Comment by theopsimist
7 hours ago
List of differences from the MacBook Air: * Only supports 8 GB of unified memory
* No MagSafe
* One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s
* No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.
* “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air
* Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color
* No True Tone
* 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage
* No camera notch
* Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air
* Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods
* Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air
* The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones
* No keyboard backlighting
* Touch ID not included on base model
* Trackpad does not support Force Touch
* Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7
* No fast charging
* The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma...
You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores)
Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10.
Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM. macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open
Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."
I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.
Indeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?"
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In macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files"
I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here.
In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
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I remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch just precaching commonly used programs to give better application startup times.
After several days of usage, Activity Monitor will usually shows that "WindowServer" is using 6 GB of RAM.
Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
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> I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine.
Most cool. Is it an M1?
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It also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.
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What are you slicing?
What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
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There's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms.
I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
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> A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip
i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending):
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
Put the M1 in your comparison - I think the A18 Pro compares favorably to it and it's a good baseline for people who bought in on Apple Silicon early and are still using it.
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Do we think the iPhone 16 with A18 Pro chips are going to be the same as the A18 in the laptop though?
When you are not confined to a iPhone body, you have a bit more flexibility in thermals, heat and power consumption.
Would there be any chance the A18 Pro in a Macbook clocks higher? or maybe clocks higher for longer?
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM.
I have an older 8GB MacBook I use for testing. It’s actually fine for normal use with a web browser, Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Spotify running. You’d think it would be an unusable mess from the way some people talk about RAM, but modern OSes are good and swapping lesser used things to the SSD is fast.
Your OS may show 5GB used, but that doesn’t mean all 5GB need to be active in RAM all the time. Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
> Letting the OS swap rarely used things out to the SSD is fine.
if this is the philisophy of osx and apple in general i dare not ask followup questions :)
Thats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications.
Depends on which metric do you look, right? :)
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My Debian (KDE) uses just under 1GB on startup. If one is not using animations and things syncing in the background and daemons monitoring file system changes and whatnot, can the stock MacOS memory usage be reduced?
What, in fact, is it doing? I'm off the opinion that RAM not used is RAM wasted, but I prefer that philosophy for application memory, not background OS processes.
This is a Mac Chromebook. You use it for cloud stuff and every now and then you can run a real application in a pinch.
You can also develop locally which is significant.
For $300 more the base MacBook Air is a significantly better machine than the Neo.
Modern pcs use the ram given to them. Its not like a fixed quantity it requires.
If you're concerned about the amount of RAM, this isn't the laptop for you. Grandma doesn't need 16GB to browse Facebook and look at family photos.
I'm actually glad they restricted the memory, because it will create market pressure for devs to stop wasting system resources on bloated electron apps and NextJS. With RAM prices skyrocketing these days people need to be more conscious of how much system resources they're taking up.
If your "market pressure" worked we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
My only real issue with this design is as far as I can tell there is no markings on exterior explaining which USB-C port is "the good one" - an important point given one port is dramatically slower than the other.
I suspect many users will probably accidentally plug stuff like external SSDs into the slow port without realizing. It's maybe too much to hope for at this price point, but would have been nice for a machine with only two ports to be able to offer the same spec USB on both ports.
My instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port - it's closest to the corner - but in doing so you use up the "good" USB-3 port leaving you with only USB2. It's not a huge deal, but charging in the other port to free up the USB3 one feels slightly weird to me. I suspect most users will charge off the USB3 port given its location.
Reading the spec sheet, it also looks like DisplayPort is only supported over the USB3 port too - again there appears no way to know just by looking at the ports. This has never been a problem on any of the Apple Silicon 2-port MacBook Airs, as those have always had the same specs on both ports and could drive a display over DisplayPort from either.
> ...instinct would be to use the socket towards the rear of the machine as my charging port...it's closest to the corner...charging in the other port...feels slightly weird...I suspect most users will...
