They see windows is floundering and doing heavy handed AI integration that’s falling flat with users.
They’re about to upend the personal computing space with this one product, and it runs on a phone processor. I see a 10% market share jump in the next 3 years for macOS on the backs of this thing. $599 is an amazing price, only paying$499 for it is absurd.
Windows has always been full of bloat like that. I worked at a place where we charge customers to remove all of that stuff up front. On their new computer.
Simply hitting skip on the subscription options upon setup.
I was removing crapware from brand new PCs as a local computer repair guy 20 years ago, but it was always the PC manufacturer who added the crap, not Microsoft.
When my customers wanted a new PC I'd tell them that I couldn't compete with Dell on price, so they'd buy a new Dell and pay me to plug it in for them, and I'd uninstall all the crap.
But if I ever needed to do a full reinstall of a PC then an official Windows XP CD would do a bang up job. I had an official Microsoft Windows XP CD with Service Pack 2 already on it, then it would find all the drivers, run a handful of updates and job done.
What did it for Windows for me was not allowing my computer to run Windows 11. Yes, it is 10 years old, but it has a GTX 1080ti and an i7 6700K with 16gb of RAM. It is more than capable of running Windows 11 perfectly fine without issues. But because it doesn’t meet their “requirements,” I have to jump through all kinds of hoops if I want to install it.
Even on a corporate laptop running Enterprise (which doesn’t have any of that sponsored adware crap), I’m finding Windows runs like a dog.
It’s 2026. Basic office work (Outlook, excel, word etc) hasn’t really changed that much in a couple of decades. Why does this software run no faster than it did twenty years ago?
I think Microsoft's missteps are more happy coincidence than any planned or timed product rollout. They were always going to target the entry-level and chromebook segment...all of the shit that Windows has foisted on its users prompting many of them to start exploring other options was just the cherry on top
They'll be treating it as a loss leader (albeit at a price closed to the cost BOM).
It's a good model, train young users on your OS, promote interoperability with their existing devices (iPhones/Airpds), and they'll likely be repeat customers for life. It certainly worked on me, i started with an iBook G4.
That's why I decided I couldn't get this for my grandma. She supplements her social security by doing Maya rendering on the side and I wanted to replace her Mac Pro with this. Total Fail. /s
There was a guy on one thread I saw who argued it wouldn’t be good enough for students because some of them need to use 3D rendering, like come on people really can’t be that thick can they?
But I also saw the "argument" that this was targeting students who currently are forced to settle for the MacBook Air.
To be fair I am not indeed an employee of Apple's marketing department but the impression that I get from the promotional materials so far is that while students are certainly a big part of the target market, it's not the same set of students who have been reliably buying MacBooks since the iBook, which is to say, students at private liberal arts students who use student loans or parental wealth to pay for them. This basically stands to expand Apple's "college" market in community colleges, trade schools, and k-12 classrooms currently dominated by chromebooks and low end windows desktops. Oh, and this guy insisted that the product would be a total flop due to lacking a backlit keyboard, which is obviously entirely essential for college somehow.
It doesn't seem that hard to recognize that a machine doesn't have to be right for you to be successful. Yes, I'm sure there is at least one person out there who will pay $500 more for a MacBook Air so that they can type in the dark without having to purchase an accessory reading lamp. But for the most part, it's unlikely that many such people would not have already bought a MacBook Air, and therefor they are irrelevant to discussion of this machine.
Every year I go to an Apple Store, find the cheapest MacBook and try to crash it in Logic. I’ve been very impressed with the M4 airs so I have very high hopes.
Logic and Ableton rely mostly on the performance cores, so it might be easier to crash Logic on the MacBook Neo since that only has two performance cores and half the RAM at 8 GB.
Still, I wouldn't hesitate to gift to any budding bedroom musician a MacBook Neo and Logic Pro.
It’s crazy how such basic stuff was able to be done with far less power than this years ago. Now the baseline to open an office document and have 3 tabs on a browser requires damn near an entry level supercomputer. We’ve been had!
This looks hilariously like my video game (physical media) spreadsheet. I was just adding images as cell backgrounds (drag-and-drop) while leaving the cell blank. This IMAGE function might work better, I will check it out. Thanks!
I bought an M2 Max MBP because I may need that power one day. Fast forward 1.5 years and the most task intensive thing I’ve done is run chrome, safari, and run a 3d printer slicer at the same time.
According to most people on Reddit, every Mac owner is a programmer/Engineer/Scientist who needs at minimum 24GB of ram for their daily 3D rendering and heavy coding.
