Comment by opjjf
12 hours ago
$599, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB, *No* Touch ID
$699, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB, Touch ID
Honestly pretty fantastic product and price.
This is clearly targeted towards education but I think I will happily replace by MacBook Air M1 with this :)
Yeah I’m pretty impressed by this, even though it’s essentially a rejigged iPad running MacOS.
Touch ID is nice but I’m fairly sure if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID - the MacBook will unlock if you’re in proximity. I even have an 11inch MacBook Air 2011 that unlocks with the Apple Watch and that doesn’t have Touch ID either.
As someone who started on a PowerBook G4 which was like some kind of unreachable holy grail with a base price of about £2500 (2002 pounds mind) this does make me happy.
Would be nice to have a 12GB or a 16GB ram option even though typing Arts essays and talking to ChatGPT in a browser is never going to need that, and this is Apple’s new first step on their infernal pricing ladder.
Citrus looks cute. Might treat myself.
The pink “Blush” colour is going to sell like hot cakes to the Legally Blonde crowd this upcoming fall semester.
> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID
Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.
My experience with the Apple Watch is that Touch ID is faster to unlock my Mac. The “unlocking with Apple Watch…” thing takes too much time and by the time it would have completed my finger already reached the Touch ID and unlocked it.
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It's nice to be able to authenticate sudo via biometric id with the help of Pam, or unlock your password manager like bitwarden.
I don't think an apple watch would help there?
> I don't think an apple watch would help there?
You can authorize via Apple Watch everything you can authorize via Touch ID. You get the notification on the Watch, and you need to press the button twice to auth.
I don't remember if it works every time, or only when MacBook is closed and connected to external display/keyboard.
Wait, one can wire up sudo to touch ID? I don't know how I never learned that before
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I've got this functionality in linux with the framework laptop, and it really isn't much faster than typing in a password.
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Apple Watch costs half this thing, but then again maybe there's a large percentage of phone/watch only users.
$499 for education which a lot of target group would qualify.
A friend has M1 with 8GB of RAM (the old design!) and she's perfectly happy about it still. Bought it in ~~2019~~ 2020!
I have one of those, it's perfectly fine for everything I do. 8GB of RAM isn't a lot, but I've never run into issues with it not being enough.
The M1 and A18 seems rather similar, but I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1. I guess they picked the A18 because they make them and because the NPU much better and Apple cares more about AI than I do.
> I might be concerned that the integrated GPU isn't as capable as the one in the M1
This is the A18 Pro, specifically, which should have a faster GPU than the M1?
> Apple cares more about AI than I do.
I’m not sure they do. They love their AI chip, but that might be where the live ends.
$499 for general educational discount, but I am betting that school districts will get volume discounts above that. It's going to be very price-competitive.
They famously don't. Betting and guessing doesn't work well here. Best to ask the question instead of make the assertion.
I doubt schools will be getting this much cheaper. This is already a really aggressively priced product.
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I think it might be 2020 when the M1 was released since I remember i had bought a mac book in 2019 and it was still intel
It was Christmas gift. so maybe 2020... not super positive about this
November 2020
M1 came out Nov 2020.
I still wish they would give back the 11" Air dimensions with Apple Silicon.
IMO that form factor was perfect for a small, low end laptop, it just needed a more power efficient chip, and a screen with smaller bezels.
They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.
Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm
11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.
But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).
Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.
I'm a bit too lazy to look it up, but this is surprising to me. I still have an 11-inch, and it has a huge bezel around it, but it still feels way, way smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.
If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.
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What are the weight measurements? kg?
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The 13" MBA has the same approximate external dimensions as the 11" MBA. I know because it easily fits in the snug case that I've had ever since I got my 11" MBA.
They basically shrank the bezels down. If they made it smaller it would impact the keyboard size, which many people probably would not like.
Yup. The MBA11 is probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's my daily driver. I have 4 of those now, running MacOS and Linux Mint.
I was really hoping for the Neo to be more like the MBA11.
That or the 12" Retina MacBook, which weighed 0.67 lbs less than the neo and Air do. And it does make a difference!
It's disappointing they finally got the silicon for the "thin and light at all costs" form factor but gave up on the form factor. I just want my clipboard laptop back!
A revival of the 12” MacBook would be amazing, but give it to me as a premium device - not an educational market positioning.
I want a real M-series chip with RAM upgrades, an OLED display, etc.
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I'm very sad this neo macbook thing isn't a replacement for my macbook retina in any way. I'm not really sure what I'll do to replace it; I'd been hoping this "phone chip based macbook" would be of the old retina form factor. But instead it's just a nerfed air. My kids have the macbook airs and my little 2017 retina is substantially dramatically smaller and more portable. At least until the battery dies.
How much did that 12” Retina MacBook cost? Small and light isn’t cheap.
That would cannibalize their ipad lineup
That's basically what this is, no?
13" is not 11" As someone who used their 11" for years, it was a workhorse. A slow workhorse, but I still yearn for that size.