Ah, but, as I recall some vintage of 2016-2018 Macbook Pro users will remember that using the "backmost, corner" USB-C port for charging could cause the MBP to overheat and fans to sound like a helicopter.
Thus, the (admittedly probably vanishingly tiny minority of) MBP veterans with "back charging USB port PTSD" who learned to use the foremost USB port for charging, will know full well to stay away from using that backmost USB port, if all they need is power!
In fairness, it still sounds better than the 1st gen touchbar macs.
Those ran the CPU at 10% normal speed if you charged with the wrong USB port.
The 8GB max DRAM thing is a brutal limitation though.
From Daring Fireball:
It was, I am reliably informed by Apple product marketing folks, a significant engineering achievement to get a second USB port at all on the MacBook Neo while basing it on the A18 Pro SoC.
But yes, even just two dots above the USB3 and two dots above the USB2 wouldn't be rude.
You don't have a problem with no keyboard backlighting?
Reading the list of QoL they scrapped I guess Jobs was right all along that to hit a base level of features Apple just needs a certain price point.
not the person you're replying to but that's the first feature I disable on any new computer
My guess is that if you plug a fast medium on the slow USB port the OS will give you a pop up letting you know. I have seen something similar in windows 11.
That's true for displays, at least. I don't know about external storage.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...
Being limited to 8gb of ram is genuinely the only thing on that list I care about (no backlight and no fast charging are teetering on the edge of me caring, but they aren't worth multiple hundreds of dollars) - Apple silicone is so fast now that (at least for my purposes) the performance segmentation between price points is basically meaningless.
No one has commented on the charger this thing comes with: It’s 20W! The sort of thing you’d plug a phone or iPad into, which seems crazy. I kind of wonder whether you could charge it with the built-in USB ports that are in newer wall sockets.
It basically is an iPhone or iPad, but with a keyboard. It’s really only the display that’s gonna consume significantly more power than its iPhone/iPad equivalent.
> * No MagSafe
For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk.
But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare.
In case you didn't already know or haven't considered it, you can find right-angle usb-c MagSafe adaptors that basically allow the charging cable to disconnect from the device like MagSafe.
Most of these devices are a fire hazard. And in an environment where kids are needing magsafe, is probably the most dangerous for fire safety.
*edit
https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...
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Any you could recommend that are safe?
I want to see the person buying the Neo and pairing it with a new Studio Display.
A potential example that comes to mind would be you have a Studio Display in your house that you use for remote work with a beefy MacBook Pro, and then maybe a family member has a MacBook Neo that they’d like to plug into a monitor occasionally.
Tbh if you have a studio display you are probably used to most things not working with it. I get that it's apple, but the lack of a HDMI or Displayport input on the monitor is insane.
I wouldn't let a family member use my desk to plug into my Studio Display. What if they mess with my chair settings?
Even better, pairing it with a Vision Pro as your monitor.
And of course the screen: 13.0-inch vs 13.6
Weight is the same incidentally.
I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)
I'll keep adding to the list:
* Only one external display
* No haptic trackpad
No force touch doesn't necessarily mean no haptics. I would assume Apple didn't go backwards to a physically clicking touchpad.
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Feels very negative! It costs 50% less than the air, in a time when everyone else’s prices are going up.
The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips.
I don't think that was the intent. If anything, 90%+ of these features here feel nice-to-have, and I bet OP agrees (or is neutrally sharing the comp).
Feels negative because the positive of the cheaper price (it's half the price) is magically not listed
> No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays
Apple appear to have reached out to 9to5Mac and confirmed it sort of works with the new displays... You can connect the new displays, but it can only drive them at 4k/60, which is not going to look all that nice scaled up on a native 5k monitor.
No mention of whether the monitors other features like the webcam and ports work when connected to the Neo though.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/04/psa-macbook-neo-intel-macs-mi...
>No camera notch
Well, I see this as a very positive thing.
The only one of those choices I disagree with is no Touch ID in the base spec. Otherwise, good corners to cut to get to the cheap price point.
