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You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)

Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.

Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.

>No camera notch

Well, I see this as a very positive thing.

Feels very negative! It costs 50% less than the air, in a time when everyone else’s prices are going up.

The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.

> * No MagSafe

For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk.

But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare.

The biggest drawback is no Thunderbolt. The biggest sell for Macs right now is the ability to daisy chain them with the new RDMA update. A used M1 Mac Mini is more valuable than this.

And of course the screen: 13.0-inch vs 13.6

Weight is the same incidentally.

I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)

I want to see the person buying the Neo and pairing it with a new Studio Display.

The only one of those choices I disagree with is no Touch ID in the base spec. Otherwise, good corners to cut to get to the cheap price point.

"1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage"

That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.

A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.

Why didn't you list the number 1 difference, the price.

It's pretty cool to see this machine come out. The Macbook Air is still my sweet spot though, I use a Thunderbolt audio interface, and need more RAM.

Great for a student or casual user though for sure.

I forgot about force touch as a feature until I read this comment.

Fantastic post, thank you. Answered pretty much every question i had. This is why I love hacker news.

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=

— ...We believe that the customers will like it despite all that. We plan to market it as MacBook Nerfed.

— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.

— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?

> No camera notch

I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar?

The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple.

Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better.

Do you know if the A series processor supports virtualization?

The Red Delicious of Macs.

Price difference?

> No keyboard backlighting

When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?

> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

That’s been the case for 5+ years :)

> * “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air

for pretty much half the price, though.

i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ laptop.

as somebody that has used both windows (at work), mac os (at work) and linux (at work and at home) the macbook neo could be an absolute steal of a laptop.

> * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

oh yeah, first world problems /s

like Neo from the Martix, it has only one interface port of real use.

"No keyboard backlighting" is a show-stopper. Nuts.

> Powered by A18 Pro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18

So this is basically running on a phone CPU

I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.

But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.

I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most.

I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop).

So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman).

Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone.

Now, if only Asahi was more complete.

> This is a major challenge to Microsoft.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I get the impression that microsoft and the pc world have given up on consumer hardware and instead are completely focused on enterprise and ai. That's why windows 11 is saturated with bugs and is basically unusable, but enterprise is forced to buy it.

Microsoft's build quality is largely equivalent, but the press has already noticed that the value proposition at Microsoft is now lacking.

> Apple's newest MacBook is an impressive play for affordability, right as the Surface line is looking expensive and out of touch.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3077961

This is not primarily competing with the surface line of laptops, this is mostly competing with chromebooks which dominate schools. That's a completely different segment of devices.

I think the 2 laptops you mentioned are targeting different markets.

The Surface Laptop you linked to is - 16GB of RAM and 512GB of Storage (no 8GB of RAM option)

The $599 Mac Neo is 8GB of RAM and 256GB of Storage. It doesn't have a 16GB RAM option but a 512GB storage option is $699.

8GB RAM seems to me to be targeting folks who don't run a lot of local apps or multiple big apps

The surface laptop is a competitor to the MacBook Air, the cheaper Surface Laptop Go was the low cost attempt from MS.

Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.

> Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world.

I completely agree. I actually quit like and get along with my Surface Laptop. It's a really nice computer overall, worthy. It's the closest you get to the same polish and usability that Apple has in their macbooks.

I absolutely love my M4 macbook pro, it's definitely the best laptop I've ever owned. I had an older macbook pro that I kept way past its lifetime too.

> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

200% is ideal but scaling on Windows has gotten really good. I use 150% on a 4K monitor and it works well.

The ARM64 Surface Laptop is great and definitely matches the MacBook Air's quality, but yeah, there's no way it is competitive with the new Neo offering from Apple at current prices.

I hope this leads to a general decrease in price for laptops, but with the RAM crunch I don't see that happening…

I don’t think it is just a hardware issue: Windows still just maps all movements and scrolling directly into pixels and lines. Most programs just slightly blur the viewport when scrolling to hide the latency, but that just adds even more latency. You can disable the scroll delay in the web browser settings, but not any of the new applications, like the new notepad

Whereas Apple uses smooth acceleration curves

Not just Microsoft. Dell and HP must be having emergency meetings right about now...

This is really well put.

It's interesting, for years I have been trying to make my iPad a nice, slim laptop I could bring with me everywhere for lighter/coding specific tasks. I've gone through several keyboards trying to make this work. It never has.

Now with this laptop, I can do exactly this, while being cheaper than what I've been attempting to do with an iPad.

I think you're undervaluing touchscreen capability, which even the cheapest laptops offer now. Kids and non-tech folks have come to expect it by default.

Now that Apple is attempting to compete in this space, they'll have to pitch these folks on what macOS without touch capability offers over Windows with touch capability.

Maybe it will still sell well enough, maybe people aren't that stuck on touchscreens.

I have the Lenovo X1 and I'm very happy with it, though obviously that's in a pretty different price category than the Yoga, Surface, or Macbook Neo.

On the other hand, more money doesn't always mean better computer. I had a Dell XPS 9570 at a previous gig that had a lot of issues: coil whine, bad camera placement, terrible thermals, etc.

The Surface has 16GB of RAM vs 8GB on the Neo (Windows definitely eats RAM though so maybe that's par).

> I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible.

Can we talk about laptops that you can’t carry by the edge where your palm rests because it flexes the frame and registers it as a mouse down event …

Sometimes I wish I could just use any laptop and Remote Desktop into my gaming rig which is awesome. Then I can have whatever form factor laptop I want, but the problem is I think the latency still sucks (maybe not?) on stuff like Parsec even locally.

PC to me is always best as a itx minitower form factor.

I agree. I read this and immediately thought to myself: The gloves are off.

The price point, the capability, the only thing stopping Apple at this point is the MDM stuff integrating it with other identity providers but its ahead of where it used to be.

> it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts

I agree with you, but I’m afraid Apple doesn’t agree with us. The recent MacBooks do not use 200% scaling out of the box anymore. It is a setting that only nerds use. I have no reason to believe that out of the box the default settings on this MacBook Neo will use 200% scaling either.

For a casual computer at home, I'd get one. Everything I do is practically web based anyway.

> The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones.

Possibly, but I would wait for reviews to make that call. The hardware is slower than other MacBooks; memory may be slower, too, and other hardware may be slightly worse in quality.

Some of the new HP laptops are pretty well designed and have reasonable prices.

That Surface has 16GB RAM though.

