Comment by roody15
9 hours ago
MacBook Neo is going to sell like crazy. In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point. With memory and SSD prices so high I don't see how Dell, Asus and others are going to be able to compete. Unless the build quality is significantly worse than a M1 macbook air not sure budget PC makers will be able to compete.
I don't know. Both of my macs are over 7 years old, and have at least 32GB of RAM. Certainly would not buy an 8GB one now.
If you have 32GB Macs, and you had them 7 years ago already, you're not even remotely close to the target market for it.
Parent said "In the education market, educators, students, aides... nothing close at this price point".
That has zero overlap with the "felt the need for 32GB 7 years ago" not-exactly-crowd.
I haven't bought an 8GB laptop since probably 2012 when I got a Sony Vaio that they upgrade to 12GB for free because of a delivery delay. I wouldn't buy an 8GB device in 2026, but this device isn't targeted at either of us.
For a lot of people who are looking at sub $800 laptops, the option to get an Apple will probably be enough to convince them. And apart from the limited memory, it really isn't a bad buy.
I also fully expect most budget devices to ship with 8GB of memory until the end of the DDR5 crisis anyway.
You might be surprised, with NVMe swap 8GB is surprisingly capable. ~1.6GB/s Read/Write.
Why are you flexing like this?
What's your purpose?
If people want to emulate what it is like to have low memory on your current mac, you can run `memory_pressure` on the cli.
Is it relevant with 5-15 year old RAM?
So, you are not in the market for a $600 computer then. Agreed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372989
Going to guess you aren’t a student
Even if your only use case is using Chrome?
That was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago.
Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.
> even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic
Why not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic
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If yours are all over 7 years old you really have no idea what a modern Mac can do with 8-16GB of ram…
8GB of RAM. Not 16GB. And oh yes, the modern Mac shares those 8GB with the video RAM...
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This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.
> This is Apple's "Nintendo moment" when they realize they can package old hardware and win on polish and ecosystem.
The A18 Pro isn't even two years old yet; it debuted in iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max September 2024. What's funny is none of the PC laptops manufactures can match the speed and quality of the Neo.
The benchmarks for the A18 Pro are impressive; its Single Thread Performance beats all mobile processors [1]; remember this processor was created for a phone:
[1]: "A18 Pro Benchmark" - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro&id=62...
Outside of some specialized benchmarks only Geekbench 6 is more or less usable for comparisons between generations or manufacturers.
Apple have historically moved forward minimum requirements for macOS and apps a bit aggressively. They need to slow that down now if they want us to take the macbook neo seriously.
I’d disable major OS updates and stay on Tahoe, and only upgrade if other Neo owners report it’s ok to do so. Ive been burned by iOS updates that made the phone sluggish enough times.
Not necessarily a reason to avoid the Neo, for the right use case. If I had secondary school kids they’d get one of these, but something to bear in mind.
Good. So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades. I hope the Neo is a kick in the pants to get everyone in the Apple ecosystem to take memory usage seriously.
More efficient software benefits everyone.
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They already had that exact strategy between 2012 and 2020.
Except you have to run Tahoe
Ironically probably one of my biggest reasons against buying one is it's obvious desirability.
I've already once in my life been in a situation where I can say with certainty the only reason my laptop wasn't stolen is that it wasn't a MacBook(despite having equal or above retail purchase value). I wouldn't be surprised if there's more that I never knew about.
How easy is it to flip a macbook tied to an apple id? i'd imagine you'd have to sell it for parts.
Granted, selling this one for parts might literally be easier.
PC makers are going to stop some of the artificial segmentation they used on the lower price devices, and that is going to hurt the sales of their higher-end lines. There is no reason they kept pushing 70 percent srgb panels on even the mid tier Thinkpads when the Neo has a good display.
I wonder if it’s less about price and more about supply chains. Are there enough manufacturing capacity to allow every laptop maker to secure enough supply?
In advance of the neo’s release, Apple probably invested billions in ensuring the supply chain was ready.
I can't imagine the low end materials actually save that much cost anyway.
There's a tremendous amount of Bill-of-Materials inflation where a part that cost $5 more translates to $50 retail price increase when the actual work and engineering cost is exactly the same. This is one of the terribly annoying facts of product design, the incredible premium you have to pay for good parts that don't actually cost very much at all.
That sounds great and like capitalism is working for once in terms of increased competition causes companies to produce more for less
In the US, cheap ThinkPads like E14 sometimes sell for a bit less when you factor in all typical discounts. They are good machines that run Linux well and can be repaired.
In EU, and I imagine other markets, there's nothing remotely close. I hope this puts some pressure on Lenovo and the rest of manufacturers to be more competitive.
