Comment by r0fl
10 hours ago
"Education customers can purchase it for $499."
That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!
10 hours ago
"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.
Yeah, but K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.
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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.
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In my area, an Acer Chromebook Spin 514 has a faster processor, more RAM, and a touchscreen and costs only $100 more. With those specs, it's much better for productivity, development, and games, so it's well worth the price. It has better Android integration than the MacBook has iOS integration and even runs Android apps natively itself. The same people who didn't know that Acer sold this before will still not know they sell it now. The people who knew Acer sold that device before will continue buying it.
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…
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That's crazy, must be a specific field? The overwhelming majority of college degrees don't require Windows.
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What software being taught in colleges today (outside of highly specialised niches) requires Windows?
Stats software is cross-platform or open-source.
Art programs are cross-platform or open-source.
Office suites are cross-platform or browser-based.
Unless you're specifically trying to learn Windows development, dev tools are cross-platform and open source.
15 years ago, what you describe was probably quite common. Today, it's almost completely disappeared.
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Student at a US Uni here. They still do very much own the space for both tablets and laptops, especially in CS
CompSci grad in the US as well, it is genuinely a sea of either Macs or ThinkPads with $INSERT_FAV_LINUX_DISTRO here, and even then 66% of that are Macs.
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 local school district is 100% Chromebooks, first issued in 4th grade and through 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. :-)
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My kids' district gives them iPads in middle school (5th through 8th) and MacBook Airs in 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.
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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.
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No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still
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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.
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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.
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My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.
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8GB will run chat, web browsing and word processors just fine.
Not every person is running 500 browser tabs and docker swarm.
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.
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> The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable
C'mon, man.
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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.
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Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.
I've bought several touchscreen Chromebooks for that price.
Growing up in the 90s all my elementary school computers were Macs. They seemed to get more Windows as I got older. Not sure the current state.
Would be great deal in 5 years to buy those post-lease if Asahi/others Linux catch up.
I'd rather go for a Refurb M1 Air with 8/256 and TouchID which go for $300-350...
A refurb M1 air with 85% battery and in 'fair' condition goes for ~$400 these days - I have no idea how bad it would have to be for $300, but good luck. How many more years do you think that battery is going to realistically hold up?
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.
Walmart sells a brand new M1 Air for ~$650 and refurbished for ~$500
doesn't need to be new, but maybe the m1s wont last another 4 years for college so maybe it makes sense...
in the m5 announcement people were saying they still have no plans to upgrade from their daily driver m1s (im in this boat too).
I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Edit: TBH I'm disappointed, I was hoping for an ultra portable macbook that is less than a kg and extra thin. This is just for the edu market. I'm sure it will do well, financially.
> you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.
Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers
Apparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...
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On the refurb market, you can get a Macbook Air at the 16-512 configuration for only a few hundred more, which is a better value.
But! Then you'll be seeing the Neos on the refurb market in the $300 or $400 range.
I think this has basically been how the market for Macs have worked since 2021.
This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used/older models.
For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.
For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.
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.
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