Comment by billyhoffman

12 hours ago

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!

32 comments

billyhoffman

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philistine  11 hours ago

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!

  • intrasight  8 hours ago

    Except sadly it is not using M.

    My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.

ciupicri  11 hours ago

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.

  • falkensmaize  1 hour ago

    Clearly the target audience for this device are the 90% of users who are going to use this to watch YouTube, talk to ChatGPT and upload photos to Insta, or whatever the kids are doing these days. It’s not designed or marketed at power users, although my past decade plus experience with Macs is that they can stretch a lot further than their specs would suggest.

  • runako  9 hours ago

    > Can it run multiple programs at the same time?

    I have used a M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GB, as my dev daily driver for many years. I generally never need to close any application.

    Typical sample of apps concurrently in use:

    - PostgreSQL (server)

    - TablePlus (db client)

    - Docker

    - Slack

    - Chrome

    - Safari

    - Zed

    - Claude native

    - ChatGPT native

    - Zoom

    - Codex

    - Numbers

    - Calendar

    - the whole stack for whatever app I am building (Redis, Node, Rails, etc.)

    With that persistent stack running, I can pretty comfortably launch whatever other apps I want to use: Office, Music, etc. I only see a beachball when I launch an Office app (they may not be native yet, I suspect it's emulating from x86).

    I was skeptical that 16 GB would be enough. I bought this fully expecting to return it and buy one with more RAM. The Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs. I believe some tech articles have been written on the why/how, but in practice you just don't need as much RAM as you think on Apple Silicon.

    • ciupicri  1 hour ago

      > Apple Silicon Macs are much more efficient with memory than even the Intel Macs

      So either it has magic fairy dust, or more likely it swaps a lot, but thankfully today's flash is faster than yesterday's hard disk; though this intense usage will shorten its life. By the way I wonder if Apple will use cheap QLC for this.

    • ewoodrich  8 hours ago

      I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said:

        Having only 8 GB sucks unless you're using it as a terminal or media player.

      I have the M1 MacBook Pro with 16 GB too and it’s fine for normal web development and multi tasking but that … really isn’t surprising?

      I still regularly use a five year old Ideapad 14 Pro with 16 GB of RAM running Windows 11 and it’s also completely fine for dev work running servers/Docker/WSL2 VM/etc locally.

      6 replies →

    • perardi  8 hours ago

      Office has been ARM/Apple Silicon-native for a while.

      It’s just pig slow, even on my M3 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM.

  • happyopossum  9 hours ago

    Yes to all of the above. Macs swap incredibly well, and an M1/*gb mac is more than capable of having hundreds of chrome tabs open while running excel with giant spreadsheets.

    As for "running multiple programs at the same time" - I assume you're leaning pretty far into hyperbole here given that machines with 1% of the resources of this one can do so...

  • quesera  11 hours ago

    This is wrong.

    My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.

    Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.

    Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.