldn't be better, but for the price you can't go wrong.
malteg 6mo ago
if not half of the hn audience wouldnt have build bloated (react or others) websites, sure we wouldnt need more than 8gb memory just for browsing...
CodeWriter23 6mo ago
"The 60-Second Thermal Cliff" It take longer than 60 seconds, but the same happens with the MacBook Air. Once heat soaked, performance drops off a cliff.
surcap526 6mo ago
[dead]
dsabanin 6mo ago
I love it. The RAM is not a problem because Apple knows a dirty secret – apps adapt to the environment both at runtime at design time. Give them less RAM, they'll allocate less and clean caches more sooner.

337 points by tosh 6mo ago

I bought a Neo as an out of the house computer and it really is a triumph. If the Air is good enough for 99% of the population, the Neo as is approaches good enough for 90% of the population at half the cost.

interludead 6mo ago
As an out-of-the-house computer, or a second/hand-me-down laptop, that tradeoff makes a lot more sense
- havaloc 6mo ago
  I use it more and more as a primary, and it doesn't feel like I've made many tradeoffs at all. I even like the keys better, they aren't transparent, so the plastic feels different, but in a good way.
criddell 6mo ago
The article says the CPU costs Apple less than $50. Why aren't these types of chips for laptops more popular in the Windows and Linux world? Where are the Dell and Framework laptops that can compete with this thing on price, quality, and performance?
- sowbug 6mo ago
  That price is even more wholesale than wholesale. Apple designed the chip and manufactures it with TSMC, as one of TSMC's best customers (currently #2 to Nvidia). Qualcomm offers the Snapdragon X series, which in theory could be competitive on price and performance. But Qualcomm is in the business of selling chipsets, not building ecosystems, so once a Qualcomm chip is out the door, they tend to forget about it. This makes it harder for manufacturers to continue providing software updates that require an up-to-date BSP (board support package). This has historically reduced the long-term value of a Qualcomm-based phone (unsure about other products). It's why, for example, Google developed their Tensor chipset, which is Qualcomm-free, and which allows Google to offer a 7-year update guarantee on the latest Pixel phones. Disclaimer: I've been out of this part of the industry for years, and I hope the dynamics have improved since then.
  - criddell 6mo ago
    When I saw the Googlebook announcement this week I was super excited until I saw that the hardware will be made by the usual crew of under-performers - HP, ASUS, Dell, etc... Google could (I think) do a lot of it in house like Apple does and make a killer product. They've done it before with the original Pixelbook. This time I was hoping they were going to essentially clone the Neo, put their software on it, and ship an inexpensive, high quality computer.

briandw 6mo ago

We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.

sgt 6mo ago
I've had many MacBook Pros but never thought about that. I guess mine has too. How do I use it? I just tap lightly to click.
- dylan604 6mo ago
  pretty much the only time I use it is to lookup the definition of a word by highlighting it and force clicking. Can't do that with the magic mouse.
  - sgt 6mo ago
    Interesting. I find it easier just to CTRL-click it and pressing down on a flat surface.
codazoda 6mo ago
I never use the physical touch on the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. It’s one of the first things I configure so that a light tap is a click. It somehow feels “faster” to me.
- mmoustafa 6mo ago
  how do you select text?
  - pashky 6mo ago
    Three finger drag. That was the best and unique thing about apple touchpads since, like, early 2000s, but then it was buried deep down the menus and forgotten for some reason. But seriously - try it, you might never go back.

nicoburns 6mo ago

The Neo is pretty great, and the compromises are totally reasonable at the price point. But if they do a second generation with A19 Pro (and thus 12GB RAM) and a slightly better cooling system then it would really be fantastic.

baal80spam 6mo ago
> if they do a second generation with A19 Pro I'm pretty sure it's a "when", not "if".
- nicoburns 6mo ago
  Probably true. I hope they do it next year, but I suspect it might the following one.
- adastra22 6mo ago
  Idk, I think they are regretting the unit economics of the Neo, and it is likely cannibalizing the Air sales.
  - QuadmasterXLII 6mo ago
    intentionally cannibalizing their own sales is iirc the official apple policy: iphone destroyed ipod and was one of the best business mives of all time
    - adastra22 6mo ago
      iPhones were more expensive than iPods though
    - SecretDreams 6mo ago
      I miss the iPod right now lol. Give me a nano!
  - tracker1 6mo ago
    Maybe some... but they're likely picking up a lot of people that would have gone with a $500-700 windows laptop instead.. and the margins are similar, so they're probably well ahead.

