It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.
The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.
I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a
redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors.
The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026.
The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have.
It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps")
People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!
You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.
This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.
Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.
I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.
8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.
I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
What's so special at this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?
It's mostly for people who need to edit some documents, a few photos here and there and other things like that. 8GB of RAM is going to be enough for the average user.
Assuming nothing really bad comes out of the reviews, this looks like the best computer for like 99% of users. I really can't imagine buying some plastic-fantastic Acer unit when this is on the market.
The thing is you could use it for 6 to 8 years if all your doing is editing documents and other tasks like that. No one is buying this to play games on or code massive AI powered applications, it's literally the "Well I need a computer sometimes may as well get the one that matches my phone"
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.
Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?
The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.
My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.
I think 90% of people will be fine with just an iPad. Some will need a small bump for laptop OS but not necessarily the specs which is where the Neo comes in, then the Air is for medium workflows and Pro is for if you do anything long running and intensive. It's quite a good ladder actually small steps that just add what each tier needs.
Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.
Don't get me wrong it's a fantastic product and great price point, but the only thing it makes me think of is the complete failure of iPadOS. Ultra portable MacBook with is A18 with 8G of ram is infinitely more useful to me (for non-pen input) than full M4/M5 chip with more ram that's completely wasted due to needless OS restrictions.
I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series.
Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.
The target user doesn't read hacker news. The target user is typing up papers for their history class. This absolutely kills the lower end of the market. I do not know why anyone who needs Safari and MS Office would buy anything else.
I think they very intentionally assume folks are not running VMs or doing much more than "every day" tasks. Given the pre-packaged E-Waste sold at most retailers for a similar price (or more) I think this is a really fantastic market move by Apple. This is doubly true as I read weirder and weirder things that Microsoft is doing with respect to Windows 12 and, well, in general.
Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.
The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.
I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.
I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.
I have an Air (M2) and I use it where I once owned a Pro. No fans sold it to me -- that's a quality feature, tired of them getting dirty over time. But I have the 15" model and essentially use it as a pro laptop.
This? This is an Air.
But the Air has become the Pro, the Pro has become the one you get for ports and super power and I don't know if many people even need it, and now 'Air' has lost its meaning (light, entry-level, portable) so they need a new name. So they name it, literally, neo: New.
Steve Jobs would weep. What happens in five years when it's not new any more?
I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?
If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.
I know, but that doesn't mean there aren't people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone/Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.
I used to only want black/silver "base" colors for resale reasons but that has fallen far on my needs for a laptop since I keep/repurpose them or cycle them through friends/family instead of reselling in most cases now.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dec everywhere.
No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.
VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.
The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although Apple might have decided against enabling it (to segment the market).
More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.
But the only issue in school is the rick kid's parent will get them Macbook Pro or even Macbook Air, and the poor kids will get Macbook Neo... I'm sure the kid will not feel great about having Neo while her friend have Pro version.
Apple: here's an affordable laptop. This comment: but the poor kids are going to feel inferior to the rich kids with this affordable laptop! Of course the poor kids are going to get cheaper & slower computers, cheaper clothes, etc. And they won't feel great about it because being poor isn't great.
But now they'll have more options! If they like Apple, they'll have a (likely pretty good) Apple laptop! It's great! I think a more affordable Mac is _good_ (at least better than no affordable Mac) and will make the poor kids happier.
Looks like they're using some new variant of branding font for this. Inspect Element shows it as SF Pro Display, but it's actually just being masked over with an image
The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs
So I guess they must have fully depreciated the gigantic fleet of CNC routers they use to cut the aluminum cases. Making a cheap laptop seems better than throwing them away.
But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.
This is an excellent addition to the lineup and changes the list of reasons for why the average person would go for a Windows laptop from “cost” to practically nothing, but from a consumer perspective, is there any reason to buy this over M1 MBA which can be purchased new for less than the education discounted version of the MB Neo?
With every new device Apple releases the split between iPadOS and macOS gets more awkward.
Makes no sense for a $1500 "Pro" iPad to have desktop-class RAM, storage, an M5 chip, and be stuck with a Fisher Price OS, while this one has the equivalent specs of last year's iPhone and gets the full power of macOS. Just unify the two already.
I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.
I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.
Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.
For the same price, Walmart is selling the HP Omnibook 5. It has a better CPU, 16 GB RAM (double), and 1 TB SSD (double).
