MacBook Neo is going to sell like crazy. In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point. With memory and SSD prices so high I don't see how Dell, Asus and others are going to be able to compete. Unless the build quality is significantly worse than a M1 macbook air not sure budget PC makers will be able to compete.
Ironically probably one of my biggest reasons against buying one is it's obvious desirability.
I've already once in my life been in a situation where I can say with certainty the only reason my laptop wasn't stolen is that it wasn't a MacBook(despite having equal or above retail purchase value). I wouldn't be surprised if there's more that I never knew about.
I haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB device in 2026, but this device isn't targeted at either of us.
For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy.
I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.
That was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago.
Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.
Because look around - same code compiled for x86_64 and aarch64 is not that drastically different in size, save for some special cases (like NumPy). Data structures are going to have even less differences. Then, assets are the same.
I’ve cursorily checked few programs and difference seemed to about 10-20% (with some exceptions), so 8GiB RAM on an aarch64 is like 10GB on x86_64. Significantly nicer, not a life-changing nicer - you’re still very limited.
Edit: Next comment has a very good point about memory and SSD bandwidth increases, allowing faster swap and compressed RAM performance. That’s something I haven’t considered. So maybe it’ll feel closer to a 16GiB old machine or something like that…
Yeah. Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. The performance impact of moving applications in and out of swap should be much lower than it was a few years ago.
> And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1].
UMAs aren't made for speed, but for power savings. You are ignoring the fact that a discrete GPU accesses VRAM and caches at much higher bandwidths (and power) than an iGPU does RAM. Shared mem also comes at the cost of keeping it coherent between CPU/GPU. So you can't just look at one part of the system and then claim that UMAs must be faster because there are no data transfers.
And by the way, even on UMAs, the iGPU can still have a dedicated segment of memory not readable by the CPU. Therefore UMA does not imply there won't be data transfers.
> This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.
The A18 Pro isn't even two years old yet; it debuted in iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max September 2024. What's funny is none of the PC laptops manufactures can match the speed and quality of the Neo.
The benchmarks for the A18 Pro are impressive; its Single Thread Performance beats all mobile processors [1]; remember this processor was created for a phone:
Apple A18 Pro 4,091
Apple M1 8 Core 3200 MHz. 3,675
Apple A15 Bionic 3,579
AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 3,546
AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 230 3,538
Apple A14 Bionic 3,382
Intel Core i5-1235U 3,090
Apple A13 Bionic 2,354
Intel N150 1,902
Intel N100 1,893
AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G 1,820
Apple have historically moved forward minimum requirements for macOS and apps a bit aggressively. They need to slow that down now if they want us to take the macbook neo seriously.
Good. So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades. I hope the Neo is a kick in the pants to get everyone in the Apple ecosystem to take memory usage seriously.
PC makers are going to stop some of the artificial segmentation they used on the lower price devices, and that is going to hurt the sales of their higher-end lines. There is no reason they kept pushing 70 percent srgb panels on even the mid tier Thinkpads when the Neo has a good display.
I can't imagine the low end materials actually save that much cost anyway.
There's a tremendous amount of Bill-of-Materials inflation where a part that cost $5 more translates to $50 retail price increase when the actual work and engineering cost is exactly the same. This is one of the terribly annoying facts of product design, the incredible premium you have to pay for good parts that don't actually cost very much at all.
I'm glad Apple's caring about the education market again – people forget how it (and DTP) sustained Apple through the lean years of the 90s, until they came out with iMac and iBook.
In the US, cheap ThinkPads like E14 sometimes sell for a bit less when you factor in all typical discounts. They are good machines that run Linux well and can be repaired.
In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.
The Macbook Neo is highly repairable too [1]. Not _quite_ as repairable as some Thinkpads with a 10/10 score, but still pretty respectable at a 6/10 with easily replaceable batteries and stuff.
RAM has no bearing on repairability? And yes, sure stuff is soldered to the motherboard, but everything is basically modular outside of it, you can replace every big part pretty easily, and no glue, even for the battery
The RAM being soldered is a hit against repair ability, you can't expand it or if the ram has issues you can't replace it, you will just be forced to throw out the entire machine. What else is modular here anyways? Can I swap out the CPU, the screen, the keyboard, ports...anything?
Soldering RAM isn't for compact size or cost or to keep you from upgrading, it's for speed. Soldered RAM can be physically closer with a faster bus than removable RAM.
In the EU it costs $200 more so it's more like a low to mid range laptop.
I have a feeling these are aimed at the same sector as the Framework 12, school provided laptops for kids meant to be bought in bulk by institutions. But there they're competing against $150 Chromebooks and neither is even close.
In the EU, you don't need to buy an extended warranty, since existing consumer protection laws require the sort of extended repair coverage Americans have to pay extra for.
Taxes are also included in the EU price, but not the US price.
The lack of reflection indicated by "US prices are so much cheaper! Why are our electronics so expensive?" vs "What do you mean, you can't take it back to the store where you got it for an on-the-spot replacement a year and a half after purchase if it breaks?" has amused me for quite some time. Not that both come from the same person, but don't they ever talk to each other?
Yes but be aware this only goes where Apple is the actual seller. If you buy it in another shop you only have Apple warranty for one year and the shop has to sort out the second one. So buying from Apple directly is better.
As someone who has been working in IT support for years, for most people a Windows laptop in the $400 range is cheaper if you add on-site IT support, parts replacement, and a longer warranty period. I wonder where Apple stands here.
> Apple is going to cannibalize their own laptop market.
As long as you buy a Mac laptop, Apple is fine with that, regardless of which one. That’s because they know who their customers are.
The Neo is in its own category; the $599/$699 Neo doesn’t compete with a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a M5 Pro, 24GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD at $1899. If you know you need more RAM and storage than Neo, the M5 Mac Air is $1099. But if you need to stay under $1000, the decision is clear.
If anything, the Neo is more competitive with the entry-level iPad with 128 GB of storage at $349; with Apple's keyboard at $249, the total is $598, $1 less than the entry-level Neo.
For someone who wants a "real" laptop with more flexibility than an iPad, getting the $599 Neo is a no-brainer.
They are just covering all the market segments. This is for people who didn't want to shell out $1000 for a laptop for their kid, or have another one just to browse the web. Or they have an iphone but not a mac laptop, but now they might want one cause it's even cheaper than a phone. This will be pushed into schools probably as well.
I think this is actually the reason the Neo has 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradable). It’s their anti-cannibalization strategy.
They’re relying on the huge portion of their existing laptop market who self-identifies as “tech-savvy” or “enthusiast” and thinks 8 GB of RAM is a non-starter.
Those folks will keep buying Mac laptops at double (or triple, quadruple, …) the price.
> I think this is actually the reason the Neo has 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradable). It’s their anti-cannibalization strategy.
It has 8 GB of RAM because they wouldn’t be able to hit the price point of $599 with more; their target audience doesn't need more. It's also why the SSD is slower than a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air; it's the only device in the lineup other than the entry-level iPad with a sRGB display; the other devices have P3 Wide Color Displays. No Thunderbolt ports, only supports 1 external display and only at 4K. No Wi-Fi 7.
These are some of the compromises they made to keep the price down. They're also using a binned A18 Pro with 5 GPU cores instead of the 6 core version in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.
There are lots of potential customer for which a Mac laptop was out of reach; it's a lot more affordable at $49.91 /month for 12 months for the $599 model.
Its display is better than PC laptops in the same price range, but that display is a non-starter for graphic designers, video editors, etc.
This is really not the right comparison to make. An OS will use memory liberally. Give it more and it'll use more. Give it less and it'll swap to disk. So the real question is how long a given workload takes to complete, or whether you can multi-task without shitting out to/from disk every time you switch windows. "My OS uses X amount of RAM" is an entirely meaningless and irrelevant statement.
Browsers use available RAM for cache, but they don't require that much. Firefox officially supports running on Macs down to 512MB of RAM. It will just be slower.
ITs going to sell like crazy not because of specs, but because its apple, and its a cheap. Cause god forbid you pull out a chromebook in a starbucks and be seen as a peasant.