armanj 6mo ago

for vibe coding stuff, especially when you're outside touching grass, I believe MacBook Neo is perfect. it fills the gap between the phone remote control (which is too painful for chatting with ai cli) and, well, not having any dev device.

weezing 6mo ago
Do people really do that when out in the wild?
- jlokier 6mo ago
  It's one of the nicest things to do if you love computers, and great for your health compared with staying indoors. > Could one actually work like this, typing and everything? After my “heart-rate discovery” I decided I had to try it. I thought I’d have to build something myself, but actually one can just buy “walking desks”, and so I did. And after minor modifications, I discovered that I could walk and type perfectly well with it, even for a couple of hours. I was embarrassed I hadn’t figured out such a simple solution 20 years ago. But starting last fall—whenever the weather’s been good—I’ve tried to spend a couple of hours of each day walking outside like this https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-productive-life-some-details-of-my-personal-infrastructure/#:~:text=Could%20one,this,-%3A https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod... https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-working-outside-lowers-his-resting-heart-rate/ https://quantifiedself.com/blog/stephen-wolfram-finds-workin...
  - phainopepla2 6mo ago
    How do you deal with screen glare?
    - gib444 6mo ago
      Moving to the UK is one option. It's been cloudy for about 7 months!
    - Exoristos 6mo ago

trollied 6mo ago

The “8gb gamble” could be seen as a misleading headline. The review is very fair - it’s an amazing bit of kit for the money.

fragmede 6mo ago

The question thus, is how does the Neo perform if I put it on top of an ice pack?

orliesaurus 6mo ago
Yup, was wondering the same, that would be a great follow up article by author
Applejinx 6mo ago
Or mod it so it burns your junk but makes you the heatsink :D
- tracker1 6mo ago
  A lot of people have used a thermal pad to bridge the CPU to the case.. it doesn't really get that hot, and you get a >5% performance bump.

headcanon 6mo ago

My wife bought a Neo and has been very happy with it. I was wary of the 8gb memory limit but she is running claude code doing web development with a reasonable number of tabs open and no noticeable lag, so I'd say its definitely getting a lot of mileage out of it. It honestly seems good enough that it might cannibalize Macbook Air sales.

crazygringo 6mo ago
It might be more likely that it cannibalizes used Macbook Air sales.
- Octoth0rpe 6mo ago
  which seem to be out of stock in any case, so probably not a loss for apple. https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- GeekyBear 6mo ago
  After years of incremental upgrades to the Airs, a new entry level M5 Air gives you double the RAM, double the storage, and double the CPU and GPU performance of an M1 Air. Hopefully used Airs will come up for sale more frequently, as they remain a step up from the Neo.
  - adastra22 6mo ago
    At double the price.
    - GeekyBear 6mo ago
      Sure. Used M1 Airs are selling for roughly half the price of a new Neo.

RubberShoes 6mo ago

I still have AnandTech in a prime spot on my bookmarks toolbar. I miss the site so much and welcome any reviews like this that attempt to capture their level of detail when reviewing a product.

sysworld 6mo ago
You tried arstechnica? they do pretty good reviews. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-review-can-a-mac-get-by-with-an-iphones-processor-inside/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apple-macbook-neo-re...

rebekkamikkoa 6mo ago

[flagged]

notfried 6mo ago

Why is the author considering Claude Code a "real developer workflow"? Unless you're doing complex tool calling, is CC really resource-heavy?

xnx 6mo ago
Why does a "real developer workflow" need to be resource-heavy?
- sannysanoff 6mo ago
  IDE written in Java indexing 10K files, compiling + running spring boot apps that take 30 seconds to start on the M4, or C++ compilation, or rust compilation.. Or maybe you were sarcastic?
- jujube3 6mo ago
  I am heavy developer guy.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    and this is my developer. She consumes one hundred fifty gigabytes and runs two hundred thousand dollar, custom-tooled GPUs at ten thousand tokens per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to develop…for twelve seconds.” [Laughs] “Oh my Claude, who touched settings.json? Alright…Who touched my LLM!?”
fastball 6mo ago
Yes, Claude Code can use a lot of RAM.

khernandezrt 6mo ago

Id pay an extra $150 for the haptic trackpad tbh

deely3 6mo ago
How about $299?
- zeroq 6mo ago
  let's make it $1099 and we'll throw a monitor stand for free

lifestyleguru 6mo ago

I already have half dozen over decade old laptops with 4-8GB of RAM in the drawer, don't need any more.