> Your new MacBook Neo. Just the way you want it[sic]. 13-inch MacBook Neo in Indigo A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine Apple Intelligence Footnote ※

    8GB unified memory
    256GB SSD storage
    U.S. English Magic Keyboard with Lock Key
    20W USB‑C Power Adapter

    Two USB-C ports, 3.5 mm headphone jack
    Support for one external display

I'll just chime in to say that not everyone cares about the features you mentioned that much. Keyboard, touchpad, looks are the last things I think about when comparing laptops. Not to lessen your preferences, just to point out that there's a variety of viewpoints.

The Dell XPS 13 plus 9320 looks pretty good design wise

> which means you have subtle display artifacts.

No. 150÷ just means 96dpi * 1.5

Doesn't the surface have a touch screen?

I don't really see how it's a competitor if it doesn't have a touch screen.

MSFT up 1.84% today..

Not really, because Surface isn't what most folks buying PCs get.

And those prices don't compute in many European countries, Africa, and most likely other regions as well.

>Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world

Thinkpads.

Or in general any business laptop, like HP Elitebook or Dell Presicion.

But they are not cheap at all haha

If you want performace get a desktop!

all apple needs, to kill surface laptops entirely, is to enable windows to run on m series laptops without issues.

I don't know why the downvotes, maybe someone can chime in if there is more to surface laptop? because i am using one laptop, and much prefer to use windows on M4 macbook pro instead.

Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.

This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).

Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.

They'll develop with 8GB of memory in mind, but under the assumption that they are the only app running. And if it's Chrome that's probably right most of the time.

I doubt it - for decades bloat increases over the time and I doubt this trend will suddenly stop. I'm using a notebook with 8Gb of RAM at home and it is working most of the time but if I open many tabs in Firefox (say 15-30) it is running out of RAM and getting killed.

Of course it's depend on which sites are open but many sites are JS heavy and use lots of RAM as a result.

NeXT reportedly used to have all their developers on the entry level 8MB NeXTStations.

With builds running on big build servers.

There is a secret easter egg: every time you say the magic incantation "You have to let it all go, Neo. Free your mind", macOS triggers every app to run a full GC cycle.

“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”

Bye bye electron

The worst memory hogs today are websites.

While I died inside at the 8Gb RAM, this is absolutely right.

We should be developing efficient software, not assuming our customers can just pay for more RAM forever.

I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

I love the new reduced resources Era. MS was clever in launching Xbox series S + X and demanding all published games run on the lower spec machine (similar to Xbox One-S specs).

Games and Apps have both been suffering from resource glut -- slow rendering, loading , large downloads , poor user experience.

It'll be great to have 5+ years of low resources to force devs back into taking performance seriously.

Where are we going? Thin-clients? No thanks.

This is the first release. They test the market and optimize. BTW, I have an old M1 with 8gb and works well for some kind of [light?] development. Not using xcode but vscode.

Wow props to that sales rep. Not many would pass on the opportunity to sell something more expensive. I'm assuming they make some sort of (paltry) commission

> This is such a better deal than I had growing up, Apple has to be taking a bath on these.

Apple doesn't sell anything where they're taking a bath; their margins have been high 30's to low 40's for many years. All of the technology in the Neo already existed; they didn't have to create anything new.

> it's pretty easy for college students to justify this plus an iPad

Why would you want an iPad?

The Neo can run iPad apps and it's small enough that it can be used in most situations where you'd typically use a tablet (bed, couch, etc).

This. My daughter is a high-school junior, and she's been asking for a laptop going into her senior year/college. This is exactly who Apple is going after.

I still find it funny that for my personal setup I have a $700 Macbook Air but a $1500 iPhone Pro and it feels like it makes sense.

> Are there any similar laptops around this price range with comparable battery life?

A Chromebook with 8Gb ram and stock ChromeOS gets 10 hours doing real work. And with real work I mean full local dev with containers, vscode, Vivado, and 100+ chrome tabs open. And even running small VMs from time to time.

I managed to get through 3 years of college (in a humanities degree, granted) with a dinky used thinkpad running the latest ubuntu distro. Only needed it for note taking, pdf reading, and essay writing, and it got the job done for $50. There were only a few times I was screwed when it came to needing special software...

For a student, a Kompanio Ultra Chromebook is a far better deal. The faster processor and more RAM make it better for typical laptop use. The touchscreen makes it better for educational use. It's only $100 more than just the Neo by itself.

I think this also looks super compelling for people who want to ditch the Macbook Pro.

I'm mostly at a desk so I'd love to be able to switch to Mac Mini only when M5-M6 drops on the mini. The problem is I need a laptop for travel, weekend trips, events, etc.

The Neo is so cheap that I can buy a new Mac Mini AND the Neo for roughly the price of the macbook pro and get the best of both worlds.

You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.

This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!

So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

The USB 2.0 should be the one on the back, so the charging cable does not interfere with me plugging and unplugging things from the good port.

Makes sense, the iphone has only one port after all. Interesting that it supported a second one though, or maybe that's the Pro revision designed for this use case?

> - USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support

I'd like to run the external display plus an external SSD at USB 3 speeds, so I'd be waiting for experience reports on whether the one port can handle both without constraining the filesystem transfer speeds.

Charging in and DisplayPort out on the same socket would mean an additional dongle or hub or something, so there's at least that reason for having both.

Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)

Im surprised that they’re doing DP and not thunderbolt?

Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.

Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.

As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.

Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.

Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.

The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.

$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!

I 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.

My 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.

Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.

*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.

The price is fantastic but 8GB RAM feels like going backwards again, but oh well, ram shortage and beggars can't be chosers

I 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.

Yeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.

Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.

I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.

12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.

I 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.

How much of that 256GB is eaten by the factory install of MacOS?

What's the CPU performance like compared to an M1?

The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.

This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.

$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.

What’s wrong with your M1 air?

nah 8gb of ram is laughable

8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.

It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.

This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.

Looks like it's aimed squarely at students.

Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.

They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.

That's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.

If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.

Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.

Growing up in the 90s all my elementary school computers were Macs. They seemed to get more Windows as I got older. Not sure the current state.

Would be great deal in 5 years to buy those post-lease if Asahi/others Linux catch up.

I'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...

call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?

I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.

Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.

A18 Pro is generations ahead of M1 and M2 on single thread if these scores are true. Are you saying we had this incredibly overpowered silicon shipped on millions of Instagram machines?

I'm physically hurting at the amount of processing power we wasted. Atleast Apple did the right thing here.

Single thread performance is 50% faster, which is more important for most ordinary tasks.