If you know what you are doing and don't want to spend a lot of money, its really not that hard to buy a refurbished thinkpad, swap in more ram, and install your linux disro of choice, for a lower price and get very similar usable performance.
Aside from gaming, I can do basically everything on Mac that I can on Linux or Windows. That's a hell of a lot more than a Chromebook. Take it from someone who has owned both a Chromebook and a Macbook; suggesting that they are in the same league is silly.
Also, used != new. I'm surprised people need to be reminded of this.
It appears most people - even on Hacker News(!) - are unaware that Chromebooks have a one-click Linux VM (currently Debian Trixie is the default). It is well-integrated into the Chrome desktop/launcher, and any Linux app can even be pinned onto the taskbar, next to your browser. Any Linux package you can `apt get` or `curl | sh` can run on Chromebooks made in the last 5ish years.
Yes because normal people want to run Linux just like normal people would rather “build such a system quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
Yep, I've been using ChromeOS/ built-in Debian VM for light VS Code, web dev and terminal stuff on a 150 dollar Lenovo ARM Chromebook with 4GB RAM for the last 2 years as my couch PC. I just disabled Android apps because that pushed it over the line.
Gets about 10 hours battery life, touchpad is way better than my $799 Lenovo Ideapad (ChromeOS is weirdly good with even cheap touchpad hardware) and does an incredible job of suspending idle tabs without being noticeable. No rooting, jailbreaking, etc required and unlike my M1 Macbook I can actually install apps without the ridiculous click app->can't open unverified app->settings->security->open anyway->click app second time-> open anyway song and dance.
Would I recommend it as your primary development device? Certainly not, and Neo would be a much better experience for sure but it also costs 4x as much so shrug.
I bought it entirely because I wanted the cheapest modern ARM Chromebook I could find with good battery life since my m1 Macbook is pretty much always tied to a dock and but pleasantly surprised by how much it could actually do beyond just web browsing.
You can do more if you have a lot more RAM. Otherwise you really are that restricted.
In the country I live in, there is no comparable Chromebook spec-wise on par with the Neo at a similar price point. You're basically stuck with 4GB RAM.
If Apple continues with the budget Neo brand into a 12 GB iteration, I can see this becoming more realistic (rather than a novelty). That being said, Parallels may need to review its licensing with a budget tier in mind. Few will buy a cheap computer and then pay what Parallels charges for a license (regardless if one-time or subscription).
They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo. What I'd personally consider is:
- Standard gets 16 GB vRAM (to perfectly target the base MacBook Air). But leave it at 4-6 vCPUs to not compete with the Pro (still for general computing, not power-users)
- New "Lite" tier with 8 GB vRAM max for the Neo (4 vCPUs). Increasing to 12 GB vRAM if the Neo does.
Then you target a $89 price point one-time-purchase for the "Lite" tier. Essentially three plans, targeting your three major demographics: budget, standard, and pro/power-user.
This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market. No one cares if the next iteration will be better with 12GB of ram. The workloads that people say that 8GB can't handle will be ones that the actual users will either wait or tolerate. I've been noticing that people who review the Macbook Neo basically don't get the point [1] and just the headline of this article matters that VMs work and thats a big win. The most ridicuous thing about the laptop is that it appears to be reparable which sort of tells me this is a template similar to the M1 Air of the future laptop designs that Apple will come out with. [2]
> This isn't a novelty it will crush the low end of the PC market.
You took what I said out of context and then replied to something else. Running Parallels on a Neo is a novelty. Parallels is both what the thread is about AND what my reply was expressly about.
Nobody can reasonably read what I wrote, in context, and believe I was referring to the computer itself as a novelty.
I saw the other day people complaining about AI slop being posted on this site by new accounts - which I agree is bad.
Someone suggested that people with 10k karma and/or 10 years subscription to this site should be able to do things (such as auto-ban) to those accounts.
The account that misrepresented your comment and thus acted in bad faith is one of those 10k+ accounts.
To me, this is a data point showing the fallacy of long term subscription and/or karma accrual as evidence of their quality/good faith abilities
I admit now after rereading that I did misrepresent what they said and I should have read their comment more closely and it was a knee jerk reaction and that its my fault.
> Heck, you can get 8GB Windows laptops with twice the SSD size of the MacBook Neo's for a little over half of the Neo’s price (again, at full MSRP.)
Let's see one of these $300 Windows laptops with 512GB of SSD (in a reasonable format, e.g. not an SD card), a body that isn't disposable, a screen that isn't a dim potato, a CPU that's within 20% of the Neo's performance, and a GPU that isn't embarrassed to be called a GPU.
I think you're misunderstanding, of course they do not exist. People don't get $300 windows laptops for their performance, build quality, or anything similar. Nor do they care about screen brightness, and 256GB is fine for the use case which is running word or some other simple application for as little $$ as possible.
The implication in the comparison is that they’re similar. The similarity between a Neo and a $300 PC is that they can both boot up and run at least one program. That’s about where it ends.
They existed on AliExpress. Chuwis and the likes (though the latest ones are lying about the CPU model). You usually get nvme storage, not the very best of course but it does the job. And IPS display. It's overall ok stuff, but the memory crisis has pushed them above 300 now.. They usually run N150s.
I also got two N100 NUC like boxes with 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe for €115 each. Bought them as the memory crisis was starting. One is now my home assistant, the other one runs matrix.
I still use an ancient chuwi for going to the makerspace. It's still got hours of battery.
I went looking, and did find stuff on Amazon, though none were made of an aluminum chasis, and none had the geekbench score anywhere near, and none had the screen brightness.
As I write this, the top Amazon search for "windows laptop" is a
> Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6 inch Business Laptop with Microsoft 365 • 2026 Edition • Intel Core • Wi-Fi 6 • 1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD) • Windows 11
The person who approved describing its 128GB storage as 1.1TB should be hanged.
The CPU also has[0] 31% of the single core and 14% of the CPU Mark rating. The screen has 220 nits (vs 500) brightness, comes with 4GB of RAM, and weighs 30% more. At least it's half price, though.
The shopping situation for Windows laptops is utterly dire.
Windows doesn't run "just fine" on 4 GiB of RAM. I had a laptop with 6; Windows 10 became barely usable. If you want to run one, small, program at a time I think you'll be ok. Forget about web browsing; you'll get one tab and it'll be slow.
Agreed. Windows 10/11 can run just fine on 4GB of RAM. You just can't run anything inside of Windows 10/11 with 4GB of RAM.
The last version of Windows that felt like 4GB of RAM was performant for me with applications was Windows XP. Not that every computer running the 32-bit edition of Windows XP could even see/utilize a full 4GB of RAM properly, but at least it was fast.
I ran a Windows 7 system with 3GiB as a gaming machine and it was just fine. Windows 7... the last Windows release that was acceptable-ish. Memories...
A lightweight Linux desktop can keep a decent amount of browser tabs (using Firefox; avoid Chrome) on 4GB RAM if you set up compressed RAM properly. It's not foolproof like 8GB would be, but it's absolutely fine for casual use.
2015 laptop, spinning rust. Nevertheless, it was at least somewhat acceptable at purchase, but crapware installed with successive system updates brought it to a standstill. An SSD might've helped, but not by much. I wiped it and put Kubuntu on it to give to my wife, for whom it ran acceptably. She gave it back when she got a shiny new MacBook Air.
A SSD would have made an absolutely massive difference.
Source: I have clients that still have 2nd/3rd gen i5 systems running 3-4 GB of RAM with Windows 10 and they're tolerable solely thanks to SSDs. Swapping that much on a hard drive would just be painful to use.
Nobody should be interactively using a computer post-2018ish (whenever SSDs fell below $1/GB) that's booting and running primary applications off spinning rust. They're perfectly fine for bulk storage drives but anyone waiting for an operating system booting off one has wasted enough of their life in the last year to have paid for the SSD. Companies that wouldn't spend $100 on an upgrade are literally throwing money away paying their employees to wait on a shit computer.
Neo is powered by a fast and battery-friendly chip. It's definitely not a novelty any more than Chromebooks or Windows 11 notebooks with integrated graphics have been.