> and can be repaired
The Macbook Neo is highly repairable too [1]. Not _quite_ as repairable as some Thinkpads with a 10/10 score, but still pretty respectable at a 6/10 with easily replaceable batteries and stuff.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...
8 GB RAM and 6/10 "respectable" repairability.
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In the EU it costs $200 more so it's more like a low to mid range laptop.
I have a feeling these are aimed at the same sector as the Framework 12, school provided laptops for kids meant to be bought in bulk by institutions. But there they're competing against $150 Chromebooks and neither is even close.
In the EU, you don't need to buy an extended warranty, since existing consumer protection laws require the sort of extended repair coverage Americans have to pay extra for.
Taxes are also included in the EU price, but not the US price.
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As someone who has been working in IT support for years, for most people a Windows laptop in the $400 range is cheaper if you add on-site IT support, parts replacement, and a longer warranty period. I wonder where Apple stands here.
> parts replacement
For a $400 laptop?
I'm glad Apple's caring about the education market again – people forget how it (and DTP) sustained Apple through the lean years of the 90s, until they came out with iMac and iBook.
Apple is going to cannibalize their own laptop market.
M1 macbook air has been available at Walmart priced at $600-650 for years (8gb, 256 ssd). Why did that not cannibalize Apple's laptop market?
I think this is actually the reason the Neo has 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradable). It’s their anti-cannibalization strategy.
They’re relying on the huge portion of their existing laptop market who self-identifies as “tech-savvy” or “enthusiast” and thinks 8 GB of RAM is a non-starter.
Those folks will keep buying Mac laptops at double (or triple, quadruple, …) the price.
> I think this is actually the reason the Neo has 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradable). It’s their anti-cannibalization strategy.
It has 8 GB of RAM because they wouldn’t be able to hit the price point of $599 with more; their target audience doesn't need more. It's also why the SSD is slower than a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air; it's the only device in the lineup other than the entry-level iPad with a sRGB display; the other devices have P3 Wide Color Displays. No Thunderbolt ports, only supports 1 external display and only at 4K. No Wi-Fi 7.
These are some of the compromises they made to keep the price down. They're also using a binned A18 Pro with 5 GPU cores instead of the 6 core version in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max.
There are lots of potential customer for which a Mac laptop was out of reach; it's a lot more affordable at $49.91 /month for 12 months for the $599 model.
Its display is better than PC laptops in the same price range, but that display is a non-starter for graphic designers, video editors, etc.
That's why cannibalization is a non-issue.
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> Apple is going to cannibalize their own laptop market.
As long as you buy a Mac laptop, Apple is fine with that, regardless of which one. That’s because they know who their customers are.
The Neo is in its own category; the $599/$699 Neo doesn’t compete with a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a M5 Pro, 24GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD at $1899. If you know you need more RAM and storage than Neo, the M5 Mac Air is $1099. But if you need to stay under $1000, the decision is clear.
If anything, the Neo is more competitive with the entry-level iPad with 128 GB of storage at $349; with Apple's keyboard at $249, the total is $598, $1 less than the entry-level Neo.
For someone who wants a "real" laptop with more flexibility than an iPad, getting the $599 Neo is a no-brainer.
They are just covering all the market segments. This is for people who didn't want to shell out $1000 for a laptop for their kid, or have another one just to browse the web. Or they have an iphone but not a mac laptop, but now they might want one cause it's even cheaper than a phone. This will be pushed into schools probably as well.
Mac doesnt run their spyware, they wont use it.
My 13 year old mac desktop is sitting here with 14.82gb used with nothing but messages and firefox. Really dount that 8gb will cut it.
This is really not the right comparison to make. An OS will use memory liberally. Give it more and it'll use more. Give it less and it'll swap to disk. So the real question is how long a given workload takes to complete, or whether you can multi-task without shitting out to/from disk every time you switch windows. "My OS uses X amount of RAM" is an entirely meaningless and irrelevant statement.
Browsers use available RAM for cache, but they don't require that much. Firefox officially supports running on Macs down to 512MB of RAM. It will just be slower.
Macos will try and keep available memory used.
Launch a few more applications and you'll see everything sort of still keeps working at an acceptable responsiveness.
ITs going to sell like crazy not because of specs, but because its apple, and its a cheap. Cause god forbid you pull out a chromebook in a starbucks and be seen as a peasant.
If you know what you are doing and don't want to spend a lot of money, its really not that hard to buy a refurbished thinkpad, swap in more ram, and install your linux disro of choice, for a lower price and get very similar usable performance.
MacBooks are a far superior product, not just a status symbol
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And run what on the Chromebook exactly?
Web browser and youtube. You know, what people mostly do on macbooks.
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The Chromebook would be slow and run worse software. So… but also yeah nobody wants to look like a peasant.
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What school IT director does this?