There's also another HP for $359 with 8 GB RAM & 1 TB SSD. For half the price of this MacBook Neo, it should offer comparable performance with double the storage.
Anyone know how this would compare to an original M1 Air? Both in terms of performance and also capability. My primary use case for my air is web browsing and similar. But I do use other things at times. I know they're both arm processors, but are there things that ne can do an M1 that won't work on this?
The A18 Pro is roughly 30% faster in single-thread, and about equal in multi-core performance compared to the M1. The iGPU is also superior, and for AI it has 38 TOPS vs 11 in the M1. The A18 Pro should also be a lot more power efficient.
This comparinson might not be fair, since we are talking about an iPhone and a Macbook. We need to wait for Neo's benchmarks. A lot of things can change from the phone factor to the laptop factor, from power supply, to thermals, to dedicated data lanes
Sure but it's very unlikely that it would perform worse in a laptop than in a phone, thermals are better, power supplies are beefier, batteries much larger, &c.
Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]
The only difference the laptop would make is slightly better cooling; although with the effort Apple puts into iPhone/iPad thermals, I doubt it'll be exceptionally better. At most, maybe a 2-4% increase in multicore, from being able to sustain burst frequencies longer before thermal throttling.
yesterday I wrote in a group slack that today I would get to decide whether:
* i'm not buying any machine at all, or waiting for omarchy to support the new dell xps (32GB & 1TB = $1899)
* i'm buying the macbook neo at the top specs
* i'm buying the macbook air at the bottom specs
* i'm buying the macbook air with 32GB RAM & 1TB SSD (also $1899)
EDIT:
* adding an M5 Macbook (not Pro) with 24GB RAM & 1TB SSD also $1899
as someone who lives in claude code / opencode these days, the 8gb hurts but.. maybe, i dunno. they made this decision very painful. for me it could basically be a coffee shop opencode terminal that lets me access my apple iphone reminders, notes, etc.
I agree that it's gone downhill, but have you been on a Windows 11 machine? It's just a cacophony of ads, jank, and slop. The computing equivalent of sitting on a lawn chair in Times Square
I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.
It's interesting because the new studio display has 4 usb-c ports and 2 support thunderbolt, but they do indicate which ports are thunderbolt above the port.
Maybe, but having wires coming out of the same side as the pointing device is annoying. For cost reasons you have to pick one side. So put it where it causes less issues.
~~Haven't yet seen anyone comment on the apparent lack of Apple Intelligence. Makes sense due to the low amount of memory but wonder how many people won't notice that until after they buy this laptop.~~
edit: somehow missed it has Apple Intelligence - whoops
There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.
I have one from the original rollout. I keep thinking about upgrading, but then I realize I'm just doing that because I want to buy something new, not because I need anything more powerful.
Interesting that it only comes with 8GB of RAM. My Macbook Pro on Tahoe uses around that just when booting up, before I start anything. I wonder if they have some memory optimisations planned?
That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.
Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.
Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.
As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.
The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.
I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.
My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.
This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn't great but 8 with apple's really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.
FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.
The problem is when you start throwing half the modern tech stack crap on top which is built on standalone browser engines. They are NOT memory or CPU efficient compared to native apps. Really kills a nice machine dead.
I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.
1. Gawd damn, scrolling through that page full of all those bright colors with their saturation cranked up to 11, feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode. No other page from Apple is like that. wtf
2. Would a used older hand-me-down Macbook Air/Pro not be better performance/value than this iPhone board in a cheap laptop shell? There was a guy here saying he bought a used Macbook Air M1 16GB for 250 Euros.
2: I'd say it's about the same, same RAM/SSD sizes, maybe an M1 chip is faster than A18 but limitations will come from running out of ram/disk Had an intern working with us, basically couldn't have an browser running together with Figma due to ram shortage making it slow down to a crawl.
That doesn't make much sense. They do lean/JIT manufacturing, so it's unlikely that they have too many iPhone boards. Also, the tooling for a completely new alu unibody size for just selling a few iPhone boards does not make much sense.
This is very clearly targeted at Chromebooks in education, where the iPad is not doing too great:
Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?
I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they'll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.
I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.
That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.
"Education customers can purchase it for $499."
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.
This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.
The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.
I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.
The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.
I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.
I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.
Looks like it's aimed squarely at students.
Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.
They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.
My son went to college with his Mac. But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software. So we had to get him a PC as well.