caycep 6mo ago

it also looks really nice. at the Apple Store, the chassis seems well machined. the "cheaper" apple logo insert also clearly also incurred some expense as it fit into the lid perfectly. Hinge, keyboard and trackpad felt good. Design team clearly took time to telegraph craft and quality in their product.

orliesaurus 6mo ago

What if you cool the chassis really really well??? Does throttling go away?

timpera 6mo ago
https://youtu.be/lswbpVtAhrc?si=N_z_g0aZmoOUz_Cs https://youtu.be/lswbpVtAhrc?si=N_z_g0aZmoOUz_Cs > tl;dw Copper shim mod (using laptop bottom as heatsink) leads to 2x performance over stock.
- system7rocks 6mo ago
  I may buy a Neo just to do this. Intrigued.

justin66 6mo ago

> Yes, 8GB of RAM is a real limitation. But give it a year and the next version will almost certainly ship with 12GB and a modest CPU bump. We'll be able to have six browser tabs open instead of four?

simonh 6mo ago
According to some reviews I’ve seen, it tops out at around 60.
mmaniac 6mo ago
You can have as many as you like, but Safari will kill them when you're not looking.

guideamigo 6mo ago

This might win big in emerging markets where there is a desire for a high-quality laptop for non-programmers.

wlesieutre 6mo ago

> The I/O is also a genuine limitation: one USB 2.0 port is functionally useless for data transfer, no Thunderbolt means no fast external storage, and charging occupies your only USB 3 port. You're supposed to use the USB-2 port for charging and save the USB-3 port for external accessories, not the other way around It only supports 10Gb/s compared to 40 that USB-4 is theoretically capable of, but that's more than enough for anyone in the $600 laptop market.

stirlo 6mo ago
It’s a bizarre take. It’s not functionally useless, it supports a mouse, keyboard, printer or even an iPhone (non pro) perfectly fine at full speed. It also probably has enough speed for the average cheap terrible quality USB drive that the buyer of a $600 PC might have. This is a Silicon Valley tech geek take not a real world one.
- retired 6mo ago
  The assortment of cheap USB sticks I have do not surpass 400mbit/sec. Not even the ones labeled USB3.0 or High Speed.
  - mycall 6mo ago
    That is good enough speed for plenty of use cases.
- sixhobbits 6mo ago
  "genuinely" is an AI tell now as well as doing things in physical world that don't make sense like walking to the car wash to wash your car if it's close, or maybe not using USB ports in the way they were designed...
washingupliquid 6mo ago
[flagged]
- 6mo ago

darkteflon 6mo ago

I bought an 8gb M1 Air in 2020 (for what now feels like an absurdly small sum of money) as an experiment in how-cheap-is-too-cheap / chuckable travel laptop. I ended up using it as my main laptop for 2 years without regret, then handed it to my son for school. It remains in perfect condition and as delightful to use as the day I bought it (Apple software snafus notwithstanding). I fully expect to get at least 10 years use out of it. Honestly, I feel like it could probably carry him all the way through school - but I’d be embarrassed to say that out loud since that’s another 9 years.

epistasis 6mo ago
I've been on my M1 Air, 16GB, since a few weeks after launch, more than six years now. I still use it daily with lots of Docker containers, VS Code, tons of Electron apps, a small macOS arm VM, and lots of browser tabs simultaneously. Recently, Claude's VM environment is getting exercised simultaneously. Usually the memory pressure is into yellow, but responsiveness is still far higher than any Mac from the Intel days, and far more usable than any Windows laptop that I have the misfortune to experience when borrowing somebody else's computer. And despite all that memory pressure, my SSD isn't getting worn out by swapping, I'm at only "3%" of SSD wear, if those stats on the CLI are to be trusted. I'm not sure I'll need another computer anytime soon. Even though the kids jumped on it once when I left it on the couch for a few minutes, bending the case on one side of the keyboard. It bent back mostly flat. Gives it a bit of personality. Never before has $1099 (or whatever) of hardware gone so far for me.
- davnicwil 6mo ago
  a bit of an aside but what's amazing is that Docker's recent beta VM for Mac (I think released a couple of months ago now) has dramatically improved the performance you get out of your CPU. Using a macbook air, even a recent one, before this Docker was definitely usable but noticably slower. Probably still worth it but a noticable tradeoff using it as a dev machine Vs a pro. Now that tradeoff has basically gone away.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  And you forgot the best part: it is completely silent.

conception 6mo ago

I think the only gap I’ve come across is that trying to drive two monitors through a display link dock it doesn’t really have the GPU to not have that be laggy.

