MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by sowbug » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #342

havaloc wrote: post #2

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.

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?

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.

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

#372

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

throawayonthe wrote: post #257

beloch wrote: post #254

>"~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 legis…

i think it's a fair concern, but quite frankly right now macos has best-in-class (desktop) memory/swap management

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by ksec » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #4

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.

I am rather hoping they put vapour chamber tech in the next MacBook Air.

And just give even a metal plate on top of Neo SoC would have increased its thermal capacity.

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

#374

Post by criddell » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

sowbug wrote: post #371

criddell wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

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.

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

#375

Post by giantrobot » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

njovin wrote: post #171

wlesieutre wrote: post #37

> 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 eno…

Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy. Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar iss…

I've had similar issues with microSD in a variety of adapters. I think the core issue is most microSD cards just aren't built, in terms of thermals, for sustained writes. In most devices they're either read-heavy loads or burst-y writes. When you stick them in a warm laptop and do a lot of writes they overheat and start throwing errors.

For many cards their drive controller might advertise and support higher UHS speeds the Flash memory is likely the cheapest silicon that can just barely pass acceptance tests. When I encounter cards that fail sustained writes I've had good luck using pv's (pipe viewer) rate limit. I stick it between dd invocations. This has worked well when writing OS images for Raspberry Pis onto cheap microSD cards. They're fine in the Pis but would fail trying to write OS images.

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

#376

Post by remix2000 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:37 PM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #304

remix2000 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P Either way, I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS.

> Two accounts, both lowercase four random letter names respond to me within two minutes time apart, what do I make of it? :P That a lot of accounts have obfuscated or meaningless names? That some people value anonymity? Either way, I agree with them, FWIW. > I find it hard to believe memory management would vary so much between those two CPU architectures on a single-codebase OS. Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM…

> Linux is a shitshow when it gets OOM, it takes at least half an hour to get out of it, if it ever does. Windows is not much better.

That's why you usually want a userspace early oom service. Most preconfigured distros ship one by default. Linux is mostly focused on embedded targets, not servers or workstations. There is not a notion of mobile-style app lifecycle either, not in freedesktop environments that is, but XDG portals are working on addressing that sometime in the near future.

> In contrast, the other day the Force Quit window showed up on my Mac Studio because the OS was running low on memory

Windows does that at since like XP and likely earlier. BeOS did that before Darwin based macOS was a thing. On Linux, I don't know which distros do that, but you're definitely much more likely to see an app die rather than be asked whether to kill it. Freezing, once again, is a result of not having a [working] early oom service.

Linux is not that bad, but traditional freedesktop model kind of is.

It's still much better than mac OS.

Also those replies just look like bots, they were really fast and not providing any value, that's what I meant.

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

#377

Post by viccis » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

seabrookmx wrote: post #352

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 j…

>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 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.

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

#378

Post by remix2000 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #314

remix2000 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the E…

The stress tests with multiple Youtube windows open simultaneously, editing 4K video, and doing heavy duty image editing tasks, in some cases doing stuff like that all at the same time have been very impressive. It does have to fall back on swap, but even then seems to soldier on really well considering. Are you better off with more memory? Absolutely, but it still seems perfectly capable of managing even many low to…

My macbook was UMA and memory compression has been used everywhere for dozens of years now. Symbian had memory compression. Is it just apple users catching up to what a snappy computer actually feels like…? (Doubt, since as I said I used Apple before) The article doesn't address the world outside apple either, and Darwin is objectively slow by its obsolete architectural design, down to the kernel. And not a single objective measure was brought up in replies, so it's my experience vs theirs. Not helpful.

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

#379

Post by remix2000 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #350

remix2000 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source…? I see this claim thrown around so much without any backing and my experience with mac os (and other darwin variants) is just terrible. My previous portable was a 2015 mac book pro with 16 (!) gigs of ram (mind-blowing for 2026 standards, I know) and the os just became terribly and unbearably sluggish with all the useless updates (that nb mostly removed features, e.g. ClearType was wiped off the face of the E…

With a 2015, is that a HDD or SSD?

Nvme SSD, user-replaceable.

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

#380

Post by nyantaro1 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

stodor89 wrote: post #112

epistasis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

Entry-spec M1 Air is the best computer ever made. I can't stand Apple, but it's the truth. I used one sporadically to build my stuff for Mac. Going back to my Windows workstation after that always felt like travelling 15 years back in time. I recommended M1 Air to everyone whose workflow was compatible with a Mac. Most of the people who acted on that recommendation still use it and don't really think about upgrading.

I absolutely loved that m1 air, but one time there was a MacOS update, and it bricked. I discovered that another mac is required to recover my M1. As if I had another working mac laying around somewhere. I would love to go back to mac, but those things really scare me.