Everything, as I understand it, is moving to the Web. Google Docs, Canvas…
Yeah.
I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?
It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.
Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.
Not in some time (retired). I have seen lots of iPads in medical facilities. In fact, just this morning, I was looking at one, with a badly-designed app for checking in patients.
Many of the patients are older folks. They tend to press long and hard on the big buttons.
A sensible app developer traps tap and long-touch, and sends them both to the same handler. This developer only catches the tap event, and ignores long-touch. The attendant was getting grumpy, because she had to keep telling patients "tap 'gently'."
It's just me, I know, but I get salty, when I see this kind of careless UI design (it was the app's fault -not the iPad's). I know that the medical group paid big bucks for the app.
My kids' district gives them iPads in middle school (5th through 8th) and MacBook Airs in high school.
Our middle schools started out with iPads. But they switched to Chromebooks because they were a lot more useful. Also, apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
apparently, middle school boys aren't that good at caring for iPads. :-)
Your district is liable to be unpleasantly surprised. Like ours, they will likely find middle school-ers are worse at caring for Chromebooks. The rate of broken Chromebooks for us was staggeringly high.
My local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through high school.
My old Highschool, as well as many other schools I've seen since, mandate Chromebooks.
I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.
If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
There are schools where close to 100% of the kids are qualified low income.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
That's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.
The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.
It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.
> It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone
I think the key difference is that phone operating systems are designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time. AFAIK macOS just isn't set up for that.
macOS is shockingly good at memory management, the issue is most people will want to slap Chrome and run 50 tabs on it, if you use Apple's built in tools and treat it essentially like you do your iPhone but with some better features for photo editing, document editing and research tools then it will be an incredible entry level device for most students and office workers.
Upgrade to air if you do things like coding and video editing semi-regularly and upgrade to a Pro if you do long running intensive tasks.
Why not? They’re the same core OS.
Because software needs to be aware of the memory lifecycle to avoid losing data when its process gets culled. iOS apps are explicitly built for that, but to my knowledge macOS apps aren't, they are allowed to assume they will run forever until the user closes them.
Isn’t this ignoring that inactive apps essentially get paged out of memory anyway?
Also conversely what about iPadOS where you can multi task on just 8GB too.
People have survived on 8GB Mac’s for a long time. I’m not sure things are as dire as you make them out to be.
They are both built upon Darwin, Apple's BSD-based kernel, they are essentially the same OS underneath with different top level API's and even those are getting more uniform with Swift and SwiftUI.
Maybe not "barely usable," but it certainly makes it more like a "terminal" of the old days or a "thin client" than anything, especially considering how bloated macOS is. This machine would fly however with Linux and a lightweight DE.
For the average user (office and student) this is all they need, access to office apps, ChatGPT and their google cloud and that's enough. They don't need it to "fly" through coding tasks and games that's not what it's for.
No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still
It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.
They were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence.
8 GB M1 MacBook Air does support Apple Intelligence.
I'll get one for my mom who uses facebook and pinterest and the occasional recipe website. I'm sure it'll be enough power for the average user.
This! It's enough power for the average user and comes with less headaches than Windows and Linux, plus most users are familiar with iPhone and it's basically the same, easy choice for most people.
Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.
My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.
The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.
I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.
I used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers.
I use an M2 Air with 8GB of RAM. I code in Swift, SwiftUI and Rust regularly with Xcode and Zed editor. I play games with Crossover and Native ones such as Control at over 30 fps. The M2 Air is an absolute powerhouse with tremendous battery life. The Neo won't be able to do these things and that's okay, it's not what it's for.
> The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable
C'mon, man.
I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.
Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop.
Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.
It was just an example of a simple app built by Apple themselves being a RAM hog. 375MB just for control centre on fresh open (15.7) but like I said I have seen it higher recently on multiple occasions. That's before we talk about a lot of their seemingly endless and inefficient background tasks. mds_stores anyone?
Hopefully the presence of a laptop like this will be beneficial to software quality. They should make their developers use it one day a week.
Honestly 128MB might be too much...
Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.
I'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...
call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?
Yea if you can find one for $500 new on sale.
Maybe a slightly used one as well.
But I think these are very tempting for brand new.
doesn't need to be new, but maybe the m1s wont last another 4 years for college so maybe it makes sense...
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
Apparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...