Don't underestimate what you can do with the 8 GB RAM. My mid-tier, Intel 2019 Macbook Pro with 32GB RAM suddenly died by the end of 2023. I quickly got a basemodel 256GB/8GB MacMini M2 as a replacement. While initialy supposed to be a temporary replacement until my MBP gets fixed, I ended up using it for another year as my main daily machine for everything, inluding professionally (fullstack software dev).
There was simply no need to upgrade, the MacMini was faster in all regards then my Intel MBP. Out of curiosity of its capability I wanted to see how gaming performs - I ended up playing through all three Tomb Raider reboots (Mac native, but using Rosetta!) at 1080p in high settings. Absolutely amazed how fast it was (mostly driven by the update to M2).
Only one thing ever made me notice the lack of RAM, and that was when I was running the entire test suite of our frontend monorepo. This runs concurrently and fires up multiple virtual browser envs (vitest, jest, jsdom) to run the tests in parallel. Stuttering and low responsiveness during the execution, but would complete in 3-4 minutes - it takes around 1 minutes on my current M4 MBP.
VMWare Fusion is free, even if it is a pain in the butt to download. It also has GPU paravirtualization for Linux/Windows which is the only reason I use a proprietary VMM on macOS these days.
Because I was fed up with parallels subscription model and they make me pay for the upgrade the non-subscription version with every new macOS release, I dropped parallels for UTM. I barely need windows, only every other month or so and often just for some small tasks. UTM is nice, but performance running windows is waaay below parallels. It is free, however, so I won't complain.
http://tart.run works great for running macOS (and Linux) VMs on macOS if you're technical. It's free for non-commercial uses too! (Don't think there's GPU acceleration tho).
There’s something called menu pricing, in order to keep its existing customer base buying their more expensive higher end models there need to be an unjustifiable drop in quality to switch.
The gap in spec is no mistake, if it was appealing enough for existing air-book users to downgrade it would cannibalise their bottomline.
I’m excited that Apple now has a reason to keep MacOS small. Their soon to be top-selling machine has 8GB and they won’t want to make all those millions of Neos unusable by shipping a bloated OS.
I wrote about how Unified Memory, SSD directly attached to the SoC and Apple's use of real-time compression saves memory, reduces power consumption and wear on SSDs [1].
In practice I think this is going to be very specific to your data being good for compression and not already compressed - so not gaming, where textures can fill up the Neo's 8GB very fast depending on the game: Cyberpunk, Robocop, Bioshock and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks are showing 9 - 10 GB of RAM used at just 720p.
As long as you ignore that whole part of the OS was still running 68K code on PPC Macs, it crashed like a drunk driving a semi truck without protected memory and the end user still had to fiddle with the amount of memory an app could use
I miss having snappy menubar lists, at the Apple Store yesterday I noticed on the Neo that the transparencies and iconified menu items with shortcut glyphs are still perceptibly less buttery smooth.
There's a difference between bloated and batteries included. From a development point of view, macOS has native system libraries for things no other platform seems to include native system libraries for. And by "native system libraries" I do not mean downloadable content, dynamic support or anything similar, even if they're first-party. Though having unremovable system apps for every one of Apple's services MAY count as bloated if you don't use them.
There’s a big difference between unnecessary applications taking up space on your storage device, and unnecessary services running in the background competing for RAM and CPU with the applications you actually want to run.
Apple won't give a shit, they'll trash the UX on old/cheap hardware knowing that their fanboys will shame anybody who complains for being too poor to upgrade. They've done it many times before. Ruined font rendering on all macs with standard DPI screens for instance.
I have mixed feelings about Parallels. On one hand, it's good to be able to run a Windows VM, that generally works and is usable. On the other hand, in my niche that became a lazy vendor's equivalent of "we support MacOS".
> Windows 11 VM requires a minimum of 4GB of RAM to function
You can give it less. It may refuse to install, but even without using any workarounds, you can change the assigned RAM after installing and it will not refuse to boot. The minimum for Windows Server 2025 is 2 GB, and it’s basically the same OS (just with less bloat).
Apple is moving into Google's territory, cheap Chromebooks. The right move for Google is to aggressively move forward with their desktop OS and launch their line of laptops. The first pixel laptops had the best keyboards and trackpads ever. Google can nail this if they have the right product person. Apple needs some competition and the legacy PC makers won't cut it. Once again, it has to be Apple vs Google, same as Android vs iOS devices.
What’s actually going to happen is the second they start to lose market share or struggle at all, they will cancel everything Chromebook related and give up.
With that said, I think Chromebook’s still hold a competitive advantage for public school contracts. It doesn’t matter that the Neo is pretty cheap and the best value. Contracts are signed based on what’s cheapest, period.
Also, a big blind spot for a lot of HN: this is going to be big in developing Markets. This is within budget for middle class Latin Americans in a way that even the Air isn’t.
I think it'd be great if they did that, but Google is pretty willing to cut things that aren't working out, whereas for Apple, they are committed to making and selling laptops
I think this is somewhat ignorant the wide variety of legitimately very decent Windows PC laptops available in the exact same $500-700 price range as the MacBook Neo.
Apple isn’t disrupting the industry here. Don’t buy into early influencer review hype. These reviewers don’t actually look at retail store pricing.
Apple is just making a decision to go downmarket and making many of the same compromises as other cheap laptops, and some odd compromises that are unique to Apple’s machine:
No haptic trackpad, no keyboard backlight, no Touch ID on the cheap model, lower-end screen, very small battery, tiny slow charger included, minimal and performance compromised I/O, below-par RAM, worse speakers/microphones, an old nothing-special processor.
This is the exact same stuff that people have complained about for years with cheap laptops.
The fact that the computer is made of aluminum is really a distraction from these facts.
This idea that it’s Google versus Apple all over again is just not true. Windows is the dominant OS in the laptop space by far. Over 900 billion people in the world play PC games on windows, for example.
If you look at Best Buy street pricing, what Apple has pulled off here is not that impressive.
Let’s say you want the top end Neo model at $699. Spend $100 more at Best Buy and you’ll end up with a Yoga 7 machine with double the RAM, double the storage (1TB), 70Whr battery, and a very capable and efficient AMD Ryzen 7 AI 350 chip that has faster multicore and same or faster graphics performance.
You’ll gain user-replaceable SSD, backlit keyboard, convertible OLED touch screen, digital pen support, more and faster USB ports, microSD slot, HDMI port, fast charger in the box, better speakers, WiFi 7, bigger screen in a more popular 14” size…it’s a better buy that will last years longer for only a slight price increase (or, spend less on the Ryzen 5 AI 340 variant ($680) if you’re okay with compromising GPU performance, which most people in this category are, and you’ll still end up with double the RAM of the Neo and 512GB storage at $20 less than Apple’s non-education store price)
In case you need it, this is the next model up with the 350 processor. If you care about graphics performance it has double the cores, and the bigger SSD as I mentioned:
Not surprising but good to hear. It seems that there really isn’t anything that runs on a new MackBook Air that you couldn’t run on a NEO. It might not be as fast for some things but it gets the job done.
Ish. It’s better in some ways, like single core and maybe multi, but not by a ton. At the same time I think the M1 may have more raw GPU power, though missing a few fancy features.
Hardware is mostly worse, but that’s to be expected for the price. And nothing terrible, just little cuts all over.
I’ve been an M1 Air fan since I got mine in 2020 but recently things have become unusable. Playing 4K videos often drops frames, even at 30fps. And I can’t reliably run Notion’s transcription AI on Zoom calls, even though it’s not running locally. I’m going to do an OS reinstall soon to see if that helps, otherwise it will be time to upgrade…
Yeah, honestly not even counting. The only reason I even consider moving is that I dislike Tahoe and I know eventually I won’t be able to stall the update; hardware wise it doesn’t even cross my mind.
I have a current gen MacBook Pro for work configured with stupid amounts of ram and I feel no difference in terms of fluidity at all.
It will have a longer support period than an M1 based on Apple’s history of device releases. This might also mean a longer support period for the 16-series phones than typical, similar to the 4S.