I'm typing this on an 8gb MacBook and Tahoe. it's mostly fine

> Sure hope macOS 27 comes with some serious performance optimization.

Ditto for iOS 26. They need some Snow Leopard action, for real.

This is the reason why I am not going to Tahoe. I have heard its very buggy at times and resource intensive.

And I am quite happy with Sonama.

It would be sensible/wonderful for Apple to release a deliberately lighter version of MacOS for these laptops; but their intransigence and (e.g.) willingness to hold the iPad’s OS back year after year suggests they won’t.

Please use the correct names, despite whatever apple says.

It's Mac OS Vista. This is the proper name for this abomination Apple calls Tahoe.

Yeah, not even having an upgrade to 16gb or more makes this dead on arrival for anyone doing real work. Bummer, since otherwise it looks great. I guess it'd be the same price as a macbook air after that upgrade anyways though, so it doesn't really matter.

lots of people now have a $1000 phone and no computer at all.

The ideal kind of Apple customers, https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Mac-Leander-Kahney/dp/1593271220...

Depends what you consider luxury feeling. It's so stripped down.

Aside from the slower CPU, half the ram, and half the SSD as the Air this is also what it's all missing compared to the Air:

TouchID, MagSafe, slightly bigger wider color (P3) screen, better 12MP CenterStage camera, 2 more speakers, 1 more mic, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensor, force-touch trackpad, WiFi 7, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, larger battery with longer runtime and faster charging.

Yes you can get TouchID with the 512GB upgrade for more money on the Neo.

It's $600, unless you're a school.

You can't kill Chromebook with hardware. Apple needs software if they want more share of that market.

Non-Socketed memory and storage is more of an upgrade friendly feature rather than a repairability feature. They don’t often fail. And most people do not attempt to upgrade their devices anyway, especially the type of people who are not power users, and are buying low end devices. For most people, upgrades are no longer a purchasing consideration, and they will buy the laptop that’s five dollars cheaper and has more attractive packaging.

And no, Apple is not soldering memory to the main board on most of their computers these days. All of the M series computers have the memory on package with the CPU, because there are latency issues with putting it any further away. The A18 Pro that this laptop uses is package-on-package, the DRAM is directly on top of the SoC.

There are no socketed standards for LPDDR anyway.

You're out of date; Apple is soldering the memory to the CPU directly. I mean are you complaining that you can't swap your L2 cache or replace the math coprocessor? The history of computing is one of the CPU absorbing every single discrete component over time. Apple is at a point where the CPU has to absorb the RAM to maintain their performance lead. I'm happy I get a super fast computer.

My 2c: I meet people all the time using the same Macbooks for 5+ years. While I'm attracted to modularity, SoCs have undeniable advantages (I'm assuming other commenters will cover this). I bought the fanless MB Air because I imagine this thing could probably go for a decade without any repair, outside the battery. I'd say this longevity is worthy of praise.

For contrast, I used a Surface Book throughout college and within weeks of the warranty expiring I ran into serious issues with the battery, then the charging port, display backlight, fan. I loved it to death so I kept it on life support and changed my usage patterns until I gave up on it. And yes, my next device was a used Thinkpad, and I was able to fix most issues I ran into. But I'd

I am NOT a fan of the measures Apple takes to monopolize the maintenance and repair of their devices.

I expect the customer of this product is not worried about repairability: to them, it's just an iPad with a keyboard. You're also citing 3x higher costs, so they're really not comparable.

The lack of upgradability is directly what provides a lot of benefits that I expect the average consumer vastly prefers: better performance with soldered memory and better battery life. It's not just to shaft you on prices (though that's definitely a big factor).

I mean durability is as or more important than repairability and apple products have a reputation for lasting a long time and holding their value. And getting software support etc. In general I think tech nerds underestimate how much people value durability over repairability and how hard it can be to sell repairability. Ive found that "this product is repairable" can be interpreted by people im trying to convince to buy a framework as "this product will need to be repaired and it's going to be your problem." On the other hand Apple's reputation for durability means that buying a used MacBook to save money is a serious and popular option which is by far the most environmentally friendly option compared to any new device, however repairable. The repairability <-> sustainability relationship isn't as straightforward as people suggest in the real world imo

If you stop the video you can see the 8 screws on the bottom of the Neo. I'm hoping that means there's some level of repairability at least from a battery perspective. I'm looking forward to some teardowns when it's in peoples hands.

> Apple I imagine is still soldering their storage and memory to the motherboard.

Memory would be in the SoC no?

Apple's idea of that is to shred old stuff and reuse the material.

How’s screen, keyboard and cooling in those? Still garbage matrix with flimsy keyboard and jet loud cooling system?

That's the tradeoff with making something small and light. I don't have a big problem with it.

that ifixit article is an AI slop puff piece.

Thinkpads have good repairability, few people would debate that. They are not perfect and the ifixit "review" itself acknowledges that the wifi antenna is soldered, hence not repairable.

macOS has been running on A series chips since the beginning of the transition to Apple Silicon. The original developer Macs had an "A12Z" CPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit

There have also been iPads running on M series chips for years now.

The actual hardware system differences between an M4 iPad Air and M4 MacBook Air are pretty slim as far as the OS would be concerned.

You can connect an iPad to an external display, keyboard, and mouse. It even has multi-window support.

Not supporting Mac apps on iPad OS is a product decision by Apple, not a hardware or underlying OS issue.

IIRC, iOS was forked from macOS (well... OSX), and they share a lot of internals. I think they could probably start up finder alongside springboard with some tweaking... but they'd much rather sell you an iPad AND a Mac!

It's been able to run on A series chips for a while. I don't think that's what's preventing MacOS on iPad. It's that the OS is not optimized for touch in any way. Too many small things to click. It's just not the kind of half-baked experience Apple would put their name behind. Likely the same reason why you haven't seen a touchscreen on a Mac.

Yep this is the biggest news. We’re one step closer to a DeX like experience for iPhone. If Apple did that they would stomp the entire Windows laptop AND desktop market.

The phone in my hand is powerful enough to handle all the general purpose computing I already do, so let me do it Apple!

It's a shame it isn't the A19 series with MIE.

Until today if they had less than around $800 to spend my answer would be "Don't buy a new MacBook from Apple" because there isn't one that cheap. Maybe look for a used or refurbished M1-M2 model.

Today it's the MacBook Neo unless you have a higher budget and want a nicer screen and more power. Then it's the MacBook Air, unless you do serious photography, video, audio, or development work then it's a MacBook Pro.