A very old article, and if you follow any of their links, they are sold out. So it's not so apparent after all
I don’t disagree, sure M1’s don’t grow somewhere and at some point will no longer exist as new but this is such a disappointing laptop. At least could have had a redeeming quality like being significantly lighter. It’s just worse in every aspect.
Is it a better deal? A18 Pro seems to be somewhat more capable than an M1.
Maybe but It has worse screen, worse battery and worse connectivity.
Noted, but I’d still pick the better CPU.
What part(s) of the "full experience" are missing in this machine?
Smaller screen with less colors(sRGB instead of P3), shorter battery life(16 instead of 18), USB-3 and USB-2 Type-C ports instead of thunderbolt.
For years Apple has been selling an M1 Apple MacBook Air for $649 via Walmart. It was still using the old wedge case design and is literally unchanged from fall of 2020 when it came out. It was the base model with 256 GB storage and 8 GB of RAM model, no upgrade options, no colors.
The price point was designed to get customers who would not pay for a $1000 computer into using a Mac. Sourcing those 2020 era M1 components, screens, etc, let alone M1's, was probably becoming a problem in 2026.
The Macbook Neo is a modern way to meet that price point. The video ad is more instructional about what macOS is, and how it would work with an iphone the customer may already have.
It does very basic Apple Intelligence (they show the photo editing in the video), but this is not for running models locally (they even show the ChatGPT native app and say "runs all your favorite AI apps")
People complaining about the 8 GB limit are missing who the target market is for this machine. Its a Mac, for $599!
You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.
This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!
So what if it's a Mac, applications suddenly don't need as much memory? Can it open a table with a gazillion rows? Can it open ten tens if not hundreds of web pages? Can it run multiple programs at the same time? Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.
Get a Macbook Air, the start at 16.
Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.
Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.
I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.
Really great to see.
8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.
I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.
Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.
What's so special at this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?
I’ve used a computer with 4 gigs for the last 15 years and it still does emails, recipes, and YouTube. I.e. 100% of my computer needs.
It's mostly for people who need to edit some documents, a few photos here and there and other things like that. 8GB of RAM is going to be enough for the average user.
it is quite forward thinking, but for Apple, they are thinking you will need to upgrade.
Assuming nothing really bad comes out of the reviews, this looks like the best computer for like 99% of users. I really can't imagine buying some plastic-fantastic Acer unit when this is on the market.
This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.
This is for people who want the cheapest MacBook possible, with the edu discount it's only 499$.
You drop it being silly, cool that's only 500$.
The thing is you could use it for 6 to 8 years if all your doing is editing documents and other tasks like that. No one is buying this to play games on or code massive AI powered applications, it's literally the "Well I need a computer sometimes may as well get the one that matches my phone"
> This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.
Why not? I would.
Uhm but you do realize that $500 is actually a lot of money for people that aren't living in SF and hop between startups every second tuesday, right?
There is no "only". It's $500.
Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.
Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?
The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.
My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.
Neither.
I would like the bubble that is this website's "community" to pop, crash down back to earth and see them struggle living like normal people again.
It can be a decent sized purchase if you were buying it outright, but $500 is just not a lot of money in America for the vast majority of citizens.
Though I agree with you completely regarding the "oops I dropped it".
When compared to the rest of the line up it is only, the Air is now $999 for the base model, that's 1k, 500 is cheap in comparison and for the quality it beats out a lot of laptops in this price range.
That is a correct statement, but "whoopsie, dropped it, but no biggie, it's just $500" is not.
I think 90% of people will be fine with just an iPad. Some will need a small bump for laptop OS but not necessarily the specs which is where the Neo comes in, then the Air is for medium workflows and Pro is for if you do anything long running and intensive. It's quite a good ladder actually small steps that just add what each tier needs.
From the marketing it’s obvious that this is built for students, so I doubt they intend for the useful life to be greater than 3-4 years.
In case anyone else is wondering -
Neo:
Air:Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.
Nah it's on there.
Don't get me wrong it's a fantastic product and great price point, but the only thing it makes me think of is the complete failure of iPadOS. Ultra portable MacBook with is A18 with 8G of ram is infinitely more useful to me (for non-pen input) than full M4/M5 chip with more ram that's completely wasted due to needless OS restrictions.
You're right. This is actually an implicit admission of the failure of the iPad for general purpose computing.
Which everyone on HN already says, but Apple seems to have its own idea what the iPad is for.