karmakaze 6mo ago

> Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Hmm, I have a very different understanding of how Apple uses forcing functions. Prematurely slowing iPhones with older batteries regardless of charge level as a forcing function to upgrade is what I take away. When the 12GB Neo's are out, I expect another bit of bloat in Liquid Glass or other to motivate the upgrade.

avidruntime 6mo ago
Apple's throttling was an undisclosed optimization that was controversial because it was not disclosed. The optimization itself was not controversial. It was not premature either. If the battery's measurable levels (impedance, current, voltage, etc.) fell out of nominal range, then throttling occurred. FWIW I somewhat resent having to 'defend' Apple here, but your narrative frame here has too much speculation for a situation finalized in fact in 2017, almost 10 years ago.
- astrange 6mo ago
  It wasn't an "optimization", it's because aging batteries have unstable voltage and the phone was likely to shut down otherwise.
  - bigfudge 6mo ago
    That is an optimisation for stability of the phone over its lifetime.

sbinnee 6mo ago

12gb bump soon? I don’t see that happening. It’s Apple.

happyopossum 6mo ago
$600 laptop? I don’t see that happening. It’s Apple.
teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
The A19 Pro has 12GB. I would bet on an upgrade to that 2 years after release, but a one year update is possible.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  I’ve heard rumors that they’ve run out of A18s and had to pay special for more, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle this going forward.

Havoc 6mo ago

Recently dived into mac world (air) too after decades of win/linux. Pleasant experience and very impressed by hardware and polish except wow the keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed. Who decided that sometimes its cmd+Q to close a window while other times its cmd+W and some apps support both but with different behaviours and knowing which of the three it is depends on knowing what's an OS window (but not all OS windows)? Or why is taking a screenshot of an area to clip it a FOUR key combo with one of them being a random number (the key 4). I can definitely memorize it and get used to it, but were the designers high as a kite when it was shortcut design day?

afzalive 6mo ago
> keyboard/shortcut situation is absolutely cursed. Not different...actually cursed You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app). You don't even need to memorize them. When I first switched to Mac after using Ubuntu for 4 years before that, I didn't expect this level of customization. It's misunderstood because Apple doesn't advertise this.
- Havoc 6mo ago
  >You know, you can change almost any shortcut you want with Karabiner (app) That's actually my other complaint. "Fixing" problems with the OS with mystery apps. Connected an external mouse. Mouse wheel is inverted...weird? Google it. Yeah you can toggle it. Thank goodness. Apple knew people use mice. Oh but that inverts the trackpad too. WHAT? You're joking. I need to pick between a sane trackpad and sane mouse? I own both and need both to work to work in a not upside down manner. Climb onto an AI and ask it what to do because this is insanity like surely not this can't be how it is. LLM goes yeah no that's just macos you need to install a mystery app to unfuck it. Don't get me wrong my overall experience is positive and there has been the expected learning curve which is fine ofc, but also a fair bit of "what the actual F how are people OK with this".
  - gumby271 6mo ago
    This one was shocking to me too. I get the argument around the upside down trackpad, but inverting the mouse wheel with no built in open is insane. I also have a mystery app who's only just is to correct this stupid behavior.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

dickywad 6mo ago

[dead]

adastra22 6mo ago

> If Apple had branded the A18 Pro as “M4 Lite,” nobody would have blinked. Apple fumbled the ball here. They should have called it the "M4 Mini", and this device the "MacBook mini". Also, OP: Have you considered doing this professionally? I'd read this as the next AnandTech.

josephg 6mo ago
"Mini" usually denotes physical size. Is the neo physically smaller than the air?
- adastra22 6mo ago
  Smaller, yes. Not thinner.

habosa 6mo ago

Macbook Neo is amazing, so impressed what Apple can deliver for so little. That said, my sister this morning asked if she should buy a Macbook Neo. I pointed her to a refurb M2 Macbook Air with 16GB of RAM for the same price. I feel like that's the right call? Slower single-core performance but better multi-core and I think for 90% of normal people use cases the RAM is the limit before the CPU. Are others making the same calculation?