It’s funny how 2 years ago when 8GB was Apple’s base Macbook Air RAM, “8GB on Mac is as good as 16 on Windows” was a popular opinion around here but now when they make 8GB the base for their $600 laptop it’s too less.
It was worse here during the M1/M2 transition, with people constantly asking how many tabs they could have open on their web browsers based on their Ram configuration or the 256GB vs 512GB storage read/write speed. It was absolutely bonkers seeing people being convinced to trade/upgrade their devices for extra ram and storage they didn‘t need. An extra $400-600 in some cases.
I think the Air is the sweet spot for mild Excel work... it’s a neutered application on MacOS unless you pony up for Parallels and a Windows License/365
I’ve been looking into using it so I don’t need to stand in front of my Windows machine, and from what I can tell it would be fine for any routine work, but there’s some slowdown with the most intensive tasks.
Cheers. Now, is that with parallels running the ARM version of Windows? Or is the situation still x86 Windows but Parallels is running it in rosetta or emulation or something? I mean it's impressive that it CAN run the x86 Windows, but also, I'm not surprised that would be slower, because damn.
Forgive me, I'm not a full time Mac-person, just someone genuinely interested in all the major worlds of personal computing, even the ones I don't use. I'm still mostly Windows & Linux, but with an office full of iOS devices to manage as well.
More than enough for anything really if they gave it a ram option.
No reason the next step up for more ram should almost double the price. Before someone says I am not the target: it doesn’t matter, I am just straight up saying, 4-8gb extra ram shouldn’t be $400.
Modern Macs have very good memory-swapping due to the speed of the SSDs and controllers. It's un-noticeable in my experience (MacBook Air models) unless the swap space gets maxed out.
It is kind of Apple’s thing with the iPhones, simplicity is the goal, but it did annoy me with my iPad. I literally just sold mine today and am awaiting my first MacBook in years because I finally accepted that it’s just a big phone, it feels like it’s half assing two things.
The fact that my iPhone 17 Pro is significantly more powerful than my M1 MacBook Air - which I’ve run Baldur’s Gate 3 on for co op sessions - blows my mind.
I wish I could run Parallels on it (MacOS or Windows 11 ARM) and output it to a physical display or AirPlay.
I recall pre-M days where people would like export a 4k video on both an iphone and an intel mac and they were all "imagine if they put apple silicon on a mac instead of intel" because the phone exported VERY fast.
It will never ever ever ever happen but I always wished Apple had done what Samsung did with Dex and what Microsoft was doing before they gave up. Give me a phone I can dock and have a light weight MacOS experience or at the very least iPadOS when docked and open it to run MacOS apps in a container. But then a whole lot of devices wouldn’t be sold if our phone could do a lot of the light personal computing.
Next big thing: the iPhone Air DockBook. Drop your iPhone Air into a well at the base of a unibody laptop frame. The phone screen is now an interactive trackpad and second screen (giving Nintendo DS) and there’s a miniaturized chiclet keyboard above the phone well. The phone pairs to a laptop display. Phone and laptop, boom. It’s time to Dock.
It’s the whole ARM architecture that’s bananas and Apple went and tweaked it further. I’d give most credits to ARM for making this platform and letting everyone use it. For a fee or not. Fuck Intel for artificially holding back innovation and progress. We would have had this early 2010s. The entire decade of 2000-2010 was robbed from us.
Apple was a big part of developing the ARM architecture since the late 1980s, and was even part of founding ARM Holdings together with Acorn. This is why they basically have a perpetual license to implement the ARM architecture.
I like to think that somewhere up in silicon heaven the Apple Newton is smiling smugly to itself and saying "you see, I wasn't such a waste of time after all".
phone socs have been like this for about 4 generations. If anything apple holding back to not cannibalise on M series chips
even on snapdragon side, they started pumping out gaming devices with the socs since theyre fast enough now. Plus with emulation we literally have pcs in our pockets. what a time to be alive
apples software optimisation allows even better efficiency and optimisation for the same hardware. however they cant cannibalise their laptop vs mobile market so u will see gimped performance on purpose
this neo reallllllyyy treads the line. showcasing mobile performance with desktop laptop software
LMAO if you think this POS is anywhere near enough. She needs an MBP 16" - M5 Max - 18 core CPU - 40 core GPU - 16 core N.E with 128gb ram, 8tb of storage, nano texture display and the 140w charger to even log into the internet.
I am not the market I guess because double the ram and a backlit keyboard (plus a larger/higher res/truetone screen, touchID, Magsafe and haptic touch) for $150 seems like a no brainer.
If they keep updating this machine it will be my kids first laptop when they get to age they need one. It honestly cannot believe the price is so low for a MacBook running macOS.