I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series.
Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.
The target user doesn't read hacker news. The target user is typing up papers for their history class. This absolutely kills the lower end of the market. I do not know why anyone who needs Safari and MS Office would buy anything else.
I think they very intentionally assume folks are not running VMs or doing much more than "every day" tasks. Given the pre-packaged E-Waste sold at most retailers for a similar price (or more) I think this is a really fantastic market move by Apple. This is doubly true as I read weirder and weirder things that Microsoft is doing with respect to Windows 12 and, well, in general.
It’s $599. The target audience for this won’t need more. Anyone who knows what a VM is is not the target audience.
I used an M1 Air with 8GB as my main software development machine for a year during Covid. It was fine.
Can the Macbook Neo run Rosetta 2?
8GB RAM, no apparent upgrade option. Regardless, these will be insanely popular. Apple has finally made a play for the budget laptop market.
Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.
The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.
I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.
>M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18.
MacBook Neo is A18 Pro and if you look at benchmarks, the A18 Pro single core performance is 50% faster than the M1...
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/8650702
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020
I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.
I have an Air (M2) and I use it where I once owned a Pro. No fans sold it to me -- that's a quality feature, tired of them getting dirty over time. But I have the 15" model and essentially use it as a pro laptop.
This? This is an Air.
But the Air has become the Pro, the Pro has become the one you get for ports and super power and I don't know if many people even need it, and now 'Air' has lost its meaning (light, entry-level, portable) so they need a new name. So they name it, literally, neo: New.
Steve Jobs would weep. What happens in five years when it's not new any more?
The body, size, weight, shape of the Neo is almost exactly the same as the current Macbook Air. What are you talking about?
'What are you talking about' aside: exactly. What is the Neo, if not an Air? What is the Air, then? What is the product segmentation?
Once upon a time, there was the white MacBook. Maybe this is trying to be the new plain MacBook?
I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?
If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.
Pro = Business/serious = Boring colors.
I know, but that doesn't mean there aren't people (like me) that buy the top-end Pro devices (iPhone/Mac) and would like some more choices. I _love_ the orange color of the new iPhone and I would buy a green or orange MBP Pro if it was offered.
I used to only want black/silver "base" colors for resale reasons but that has fallen far on my needs for a laptop since I keep/repurpose them or cycle them through friends/family instead of reselling in most cases now.
I wonder if this means a Mac Nano with an A-series chip is on the table now. Essentially a beefed up Apple TV that runs macOS.
It's still almost three pounds....
Whatever they did with the 11" macbook air was magical. It doesn't seem like they can pull it off twice.
Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dec everywhere.
No Magsafe on the M1. The USB ports are actually Thunderbolt 3 but the target customer does not care about that or even knows what Thunderbolt is. I think the main upgrade is the A18 Pro is about 50% faster in single core and matches the M1 in multicore. Which is going to make everything feel a lot snappier for the kind of tasks they're targeting. Plus I think the $100 upgrade to double the storage space and get Touch ID is actually going to be pretty popular.
Average user doesn't know to look at refurb, the M1 Air will slowly drift out of manufacturing due to component sourcing etc.
Where can you buy these reliably?
VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686
The refurb M4 Air are on Apple website.
The M4 does not have Apple’s groundbreaking memory integrity enforcement (MIE) whereas the CPU in this (the A18 Pro) does -- although Apple might have decided against enabling it (to segment the market).
More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.
But the only issue in school is the rick kid's parent will get them Macbook Pro or even Macbook Air, and the poor kids will get Macbook Neo... I'm sure the kid will not feel great about having Neo while her friend have Pro version.
Apple: here's an affordable laptop. This comment: but the poor kids are going to feel inferior to the rich kids with this affordable laptop! Of course the poor kids are going to get cheaper & slower computers, cheaper clothes, etc. And they won't feel great about it because being poor isn't great.
But now they'll have more options! If they like Apple, they'll have a (likely pretty good) Apple laptop! It's great! I think a more affordable Mac is _good_ (at least better than no affordable Mac) and will make the poor kids happier.
It will be a nice step to the "Blue bubble" lifegoal for them.
Looks like they're using some new variant of branding font for this. Inspect Element shows it as SF Pro Display, but it's actually just being masked over with an image
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-neo/a/images/overview/welcom...
Also, why not just MacBook? Wasn't that historically the base-level laptop name?