bombcar 6mo ago
If the used ones are out there the more RAM is probably the way to go - but colors! The reality is nobody is noticing differences between the M1 and anything afterwards, really - those that do will know enough to pick their laptop.
havaloc 6mo ago
I think I would cut the line at M3 or above. I think M2 uses an older architecture and it doesn't have WiFi 6E in it, and of course single core is a bit lower. Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6mo ago
  It depends on the benchmark/workload. There isn't much of a difference per core between the M1 (3.7k) and A18 pro (4k) based on passmark, but I'm sure the A18 does much better in AI/similar stuff.
- Scrounger 6mo ago
  > Also M2 batteries are about maybe halfway done already unless the refurb replaced the battery. My mom still uses a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB of RAM. The battery requires servicing, but she's unaware and still using it just fine. I asked her to go to the Apple Store and get the battery replaced along with her iPhone 12 Pro Max battery, and she'll easily get 10 years out of each device.
alirezaxdehghan 6mo ago
M2 Air with 16GB is the logical choice, especially if she doesn't have a habit of breaking/dropping laptops because probably she won't get apple care with a user air.

kristianp 6mo ago

I wish the author had toned down the chatgpt style of the writing. e.g. headers that say "What You’re Getting for $599". Another example: "Read those numbers again. The same chip that posts 3,569 single-core when cold delivers 476 after five minutes of sustained load. That is an 87% reduction in single-core performance on the same hardware, running the same benchmark, separated by nothing but heat."

zozbot234 6mo ago
That second phrase did not feel too ChatGPT-like to me. The throttling behavior really does feel quite extreme and unprecedented as described, more typical of a mobile phone than a traditional PC. By analogy, even the crappiest and cheapest mobile PCs will not go as far as throttling the processor from a nominal 3.6 GHz to 480 MHz after five minutes of CPU-intensive load.
- a96 6mo ago
  Yes. That was the clearest and most sensible part of the article. It literally falls off a (figurative) cliff and that's exactly what a writer would have pointed out 30 years ago.

p0w3n3d 6mo ago

[dead]

Fannon 6mo ago

While I got me a 16GB Macbook Air, I appreciate that Apple continues to make 8GB devices. This indicates for me also a commitment for not bloating up the OS (like Windows did) too much and caring about memory efficiency.

majorbugger 6mo ago
I don't understand this logic. You can live with 8 GB but there is nothing to "appreciate". It's enough for some stuff but totally short for other stuff.

interludead 6mo ago

The most interesting part of this is the 8GB RAM decision. Soldered 8GB in 2026 is the sort of compromise that looks fine on day one and painful in year three

SXX 6mo ago
It's not "soldered". It's literally part of SOC package as it's comes out of TSMC lines. Using exactly the same iPhone chip is kind a the only reason they can target this price target. Hate to defend Apple here, but there are so many more garbage laptops out there for the same price tag that can as well just go directly into landfill. Apple at least have the volume to make sure Mac software actually works on said 8GB. If Apple manage to decrease market share of other e-waste manufacturers it's good on me. At least these laptops will live 5-7 years as we browser machines.
- lifestyleguru 6mo ago
  Yes they will reduce but for a start you have to buy yet another low end laptop. This time will be different.
  - SXX 6mo ago
    There is massive percent of population whose needs will be 200% covered with Neo performance. Most people just need a laptop for web browser, watching videos, occasional app use. Problem with cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks is not performance, but horrific build quality, displays, webcams, audio and keyboards. This is something Apple have solved. Also there is no Windows which solves a lot of problems. I was doing gamedev for years on M1 Air with 16GB / 256GB and some other software engineering too FFS. Surely non-power-users can live with less.

charpit 6mo ago

[dead]

quietthrow 6mo ago

Apple makes unbelievably good hardware and software that just lasts and just works. Until it’s 7 years old. After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser. I wish once you bought an Apple computer it was truly yours for as long as you wanted it instead of it being dictated by Apple. Still Great computers though.

d1sxeyes 6mo ago
It is yours for as long as you want it, and it (mostly) runs all the software it was compatible with when you first bought it (there are some quirks around software you had access to but didn't install, like Garageband, where you may no longer be able to access the original version). Stuff doesn't just 'stop working', as a rule, but the rest of the world does move on. I'm not sure what you think should be done about that? All software should always be backwards compatible with older versions forever? As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely, although with a different set of software to what you got the laptop with. 2026 is the year of the Linux Desktop!1! (in all seriousness though, it is actually quite good by now).
- gib444 6mo ago
  > Stuff doesn't just 'stop working' They didn't say that. In fact they said the total opposite > As a reasonable alternative, you can stick Linux on it and it'll run nicely Somewhat true for Intel Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?)
  - d1sxeyes 6mo ago
    I did read between the lines here: > After that you essentially have to chuck it as you don’t get any updates from Apple and slowly you descend into incompatibility unless you world exists in browser. But I don't think the lines were particularly far apart. > Not so true for Apple Silicon (Asahi are only upto M2 I think?) M1 was six years ago, M2 was four, both within the seven years OP was talking about. You can run Linux inside a VM on any Apple Silicon Mac already, even if there is no progress on native Linux on Apple Silicon.