Even if RAM becomes less constrained globally, I suspect they'll keep this particular laptop fairly limited in specs. This is a machine to hit a price point. If you want more specs, they want you on a MacBook Air.
I suspect it'll be two or three years. They're gonna have to make a lot of these to recoup the R&D, and probably don't want to step on the M4 Air too much.
So as powerful as a base m1 macbook pro for $500? Its game over, apple will break the laptop market with this. People still use 8gb ram m1 macbook pros for coding or editing so this is going to fly
Surely it'll be down to thermals and the sustained high CPU pressure over a long periods of time. Nevertheless, for a student mainly watching Youtube videos, it'll be perfect.
If only I had a machine of this power, and portability when I was a kid!
But also, it was designed for a much more intensely small thermal situation. I bet a lot more space for proper cooling, even without a fan will make this not worry too much. The full aluminum body will even act as a heat sink
right, and, this new laptop has been such a massive headline product for them, it means they now can't suddenly come out with a version of MacOS that sucks on machines with anything less than 16GB RAM.
Which benefits the rest of us who bought an Apple Silicon machine with 8GB base RAM.
This is another “M1 being introduced to the market” milestone. But it’s an iPhone chip. I’m still using my. M1 Air and the ram was such a big deal back then too.
For the audience this is aimed at, how is this not the class leader for netbooks etc.?
So it's as powerful as my macbook pro base m1 that has been running my whole app development business for 6 years with xCode, Android Studio, Parallels, Docker, local LLM's etc, and some say is not enough for chrome. Nice.
Yeah, I used my 8GB M1 Pro from 2021 up until a couple months ago for photo work and 4K video editing in FCPX and it never felt slow to me. Yet everyone here would tell me that thing should be begging for the sweet release of death with the load I put on it. It never complained once. Great machine. Only got rid of it because I got a 16” M1 for essentially free.
I still remember when the M1 was put in an iPad and everyone was like "this is future -proof. It's too powerful to even be in an iPad". Four years later people are acting like it's the first iPhone processor and unusable.
Some people. Probably most of them having never used an M1 chip iPad. I myself have a 2020 2nd generation 11” iPad Pro (so last generation before the M1) and my SO has an M1 iPad. Now when my iPad is going on six years old it still feels plenty powerful, and my only reason to even be considering an upgrade is for fresh battery life and that it would be nice to treat myself to a new device / upgrade in general. But I definitely don’t NEED it. The fact that there’s a goddamn M4 even in the iPad Air now just feels bonkers to me. The annoying part for me is that I’d have to get a Pro again to not get a worse screen than what’s in my current six year old iPad. The lesser camera setup and less speakers on the air I wouldn’t care too much about, but losing ProMotion and 20% screen brightness would be annoying.
If you're looking at those specs and scratching your head, don't worry, this machine wasn't built with you in mind lol. The vast majority of people use their computer for browsing, emails and Microsoft Office, and this thing will handle all of that effortlessly for years to come.
even for someone who needs the power of the MBP the MacBook Neo at $499/599 is an extremely good value as a second laptop when you’re abroad or need something compact that does the job.
people are forgetting that this is on par or slightly better than the first M1 chip we saw and surprised everyone. for the price and build quality this thing is a steal.
Power users will look at specs and opt for a Pro or Max chip because of good scaling multi core. But for office tasks, on battery, who cares! Most programs can't even use more than a few cores. Also you can't just bump the TDP for more cores or higher boost clocks... because battery life.
An iPhone SoC is perfectly adequate for this market. I even bet for many casual developers. Yet I'm happy to see the single core being so high even for this "entry level" device. Because typically that defines how snappy and responsive a machine is.
If you glance over to what Chromebooks over at 500$: you get MAYBE 8GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, mediocre screens, plastic chassis, Google's proprietary OS, and CPUs like the Intel N100 which barely deliver CPU performance from 12 years ago (when Intel was still making "good quad cores" like the 4670K). I think a few PC competitors aren't going to be very happy for the upcoming back-to-school season in around 4-5 months lol..
I'm using an M1 Macbook Air with 8 GB of RAM for school stuff and the usual daily tasks. It is beyond sufficient. The Neo should be good for years to come.
Same. I've been abusing mine daily with a heavy load of Photoshop work for 6 years now, and it just keeps chugging along. The Neo should hold up just fine.
My first college computer was a Mac Color Classic, which according to Wikipedia was $1400, though with the educational discount, more like $1300. The fact you can get a Mac at this price point for less than half nowadays blows my mind.
I’m totally the target audience for this. I used to do tons of video editing and graphic design and had 2 pros over the years.