As others have said, should be fine to run Linux in a VM. Running natively from boot, the only potential option would be Asahi Linux, but my understanding is that the A18 Pro chip has certain internal attributes which are akin to an M3, and Asahi has only gotten full support in place for the M1/M2 generations. Perhaps once they get M3+ fully working, A18 Pro would also be an option. (I'm also super interested in a Neo running Linux.)
If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.
Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries?
Clearly I'm not as knowledgable about this as I thought I was. I already have a Ubuntu x86 VM running on an Intel Mac (inside VirtualBox). Same with Windows 11. Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way? Last I checked VirtualBox on Apple Silicon only permits the running of ARM64 guests.
While I have a preference for VirtualBox I'd say I'm hypervisor agnostic. Really any way I can get this to work would be super intriguing to me.
> Can this tool allow me to run both VMs in an Apple Silicon device in a performant way?
I use VMWare Fusion on an M1 Air to run ARM Windows. Windows is then able to run Windows x86-64 executables I believe through it's own Rosetta 2 like implementation. The main limitation is that you cannot use x86-64 drivers.
Similarly, ARM Linux VMs can use Rosetta 2 to run x86-64 binaries with excellent performance. For that I mostly use Rancher or podman which setup the Linux VM automatically and then use it to run Linux ARM containers. I don't recall if I've tried to run x86-64 Linux binaries inside an Linux ARM container. It might be a little trickier to get Rosetta 2 to work. It's been a long time since I tried to run a Linux x86-64 container.
Not until macOS 28., but you're right, it's frustratingly unclear whether the initial deprecation is limited to macOS apps or whether it will also stop working for VMs.
The instruction set is not the issue, the issue is on ARM there's no standardized way like on x86 to talk to specialized hardware, so drivers must be reimplemented with very little documentation.
As long as you're ok with arm64 guests, you can absolutely run both Ubuntu and Win11 VMs on M-series CPUs. Parallels also supports x86 guests via emulation.
How is the performance when emulating the x86 architecture via parallels?
Also is it possible to convert an existing x86 VM to arm64 or do I just have to rebuild all of my software from scratch? I always had the perception that the arm64 versions of Windows & Ubuntu have inferior support both in terms of userland software and device drivers.
Have you confirmed this? I haven't seen anyone concretely describe the boot policy of the Neo yet (it should be an easy enough check for anyone who has one in-hand).
How does it function? Last time I tried was a 2018 Intel MBP and it was a gamble where I would always lose either WiFi (despite the driver being in the installer iso) or the keyboard. I'm aware it's a totally different architecture, but I also seem to remember comments about that one too before I tried.
It's the best linux-on-laptop experience I've had so far (including various Thinkpads). Never had any issues with wifi nor bluetooth (I'm streaming music via bluetooth via spotify via wifi, right now). The only missing feature I personally care about at this point is HDR support. There's no thunderbolt yet, but I don't own any thunderbolt peripherals in the first place.
There is occasional jank, but nothing out of the ordinary.
I'm confused, you weren't talking about what the average user would do, just about what it can? Asahi Linux is pretty good, not sure why that'd be a real issue?
Every thread about Windows on Hacker News includes claims about apps taking 30 seconds to launch, web pages taking 20 seconds to load, simple applications being unusable, and other extreme performance problems. These are puzzling for anyone (like me) who uses Windows at home without all of these extreme performance problems.
That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
There's an unspoken rule in corporate America, colleges, etc. Laptops MUST be loaded down with terrible software, no exceptions. My last corporate laptop actually had the paid version of winzip in 2025, and it ran with a little tray icon that I couldn't disable or remove. That was in addition to all the other corporate crap I couldn't remove.
Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.
This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
I think there’s a pretty big difference though. Linux is open while windows almost certainly will remain closed so even if corporates start bloating up Linux users can rely on the gpl to give them choice while windows users are stuck
The reason every developer makes their app open at startup, is because the Windows ecosystem doesn't have a good package manager. So every app needs to be its own package manager and check for updates on a timer. So they need to run all the time so they can run that timer.
In theory the Windows Store will handle updates. In practice, I avoid the Windows Store version of applications. Also, you can't turn off app updating, only pause them for a time.
> If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
They do already, my work laptop runs the corporate spin of Ubuntu, complete with Crowdstrike, which goes absolutely crazy and chews all the CPU whenever I do a Yocto build.
I used to be able to reliably BSOD a work computer by doing a largish git pull inside WSL2, with the culprit seemingly being the McAfee realtime scanner. VirtualBox VMs were fine though. Not confidence-inspiring!
Our corporate linux machines have exactly the same monitoring software as Windows - even the servers.
The performance is still not even remotely comparable. Could be the hooks are more performant on linux, could be the filesystem, maybe the tools are written more sanely... But loading apps, filesystem operations... Everything is still far faster on the linux dev instance. And I have half the ram allocated to that one.
A bank I worked at had one so bad that at 9am when everyone was logging in or forcing updates it could take 15 minutes to be usable. And every couple of weeks they'd force update just to change everyone's lock screen to something like "I support pride month"
I once worked on a computer for the US Government that felt slow. I counted nine (9) directly competitive and redundant endpoint protection products on it.
Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.
I like videogames, maybe more than I should at my age, and I prefer to play them from Steam in Linux through Proton. A couple of months ago I caved in and bought a proper Windows gaming miniPC because a game I want is not stable in Proton.
I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through update after update, while avoiding linking it to a Microsoft account despite its protests.
It's literally used to run only Steam and Firefox, and it still sucks compared to the ease of install/management of Linux. Ubuntu LTS took me about an hour to set up dual boot, apply updates, install Steam, and every other software and tool I use daily.
Why is Windows 11 still so clunky in 2026? It doesn't feel like the flagship product that many bright minds have improved for three decades. Why are hobbyists and small companies outperforming Microsoft's OS management?
Because Windows isn't really an OS anymore, but a "platform" to deliver advertisements and lock you into Microsoft services. The OS core itself is fairly solid (and has been since Vista/7) but it's all of the crud shoved on top which really ruins everything.
The LTSC IoT releases are easy to find (wink-wink) and don't have 80% of the annoyances, including constant "feature upgrades" - still not Linux, but better than consumer Windows.
No this is not just an enterprise issue. I waited 10 seconds (I counted.) for a Windows Explorer context menu to open the other day. This is on a fully decked out system with an Ultra 9 cpu and a 4090 and 32gb of memory, and basically no apps running. I think I had 2 tabs in Edge? Windows is a shitshow these days.
I just tried to open the context menu in Windows Explorer. It showed up almost as soon as I released the mouse button, and I have a much slower CPU, older video card, and way less RAM then you do. I was also running 12 windows of Firefox with collectively 1000+ tabs (though only about 36 or loaded), Steam, a Unity game, and Microsoft Teams, plus a number of background programs.
If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.
There must be something wrong with quite a lot of hardware then. My windows laptop at work took > 20 seconds to open the right-click menu on the desktop.
During the wait the entire desktop background went black along with the icons then it came back. I was actually trying to get to a setting to set the background to a fixed colour instead of an image in the hope of speeding the machine up.
From a UX experience there was zero indication that it was trying to do anything during this time.
Microsoft is responsible for the UX of the ecosystem they create. Things that extend the OS are part of that responsibility. It shouldn't be possible for such a thing to happen. The OS could just show the damn menu after 500ms even if some extension hasn't responded.
Corporate spyware is pretty nasty, regardless of platform. When I was at FB, they had something that forced a kernel module that was incompatible with the next big OS release; and I had accidentally disabled the FB spyware scripts. I set /etc/hosts to immutable because I was tired of them fucking with it ... didn't realize that's why things were better for the next 3 months, until I did the major update and I had to fix things from safe mode ... where everything only barely works.
Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.
Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it.
At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.
And Windows laptops are such a commodity business that prices are incredibly low. So PC makers load ‘em up with junk because they get paid for those deals.
They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.
And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.
Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.
Oh yeah no... its still terrible even without all the spyware.
First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.
Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.