It's still a pretty simple, linear progression up the line.

Steve Jobs presided over an era where they were selling:

- A white plastic 13" MacBook

- An aluminum 13" MacBook

- 13", 15", and 17" Macbook Pro

- A high end 13" MacBook Air that thermally throttled and was more expensive than most of their other laptops

When Steve came back Apple was months from bankruptcy; their product lineup was full of duds.

Today Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and every product line is ruthlessly optimized/scrutinized to maximize their revenue/supply chain use/suss out consumer needs for the next cycle.

There isn’t a world where Apple has a $4T market cap and where their product offering fits in a neat 2x2.

Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?

Well first I would ask them what they are planning to use the Macbook for.

Then I would make the recommendation. There is Macbook Neo for basic stuff. Macbook Air for regular stuff and Macbook Pro for gangsta stuff.

It seems there is still good differentiation between the Macbook lines.

Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.

People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.

Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.

With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.

MacBook Air - mid range mid price, good quality, basically as functional as the Pro now. The price of the Neo is very compelling if they want it for light duty work though. And obviously high end is high end but those people know who they are

I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)

Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.

I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.

Agree, there is a watered down product vision

> Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy!

Depending on their budget and needs, a Neo, Air, or Pro.

When Jobs took over Apple he didn’t have a device in a quarter of the world’s pocket.

The Neo is definitely a response to Chromebooks. Apple bet on the iPad for the education market and lost that bet for obvious reasons. This was already obvious 10 years ago when I was working in edtech.

They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that?

The problem with competing against Chromebooks is that Chromebooks + GSuite and Google’s managed offerings for schools.

8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.

Assuming nothing really bad comes out of the reviews, this looks like the best computer for like 99% of users. I really can't imagine buying some plastic-fantastic Acer unit when this is on the market.

This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.

This is for people who want the cheapest MacBook possible, with the edu discount it's only 499$.

You drop it being silly, cool that's only 500$.

I think 90% of people will be fine with just an iPad. Some will need a small bump for laptop OS but not necessarily the specs which is where the Neo comes in, then the Air is for medium workflows and Pro is for if you do anything long running and intensive. It's quite a good ladder actually small steps that just add what each tier needs.

From the marketing it’s obvious that this is built for students, so I doubt they intend for the useful life to be greater than 3-4 years.

Getting strong original iMac vibes as well, with a similar market opportunity. The chromebook / education space is awful, and a well built (and stylish) competitor can do serious business.

I wish they had the green from the iMac lineup. I like that color a lot. Still this is a nice device at an excellent price.

I think branding and reputation basically encapsulates all the build quality and support and stuff you mentioned. Non-technical consumers will see this, decide that it's probably better than a Chromebook, and be right.

There's a compelling value case here. It might well be my first Apple purchase.

Just not having a Celeron level chip is worth the difference...

Windows update on a Celeron chip makes it 100% utilisation with full boost.

I would actually rather but an Android phone than a laptop with a Celeron chip for the same price.

Assuming the Neo is broadly available, which it very likely will be, the price will likely continue to come down. The used market will be strong on Neos. It's never really going to compete for the ultra-budget conscious market but that isn't Apple's playbook. It will compete VERY well for people that want the upmarket appeal of a Mac product which I think has enormous appeal. Probably the main thing this will do for the chromebook and low end windows market is they will go even cheaper to make the price jump for the Mac as noticeable as possible.

Resale value. You practically have to pay someone to take an open box chromebook. The secondary market for apple products lasts longer than apple’s software support.

I’m still on an M1 Air for my personal laptop and probably will be for another couple years. It doesn’t feel “slow” and I feel no urge to start browsing newer models.

My understanding is this laptop matches or exceeds the M1 Air’s performance, so it should be pretty damn nice for most people.

Counterpoint; Apple was already selling ~$600-700 Macs with the M1 MBA. If you weren't already in the market for one of those laptops, there is pretty much a 0% chance that these pared-back models will appeal to you.

I don’t ever wanna hear a word about how my iPad Pro isn’t good enough to run macOS, so that’s why Apple won’t let me have a Terminal.app on it.

why wouldn't it be? I'm running real OSs on ancient TI ARM chips that are probably 50 times slower.

It feels like they did everything they could so that the cheap MacBook with an iPhone CPU would not be lighter than the 1.5x more expensive MacBook with Apple Silicon

Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.

I wonder, if Asahi get's ported to this, would that potentially open the door for Asahi on an A18 powered iPhone? Or are those secure-booted too hard?

You're right. This is actually an implicit admission of the failure of the iPad for general purpose computing.

Which everyone on HN already says, but Apple seems to have its own idea what the iPad is for.

Your “failure” is billions of dollars to them.

I can't see Apple doing anything that'd make the iPhone not a usable phone while it's being used as a Mac. But I bet they could have macOS components running alongside iOS, in a VM/container of some sort. Would be very cool.

(Honestly I can't see Apple doing that either though since it'd cannibalize their other product lines. But c'mon, Apple!)

I also know many professionals who have a work computer and just want a personal device for occasional things like personal web browsing/shopping/occasionally watching videos -- things that would be inappropriate on a work computer and inelegant on a phone. These people already basically use their phone for everything -- many of them have never upgraded from their college laptop, which is now obsolete. They'd value a well-built (design, feel, screen) computer but have no performance needs.

It looks like a perfect replacement for my 2011 MBP. I always figured I’d get a Chromebook when it croaked but this is a viable contender

I thought Apple's RAM architecture/speed lets more than 8 GB be addressed, effectively letting it have 50-100% more operating capacity?

> the trackpad will be excellent

Nope. It is mechanical.

For daily use the single core speed is the most important. Web browsing, UI render, etc., is still single threaded mostly.

Single core is close to M4, even.

I’m using a used M1 air as my daily for editing tens of thousands of photos, tons of 4K video editing, web and light dev work.

It’s still the fastest computer I’ve ever used. (No Tahoe for me)

I would love this. Don't see it happening though unless it turns out that people really love the Android desktop mode. (Which, maybe, if/when it becomes basically their ChromeOS replacement.)

I hope too, maybe with iPad Pros first: A new hybrid binary for apps that allows you to seamlessly switch between MacOS mode when connected to peripherals and iOS when not, apps just render in a different place, but maintain state.

Imagine putting on some glasses for virtual display and iPhone going into desktop mode...