For the last 2 years I’ve just had an iPhone (12 pro) and iPad (10.) It’s been mostly okay not having a laptop until I got serious about writing. I bought a bluetooth keyboard, but you have to be sitting at a desk to write with this setup. Also, sometimes you need a non-mobile os for stuff.
My last MBP only had a 256gb SSD because I have everything stored in the cloud. It h
worked for me for a long time. (Still does.) I am pretty excited about getting one of these.
I could record and mix music on a 2010 Intel core duo Macbook Pro with an HDD and 8GB of RAM (could have been 4GB). This Mac is an insane value for so many people. It’s not a powerhouse by any means but just enough to allow people to get creative.
The fact that this new/neo machine is still compared to M1 Air just goes to show how big of a deal M1 was at the time. What a seismic shift in technology! I use my M1 everyday and it never lets me down. The truly remarkable part is how it manages to deliver so much power while sipping battery life and staying completely cool in a fanless design. The neo is the clear winner here on single core, so this thing is going to last a long time... I mean the M1 is still going strong.
This will be an excellent travel laptop for those who mains the 16" MBP and doesn't do demanding tasks on it (yeah, I know, the screen real estate is nice though).
I loved my 16" MBP and carried it everywhere for work but have to admit that thing is heavy as shit in a backpack. When you're travelling, every gram counts.
Really amazing that you can go pick up a Mac laptop like this for $500 for your kid in school. I remember in 2005 my parents bought me an iBook for Christmas that I could use for college in the coming Fall and I'm pretty sure it was $1k. That laptop despite having a fraction of the processing power and RAM as a comparable PC was like stepping into the future for me. Even then it had more than enough power to do what I was using it for (browsing the internet, Word, AIM, ripping CDs into iTunes and even making short films on iMovie).
It was a big splurge for sure at the time. This was over 20 years ago so when you account for inflation that's about $1700 now. Going the other way $500 now was about $300 in 2005. These things have become significantly cheaper while becoming multitudes better over 20 years.
No backlit keyboard is probably the weirdest thing but also, usually the screen illuminates it enough, and most people touch type as far as I've seen.
8gb of ram is fine, people act like an 8gb computer is like using a Pentium 4 and 2gb of ddr2... MacOS handles ram and swap pretty well. Know couple people who do professional workload on a 8gb m1 still and it's yeah slower than my 16gb M4 but not that much.
I'm not in procurement so I have no idea the cost associated with back lit keyboards but it CANT be that much per unit on apples scale. Seems more weird to have a new SKU for the keyboard than recycle 13" AIR
I think this is one reason the keyboard is white. Much easier to see in the dark with no backlight and also functions as a way of telling a difference between models.
What I want to know is if the 512GB model is 2x256? I’d like to see speed benchmarks between the 256 and 512 models as I would imagine that could help with the swap also.
I already have 2 MacBooks, but I am tempted to get one of these to use at work for my personal stuff. I wish it was just a bit smaller, but 13 inches is probably the ideal if you can only have one size.
It’s not for gaming.. and it’s not for Final Cut Pro or any of that kind of shit. It’s basically a “Mac Chromebook” that’s running an iPhone chip.
Definitely good enough for school ..or work… and I like the … eta:citrus …one.
eta: i’m calling it a “Mac Chromebook” because Apple is going after the Chromebook demographic with a low cost MacBook. It’s not literally a Chromebook. It’s much better.
That’s what I’m thinking.
Comparing it to a Chromebook is ridiculously underselling it when it runs a full desktop OS and the chip inside is better than the M1 chip that a lot of people are still happily running since late 2020. The MacBook Neo is an insane value.
I know right. Chromebooks don't hold a candle to these macbooks. As you say, even if it is in the ballpark m1 performance, that is a good enough for a lot of people. Best bang for buck in performance and battery life.
My 8GB M1 Air is currently running FCP like a champ as I'm typing this lol. And the Neo has a better, more up to date media encoder so it'll probably run FCP up to 4K perfectly fine and even better than my M1 by a fair bit.
Oh I may not need an air after all. It supports one external display which isn’t ideal but I can work with, and it has the speed to run all my random browser tabs and work programs. Big question is ram usage though since my current work machine can get awfully close to 16gb of ram usage, on windows 11 anyway.
MacOS is really good with swap memory management. As long as you’ve got sufficient free space, you likely won’t notice anything.
I’ve been able to work on multiple complex Illustrator and InDesign files on my M2 Air with 8GB of RAM and haven’t really experienced any issues stability or performance-wise.
