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MacBook Neo

apple.com

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Re: MacBook Neo

#601

Post by stefan_ »

jeroenhd wrote: post #441

8GiB of RAM, combined with "Built for Apple Intelligence.", makes me question the user experience on this thing. macOS with a browser open pretty quickly hits 13 GiB of RAM usage for me. That poor SSD is going to be swapping its whole usable life. I suppose it's enough if all you're doing is light office work, but you can get a laptop half the price to do that. The USB 2.0 USB-C port seems like something that's going…

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

Re: MacBook Neo

#602

Post by artursapek »

This is an amazing move by Apple. Most excited I've been about an Apple product launch in a long time. Low cost, high quality, colorful laptops are back.

Re: MacBook Neo

#603

Post by bpye »

kokada wrote: post #175

I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series. Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.

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.

Re: MacBook Neo

#604

Post by aobdev »

zahirbmirza wrote: post #596

The Macbook 12 inch was a relatively better laptop than this. An "re"-launch of equivalent for today, really would have been something. This is half-baked compared to the innovation that was there.

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).

Re: MacBook Neo

#605

Post by soared »

Does anyone know if Linux is viable on this? I want Apple hardware (or surface hardware) but despise osx. Saving a few hundred over a surface would be sweet.

Re: MacBook Neo

#606

Post by cromka »

I'd like to bring to your attention the 2026 irony of how much things now cost: this thing has nearly the same chip, way bigger display,a keyboard, extra USB port, a touchpad, lots of copper inside and aluminum outside, way bigger battery and yet it is same price as entry level iPhone with same RAM and storage. Go figure!

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!

Re: MacBook Neo

#607

Post by general_reveal »

lateforwork wrote: post #306

This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts. Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has…

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.

Re: MacBook Neo

#608

Post by hypercube33 »

xtracto wrote: post #549
lateforwork wrote: post #306

This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts. Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has…

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 bend…

ASUS ROG G14 is as close as you're going to get on the x86 side of things or that new chonk of a surface with the Ryzen 395+ and 128gb of ram. both are like $2500+

Re: MacBook Neo

#609

Post by petterroea »

8GB of unified memory, the fine print says. Hardly enough to multitask with today's bloated software. Maybe products like this, and the ram price hike, may finally push developers to care more about their memory budget.

Re: MacBook Neo

#610

Post by runako »

ciupicri wrote: post #393
billyhoffman wrote: post #164

For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors. The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 compone…

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.

> Can it run multiple programs at the same time?

I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.

Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:

- PostgreSQL (server)

- TablePlus (db client)

- Docker

- Slack

- Chrome

- Safari

- Zed

- Claude native

- ChatGPT native

- Zoom

- Codex

- Numbers

- Calendar

- the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)

With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).

I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.

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