I've said for decades that from a user perspective, malware scanners and prevention tools are fundamentally indistinguishable from actual malware. They intercept file accesses, block you from doing what you want to do, pop things up all over the place, and make your machine slow aand unreliable.
I’ve helped someone with a rather clean iMac, circa 2019, still supported by Apple. Forget 6 minutes — you can spend a full hour from boot to giving up trying to get anything done.
I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.
I bet this is it. I had a 2018 Mac Mini with a failing drive that moved like frozen molasses, but wasn't throwing obvious errors. Before it failed, it was slow compared to an SSD, but booted up in a reasonable amount of time and ran office apps just fine, just with a little startup lag. It was bad compared to an SDD, but not intolerably slow.
If a Mac is running that slowly, there's probably a hardware issue.
what? on a semi modern CPU and a SATA / M2 SSD?? My Vista laptop on a spinning drive took that long to boot I am pretty sure. I am flabbergasted if this is true
corporate laptops is the key here. take 2 identical laptops one with and one without the spyware - its night and day in both performance and battery life.
Wouldn't corporate spyware equally burden the NEO? Especially more give the 8GB of RAM vs 16+ on X64 laptops? Chrome, Teams, IDEs, websites etc are equally bloated on both platforms.
A Neo will win a race with a similar speed Windows computer full of bundled crap and security slop.
But it would work the other way around too.
The nice thing about Macs is even if you see a lot of what Apple puts on the computers as useless trash (“Why the hell do I need iBooks?”) it’s not stuff running in the background interfering with everything you do the way bad PC security software bundled on cheap Windows PCs or forced by corporate often does.
I can tell you my last work Mac slowed down noticeably (though not too bad, luckily) the day they decided to put the corporate security crud on it.
The newer security crud we use now seems much better behaved though.
My (former) corpo HP laptop with 16GB RAM had 75% RAM used at idle after a fresh boot with Outlook, Teams and all the copro shit running in the background. So the 8GB NEO CPU will spend its time swapping data from ram to disk versus the 16GB+ ones, given both being filled with corporate spyware and same heavy use cases.
Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.
This is another myth that needs to die. You can’t just look at Task manager and see that the OS is using extra memory and assume anything else loaded will cause swapping. Thats not how modern OS work.
My corporate spyware laden Surface ARM runs Windows faster than the Macbook Neo, but unlike the Neo can survive a fall onto a concrete floor. (Ask how I know...)
How do you know a Neo cannot survive a fall onto a concrete floor? I think it would take at least ten tests each with a new machine to get some confidence of the impossibility of that.
Geekbench 6 was around ~2600 single-core with the VM overhead for me. That's still punching above single-core power in its class for Windows machines and it makes me giggle.
Man, I do wonder what the realistic lifespan of that single NAND chip will be after it gets hammered by constant swapping of running tasks way beyond the capabilities of a 8GB RAM machine.
I have a PC with a 10+ year old 256GB SATA Samsung SSD that's still in top shape, but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the controller to extend lifespan. But when your entire wearable storage is a single soldered chip, I'm not very optimistic about long term reliability.
There was quite a bit of discussion about that when the M1 first came out, but none of it really seemed to have happened six years later. The target audience isn't in danger of wearing it out and the ones that will push the limits will grow tired of it and sell it in a year or two or move on to the Neo 2, which might have 12gb of ram due to the expected chip.
I still think it's a great machine, but I think all these worries about NAND dying really haven't come to fruition, and probably won't. I have about a hundred plus of various SSD Macs in service and not one has failed in any circumstance aside from a couple of battery issues (never charged and sat in the box for 2 years, and never off the charger).
If swapping was causing SSDs to fail on M1 Macs, we would never see the end of the hysterical articles about "NANDgate". Since we haven't seen any in all these years, it's seems pretty certain it's not happening.
Exactly. If some sort of random Dell model has a failure, you'll never hear about it because there's only a few thousand or so in circulation. But if any Apple product which sells in the tens/hundreds of millions has an issue, you'll hear about it whether you want to or not.
Hysteria would be if all had an issue like the keyboard gate, but this isn't an issue, it's a design limitation for certain uses cases which not everyone has. Some users will wear out faster than others due to usage patterns. If their M1 dies after 6 years of heavy usage, do you think they'll investigate if it was the NAND that died and go online to tell the news, or will they chuck it and buy new one?
NAND is still the same wearable part that regular X64 laptops have, Apple doesn't use some magic industrial grade parts but same dies that Samsung, Micron and SK ship to X64 OEMS, and those are replaceable for a reason, because they eventually fail.
The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later. Power users know they need more than 8GB of RAM and will buy a MacBook Air or Pro with 16GB+.
The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.
Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.
>The reality is most 8GB M1 Macs are still working just fine 6 years later.
Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason? Just because M1 mac aren't failing left and right doesn't mean their NAND won't fail.
Even though I like the NEO, I can't in good faith buy a machine with soldered wearable parts. That's like buying a car with soldered brake pads because "in 6 years average users don't feel like they need changing".
I still had laptops on my hands from 20 years ago that work fine simply because you can swap their drives with fresh ones. How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?
"How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?"
Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.
For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.
> Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason?
The number one reason why laptop OEMs primarily use replaceable SSDs is so that they can switch SSD vendors on a monthly basis to whoever is the lowest bidder at the moment. The number two reason is so that they can offer multiple storage capacity options without building different motherboard configs (though in practice, a lot of OEMs never get around to actually selling the alternative configs). Repairability is a very distant third place.
> Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere?
As a data point: I got a 14" MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD the first day it was available in 2021, and I've used it daily since then.
According to the SMART data ("smartctl -x /dev/disk0"), the SSD "percentage used" is 7%, with ~200 TBW. At this rate, the laptop will probably outlive me.
>but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the controller to extend lifespan. But when your entire wearable storage is a single soldered chip, I'm not very optimistic about long term reliability.
I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip, you're still screwed.
You're correct, GP's understanding of how wear leveling works is off by several layers. Counting the number of BGA packages tells you nothing. There are multiple NAND dies per package, multiple planes per die, many blocks per plane, and the size of each erase block is the largest-scale feature that is relevant to wear leveling.
from what i seen in "low end" ssds like the "120gb sata sandisk ones" under windows in heavy near constant pagging loads is that they exceed by quite a lot their manufacturer lifetime TBW before actually actually started producing actual filesystem errors.
I can see this could be a weaker spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks.
an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned.
Most flash has average wear out after 300k cycles. Let's say 64GB is used for swap. That's 19200 TB or 19.2 PETABYTES of Swap usage. Let's say you swap 12GB a day, you will burn out that 64GB of Flash Storage in 4.38 years and my guess is that amount of swap usage is extremely high that user would probably replace laptop sooner out of performance frustration.
>Most flash has average wear out after 300k cycles
No it doesn't. Most 1TB drives are rated for around 600 TBW, so enough to overwrite the drive 600 times, nowhere near 300k cycles. If you search for specs of NAND chips used in SSDs, you'll find they're rated for cycles on the order of hundreds to thousands, still nowhere near "300k".
12GB a day isn't very much. If your working set is larger than the 8GB RAM, you're swapping multiple times per second. It doesn't take very many megabytes per swap to reach 12GB if you're doing that multiple times per second.
“Parallels Desktop runs on MacBook Neo in basic usability testing. The Parallels Engineering team has completed initial testing and confirmed that Parallels Desktop installs and virtual machines operate stably on MacBook Neo. Full validation and performance testing is ongoing, and additional compatibility statement will follow if required.”
The M line was derived from the A line in the phones, and the individual cores are generally the same (though not in the same year). Counts, accelerators, other stuff on package/die is custom.
I think it was a fair question too. Even if things should be capable it was always possible the feature would be disabled in hardware or software somehow.
And with iPhones never running VMs as far as I know, we didn’t know if it was capable at all.
Virtualization requires specific hardware support to be performant. There are ways to do complete software emulation of a virtual machine but it would be so slow that nobody would want to use it.
This is them confirming that the CPU has enough virtualization support that they can virtualize rather than emulate the guest OS
Yeah. It's the first production Mac using an A-chip and is a Mac that has had many things cut out for savings. The question is did Apple feature cut required functionality.