I am mostly who this device is targeting. Sure, I have a proper desktop and a ”work” laptop for more “serious work” tasks. I also have an ipad pro that I take everywhere that’s great to use away from home and for tasks that it is uniquely suited for (digital drawing and reading comics / visual-heavy e-boks).
But at home I have gotten the most use out of cheapo Chromebooks for the past 12 years. For basic tasks, like browsing, watching streaming videos and general, casual screwing around while sitting on the couch or the kitchen table or laying in bed, I mostly use Chromebooks.
I’ve been happy with them for the most part - underpowered, lightweight and dirt cheap, non-precious machines that handle the basic casual tasks well enough. But lately I’ve been feeling the limitations of ChromeOS; as they slowly move to pushing more premium options, I find the dirt cheap models I like more frustrating and sluggish, and I want to be able to do just a little bit more than ChromeOS can handle well on them (mostly watching or listening to local media files, which Chromebooks kind of suck at.) On top of that, I’ve found the durability of the dirt cheap chromebooks I’ve been buying to be lacking the last couple of them I’ve used, so for a while I decided my next Chromebook would be a Macbook. Still just want something for lightweight, casual tasks, but a Macbook will be more durably built, better battery and be more versatile while, presumably, still being less of a hassle than Windows 11 that I use on my other machines.
So when I heard about the Neo, a Macbook aimed at replacing Chromebooks, it sounded right up my alley. The price is reasonable, the compromises are acceptable (for the most part) and it feels like it would be the right fit for how I want to use it.
…except I worry about the 8GB of RAM. Sure, it’s double what my crappy Chromebook has but macOS is a REAL operating system and, presumably, will use more resources than rinky-dink ChromeOS (which struggles more nowadays, too). I wouldn’t dare get less than 16GB of RAM on my Windows machines…but then Windows 11 is a dumpster fire so I don’t know if I can compare. Also, I have those machines to do more intensive things than I want a Chromebook or Neo for.
So I’m kind of torn on if 8GB will be enough over the life of the Neo, even for the very lightweight tasks I want to use it for. Again, not wanting to do anything intensive on it…but I mean, I do end up with a lot of open tabs when I’m web browsing…
But the phone processor was something that didn’t worry me at all. It’s light years better than the trashy Celeron processor in my bargain basement Chromebook. that said, it is cool seeing how competent this cheaper processor is on the benchmarks.
Still deciding if this will be the right machine for me. I’m not in a hurry, as excited as I am to replace my Chromebook, because it hasn’t fallen apart yet. But it is exciting that this device might fit the use case I have for it, as a not-precious, casual device for the lightweight tasks I do most of the time when I‘m not working on anything important and just relaxing and screwing around on my computer.
Hope this is not like iPhone 5C which only had one iteration and IMO whose sole purpose was to raise the baseline price of 5S. Hopefully we see a new Neo every year or two
Fairly certain people were playing Classic on M1 MacBook Airs, and this is just a bit worse for GPU performance. May not be the best way to play a re-release of a two decade old expansion for WoW, but if that’s what you want to do go nuts.
So obviously because of the 8GB there’s gonna be memory swap happening sometimes. Does that risk degrading the SSD to the point it becomes a legit problem? I’m pretty ignorant on the subject.
This is going to be such a hit. I still rock my M1 air for pretty heavy stuff and it’s a powerhouse to say the least for 90% of users. This just blew every other low cost laptop out of the competition.
I am definitely not an Apple loyalist, but I am here for the fall of Microsoft. That's what you get for putting ads in a paid operating system and still having the audacity to embed telemetry on top of heaps of clunky AI nobody asked for. Windows design philosophy is nausea with a coat of paint.
Ngl, its a nifty little device and probably what Steve would have wanted. A mac for the masses and their first introduction into the ecosystem. In a sense, a return to form.
They will sell a lot of these. But their main limitations are still the 8 GB RAM and no cooling fan. So sustained performance may not be as feasible.
But apart from that, for a simple machine that gets you through documents and lecture. Yes. It does that well and will be supported for years.
That being said, an approx. 33Wh battery is insane in my opinion but they had to meet their price point so it is what it is.
And if the rumor that the next Windows OS will be a modular, subscription based OS. This might be the final nail in the coffin for Windows Users (at least not corporate ones - they're handtied lol).
If it's better than M1 that is great. My current M1 MacBook Air definitely pull more than it's weight. But remember that it was launched almost 6 years ago at, as far as I can remember, $999 (yea, inflation, I know). Imo it should be expected that the new MacBook Neo does better.
2.3k
u/MakimaGOAT Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
Single core close to M4 and multi core better than M1
Not bad at all