Because it's a new base MacBook? so MacBook Neo.
It's interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was
- No touchID on the base model
- 8GB of RAM
- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2
- No MagSafe.
But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.
Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.
8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.
The M1 Air didn’t have MagSafe, but yeah agreed
The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs
You are totally right. Also, I think it's basically to avoid only one port to charge and use for connectivity.
So I guess they must have fully depreciated the gigantic fleet of CNC routers they use to cut the aluminum cases. Making a cheap laptop seems better than throwing them away.
Hey Folks: no notch! This is beautiful!
But it's also a smaller display, smaller than the MacBook Air before it got the notch. So really you're losing screen area not gaining when comparing to the 13.6" MacBook Air with a notch.
Edit: Not 16x9 as originally stated.
This is an excellent addition to the lineup and changes the list of reasons for why the average person would go for a Windows laptop from “cost” to practically nothing, but from a consumer perspective, is there any reason to buy this over M1 MBA which can be purchased new for less than the education discounted version of the MB Neo?
With every new device Apple releases the split between iPadOS and macOS gets more awkward.
Makes no sense for a $1500 "Pro" iPad to have desktop-class RAM, storage, an M5 chip, and be stuck with a Fisher Price OS, while this one has the equivalent specs of last year's iPhone and gets the full power of macOS. Just unify the two already.
> just unify the two already
Yeah but some people buy both, and apple wants to keep it that way
I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.
I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.
Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.
For the same price, Walmart is selling the HP Omnibook 5. It has a better CPU, 16 GB RAM (double), and 1 TB SSD (double).
There's also another HP for $359 with 8 GB RAM & 1 TB SSD. For half the price of this MacBook Neo, it should offer comparable performance with double the storage.
Anyone know how this would compare to an original M1 Air? Both in terms of performance and also capability. My primary use case for my air is web browsing and similar. But I do use other things at times. I know they're both arm processors, but are there things that ne can do an M1 that won't work on this?
The A18 Pro is roughly 30% faster in single-thread, and about equal in multi-core performance compared to the M1. The iGPU is also superior, and for AI it has 38 TOPS vs 11 in the M1. The A18 Pro should also be a lot more power efficient.
a18 scores better than m1 in single thread benchmark and about the same in multi thread
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-16
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020
This comparinson might not be fair, since we are talking about an iPhone and a Macbook. We need to wait for Neo's benchmarks. A lot of things can change from the phone factor to the laptop factor, from power supply, to thermals, to dedicated data lanes
Sure but it's very unlikely that it would perform worse in a laptop than in a phone, thermals are better, power supplies are beefier, batteries much larger, &c.
Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
The A18 Pro has been around since September 2024, we have plenty of benchmarks.
Not on laptops no, we should expect much better numbers on a full fledged laptop
The only difference the laptop would make is slightly better cooling; although with the effort Apple puts into iPhone/iPad thermals, I doubt it'll be exceptionally better. At most, maybe a 2-4% increase in multicore, from being able to sustain burst frequencies longer before thermal throttling.
They're pretty much equivalent.
They are not. The A18 Pro has much better single threaded performance (similar multi-core performance).
Unless you are going to build software projects, a difference in single-threaded performance is going to be much more noticeable.
yesterday I wrote in a group slack that today I would get to decide whether:
* i'm not buying any machine at all, or waiting for omarchy to support the new dell xps (32GB & 1TB = $1899)
* i'm buying the macbook neo at the top specs
* i'm buying the macbook air at the bottom specs
* i'm buying the macbook air with 32GB RAM & 1TB SSD (also $1899)
EDIT:
* adding an M5 Macbook (not Pro) with 24GB RAM & 1TB SSD also $1899
as someone who lives in claude code / opencode these days, the 8gb hurts but.. maybe, i dunno. they made this decision very painful. for me it could basically be a coffee shop opencode terminal that lets me access my apple iphone reminders, notes, etc.
but 8gb?
Built for Apple Intelligence. 8GB of RAM. It will be a struggle but I have no doubt it will sell really well.
Interesting.
It's been a while since we've had excitement at the "cheap and cheerful" end of the spectrum.
Anyone remember the initial Eee PC... and the problems it created for MSFT during the Vista transition?
That mini pc trend was really something ! Thanks for the blast from the past.
Feeling glad I got a 2nd hand air M1 (16gb+512gb) for ~400 GBP last October, rather than waiting out for this.