jorisw 6mo ago

> There’s also a silver lining to the tight memory envelope: Apple has to keep macOS running well within 8GB, which is actually a nice forcing function against bloat and inefficiency. We could all use a little more of that. Love this

dlcarrier 6mo ago
Eight gigabytes is orders of magnitude more than an OS could ever use, or even the pre-installed software. It's web browsers and the software that uses them that occupy all the RAM, and those are usually made by third parties. Open a few news web pages, and run Discord, Slack, VS Code, etc, and you'll quickly run out of RAM.
- HPsquared 6mo ago
  Ironically these are all text-based applications where the actual content on screen is in the order of a few hundred bytes. They've managed to reach a bloat factor of one million.
  - Affric 6mo ago
    Tragic
    - nwienert 6mo ago
      If you decry bloated web apps and use Chrome on their Mac... there's Safari. It's far more efficient and has a far snappier UI.
      - dlcarrier 6mo ago
        There's also Epiphany web browser for cross-platform desktop support and the Fulguris browser for Android. It is noticeably faster, but Chrome is the new Internet Explorer in more ways than one, and many web pages don't work in WebKit browsers.

isaisabella 6mo ago

I take Max Neo as a toy computer. Maybe a good choice for those non-tech users, cuz it's enough for they daily use: writing docs, watching videos, etc. A good marketing product.

Keyframe 6mo ago

I understand the premise and it might be cool, but it does feel weird when your 6 year old playstation has more RAM than your laptop. Heck, even Nintendo Switch 2 has more RAM.

palata 6mo ago
Does it? If you browse the web and run Excel, it makes sense to me that you wouldn't need the same specs as when running video games? IMO developers should be forced to run on such computers, such that they would care a little bit about optimisation.
- Keyframe 6mo ago
  Depends what you're browsing and what's in your sheets? You can't play games on this computer then? How about a phone then? My 3 year old phone has 50% more RAM.

lynguist 6mo ago

Seriously what is this ugly engagement optimized LLM slop of an article doing here yet again on the HN front page? I love the Neo as much as any other enthusiast, so yes, the subject matter is subjectively “cool”. But this “article” is indigestible. Not only it regurgitates the same thing over and over (and it has links to other articles on the same page where they already did the same), on top of that the writing style, content, intentionality does not exist in the slightest. I feel like having been offered chocolate, but having received artificial cocoa flavored petrochemicals.

yokoprime 6mo ago
The author appears to have done actual measurements and put in the work. I agree that the article probably has been run through an LLM, but as long as there's actual new (for me!) information, i don't really care

tobyhinloopen 6mo ago

This article feels written by Claude

mmoustafa 6mo ago
[flagged]

pantulis 6mo ago

Love how the post begins praising Anandtech, then proceeds to write the rest of the content as if it was written by Anand himself. Great nod!

revengerwizard 6mo ago

Was it really necessary to cut out Magsafe? I feel like I end up stumbling on the charging cable at least one or two times. Plus, I wouldn't be able to re-use the old Macbook charger I have :(

iknowstuff 6mo ago
Just buy a magnetic usb-c cable if it’s very important to you
- revengerwizard 6mo ago
  The USB-C standard doesn't allow for a magnetic attachment. Besides, those are notoriously unsafe and probably even dangerous to use.
  - iknowstuff 6mo ago
    TIL thx
  - a96 6mo ago
    Also the port you plug an adapter in will still be just as fragile and just as taken up by a charger.
memsom 6mo ago
This makes no actual sense as a complaint. The M-series all have chargers with a USB-C socket on them that the cable is plugged in to, so you would have been able to use the PSU from any M-series MacBook - even if they were the models prior to magsafe being re-introduced. The magsafe in the M-series is not the same as magsafe 1 or 2, so they are not compatible and you would have needed to buy an adapter (and I have no idea if Apple has even made a first party version of this.) So you'd need a new adapter. On the other hand, any USB-C charger that delivers the right voltage will charge the Neo.

karel-3d 6mo ago

I wanted to ask "hm is 8GB that bad for coding? I don't use that much anyway" and now I look at my Activity Monitor and I somehow use 22GB, I don't know why. Why is Rust Analyzer running and taking 2GB? I don't even write in Rust. Each Electron app takes 300-400MB and for some reason Ghostty takes 400 MB... ok I take it back, I couldn't use 8GB.

xelaboi 6mo ago

The author clearly had some involvement in the article, I wish they could have written it themselves. It reads like they gave Claude some benchmark data and got it to write the rest of the article.