Since it's just $100 to get 250 -> 500 GB and Touch ID, I think it's okay.
It means people who need the cheapest computer can get it, and people who want to upgrade pay a small amount and get all the upgrades in a package without jumping up to the MacBook Air, etc. for much more.
I would say "No keyboard backlighting" is a true show-stopper for a huge portion of the target audience (students).
My experience with students (outside of engineering) is that the most common show stopper for MacBooks is price. They’re not nit picking about keyboard backlighting.
Most people have no problem using a keyboard in the dark or with light from the screen.
Backlit keyboards are a nice-to-have, not a showstopper.
Learned touch typing just fine on a non-backlit keyboard. What would you feel would be the issue?
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I think different people will have one feature they feel should have been kept (other than the ram which is universal). For me not so much the Touch ID but the backlit keyboard.
Agree on the Touch ID. Love that feature for passwords etc.
Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well
I bet there are some paranoid people out there who will love that no touch-ID means no way for law enforcement to compel you to unlock the device.
You could just not set it up don't add your finger.
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It's an A18 Pro cpu with a 60Hz retina display. So it's basically a iPhone 16 Pro with a larger display and physical keyboard.
and there's nothing wrong with that.
The last point made me chuckle, good catch :D
* Max storage is 512GB instead of 4TB.
I currently have 1TB and I'm pretty happy with it, but I've had 256GB and 512GB in the past and I was not happy with those. This might be the only reason I would not consider this laptop.
Has anyone tried to use a laptop at night? It’s pretty hard without lit keys. Maybe this one has some super reflective letters so that the screen lights them up.
Skilled computer usage includes learning to type without looking at the keyboard
Just turn on a light?
I would not buy an Apple laptop regardless, but they at least addressed one of my major complaints:
No camera notch
Praise the...market?!
I forgot about force touch as a feature until I read this comment.
"1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage"
That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing.
A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses.
So no real issue at all for the target group
It's pretty cool to see this machine come out. The Macbook Air is still my sweet spot though, I use a Thunderbolt audio interface, and need more RAM.
Great for a student or casual user though for sure.
> No keyboard backlighting
When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting?
2010. https://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/12/backlit-keyboard-to-ret...
> One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s
This is one of the things I never really expected Apple to do, since they've somehow managed to avoid the confusing black/blue colouring of USB-A ports, giving every laptop they've ever produced since 2012 USB 3.0 ports.
Seems like they're buying into hardware enshittification too (macOS and iOS 26 being software monstrosities with liquid glAss).
Confusing? Seems pretty straightforward, more so than the USB-C system of no indication at all. If you're lucky, you'll get a label.
Do you know if the A series processor supports virtualization?
The A-series has supported virtualization since long before the M-series existed. iOS disables it in early boot, though.
On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?
A lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249309
The hardware support was there for a while. Given that this runs macOS, i would guess (no insider knowledge) that it would work just fine and not be disabled like it is in iOS (by policy, not by technical reasons)
Fantastic post, thank you. Answered pretty much every question i had. This is why I love hacker news.
Price difference?
* $500 = base model (250 GB SSD) (education)
* $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education)
* $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education)
The Red Delicious of Macs.
Why didn't you list the number 1 difference, the price.
> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
That’s been the case for 5+ years :)
I think they mean not reflective like current models, not that it isn't illuminated like the MacBooks of yore
I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it matte, but just a different matte from the rest of the case? I kind of want to see it in person. It looks very tasteful.
I thought they changed from glowing Apple to reflective Apple
> The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (=
Looks like a bunch of great trade-offs to give value to customers in this economy.
You can use 16Gb of ram on an 8Gb machine, anything more than that it will start creaking and have out of memory errors on applications.
fyi: "Gb" implies gigabit, used in network and RAM where 8 bits = 1 byte is not guaranteed. "GB" implies gigabyte.
"One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s"
Why? Did they stock-piled USB 2.0 controllers and now need to get it off their inventory or something?
Costs. gotta remember this thing is based on iPhone hardware...which doesnt have more than 1 usb port normally.