Maybe/maybe not (we don't know how identical the A18 chip is to what shipped in the iPhone) - but it does determine that the virtualization stuff that was added to the M1 (in the era of the A14) has now moved over to the A series, at least enough to support macOS.
Speculation I’ve heard from Ben Thompson of Stratechery is this machine is, in part, a way to get value out of iPhone Pro chips that had defects.
The Neo has a 5 core GPU. The iPhone 16 Pro had a 6 core.
So, if he’s correct, these are the same exact chip. Just with a fault in one GPU core or one GPU core disabled if it was good. That lets them use extra chips they already made that would have gone to waste, at least until they run out.
Which would mean they both would have identical abilities, assuming no software lock for segmentation purposes.
It’s all supposition. But it make a lot of business sense.
People keep claiming this, but my experience is that it's pretty similar. My mom's PC accidentally had only 4GB of RAM for the past 5 years (whoops), and we only noticed it a month ago because the cheap SSD was finally dying due to heavy swapping.
I've already once in my life been in a situation where I can say with certainty the only reason my laptop wasn't stolen is that it wasn't a MacBook(despite having equal or above retail purchase value). I wouldn't be surprised if there's more that I never knew about.
For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy.
I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.
Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.
Why not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic
I’ve cursorily checked few programs and difference seemed to about 10-20% (with some exceptions), so 8GiB RAM on an aarch64 is like 10GB on x86_64. Significantly nicer, not a life-changing nicer - you’re still very limited.
Edit: Next comment has a very good point about memory and SSD bandwidth increases, allowing faster swap and compressed RAM performance. That’s something I haven’t considered. So maybe it’ll feel closer to a 16GiB old machine or something like that…
The Unified Memory Architecture is why these Macs are so fast—no wasted cycles moving data between RAM and GPU. And the data is compressed in real-time so less data has to be transferred and there's less ware and tear on the SSD, which is directly to SoC [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705
And by the way, even on UMAs, the iGPU can still have a dedicated segment of memory not readable by the CPU. Therefore UMA does not imply there won't be data transfers.
The A18 Pro isn't even two years old yet; it debuted in iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max September 2024. What's funny is none of the PC laptops manufactures can match the speed and quality of the Neo.
The benchmarks for the A18 Pro are impressive; its Single Thread Performance beats all mobile processors [1]; remember this processor was created for a phone:
[1]: "A18 Pro Benchmark" - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro&id=62...More efficient software benefits everyone.
There's a tremendous amount of Bill-of-Materials inflation where a part that cost $5 more translates to $50 retail price increase when the actual work and engineering cost is exactly the same. This is one of the terribly annoying facts of product design, the incredible premium you have to pay for good parts that don't actually cost very much at all.
In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.
The Macbook Neo is highly repairable too [1]. Not _quite_ as repairable as some Thinkpads with a 10/10 score, but still pretty respectable at a 6/10 with easily replaceable batteries and stuff.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
I have a feeling these are aimed at the same sector as the Framework 12, school provided laptops for kids meant to be bought in bulk by institutions. But there they're competing against $150 Chromebooks and neither is even close.
Taxes are also included in the EU price, but not the US price.
No one does this, because they're low enough to begin with.
For a $400 laptop?
As long as you buy a Mac laptop, Apple is fine with that, regardless of which one. That’s because they know who their customers are.
The Neo is in its own category; the $599/$699 Neo doesn’t compete with a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a M5 Pro, 24GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD at $1899. If you know you need more RAM and storage than Neo, the M5 Mac Air is $1099. But if you need to stay under $1000, the decision is clear.
If anything, the Neo is more competitive with the entry-level iPad with 128 GB of storage at $349; with Apple's keyboard at $249, the total is $598, $1 less than the entry-level Neo.
For someone who wants a "real" laptop with more flexibility than an iPad, getting the $599 Neo is a no-brainer.
They’re relying on the huge portion of their existing laptop market who self-identifies as “tech-savvy” or “enthusiast” and thinks 8 GB of RAM is a non-starter.
Those folks will keep buying Mac laptops at double (or triple, quadruple, …) the price.
It has 8 GB of RAM because they wouldn’t be able to hit the price point of $599 with more; their target audience doesn't need more. It's also why the SSD is slower than a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air; it's the only device in the lineup other than the entry-level iPad with a sRGB display; the other devices have P3 Wide Color Displays. No Thunderbolt ports, only supports 1 external display and only at 4K. No Wi-Fi 7.
These are some of the compromises they made to keep the price down. They're also using a binned A18 Pro with 5 GPU cores instead of the 6 core version in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.
There are lots of potential customer for which a Mac laptop was out of reach; it's a lot more affordable at $49.91 /month for 12 months for the $599 model.
Its display is better than PC laptops in the same price range, but that display is a non-starter for graphic designers, video editors, etc.
That's why cannibalization is a non-issue.
Launch a few more applications and you'll see everything sort of still keeps working at an acceptable responsiveness.
If you know what you are doing and don't want to spend a lot of money, its really not that hard to buy a refurbished thinkpad, swap in more ram, and install your linux disro of choice, for a lower price and get very similar usable performance.
Also, used != new. I'm surprised people need to be reminded of this.
It appears most people - even on Hacker News(!) - are unaware that Chromebooks have a one-click Linux VM (currently Debian Trixie is the default). It is well-integrated into the Chrome desktop/launcher, and any Linux app can even be pinned onto the taskbar, next to your browser. Any Linux package you can `apt get` or `curl | sh` can run on Chromebooks made in the last 5ish years.
Instead of using iCloud
Gets about 10 hours battery life, touchpad is way better than my $799 Lenovo Ideapad (ChromeOS is weirdly good with even cheap touchpad hardware) and does an incredible job of suspending idle tabs without being noticeable. No rooting, jailbreaking, etc required and unlike my M1 Macbook I can actually install apps without the ridiculous click app->can't open unverified app->settings->security->open anyway->click app second time-> open anyway song and dance.
Would I recommend it as your primary development device? Certainly not, and Neo would be a much better experience for sure but it also costs 4x as much so shrug.
I bought it entirely because I wanted the cheapest modern ARM Chromebook I could find with good battery life since my m1 Macbook is pretty much always tied to a dock and but pleasantly surprised by how much it could actually do beyond just web browsing.
In the country I live in, there is no comparable Chromebook spec-wise on par with the Neo at a similar price point. You're basically stuck with 4GB RAM.
They need to introduce something below the Standard license targeting the Neo. What I'd personally consider is:
- Standard gets 16 GB vRAM (to perfectly target the base MacBook Air). But leave it at 4-6 vCPUs to not compete with the Pro (still for general computing, not power-users)
- New "Lite" tier with 8 GB vRAM max for the Neo (4 vCPUs). Increasing to 12 GB vRAM if the Neo does.
Then you target a $89 price point one-time-purchase for the "Lite" tier. Essentially three plans, targeting your three major demographics: budget, standard, and pro/power-user.
[1] https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbPCGqoBB4Y
You took what I said out of context and then replied to something else. Running Parallels on a Neo is a novelty. Parallels is both what the thread is about AND what my reply was expressly about.
Nobody can reasonably read what I wrote, in context, and believe I was referring to the computer itself as a novelty.
Someone suggested that people with 10k karma and/or 10 years subscription to this site should be able to do things (such as auto-ban) to those accounts.
The account that misrepresented your comment and thus acted in bad faith is one of those 10k+ accounts.
To me, this is a data point showing the fallacy of long term subscription and/or karma accrual as evidence of their quality/good faith abilities
These won't run Crysis, but they don't need to.
And if they can do that, they can get them (at full MSRP) for about half the price of a MacBook Neo.
Heck, you can get 8GB Windows laptops with twice the SSD size of the MacBook Neo's for a little over half of the Neo’s price (again, at full MSRP.)
Let's see one of these $300 Windows laptops with 512GB of SSD (in a reasonable format, e.g. not an SD card), a body that isn't disposable, a screen that isn't a dim potato, a CPU that's within 20% of the Neo's performance, and a GPU that isn't embarrassed to be called a GPU.