That'd be the dream

"Apple Pi"

Phones contain 3+ cameras, OLED displays, FaceID, wireless charging, and cellular modems. Plus there is a price to be paid for the latest and greatest in miniaturization, machining, and packaging.

Plus this is exactly the same price as the base iPhone 17e.

Because this is probably using a bunch of old parts that didn't get sold and are very cheap now (the a18 from last year's iPhones, etc).

It also probably doesn't have a ~60% margin.

It's possible that they are selling it close to cost to get more young people into the macOS/iOS/iPadOS ecosystem. If you can translate each one of these into a "Pro" device sale down the line then it's a win for Apple.

The same way that Apple can sell a low end iPad with cellular for $479 that has a larger screen and larger battery. If the iPhone wasn’t heavily subsidized and/or available on installment plans, Apple would have to lower prices.

On the other hand, the iPhone is water proof, made of sturdier materials to survive falls, has cellular, and the high end ones have more memory

To name a few components:

- Older chip (and with fewer thermal constraints)

- Only one camera (and much cheaper)

- Less RAM than 17pro and Air

- No cell modem, FaceID, ProMotion, MagSafe, etc.

First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.

Besides the phone CPU, they’re using less apple custom silicon: MediaTek wifi/bluetooth, no cellular modem, generic 1080p camera.

There are bunch of expensive components in a phone that aren't in this. The modem and camera system come to mind.

probably a lot of economics going on, such as early age vendor lock-in, and new market acquisition loss-leaders, but ultimately it's not cutting edge hardware. So the same reason the laptop you bought 2 years ago is half the cost it is today. Granted, even that is not purely a cost only decision. Stratify any market and see how much you can get each segment to pay, and convince them they are getting the best deal for their money.

For starters, no royalties to pay Qualcomm.

The MacBook Neo starts at the same price as the new iPhone 17e!

I think they should have branded the 17e the iPhone Neo.

Good question... I wonder if the 5G chipset adds significantly to the price? IP licensing?

because all those prices are artificial, Apple is charging what they think they can get away with and also betting on making more money in the long run with subscriptions to iCloud and their other services.

Maybe it's cheaper to make something that doesn't have be small as an iphone.

You're confusing the sales price with the manufacturing cost. They will continue to set whatever prices people will pay because it's a walled garden and there's no other company building Apple (MacOS) compatible laptops.

> But the base model has no Touch ID which seems terrible to me.

But that's the point. If you're super price conscious and a student, it's only $499! Typing a password is not a big deal compared to $100 for some people.

But if you want convenience, it's $599. Which helps subsidize the $499 price.

Product differentiation like this is what enables the cheaper price to begin with.

I'd probably go for a $50 Yubikey over a $100 Touch ID upgrade.

Why would you spin up a linux vm for development when you are already running a unix os?

Since this is a A series processor it's not clear if the MacBook Neo supports virtualization though.

It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.

I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.

with 8 GB of RAM?

8gb was standard not that long ago and was just fine for most people.

It’s 60Hz. “Pro Motion” is Apple speak for 120Hz, which as of right now, is only reserved for the MacBook Pro machines.

Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.

The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.

I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.

That’s great, maybe someone will finally start optimizing their shitware.

- 2.03 lb on the old 12" books

- 2.7 lb on the 13" neo and 13.6" air

does that 2/3 lb difference really matter in a ~10–15 lb backpack?

Exactly, this is good news, it'll force them to keep 8gb in mind. It essentially restarts the clock on 8GB machines for the next five to seven years.

...hopefully.

That assumes Apple dev teams use one in their test suites.

One downside to the 11" Air when it was still sold is so much software that would be slightly broken on the vertically-constrained display.

> The iOS device line gradually shifts towards the M chips

No it doesn't - no iOS device has ever shipped with an M series chip...

> Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?

Yes to A, no to B.

Also, you're completely leaving out scale and cost. Apple has already made (ok, had TSMC make) hundreds of millions of A18 chips, so throwing an A18 pro in their least expensive laptop ever makes a lot of sense.

I don't think the M line is more energy efficient (at equivalent performance), just more performant overall and with more advanced features (more maximum display outputs, more maximum USB interfaces, more maximum memory channels, etc).

Why is that confusing? The A chip is cheaper, hence is goes into their cheaper laptop. The more expensive laptops get the more expensive M chips.

The target user doesn't read hacker news. The target user is typing up papers for their history class. This absolutely kills the lower end of the market. I do not know why anyone who needs Safari and MS Office would buy anything else.

I think they very intentionally assume folks are not running VMs or doing much more than "every day" tasks. Given the pre-packaged E-Waste sold at most retailers for a similar price (or more) I think this is a really fantastic market move by Apple. This is doubly true as I read weirder and weirder things that Microsoft is doing with respect to Windows 12 and, well, in general.

It’s $599. The target audience for this won’t need more. Anyone who knows what a VM is is not the target audience.

I used an M1 Air with 8GB as my main software development machine for a year during Covid. It was fine.

Are the instructions missing, or does iOS just not run the hypervisor?

I suppose we'll find out pretty soon, supporting virtualization would be important if they wanted to sell these to CS students that need eg. Docker.

Can the Macbook Neo run Rosetta 2?

Product Positioning...

Apple is doing everything they can to ensure it doesn't appear as a premium product.

A decade ago, they had the 12" MacBook (not Air, just "MacBook") it it felt super premium because it was lighter and smaller than any Air/Pro ... and used by executives (because it targeted that use case).

By having this product:

- called "Neo"

- thicker

- as heavy

- limiting RAM

And marketing this towards kids and lower grades, they are avoiding any mistaking this product as premium.

> Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.

Apple customers forgot about the golden trophy real quick, huh? https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...

> but the Neo may be proof that decades old macs could run Tahoe, and maybe as well or better than the Neo

The A18 Pro is going to out perform many "decades old" processors, which would you be referring to?

I wouldn't conflate "affordable" with "low-end" in terms of processing speed. Apple is able to get the price to this point because of decisions that the rest of the market did not make.

I'm not sure this really makes sense. The single core performance for the iphone chip is leagues ahead of anything even a couple years old. They can likely increase clock speed of the iphone chip in a larger chassis so the performance isn't exactly 1:1 with the 16 pro, which was hardly a slacker. 8gb on apple silicon goes much further than 8gb would have on an intel chip, due to faster and on chip RAM and much faster storage to enable smoother use of swap.

I'd agree that an m1 chip can probably continue to run modern macOS for a very long time, and they will likely drop support for it much earlier than they would need to.