Center stage is dumb anyway
— ...We believe that the customers will like it despite all that. We plan to market it as MacBook Nerfed.
— But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute.
— Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"?
> No camera notch
I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar?
The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple.
Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better.
The free rectangle area is a 16:10 screen, the space around the notch is a freebie.
like Neo from the Martix, it has only one interface port of real use.
Like Neo from the matrix, the other port is still useful for mice, printers, DACs, arduino projects, and little USB powered fans.
Can’t believe anyone this is targeted at is going to plug in a mouse in 2026.
Man, that's just gross!
> * “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air
for pretty much half the price, though.
i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ laptop.
as somebody that has used both windows (at work), mac os (at work) and linux (at work and at home) the macbook neo could be an absolute steal of a laptop.
> * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny
oh yeah, first world problems /s
"No keyboard backlighting" is a show-stopper. Nuts.
You're not the audience, obviously.
It just looks slightly nicer. Touch typists don’t look at the keyboard anyways. And if you care enough about looks, you’ll want RGB lighting.
Plenty of people work in dark or dim places, like school classrooms, where backlighting is great and RGB lighting is useless.
That you seem to think everyone shares your needs and goals makes you a far less effective participant in these kinds of discussions. Maybe think for a bit before asserting what people who care about backlighting need it for and don't.
> Powered by A18 Pro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18
So this is basically running on a phone CPU
I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux.
But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was.
The A18 Pro performs about on par with an M4 in terms of single threaded performance, and a little better than M1 in terms of multi threaded performance.
The MacBook Neo has one of the fastest processors on the market for single threaded tasks, which is what has the most impact on how "fast" a processor feels for day to day usage.
Netbooks had processors that were glacially slow.
I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad.
People thinking I mentioned my (somewhat) disappointment about the CPU because it is also used in Phones, but actually what I meant is that I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one.
But I don't really see doing that for the A18, personally; even though I don't doubt its a good chip!
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That’s pretty impressive
I used a first-gen eeepc with Linux in college. I didn't have any problems with speed for normal use, though I ssh'd into servers for anything more intensive than running a browser.
I think I'd put a phone CPU running netbook-like costing $599 still in the "overpriced premium brand" bucket myself.
(Not sure if that's really an apt description though, but then I was out as soon as I read they're neutering one of the usb-c speeds.)
So long as you can use the slow port for charging, I think it’s an entirely tolerable trade-off. Remember, this is a machine for people with low technical requirements. It’s not a machine for someone who needs lots of high speed ports.
It just means the phone is massively overpowered :)
Of course it’s an iPhone chip, which is why it’s got just 8 gigs of RAM. I think it’s the same exact SoC that went into the 16 Pro Max.
There were some M-series chips with 8 gigs, iirc. There was a whole debate going on about that on the net when they were released. Not the M5 though, as it seems.
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If so, it's a binned version with fewer working cores.
This suggests someone may be able to install MacOS on an iPhone with some modification.
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The A18Pro is a very powerful CPU, besting even the M1 in single-core performance (about even in multicore). Saying its just a "phone CPU" is disingenuous.
I do wish they used the A19 Pro which has better hardware based memory security.
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The biggest drawback is no Thunderbolt. The biggest sell for Macs right now is the ability to daisy chain them with the new RDMA update. A used M1 Mac Mini is more valuable than this.
I'm losing my mind. This is a BUDGET, entry-level laptop, and you're complaining about the lack of Thunderbolt daisy chaining?!
Listen I bought six Retina displays, I don't also have money for a new Mac. Of course I'm going to complain about the lack of Thunderbolt daisy chaining after my frivolous expenses come home to roost.
That's an extremely niche use case and not even a remotely selling point for probably 99% of buyers, much less the "biggest" one.
You get what a budget product is right?
The Neo is basically the mac flavor of an iPad meant for schoolchildren. It's a Chromebook competitor, not meant for whatever kooky AI shit you're doing at home.