Aerolfos 6mo ago
AI or not, it's such a bad article that constantly repeats itself and spends more time (and words) promising the upcoming sections and "deep insights" than it does on actually writing any of those facts.
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  That is a hallmark of AI writing. It constantly thinks it has some deep insight.
  - leoedin 6mo ago
    This kind of breathless hyperbole is spreading everywhere. "The thing nobody's talking about" is basically never an appropriate phrase for a deeply technical article. But it's everywhere now. I'm in two minds about this - on one hand, the AI assisted writing is probably surfacing ideas and articles that never would have been published otherwise. Either because the author isn't a great writer, or because the editing never got finished. In cases like that, maybe a bit of AI induced cliche is a price worth paying. But on the other hand, I increasingly read half way into an article to realise that there's nothing there. It's ALL hyperbolic nothingness. It used to be that a well written article was a sign of a well thought out argument. No longer! It's made reading anything on the internet become tedious. I feel we're heading towards the death of the interesting internet at a rapid pace. The cats out the bag though. What can we do?
IshKebab 6mo ago
Yeah I noped out of that slop after "Bottom line:" and "Here's the math." Shame because they clearly put a fair bit of work into it.

beloch 6mo ago

>"~1.5-2GB of available application memory (after macOS overhead)." Having an OS eat up >75% of your memory on a fresh boot is not ideal. You're gambling on macOS experiencing zero bloat for the lifetime of this product. If the OS memory footprint grows even just a few percent, users of this model will lose a significant portion of available memory for applications. This model might trigger planned obsolescence legislation in some jurisdictions.

throawayonthe 6mo ago
i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management
- zozbot234 6mo ago
  Compared to Windows or Android, sure. Hopefully the Asahi folks will get around to supporting this device so we can run a proper lightweight OS on it.
  - Retr0id 6mo ago
    Unfortunately Linux is pretty damn bad under memory pressure, I think you'd get an objectively better experience on macOS. I say this as someone running Asahi right now.
    - ahartmetz 6mo ago
      But then, you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things (for me with 32-128 GB depending on machine it's C++ builds using all cores and of course local LLMs). I guess a bunch of Electron apps would also do it for 8 GB.
      - kergonath 6mo ago
        > you don't usually run into memory pressure with 8 GB and Linux unless you do a few specific things Like using Chrome…

roody15 6mo ago

One good thing about the 8gig Neo means that I think Apple will at least work to support M1 8gig for a few more years!!

phyzix5761 6mo ago

I'll be impressed when Apple can make a charger that can stay in the wall.

nottorp 6mo ago

Hmm besides the 8 Gb being there mostly for market segmentation... Does this mean the Neo/Air aren't useful for lightweight gaming at all? Lightweight as in indie-ish games, not as in session length.

a96 6mo ago
8 GB (not bits) should be fine for light games. Was on the M1 mini at least. But that thermal cliff might come up surprisingly quick with modern graphics on even something that looks simple on the surface.
- nottorp 6mo ago
  Well… ever since Unity came out indie games have been hard on your hardware. Anecdata: the first x-com reboot was nicer on my laptop battery at the time than random indies at the same time. Also it definitely had way more poligons.

wvh 6mo ago

I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production. I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.

criddell 6mo ago
Buy one and try it. Apple returns are hassle free in my experience.
feisty0630 6mo ago
It really depends on what sort of DAW work you're doing, but you'd be surprised. I've always found Audio and MIDI processing on a Mac to be a lot more responsive and a lot more resource-efficient on MacOS than any other OS. It's the reason a lot of us ran Hackintoshes back in the day. For what it's worth, my M3 MBP with 18GB RAM can have dozens of Firefox tabs, virtual machines (some x64, some ARM), editors, terminals, Mail, and Excel open, and you literally couldn't tell it wasn't idling. I've never even heard the fan ramp up.
a96 6mo ago
Essentially anything is lighter than a web browser.

fooker 6mo ago

It’s 8GB because they want to sell you a 16GB model for the same price when the dram crisis is over. That way the marketing can be: double the memory for the same price. Apple has done this again and again, the more time people are spending talking about one single deficiency in your product, the less time they are spending on any other product. Then you solve that single issue in the next cycle.

varispeed 6mo ago
> when the dram crisis is over. When it's over, Neo will be long obsolete.
- fooker 6mo ago
  I give it six months to a year. All the current fabs are trying to balance current production with building next gen scaled up facilities. Can’t have both.
  - varispeed 6mo ago
    More like 5 to 10 years.