Yeah, the optimization is going to make or break it. I've heard people say that 8GB on their Air's with M chips are sufficient, but I do wonder if it will still be true now with MacOS - maybe we'll get a cleanup/performance release cycle?... With regards to AI I hope it's not a Gemini/Pixel situation where there's a lot of ram but 3.5GB are permanently reserved for the on-device model to be always-available.

> macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me.

Without context on total memory available, this is a meaningless metric. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

Since Apple Intelligence is terrible and behind, I'm sure its gonna be just fine.

I honestly don't think "neo" invokes thoughts of "new" to most people (despite the Greek etymology, of which I'm well aware).

It's a subtle distinction, but I think the general connotation is more like "hyper-modern" or "reinvention/reinterpretation."

People won't see "MacBook Neo" and think "oh there's just a new MacBook."

It's a product category name at least, not a release name, so the next release can be Neo 2

> Are they going to silently rename it in 6 months?

Probably when they update it, if they decide to keep the product line going.

The way Tahoe is headed, this is also exactly what's needed to get general users off macOS too.

Pro = Business/serious = Boring colors.

The M2 air supports asahi Linux and used ones can be had for 600ish

The Neo runs on the same chip as iPad so fat chance unlocking the bootloader

For NL €699 and €799 (512Gb) at apple store. Will likely only be closer to 600 at big stores that do discounts.

The 2015~2017 MacBook (I own one and love it) was a similar thing, but with a passively-cooled Intel chip. With Apple Silicon this will be amazing.

If they wanted people in the Mac ecosystem, they could dominate the market tomorrow by enabling a DeX like experience for iPhone. This new laptop running on an out-of-date A series chip proves that it can be done.

iPhone’s are more expensive than this laptop anyways and Apple could upsell all the docks and accessories with sky high margins. It’s a mystery why they haven’t done this already.

This is a 13” screen.

If they made an 11” model, it would probably weigh less than the original.

Mac Mini is already the Mac Mini version of this. How much lower in price can it realistically get?

> just unify the two already

Yeah but some people buy both, and apple wants to keep it that way

That machine's form factor was so great, it was just saddles with that awful hot-running Intel CPU. I was hoping this device would be essentially the MB12, finally with the right chip. I guess they were going for target price, not target weight.

How much did the 12” MacBook cost?

A Chromebook with stock ChromeOS runs the Linux Dev VM just fine and you can do real work with it

M4 air to Neo is a huge downgrade, what’s the motivation?

Funny; for me, a backlit keyboard is one of the most unnecessary features I can think of. Even for those who can't touch type, the keyboard is just inches away from the bright screen which sort of illuminates them.

IMO it’s not that big of a feature. People touch type.

I mean, they could turn on a lamp no?

It’s going to be a real struggle with 8 GB of RAM. I have the M1 mini with 8 GB of RAM and even the simplest smallest app in X code is an absolute slog. I ended up having to manually disable some of the Apple Intelligence services to get the ram back just to get the canvas renderer working in Xcode. Literally some of the xcode services just failed in tutorial apps due to RAM shortages. Really bafflingly inefficient compared to Windows IDEs

The body, size, weight, shape of the Neo is almost exactly the same as the current Macbook Air. What are you talking about?

Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.

Apple: here's an affordable laptop. This comment: but the poor kids are going to feel inferior to the rich kids with this affordable laptop! Of course the poor kids are going to get cheaper & slower computers, cheaper clothes, etc. And they won't feel great about it because being poor isn't great.

But now they'll have more options! If they like Apple, they'll have a (likely pretty good) Apple laptop! It's great! I think a more affordable Mac is _good_ (at least better than no affordable Mac) and will make the poor kids happier.

Poor kid would definitely feel superior rocking shitty, plastic Windows tombstone that won’t survive for 2 hours without power supply.

It will be a nice step to the "Blue bubble" lifegoal for them.

No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.

Macbook Nano will probably be supported with security updates for a lot longer.

Apple try to provide updates for a certain number of years after the model was originally released. The M1 Air was released many years ago now.

Average user doesn't know to look at refurb, the M1 Air will slowly drift out of manufacturing due to component sourcing etc.

Where can you buy these reliably?

The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although it is possible that Apple decided against enabling it (to segment the market).

Why is that unfortunate? They make MacBook Airs with 16GB for those that need more than 8GB.

As others have pointed out, the original Apple Silicon development kit used the A12Z chip.

Came here to ask this - seems like the most important question.

I’m guessing you don’t have a Mac? My 8GB Intel Mac has always been just fine.

Good for you. Not sure how your comment contribute to ... well, anything, but... Good for you!

Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.

8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.

The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs

Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.

The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.

Not sure about the "cheap shit" part, there are no other laptops with the build quality of MacBooks. It is as premium as it gets.

Software has gotten shittier tho, but I think it is an overall trend and not just Apple.

I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.

Not if their goal is to make money on repairs/upgrades!

Kidding aside, I think this is one of their key differentiators from the MBA line. It's partly the MagSafe itself, and partly that you have an extra USB port open even when charging.

Honestly I am still wondering why tf they brought magsafe back. I thought Apple had turned the corner on proprietary connectors. I charge my M2 air with a usb-c cable.

Right? also, where's the thunderbolt ports? and it needs about another inch? maybe half inch on the screen. And really, 16gb is the new minimum. There's a whole bunch of acceleration and co processing features in the m series missing from the a series, so they really should put an m5 in there instead...

Seriously though. Every feature someone says is missing and should have been added would be another $100 on the cost. This is already likely a low margin product meant of someone who's only using a browser and maybe a few apps.

> The Macbook 12 inch was a relatively better laptop

Which virtually nobody bought... Everyone loves an ultra-light ultra-compact laptop, then decide that one of the sacrifices required to make one is a deal-breaker and the company was dumb to not "just include X".

I really don’t see how you came to that conclusion—that Mac was overpriced and underpowered, and only had the single usb-c port. Neo has better battery life, a better display, a more capable processor, and a much lower price (9 years later no less).

This device has been in the pipeline for a lot longer than our current RAM shortage, and it's A18 Pro SOC (with it's integrated 8GB or RAM) was probably taped out before ChatGPT was a thing...

That's a bit... uninformed, there are and historically have been plenty of non-chromebook laptops with 8 GB of memory in that price bracket (HP, Samsung, Lenovo, ASUS, etc).

The finger prints would drive me crazy.

Cause kids will be happier with a Neo.

Because it's a new base MacBook? so MacBook Neo.