I doubt they exist.
I think you're misunderstanding, of course they do not exist. People don't get $300 windows laptops for their performance, build quality, or anything similar. Nor do they care about screen brightness, and 256GB is fine for the use case which is running word or some other simple application for as little $$ as possible.
I also got two N100 NUC like boxes with 16GB DDR4, 512GB NVMe for €115 each. Bought them as the memory crisis was starting. One is now my home assistant, the other one runs matrix.
I still use an ancient chuwi for going to the makerspace. It's still got hours of battery.
It's all ok stuff if you know what you're doing.
> Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6 inch Business Laptop with Microsoft 365 • 2026 Edition • Intel Core • Wi-Fi 6 • 1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD) • Windows 11
The person who approved describing its 128GB storage as 1.1TB should be hanged.
The CPU also has[0] 31% of the single core and 14% of the CPU Mark rating. The screen has 220 nits (vs 500) brightness, comes with 4GB of RAM, and weighs 30% more. At least it's half price, though.
The shopping situation for Windows laptops is utterly dire.
[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6268vs4227/Apple-A18-Pr...
The last version of Windows that felt like 4GB of RAM was performant for me with applications was Windows XP. Not that every computer running the 32-bit edition of Windows XP could even see/utilize a full 4GB of RAM properly, but at least it was fast.
Though I get by just fine with 512MB on my favorite Pentium 3 XP system. :D
A SSD would have made an absolutely massive difference.
Source: I have clients that still have 2nd/3rd gen i5 systems running 3-4 GB of RAM with Windows 10 and they're tolerable solely thanks to SSDs. Swapping that much on a hard drive would just be painful to use.
Nobody should be interactively using a computer post-2018ish (whenever SSDs fell below $1/GB) that's booting and running primary applications off spinning rust. They're perfectly fine for bulk storage drives but anyone waiting for an operating system booting off one has wasted enough of their life in the last year to have paid for the SSD. Companies that wouldn't spend $100 on an upgrade are literally throwing money away paying their employees to wait on a shit computer.
Windows 7. Windows 10 eats about 6GB (custom IoT with a lot of things disabled).
Neo is a parody of a computer.
check your install mate
There was simply no need to upgrade, the MacMini was faster in all regards then my Intel MBP. Out of curiosity of its capability I wanted to see how gaming performs - I ended up playing through all three Tomb Raider reboots (Mac native, but using Rosetta!) at 1080p in high settings. Absolutely amazed how fast it was (mostly driven by the update to M2).
Only one thing ever made me notice the lack of RAM, and that was when I was running the entire test suite of our frontend monorepo. This runs concurrently and fires up multiple virtual browser envs (vitest, jest, jsdom) to run the tests in parallel. Stuttering and low responsiveness during the execution, but would complete in 3-4 minutes - it takes around 1 minutes on my current M4 MBP.
https://mac.getutm.app
The gap in spec is no mistake, if it was appealing enough for existing air-book users to downgrade it would cannibalise their bottomline.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354705
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOe-Ock4pnw
You can give it less. It may refuse to install, but even without using any workarounds, you can change the assigned RAM after installing and it will not refuse to boot. The minimum for Windows Server 2025 is 2 GB, and it’s basically the same OS (just with less bloat).
With that said, I think Chromebook’s still hold a competitive advantage for public school contracts. It doesn’t matter that the Neo is pretty cheap and the best value. Contracts are signed based on what’s cheapest, period.
Also, a big blind spot for a lot of HN: this is going to be big in developing Markets. This is within budget for middle class Latin Americans in a way that even the Air isn’t.
Apple isn’t disrupting the industry here. Don’t buy into early influencer review hype. These reviewers don’t actually look at retail store pricing.
Apple is just making a decision to go downmarket and making many of the same compromises as other cheap laptops, and some odd compromises that are unique to Apple’s machine:
No haptic trackpad, no keyboard backlight, no Touch ID on the cheap model, lower-end screen, very small battery, tiny slow charger included, minimal and performance compromised I/O, below-par RAM, worse speakers/microphones, an old nothing-special processor.
This is the exact same stuff that people have complained about for years with cheap laptops.
The fact that the computer is made of aluminum is really a distraction from these facts.
This idea that it’s Google versus Apple all over again is just not true. Windows is the dominant OS in the laptop space by far. Over 900 billion people in the world play PC games on windows, for example.
If you look at Best Buy street pricing, what Apple has pulled off here is not that impressive.
Let’s say you want the top end Neo model at $699. Spend $100 more at Best Buy and you’ll end up with a Yoga 7 machine with double the RAM, double the storage (1TB), 70Whr battery, and a very capable and efficient AMD Ryzen 7 AI 350 chip that has faster multicore and same or faster graphics performance.
You’ll gain user-replaceable SSD, backlit keyboard, convertible OLED touch screen, digital pen support, more and faster USB ports, microSD slot, HDMI port, fast charger in the box, better speakers, WiFi 7, bigger screen in a more popular 14” size…it’s a better buy that will last years longer for only a slight price increase (or, spend less on the Ryzen 5 AI 340 variant ($680) if you’re okay with compromising GPU performance, which most people in this category are, and you’ll still end up with double the RAM of the Neo and 512GB storage at $20 less than Apple’s non-education store price)
Seriously, give me a good reason to buy a Neo over a machine like this. What is actually better about the Mac objectively? https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/lenovo-yoga-7-2-in-1-copilot...
Review: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTe5kUYt9k
"As of 2026, the world population is approximately 8.3 billion." [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
The sheer amount of useless nonsense that must be in memory.
I’ve got that one and I’m yet to feel limited.
Hardware is mostly worse, but that’s to be expected for the price. And nothing terrible, just little cuts all over.
I have a current gen MacBook Pro for work configured with stupid amounts of ram and I feel no difference in terms of fluidity at all.
[1]: https://github.com/apple/container
https://lima-vm.io
0: https://github.com/apple/container
While I have a preference for VirtualBox I'd say I'm hypervisor agnostic. Really any way I can get this to work would be super intriguing to me.
I use VMWare Fusion on an M1 Air to run ARM Windows. Windows is then able to run Windows x86-64 executables I believe through it's own Rosetta 2 like implementation. The main limitation is that you cannot use x86-64 drivers.
Similarly, ARM Linux VMs can use Rosetta 2 to run x86-64 binaries with excellent performance. For that I mostly use Rancher or podman which setup the Linux VM automatically and then use it to run Linux ARM containers. I don't recall if I've tried to run x86-64 Linux binaries inside an Linux ARM container. It might be a little trickier to get Rosetta 2 to work. It's been a long time since I tried to run a Linux x86-64 container.
I don’t know what the story for VMs is. I’d really like to know as it affects me.
Sure you can go QEMU, but there’s a real performance hit there.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
This is a super easy way to run linux VMs on Apple Silicon. It can also act as a backend for docker.
I used to use VirtualBox a lot back in the day. I tried it recently on my Mac; it's become pretty bloated over the years.
On the other hand, this GUI for Quem is pretty nice [1].
[1]: https://mac.getutm.app
I've run amd64 guests on M-series CPUs using Quem. Apple's Rosetta 2 is still a thing [1] for now.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
[2]: https://mac.getutm.app
Also is it possible to convert an existing x86 VM to arm64 or do I just have to rebuild all of my software from scratch? I always had the perception that the arm64 versions of Windows & Ubuntu have inferior support both in terms of userland software and device drivers.
[1]: https://github.com/apple/container
There is occasional jank, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Also: https://getutm.app/
brew install wine-stable
or package any windows app with your own environment:
brew install --cask Sikarugir-App/sikarugir/sikarugir
That was until I realized how many reports are coming from people talking about their work laptops loaded with endpoint management and security software. Some of those endpoint control solutions are so heavy that the laptop feels like you've traveled back in time 15 years and you're using a mechanical hard drive.