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This is a 13" 16:9 screen. A little smaller than the current 13.6" 16:10 MacBook Air in display size but not really any more portable. Weight is the same as the 13.6" MacBook Air.
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It's a 13" and is ~2.5x as heavy.
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My thoughts as well.
8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Fantastic value for money.
Honestly what I am (pleasantly) surprised by is the minijack.
Depends what you're developing. You could build a pretty powerful webapp as long as you don't fall into 'i need my blog running in kubernetes' trap.
For a couple months I was on an 8gb m1 air, it was perfectly fine, even with docker containers. As long as i didn't launch teams....
This largely shows how far standards have fallen - it’s not that long ago that 8 gigabytes of RAM was unthinkable in a desktop class machine - much less one that cost nothing once inflation was taken into account. It required buying an E10K style machine for tens to hundreds of thousands to get 64GB. And all of those hardware gains have been squandered by the electron people.
That said, we are where we are - I wouldn’t buy a machine with only 8GB for any purpose at this point.
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I've done web dev work on the 12" retina macbook. Sometimes docker goes crazy and needs to be restarted but otherwise it worked surprisingly well. I used it all the way till the M2 air came.
I also have a (relatively) beefier mac mini at home if I needed to something more powerful.
> Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Here I am, running OpenBSD on a 2019 Dell with 8th gen CPU. I'm currently using a bit less than 4GB of with 6GB as caches (for IO?). It's fine for a lot of progamming work (I have built kernel on this). 8GB is a good amount of RAM if you're not using bloated software.
most of us mere mortals are using bloated software :)
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> Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Because it doesn't have twice the ram. Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine, especially for users like me that work primarily on desktop and don't want to bring the much heavier macbook pro around. I've got both the m1 max and m3 max (16") and I absolutely hate carrying them around yet I have to, because even on vacations I may have to log and fix a bug in prod blocking the company so to me, weight is absolutely a primary factor for a notebook, and this would've been perfect at just twice the ram.
The MacBook Air is the same weight and thinner, so for a mobile machine I think that still wins out.
The last gen MacBook Air (M4, 16GB, 256GB) was down to $749 with retailer discounts last year. Currently $759 on Apple's certified refurbished site.
> Otherwise it was a no brainer complementary machine
Even as a main machine for most people. Heck I could probably even get away with it. I have my work laptop that's technically my "main" machine as I spend 8+ hours a day on it, and it's sufficiently beefy.
I hardly do much on a personal computer (not counting my gaming desktop), this neo would be more than enough for my non-work needs.
Granted, I don't currently have a need for it as I have my own MBA and an iPad pro, but if I had neither this would definitely be a no brainer and I could confidently recommend this over pretty much any off-the-shelf budget windows laptop to anyone who asks me "What laptop should I buy?"
Users like you have money and Apple wants them buying a MacBook Air for that use case :)
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> 8GB is STILL perfectly fine for a starter notebook, casual browsing and light work. Noone is going to develop on this after all.
Given the ridiculous speed of Apple's almost-on-the-SoC flash storage, 8GB is fine for basic development workloads.
That's the tradeoff you get with soldered RAM and storage... you can't expand it, but the lack of sockets and shorter PCB trace paths gives a lot of headroom on what is essentially high-frequency analog signalling. The longer the traces the more latency, and the more sockets and vias, the more potential for interference.
The performance gap between Apple’s flash and a typical aftermarket NVMe drive in a Windows laptop is more attributable to controller design and integration than to trace length.
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If by basic you mean running a simple Python script then sure; but try running Xcode + iPhone simulator (a basic development workload by Apple standards) with 8GB of RAM on Tahoe, and get ready for a lot of waiting and stutter.
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i suspect the 256 gig model is going to have a single nand flash chip so it won't be thaaat fast
you must be joking sir. those gonna be paperweight in 2 years. 16 is usable minimum for music making, grpahics and web browsing
My daily laptop is a 2017 MacBook Air with intel and 8GB. Web browsing, finance, and civilization 5.
These things will be running in 5-10 years.
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I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.
Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…
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Do you think the RAM is too weak while the CPU is too strong for the use case? Like, with just 8GB RAM it can't do much that needs that kind of CPU. And with the same price point I can easily get a refurbished 16/32GB Dell mobile workstation -- which I admit won't last as long as a Macbook, but 8GB is only enough for light usage, which could just use a much older and maybe cheaper CPU.
*Edit*: just read about education discount, so yeah, $499 or lower is more competitive.
My sibling comment was right about nvme swap. It wouldn’t be excellent for a dev-heavy workflow, but for the kinds of things you might use an iPad for, the target market of this won’t notice much of a difference.
But this is going to be vastly more pleasant ergonomically than a Dell mobile workstation refurb. On paper, a Cybertruck has better specs than an old Miata, but I know which would be more fun to zip around in.
Yeah I think there are a couple of advantages of a Macbook versus a Dell mobile workstation. it is definitely lighter and more pleasant got general use. I'm only concerned that modern apps usually take amount of RAMs that are close to or north of 500MB, so if you have say a word processor plus 10+ Chrome tabs you quickly run out of RAMs (I tend to have way more on my personal gig but I'm a developer). But maybe swapping is not a big issue on the Mac as both comments said.