I do remote support with my iPad using Horizon, Citrix and Jump to RDP with a VPN.

I doubt anyone learning to program would need to subscribe to a remote dev machine just to run hello world type programs. From 2020-2023 I used an 8GB Macbook Air M1 to develop a lot of relatively heavy software, containers in the background too, and it wasn't a bad experience.

But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.

Edit: Not 16x9 as originally stated.

8GB is all the target market needs.

I've said for years now that if they make a purple one, I will instantly buy it.

Isn’t the screen kinda small for parents to use?

The M1 MBA is no longer available new, and was only available new for that price in the US.

The A18 Pro is roughly 30% faster in single-thread, and about equal in multi-core performance compared to the M1. The iGPU is also superior, and for AI it has 38 TOPS vs 11 in the M1. The A18 Pro should also be a lot more power efficient.

a18 scores better than m1 in single thread benchmark and about the same in multi thread

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-16

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

They're pretty much equivalent.

That's around $85 more expensive once you account for the fact Danish advertised prices include VAT at a rate of 25%, whereas the US advertised price excludes sales tax.

That's only a little more than the EU price of 699 Euro or approx $813. Part of that is VAT which is included the price (right?) instead of being added at checkout like the US. That would bring the USD price up to $713. IDK where the rest of the increase would come from though.

edit: Denmark VAT is actually 25% not 20% so the USD price plus Denmark VAT is ~$750

Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.

With or without VAT? The USD price is without VAT.

It's the 25% VAT. Pre VAT, it's ~$685.

With state sales tax of 8% where I live, the base would cost me $648.

So not a huge difference.

The Danish version has two years of warranty.

Vote for politicians who'll lower VAT from 25% (!!!) to the same about as we pay in sales tax (5-9% depending on locale, 0% in some states) -- see lower prices :)

Europeans (I'm German) often sigh at the price differences, but a big part of it is just that US prices are listed without VAT, while European prices are, and VAT differs across EU member countries.

Denmark has a VAT of 25%, so the DKK 5499 price without VAT is DKK 4399, which amounts to ~$684. Still more but not substantially.

The US price doesn't include tax, Denmark price I assume does.

Because the motherboard is tiny and on the left?

I think the charitable read is that Apple wants to minimize confusion by ensuring all usb ports on the device have the same capabilities. A simple USB 2.0 port would be cheap but supporting charging and thunderbolt would add meaningful cost.

edit: NVM lol, the Neo only has one fully featured USB port

they do it so that you'll buy a MacBook Pro

I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.

Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.

Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.

The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.

The M-chip with that balance is the A-chip.

I don't think they would; I'm sure they share a lot of the low level code already, the main difference now is in the user interface and software.

Some time ago (...over ten years ago) they made some movements towards unifying the desktop and tablet interfaces with LaunchPad, which looked like it was designed for a touch screen, but they never followed through. Not even touch screens on their laptops, which honestly still surprises me.

Shipping macOS on iPads will near instantly vanish a very large cohort of their macbook users.

I think it's purely a pricing & supply chain thing. Certain iPads have M-series chips in them, now certain MacBooks have A-series chips in them.

Also, the chip used has no impact on the viability of merging macOS and iOS anyway.

Haven't they? I can download iOS apps from the app store, sign them again with my own keys for MacOS, run them natively on my MacBook without any issues. Same binaries, same APIs. It all just works.

Seeing as it's the A18, are there any concerns about third-party "desktop" software not running on this new platform?

Why would that mean that, when iPads have had A series and M series chips for ages now?

Hasn’t that been the discussion since the laptops/desktops went arm?

in a competitive market they would have been unified a long time ago. google has been making slow steps at doing this apple wont until google does

I am using a M1 Mac Mini 8GB as a home server/desktop, and it works just fine. It can run games and a Minecraft server in the background while serving video and home automation, and I've never had anything force quit because of it. I agree with the people who are saying 8GB should be kept as a target spec for the low end. It's really only bloated software that has made it necessary to get so much RAM, and now that prices have gone up, if Apple forces developers to do more with less for a segment of their market, I'm all for it.

I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP with 8Gb of RAM. That seemed like plenty when I bought it, and I did dev work in Xcode on the thing. Granted, it can only run Catalina, but it still gets the job done for what I use it for now. "Now" being web browser and running the Numbers/Pages/Keynote apps, which is about what anyone buying the Neo is going to do with it.

After 14 years of service, though, he'll get to retire soon, probably taking it easy running some version of Linux in his old age. Just as soon as that new M5 MBP (with 32Gb this time) shows up tomorrow.

There are millions of people using 8GB or RAM with MacOS without issue right now. I would bet 80% of all MacBooks in use right now have 16GB or less of RAM.

Wondering how it decided to show the force exit program dialog. I used to use 8g macbook for development. But instead warning on serious memory exhaustion, it just decided to lag and suicide with everything freezed (including the restart button).

People run million dollar businesses out of 8GB MacBooks.

> I wish now apple would add some sort of AI to it's icloud offering that these computers could use that wasn't necessarily 'local'

I think something like that is in the works, but you could leverage Claude or ChatGPT or a similar service, right?

In Canada they don't seem to be priced the same - Neo starts at $899, and 17e at $799.

Neo as in New, as in "our customers can't afford our products anymore so this represents a potential major pivot for this company if it works"

Neon, and also “fun for kids”.

That mini pc trend was really something ! Thanks for the blast from the past.

oh man, I loved my little 10" netbook back in the day.

It's macOS. Yes, absolutely positively more than enough for web browsing plus a whole lot more, simultaneously.

If you do serious development, you might need to think about it.

I do serious development with local applications on my 16GB M2, and my current usage about 6GB. It goes higher when I run LLMs or VMs, and of course Xcode. Aside from iOS dev, I do not use an IDE.

A18 Pro offers 44% better single thread performance and similar multi-thread performance as the M1 processor.

The Neo should offer similar if not better performace as the first round of entry level Macbook Pro/Mini/Airs that Apple launched in 2020 with the M1 chip.

They don't have a "macOS Lite", and if these were running anything less than full macOS, you can be sure Apple would be positioning them as a new product (or part of the iPad line) rather than as a Mac.

And maybe, just maybe, that fact, once it becomes clear, will make at least a few of the people who assume that Apple desperately wants to lock down macOS realise that that's bullshit and always has been...

Dont bother. Even when works iPhone mirroring is unreliable and buggy experience, often asks to unlock iPhone again and sync gets broken at random and you have to go over enabling it again even though phone was next to the Mac mini all the time.