zeroq 6mo ago

keep in mind that installing thermal pad will void warranty. Source: apple store staff

zeroq 6mo ago
No idea why is this getting downvoted. I literally went to an Apple Store the other day after every influencer released their video on yt claiming that it's a great computer, you just have to install the pad in less than 3 minutes and it will work like a charm... So I asked the salesperson about that and they told I'm not allowed to tamper with the device and it will void the warranty.
- a96 6mo ago
  It tastes funny with kool-aid.

frabonacci 6mo ago

i bought this for my girlfriend as an entrypoint laptop considering she is coming from Windows - and overall satisfied. the battery though could be improved especially considering for a couple of hundred bucks more we could have gotten a used macBook air

hirvi74 6mo ago
Battery issues perhaps? I haven't charged my Neo since I bought it 8 days ago. It came with a 78% battery charge and is now at 53%.

butz 6mo ago

How locked down macOS is these days? Is it still possible to use OS without account and freely "sideload" software applications? Is homebrew still a thing?

crancher 6mo ago
Yes, yes, and yes.
a96 6mo ago
My view so far: I haven't done a brand new install in a few years, but it's possible to run macos (not ios) without an account. You can't use the store, but it doesn't try to sell you things all the time either. Siri can be disabled. I don't think you can know how much it leaks and where. You can install real software pretty much freely, but some of it may pop up with a dialog saying it was downloaded from the internet (OMG!) or that it doesn't pass a signature check. First one is a warning, the second disables the program. There's a workaround. That'll work as long as it works. Brew still exists and is still terrible, but seems to still be the most common way and has a ton of things and updates pretty frequently. I think there's also Nix and some other things but I don't know how common "mac" software is on those. And you can run VM's with pretty full real environments if you like. Also the OS itself has come a long way since the first os X releases. Nearly usable apart from the GUI stuff. Installing a real OS instead only works on M1/M2 and there's no sign of things getting better. M chips and Retina screens (apart from the old 5k weirdo) are pretty damn nice.

hirvi74 6mo ago

I bought an Indigo Neo last week. I am utterly in love with machine. It's honestly exceeded all my expectations. I have a more powerful Mac for "serious" development work, so I figured the Neo would practical to buy for travel purposes. Honestly, there is something really reassuring about traveling/running around town with a $499.99 + tax laptop. I do not treat it poorly, but if something spills on it, I drop it, etc. stomaching the damage is much easier than a $2.5k MBP.

seabrookmx 6mo ago

I bought one just to have Mac around (I haven't daily driven MacOS since the PowerPC days) and to help debug MacOS specific dev environment issues my team has. While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client, I've ended up using the Neo more than any of my other machines. My Windows and Fedora machines have 2-4x the RAM but the Neo is just as responsive when juggling 20 Firefox tabs and a few other apps (mostly electron eg. Slack).

viccis 6mo ago
>While I lean on VSCode remote SSH pretty heavily so you could argue I'm using it as more of a thin client I plan on getting one for this use case. I do most dev work on servers via either something like VSCode remote or just through Vim. Tailscale and <pick your own VNC type tool> make it easy to use my Mac Mini from anywhere. I can get the Neo on an educational discount, making it $500 and a pretty easy choice. A while back I went into an Apple Store and opened up as many huge applications (Logic Pro, etc.) and like 50 browser tabs and the Neo still worked fine. I think it will be a good thin client.
- seabrookmx 6mo ago
  Yeah I think with how efficient MacOS's memory compression is, the swap works _really_ well. You can have a lot of things open, as long as those things aren't active/too heavy it all works smoothly. Popping open Activity Monitor, when I have a lot open my swapfile regularly hits 6GB and memory pressure is yellow, but I'd have no idea otherwise. Not to say the rumoured 12GB in the next Neo wouldn't be better, but for the price you can't go wrong.

malteg 6mo ago

if not half of the hn audience wouldnt have build bloated (react or others) websites, sure we wouldnt need more than 8gb memory just for browsing...

CodeWriter23 6mo ago

"The 60-Second Thermal Cliff" It take longer than 60 seconds, but the same happens with the MacBook Air. Once heat soaked, performance drops off a cliff.

surcap526 6mo ago

[dead]

dsabanin 6mo ago

I love it. The RAM is not a problem because Apple knows a dirty secret – apps adapt to the environment both at runtime at design time. Give them less RAM, they'll allocate less and clean caches more sooner.