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RAM need shave changed slightly post nvme. Normal people apps can swap just fine with a pretty seamless experience. Average people aren’t opening single files that can’t fit into 5gb of ram.
RAM is also an insanely high percentage of computer price right now. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/hp-says-memory-co...
Fwiw i have an 8gb macbook air m1 with 8gb and it’s pretty decent. Factorio (not megabasing past the endgame), Baldurs Gate 3 and Newstower all run well. General browsings no issue and it’s well beyond whats needed to plug into tvs for streaming.
The tiny screen basically encourages one app being used at a time and it seems to use swap fast enough with the ssd.
The price is fantastic but 8GB RAM feels like going backwards again, but oh well, ram shortage and beggars can't be chosers
Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.
Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.
It seems fine for basic web browsing and office tasks: a youtube, facebook, or word doc machine. It's a "netbook" replacement, not for software development work.
That being said, it seems like a good living room laptop.
It's perfectly capable for doing simple backend or webdev work too. Especially with a TUI editor, sqlite as a DB, and being disciplined enough to bookmark/close your browser tabs instead of leaving 150+ tabs open.
I really wish they let you pay for RAM upgrades though. I like the colors way more than the macbook air, even though I know the air (or non-apple laptop) is what I should really be looking at.e
I do wonder if the plan was originally at least 12 GB, but the RAMageddon foiled that.
Although this is competing with PoS Chromebooks, which often don't have much ram (sometimes as low as 4 GB) and have slow CPUs.
The A18 Pro chip has 8B of ram and no option to change it.
1: Education market 2: Avoiding cannibalizing their own products
Apple has always ignored cannibalism because they would rather cannibalize their own products than have someone else do it.
Very tempting, but considering a macbook air m4 is often just $300-350 more, the 8GB or RAM feels like it's just enough of an asterisk to make this less of the value champion.
I still really like it, but I'll probably wait for a discount.
12 GB would've been amazing to have though, oh well.
This is a 600 buck machine. "Just $300-350 more" is a 50% price hike!
That's true, but I just know a bunch of people looking at this will have that lingering thought at the back of their minds on how that extra 50% gets you just enough little improvements across the board to make them second guess.
Apple's product/marketing teams did an amazing job with the segmentation of this and the air.
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300*500 kids is 150k and the difference between a school choosing chromebooks again. This is priced against the $450 Chromebook.
From someone in this thread with actual experience:
>Chromebooks in EDU cost approximately $290 (+- $10) per unit. >For the cost of 10 Neos, I can buy 17 Chromebooks.
Agreed.
This is really nice for schools.
I really want this to work for me too, just because of those colors, but the RAM is really the only issue. Oh well, at least this forces every other budget laptop to compete harder.
I believe the single core performance of the a18 pro is a 50% boost, but the multi core performance is about the same as the m1. I'm sure you're already taking the ram limitations into account for longevity.
Yeah - this easily replaces the Macbook Air M1, which I only use for traveling. I am hoping the battery life is just as insanely good.
How much of that 256GB is eaten by the factory install of MacOS?
What's the CPU performance like compared to an M1?
CPU performance is about equal to the M1 multicore and a bit better single core.
The ram is the only thing that I think is a little light, but with the ram situation in the world, asking for 12-16 GB have been too much.
This looks like a huge step-up from most Chromebooks, which are frankly junk. Apple, however, will need to build education software and services to really get schools to commit.
I would say that the look and feel of M1 MacBook Air is better, and you aren't getting an upgrade in performance department either, so is it really an "upgrade"?
Source: disappointed by the new speaker system in M2+ Airs and worse build quality, the classic chassis is, in my humble opinion, better engineered and is more delightful. M4 rips though, but you aren't getting this with the clock speeds and core counts of A18 Pro.
$499 Education discount. Just placed my order in and I'm super-stoked.
What’s wrong with your M1 air?
nah 8gb of ram is laughable
8GB RAM means bye-bye Electron apps and Chrome running at the same time.
I had to check because I'd genuinely forgotten, but the Mac Mini I use all day only has 8 GB. Chrome, Slack, and Spotify are running on it 99.9% of the time, along with several other apps.
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Not true, but good riddance if it was.
It's great to see that others have had better experiences than me. I had to upgrade from my M1 Air cause I kept on hitting issues. Note that I'm more on the power user side, and not on the typical light use side in my computer/software use cases day-to-day.
No. It doesn't. Mac OS runs fine for this with 8GB
Define fine. Tahoe, chrome, electron apps running with pretty much anything else already push things over 4gb when things start to get laggy and usability becomes more problematic, atleast to me. You could theoretically run a lot of things ‘fine’ the way you describe. And for the college student who hopefully doesn’t already run Spotify and Discord, it’ll hopefully be “fine”.
I just don’t get arguing that it’s the same experience as what people actually consider fine.
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