One of the worst supported features Apple has shipped. Idea was good though.

599usd == 514eur

That's only like a 100 dollar student discount right? Seems pretty standard

A18 is ahead of M1 single core, slightly behind in multi core on Geekbench

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/16858435?baseli...

you’re essentially getting an m1 macbook air with a worse keyboard

a quality used m1 air on ebay is about $400 w 256gb storage https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=m1+macbook+air&_trksid=...

Mac manages memory significantly better than Windows. My 8 GB Air feels better at multitasking than my 20 GB Windows laptop.

I agree that it's gone downhill, but have you been on a Windows 11 machine? It's just a cacophony of ads, jank, and slop. The computing equivalent of sitting on a lawn chair in Times Square

You are so wrong. macOS manages memory much more successfully than whatever you are used to.

I assume it's not Linux, because things are pretty good there too (aside from the poor behaviour when you reach OOM).

There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.

I don't think LLM use cases are the target audience's chief concern here

I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.

It's interesting because the new studio display has 4 usb-c ports and 2 support thunderbolt, but they do indicate which ports are thunderbolt above the port.

https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/

Looks like there isn't any indication in the photos.

Who wants it? On my iPad I want an iPad OS, MacOS is not good for touch operation. MS tried merging two OS-es (surface) and see how it went.

Because this way they sell two for the price of two.

The ipad pro with keyboard is $1300, more than 2x the price of the Neo. Definitely not the same product category.

put a skin or case on ur favorite boring-colored pro laptop

first thing i thought when i saw the citrus version - give me that in a 16" M5 Pro machine!

wat? jobs shipped worse machines at twice the price with horrible thermally throttled intel cpus

Speaker grilles, one on each side. Shame it's not an SD card slot.

It's probably cheaper to squish everything into one small PCB on one side of the machine.

Most people use a mouse on the right so having a wire where a mouse will be can be annoying.

So people like you spend more

Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?

The fact it stood for quality doesn't mean you can't keep offering quality at lower budget and lower spec levels, while still pushing high-budget and high-spec levels. In fact it seems very succesful in doing so and keeps capturing more of the market.

You could say there is limited growth in the hardware (total pie), and that there is are increasingly smaller shares of the market share pie left to conquer. And that's mostly true.

But Apple has built out its Services business, from $12b in 2012 to $110b last year. That $110b revenue is more than Tesla's revenue, and that has a market cap of $1.2 trillion. And unlike hardware, services (i.e. software) are extremely high-margin. It's estimated that $110b revenue constitutes something like $80b in gross margin, whereas Tesla's $100b revenue lead to <$17b in gross margin, and just 3.8b in net profit.

A push into budget offerings increases users and scales service revenue, a high-margin and fast growing business. Apple has been a tremendous success. I won't make predictions of the future but its push for affordable devices was a strategic win, to the contrary of your point.

They tricked you. $40/month over two years is still $960 - definitely still luxury.

https://www.macports.org

It's UNIX, just open Terminal.app

https://brew.sh/

That's one way of looking at it. How much do you think it costs to take a laptop system and shrink it down to iPhone-sized?

PS. Wonder why they didn't use A19 in this? Imagine they thought "yeah, that A18 will do for an entry-level laptop", but the entry-level iPhone 17e with A19 needed more kick? What for, our social media apps and mobile websites? This is soooo absurd!

You have to be able to get enough of the things made, too. A19 and A18 Pro are made on different TSMC processes, and most likely it's easier to get production capacity on the older N3E process.

ya they’ve been teasing a week of releases for a while

I can near guarantee this will perform better than both, especially as the user adds more programs and the OS gains cruft

Maybe. When a decent Chromebook is £697 (https://www.johnlewis.com/lenovo-chromebook-14m9610-laptop-m...) it doesn't make economic sense to get one.

I would first check the iPad + keyboard is actually lighter than the Macbook Air. As far as I know the keyboard weighs quite a bit, though coincidentally Apple's website doesn't specify the weight.

8 GB is plenty for the base of this use case but I'd still wish for a 16 GB upgrade option before I'd wish for a 1 TB upgrade option.

This is the first Mac to use an A-series (i.e. iPhone) processor, so it's a distinct class in their lineup.

They literally mention in the video that it contains Apple Intelligence.

I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

No. 8gb is fine for normal use.

It has the A18 Pro, same as the iPhone 16 Pro (2024).

The USB-C ports are unbalanced. Should have one on the left and right, not side by side.

Unbalanced USB-C ports has become a common bad design in the laptop industry.

The first USB type C device was a usb 2.0 device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N1

There are also USB-C 2 cables.

Hasn't this been the case for most Apple laptops?

You would be shocked to learn that HP is able to sell plenty of $500 Chromebooks with 8GB of RAM.

Same as the iPhone 16, when they started using that marketing phrase.

IMO the biggest sell for Chromebooks in the education market (which is where they shine) is the software. It's a locked down OS with a cloud login that means when you encounter the slightest hardware issue you can swap out for another device seamlessly. macOS doesn't have anything comparable to that.

Not only can you buy two and a half Chromebooks with this, they never had much uptake outside a few countries school system.

Chromebook’s are like $200

That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.

The newest entry-level Air is $1100, this is $600, or $500 difference. It's significant.

Apple released the M1 MBA for $999 and it was considered insane value, and it had 8GB of RAM as well.

I don't think it's criminal, sufficient for plenty of casual users. Of course not for everyone.

I agree. Especially now, with the insane RAM prices.

> And yet same specs iPad + Magic keyboard will cost you twice as much

It's not about specs, it's about capability. You compare the Neo to the wrong iPad.

The base model iPad + keyboard folio match the MacBook Neo price, which seems to be intentional. iPadOS requires less resources to run but is functionally equivalent outside of being able to run arbitrary programs.

Which makes me wonder who the Neo is for. If someone wants to build software they should be paying more money. The average person is fine with an iPad, and it will even give them a touchscreen, the Neo won't.

Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.

My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.

This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn't great but 8 with apple's really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.

FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.

They sell hundreds of millions of iPhones every year. The iPhone installed base is in the billions.

I think there are many users who will be interested in an inexpensive laptop that neatly integrates with their iPhone. Same as there were many users who were interested in Airpods and a Watch.

The low end iPad is $329 and usually found for $299

it's roughly the same physical size, just smaller bezels so bigger screen.

Stating the obvious - because keeping them separate means Apple gets to double-dip on people buying more or less the same hardware twice.

I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.