Some of this is not _just_ a corporate problem. Why would Winzip have an auto run application and tray application in the first place? Every single app seems to think they need one, and it's a classical tragedy of the commons. Perhaps on a virgin Windows install, your app with autorun and a tray icon will be more responsive. But when 20 other apps pull that same trick, no one wins.
This is actually one of the reasons I'm not excited at the idea of Linux defeating Windows. If it did, corporations would just start crapping up Linux the way they've crapped up Windows.
They do already, my work laptop runs the corporate spin of Ubuntu, complete with Crowdstrike, which goes absolutely crazy and chews all the CPU whenever I do a Yocto build.
Not nine different/only somewhat overlapping pieces of software from companies that were competitors. Nine equivalent products. I guess defender made ten.
Except they were unusably slow. Literally.
Log in when class starts, you may get control after 10+ minutes. Opening a web browser was a mistake you may not live to regret.
The network there was not fast. The various security stuff slowed every computer down a lot.
I suspect they were already older and maybe underspec. Probably had 4200 RPM disks or something.
But the combination meant they were 100% worthless.
I use a corporate Windows VDI at work, so the experience is understandably subpar there, but it is still horrible on high.end hardware. Took me half a day just to herd it through update after update, while avoiding linking it to a Microsoft account despite its protests.
It's literally used to run only Steam and Firefox, and it still sucks compared to the ease of install/management of Linux. Ubuntu LTS took me about an hour to set up dual boot, apply updates, install Steam, and every other software and tool I use daily.
Why is Windows 11 still so clunky in 2026? It doesn't feel like the flagship product that many bright minds have improved for three decades. Why are hobbyists and small companies outperforming Microsoft's OS management?
The LTSC IoT releases are easy to find (wink-wink) and don't have 80% of the annoyances, including constant "feature upgrades" - still not Linux, but better than consumer Windows.
If your Explorer context menu is taking more than a split second to load, there's something wrong with your hardware.
During the wait the entire desktop background went black along with the icons then it came back. I was actually trying to get to a setting to set the background to a fixed colour instead of an image in the hope of speeding the machine up.
From a UX experience there was zero indication that it was trying to do anything during this time.
Microsoft also puts a lot of crap into a default install that you may want to disable. Windows 11 with some judicious policy editor settings isn't so awful.
At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.
They are more incentivized by that than the few lost sales from people who know better to look for low crud machines.
And on more expensive machines they’d just be leaving money on the table. So they still often ship bundled crud.
Similar to spyware on TVs. Margins are razor thin. They’re going to make them up somewhere.
Like, the UI shows my hovers and interactions live but clicking things just takes time to do the corresponding result.
First experience of Windows 11, trying to download a file through firefox caused my 18 core 10980xe to have the entire UI freeze for the full time the download was going.
Reverted back to windows 10 immediately and the problem went away.
Windows 11 is full of spyware from the Mothership
I think that Apple has gotten so used to having fast storage in their machines that the newer OSes basically don’t work on spinning rust.
If a Mac is running that slowly, there's probably a hardware issue.
A Neo will win a race with a similar speed Windows computer full of bundled crap and security slop.
But it would work the other way around too.
The nice thing about Macs is even if you see a lot of what Apple puts on the computers as useless trash (“Why the hell do I need iBooks?”) it’s not stuff running in the background interfering with everything you do the way bad PC security software bundled on cheap Windows PCs or forced by corporate often does.
I can tell you my last work Mac slowed down noticeably (though not too bad, luckily) the day they decided to put the corporate security crud on it.
The newer security crud we use now seems much better behaved though.
Also it isn't 2-3x faster, stop with the made up nonsense please. Just checked and my 3 year old AMD laptop is on par with the NEO geekbench score I found online (slower in single core but faster in multi core), not 2-3x slower.
My home laptop is even faster.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17011372
This was the latest UTM in the App Store, so native Hypervisor.Framework access for arm64 Windows acceleration.
I have a PC with a 10+ year old 256GB SATA Samsung SSD that's still in top shape, but that's different because that drive has those 256GB split over several NAND chips inside, so wear is spread out and shuffled around by the controller to extend lifespan. But when your entire wearable storage is a single soldered chip, I'm not very optimistic about long term reliability.
I still think it's a great machine, but I think all these worries about NAND dying really haven't come to fruition, and probably won't. I have about a hundred plus of various SSD Macs in service and not one has failed in any circumstance aside from a couple of battery issues (never charged and sat in the box for 2 years, and never off the charger).
1. How do you know nothing happened? Define nothing in this case. Do Mac users check and report their SSD wear anywhere?
2. Didn't the OG 256gb M1 have 2 128MB NAND chips instead of one 256 meaning better wear resistance?
NAND is still the same wearable part that regular X64 laptops have, Apple doesn't use some magic industrial grade parts but same dies that Samsung, Micron and SK ship to X64 OEMS, and those are replaceable for a reason, because they eventually fail.
The MacBook neo is for students, grandparents, travel, etc.
Hell, even if it dies after 6 years it was still a better experience than using a $500-600 windows PC and the cost comes out to ~$8/month spread over 6 years.
Do you think SSD drives are replaceable for no reason? Just because M1 mac aren't failing left and right doesn't mean their NAND won't fail.
Even though I like the NEO, I can't in good faith buy a machine with soldered wearable parts. That's like buying a car with soldered brake pads because "in 6 years average users don't feel like they need changing".
I still had laptops on my hands from 20 years ago that work fine simply because you can swap their drives with fresh ones. How many M1 mac will still be functional in 20 years?
Probably quite a few, MacBooks have had soldered SSD's for over 10 years now. My 2018 McBook Pro still has a perfectly functioning SSD. I still see people using 2015 and older MacBooks all the time. There is no widespread SSD failure issue after 10+ years of Apple soldering the SSD's.
For most people the SSD's are lasting longer than the useful life of the device.
The number one reason why laptop OEMs primarily use replaceable SSDs is so that they can switch SSD vendors on a monthly basis to whoever is the lowest bidder at the moment. The number two reason is so that they can offer multiple storage capacity options without building different motherboard configs (though in practice, a lot of OEMs never get around to actually selling the alternative configs). Repairability is a very distant third place.
(But it's encrypted, so you'd better have backups because you can't read it off the chips.)
As a data point: I got a 14" MacBook Pro with a 512 GB SSD the first day it was available in 2021, and I've used it daily since then.
According to the SMART data ("smartctl -x /dev/disk0"), the SSD "percentage used" is 7%, with ~200 TBW. At this rate, the laptop will probably outlive me.
I thought wear leveling worked at the page/block level, not the chip level? On an SSD, if there was a failure of an entire chip, you're still screwed.
I can see this could be a weaker spot in the durability of this device, but certainly it still could take a few years of abuse before anything breaks.
an outdated study (2015) but inline with the "low end ssds" i mentioned.
https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-t...
No it doesn't. Most 1TB drives are rated for around 600 TBW, so enough to overwrite the drive 600 times, nowhere near 300k cycles. If you search for specs of NAND chips used in SSDs, you'll find they're rated for cycles on the order of hundreds to thousands, still nowhere near "300k".
https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/crucial-mx500-4-tb.d95...
I think it was a fair question too. Even if things should be capable it was always possible the feature would be disabled in hardware or software somehow.
And with iPhones never running VMs as far as I know, we didn’t know if it was capable at all.
This is them confirming that the CPU has enough virtualization support that they can virtualize rather than emulate the guest OS
The Neo has a 5 core GPU. The iPhone 16 Pro had a 6 core.
So, if he’s correct, these are the same exact chip. Just with a fault in one GPU core or one GPU core disabled if it was good. That lets them use extra chips they already made that would have gone to waste, at least until they run out.
Which would mean they both would have identical abilities, assuming no software lock for segmentation purposes.
It’s all supposition. But it make a lot of business sense.
It would explain why they picked such an arbitrary number of cores.
Unfortunately, the performance is very poor due to Apple restrictions on iOS.
Are they arbitrary restrictions Apple puts on them to prevent this kind of thong?
It doesn't work well - probably not at all for a modern version of Windows - but the tools exist.
https://DownloadMoreRAM.com
The best Windows laptop you can buy is still a MacBook.