No idea how the processors compare, but that RAM isn't a good sign
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247645
I think this is a very niche product or a potential Chromebook competitor. This is good enough for students and kids.
Given how incredibly bloated OSX is now and that everything else is CEF, how can they possibly justify 8gb of ram? Even my ancient w7 box has 64gb
Mac manages memory significantly better than Windows. My 8 GB Air feels better at multitasking than my 20 GB Windows laptop.
I agree that it's gone downhill, but have you been on a Windows 11 machine? It's just a cacophony of ads, jank, and slop. The computing equivalent of sitting on a lawn chair in Times Square
How will the A chip fare for LLM-based use cases, compared the M series?
And will we have software compatibility issues because of A versus M issues?
I don't think LLM use cases are the target audience's chief concern here
That's a pretty slick video where the block of aluminum transforms into the finished MacBook in the presenter's hands.
Would definitely consider for my next laptop. What’s the best solution for “Mac Subsystem for Linux”?
It's UNIX, just open Terminal.app
https://brew.sh/
I was hoping they'll revamp the 12" MacBook. I liked a lot that design and form-factor.
Tiny, silly, no good, minor, tedious complaint: can you visibly tell which port is USB 3 vs. USB 2 or do you have to just remember?
I think the old 4 port usb-c macbook pros were similar, two usb-c ports were better for charging and supported thunderbolt, while the other two were non-thunderbolt and not optimized for charging. No visual markings.
It's interesting because the new studio display has 4 usb-c ports and 2 support thunderbolt, but they do indicate which ports are thunderbolt above the port.
https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/
Looks like there isn't any indication in the photos.
Why do all the low-end Apple laptops not have USB-C ports on the right?
That's one of the main reasons I had to get a MacBook Pro.
It's probably cheaper to squish everything into one small PCB on one side of the machine.
Most people use a mouse on the right so having a wire where a mouse will be can be annoying.
Yeah, but most people will also be using Bluetooth pointing devices.
That's the point. You don't want to be running your bluetooth mouse into whatever you plugged in on the right side.
That might be the reason, but the number of people that actually use a mouse these days is tiny.
Maybe, but having wires coming out of the same side as the pointing device is annoying. For cost reasons you have to pick one side. So put it where it causes less issues.
So people like you spend more
With only 8 GB of RAM would this be usable even for web browsing?
Whats "neo" about this compared to the last macbook they put out?
This is the first Mac to use an A-series (i.e. iPhone) processor, so it's a distinct class in their lineup.
~~Haven't yet seen anyone comment on the apparent lack of Apple Intelligence. Makes sense due to the low amount of memory but wonder how many people won't notice that until after they buy this laptop.~~
edit: somehow missed it has Apple Intelligence - whoops
They literally mention in the video that it contains Apple Intelligence.
Not sure how I missed that - was too fixated on tech specs. My bad.
Sounds like the Apple equivalent of a ChromeBook.
Seems like landfill fodder with the memory at 8gb.
There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.
I have one from the original rollout. I keep thinking about upgrading, but then I realize I'm just doing that because I want to buy something new, not because I need anything more powerful.
Interesting that it only comes with 8GB of RAM. My Macbook Pro on Tahoe uses around that just when booting up, before I start anything. I wonder if they have some memory optimisations planned?
This is an incredible price. Lucky students.
> Built for Apple Intelligence.
With 8GB RAM?
After Tahoe and Apple Intelligence what's going to be left for actual applications to use?
Same as the iPhone 16, when they started using that marketing phrase.
More discussion on release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/say-hello-to-macbook-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247645)
8gb ram is criminal. For $100 more Air is the one to buy.
That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.
how much money I have lost to this damn ladder
The newest entry-level Air is $1100, this is $600, or $500 difference. It's significant.
Apple released the M1 MBA for $999 and it was considered insane value, and it had 8GB of RAM as well.
I don't think it's criminal, sufficient for plenty of casual users. Of course not for everyone.
I agree. Especially now, with the insane RAM prices.
256gb and 8gb of ram, here we go again. Old gen macbook air seems a better deal, isn't it?
8Gb. Fuck off no chance.
Not in a world of everyone shipping fat browsers with everything.
Edit: everything my kids use in their educational side is browser based or thick web apps. This is going to suck.
We shouldn't be here and 8Gb should be absolutely fine, but that is not the case.
Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.
Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.
As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.
The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.
I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.
They should all be native apps.
You cna use of all Teams, Outlook and Slack from an actual browser if you want to.
My kid's school chromebook is 4GB and it's barely usable -- to the point of being offensively bad. I bought them a macbook air to use at home so they could get things done.
This would be a _drastic_ improvement over what I see most middle school kids using, at a similar-ish price point. 8 isn't great but 8 with apple's really rather decent nvm paging is a step up.
FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
> 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world.
Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.
It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.
The problem is when you start throwing half the modern tech stack crap on top which is built on standalone browser engines. They are NOT memory or CPU efficient compared to native apps. Really kills a nice machine dead.
Having used both... it's 100% true
I still use my M1 Air with 8gb as well. I don't do my daily dayjob work on it, but it's more than fine for everything else I do.
Why don’t they just allow MacOS on iPad Pro. It’s what people want.
Stating the obvious - because keeping them separate means Apple gets to double-dip on people buying more or less the same hardware twice.
I thought I wanted this. And in fact, I turned on the 'window' option for my iPad Pro when it came out. I did not, in fact, want this. The iPad just has totally different ergonomics, even with keyboard / trackpad / etc. Anyway, for years I've been convinced that would be the perfect combo - but in my own tests, - meh - At the very least, new hardware needs to be built that gives laptop-grade typing and trackpad. With that, then it would be upside - but I'm not sure that it would be that much cheaper than just having two devices.
Honestly a pretty interesting little thing but my god what a terrible name
1. Gawd damn, scrolling through that page full of all those bright colors with their saturation cranked up to 11, feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode. No other page from Apple is like that. wtf
2. Would a used older hand-me-down Macbook Air/Pro not be better performance/value than this iPhone board in a cheap laptop shell? There was a guy here saying he bought a used Macbook Air M1 16GB for 250 Euros.
> 2.
To an individual consumer perhaps, but schools need to buy hundreds at a time and the second-hand market isn't really great for that.
This is basically Apple taking a bite at the Chromebook market. Interested to see what reviewers have to say.
Definetly, my kids at different schools had iPad's and Chromebooks. The kid with the iPad was using an external keyboard most of the time iirc.
2: I'd say it's about the same, same RAM/SSD sizes, maybe an M1 chip is faster than A18 but limitations will come from running out of ram/disk Had an intern working with us, basically couldn't have an browser running together with Figma due to ram shortage making it slow down to a crawl.
> feels like I'm being flash-banged by a Cocomelon episode.
This is by design, who do you think the target market for this Macbook is?
2. Apple would know best no? lol, this screams Cook. Too many iphone boards? Existing laptop tooling. Bam, revenue.
That doesn't make much sense. They do lean/JIT manufacturing, so it's unlikely that they have too many iPhone boards. Also, the tooling for a completely new alu unibody size for just selling a few iPhone boards does not make much sense.
This is very clearly targeted at Chromebooks in education, where the iPad is not doing too great:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-apple-lost-the-k-12-educ...
A used one probably has not-so-healthy battery and a bit worn keyboard. Maybe some scratches on the screen as well.
At this price, a new device seems very tempting over dealing with a used hardware which is always a bit of a lottery.
Performance-wise A18 would be plenty for casual stuff. IIRC it's faster than M1.
256gb on a macbook should be illegal in 2026
Why?
If it's aimed for education, where does the need come from?
I use ~500 Gb on my laptop, but that is only because I have all my music on that thing. Doubt most students today have that need.
Absolutely ridiculous that they still offer this while macOS + Apple Intelligence already take ~30 GB
I wonder if the bootloader will be locked down, I hope not.
Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?
Apple has never locked down the bootloader on a Mac-series product before.
(But they have never not locked down a product with an A-series CPU - hence my concern)
They do allow you to run third party operating systems on Macs. For now.
Yes? This is a demonstrable fact?
Lay off the hater-ade for a second.
Uhh... you know when the Mac's were Intel they specifically made a tool for installing Windows on your Mac and shipped drivers for Windows.
What on earth, at least they could have provided 16gb as base RAM. 8gb RAM in 2026 - what on earth were they thinking.
You would be shocked to learn that HP is able to sell plenty of $500 Chromebooks with 8GB of RAM.
I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they'll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.
I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
> Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.
I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.
That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.
No. 8gb is fine for normal use.