So many people are going to get burned by the hypnotism of these Neos. They're going to be gateways into being traded in within 2-3 years to get something with more RAM and storage when their owners find out how much they struggle with basic tasks due to insufficient RAM and storage.
If you actually go on Best Buy or Micro Center websites and look at street prices you'll realize that the Neo isn't actually that disruptive.
The trackpad is mid. I've tried it. It's mid enough that basically any PC can compete with the trackpad experience. There are multiple $500-800 PCs that are easy recommendations as alternatives, all with 16GB of RAM, all with modular storage.
The battery in the Neo is so small that even with the extremely efficient iPhone processor inside, basic Windows laptops can beat the Neo in battery life. Grab a Yoga 7 and you've got double the RAM, 2-in-1 convertible touch screen, and better battery life. Oh yeah, and you get a better OLED panel, too.
I think you might be very surprised by what you can do with eight gigs of RAM on Apple Silicon. Apple does hardware compression into memory - it performs as well as a 16 GB machine did with an Intel chip.
I don't know where this myth has come from that macOS magically uses less RAM even though you are using the same applications as everyone else.
The Just Josh Tech review of the MacBook Neo demonstrated that the Neo cannot do a fractional resolution playback of a very simple Adobe Premiere project. We are not even talking about doing any editing work, simply playing back the project in the timeline.
The ~$500 Acer loaded with 16GB of RAM performed much better on that workflow.
I think it's worth pointing out that the base RAM on a MacBook Air was 8GB six years ago.
The Neo is a low end machine that trades RAM, storage, keyboard backlight, I/O and battery capacity for fit and finish and aesthetics.
It is a machine that will introduce many people to the Mac, and it will be very successful, but I also think it is a machine that for many people will not last them a very long time. And who knows, that might have the same negative impact that cheap Windows PCs have had for Microsoft in the long run, which was the whole reason they started their premium Surface brand.
> I don't know where this myth has come from that macOS magically uses less RAM even though you are using the same applications as everyone else.
Well, you're certainly not running the same code on both systems. Some applications absolutely use less RAM on MacOS... some use less on Windows.
Some of this is due to the various builds of the software itself, some of it is due to architectural differences in memory management, CPU instructions, differing memory access capabilities, etc.
8GB is tight for power users, definitely. But it is certainly very usable for on a Mac for the average person.
I agree that it’s usable, but I think it’s still worth pointing out that it was the base configuration of the M1 Air almost 6 full years ago.
It feels to me a lot like past cut down systems such as the eMac or that horrendous 21” 1080p Intel iMac that sort of make sense by being cheap but don’t make as much sense in wider context of available choices.
Of course, I think the Neo will be a huge success and is a good product overall, but a product where an informed buyer can do better.
It is potentially a purchase decision that really won’t last as long as a cheap Acer with 16GB of memory, even though the Neo is built better.
In the last six years, the memory footprint of most Mac apps I use has decreased. When Apple Silicon was new, a lot of apps were still running Intel binaries. Now they almost all have native binaries and memory footprint has shrunk quite a bit!
8gb on a apple is not enough and its not surprising at all.
Source: dealing with dozens of Mac devices with 8gb memory that clients had which all can't handle their workloads. I've switched whole companies from Mac back to pcs. And I've watched companies try switch to Apple and go from reasonably problem free operations to a nightmare of broken systems. Want to use apples data transfer to migrate from windows to Mac? Good luck it just plain doesn't work.
Device management on macs is an absolute nightmare along with the hell hole that is apple ID and the app store. Not to mention their absolutely abysmal performance with rmm. You can literally configure a machines permissions to allow remote access apps to work then a week later they just break the software and your access to manage the device is broken too.
Apple products are absolutely terrible for business from phones to laptops to their entire office suite.
The computer is $600. It’s only $500 on the education store. Many Apple customers will not have access. Anyone who walks into a physical Apple Store will have to prove their eduction status.
I am not sure why it’s eating competitors lunch when many very well-regarded competitors are in the price range available at stores.
What’s better about a Neo than a Yoga 7? Same price range.
Aside from the pitiful screen resolution for a 14-inch screen and the fact that the Lenovo has a fan, they are indeed similar.
But I don't know why you cannot see it as terrible for the PC makers that Apple finally has entered the sub-1000$ market. Since Apple has existed they've been in the high-end of the market, and now they're not. The Lenovo I'm sure is fine, but what it doesn't have is clarity of purpose. The Neo is a laptop and nothing else. Which leads me to question whether that very complicated Lenovo hinge will survive the 7 years my Mac laptops give me.
160 ppi is not pitiful, it's the same as a 27" 4K monitor.
Is "clarity of purpose" ghost of Steve Jobs speak for refusing features to customers?
Why is it so hard to conceive of a student wanting to write hand-written notes on a 2-in-1 laptop? Apple would rather sell you a second device.
Why are we assuming the hinge on 2-in-1 laptops can't survive? These are not new products. These are well-regarded, highly reviewed products from the #1 PC manufacturer in the world (Apple is #4).
If you already have an iPhone, there are lovely little integration things that sound like small beans but are really valuable over time, eg.:
- copy-paste text between devices
- get verification codes from text messages to auto-fill in Safari on Mac
I don't know if Yoga 7 is good in this regard, but when you open the lid on a Macbook, it's awake and interactive before you've finished swinging it open. And battery life is outstanding. I'd miss things like that.
So the Apple advantage is, essentially, the evasion of antitrust rules. Nice. In any event, I use KDE Connect to send my clipboard around between iOS, Windows, Android, and Linux.
The whole "instant on when you open the lid" thing is not impressive in 2026. Even with Linux my laptop is instant-on from sleep in a very similar fashion.
And, again, here I am as a broken record repeating this since nobody is listening because they've been indoctrinated by Apple marketing:
The MacBook Neo does not have as good battery life as the more expensive models! In comparison testing with other similar PC laptops the battery life is very middle of the road!
Millions and millions of normal people have used 8GB M-series Macbooks for the past 5 years, and nobody has those problems you describe. In fact, everybody is happy to have machines which don't have the usual problems that PCs have.
Computing tasks related to real world scenarios don't need giant RAM repositories, as evident in that people could do these tasks just fine when 32 megabytes of RAM was enough.
So what you're saying is that the same 8GB of RAM that MacBook Air M1 had 6 years ago is a good idea for a brand new laptop?
Like I said, the MacBook Neo is squarely a low-end device. Make excuses all you want, it trades RAM, storage, keyboard backlight, and battery size for a nice chassis and portability.
Yes, it's an excellent idea. For normal people a computer is a tool to get things done, and any 8GB Apple Silicon machine will serve them very well.
Think about it this way: If you loose 5 days of productivity then you have lost $500. A Windows or Linux machine is guaranteed to cause many more days than that of productivity loss per year.
And with "normal people" I mean everybody who is not a developer or hacker, including millions and millions of people who work professionally with computers.
The RAM doesn't matter as much as people here insist. What do I care that my computer has half the RAM, when it completes any and every task blazingly fast and never freezes up or crashes? RAM turns into an abstract.
Look at it this way: You're arguing that a diesel truck is always better than a motorcycle because it has more horsepowers. Okay, but the motorcycle gets me where I want twice as fast and is more comfortable, and doesn't break down all the time. That's what I care about.
I don’t understand why there’s a strange assumption that Windows or Linux users are just burning productivity all the time and macOS users are the only ones where “everything just works.” Heck leave Linux out of it for all I care: Windows isn’t some kind of immature OS that that requires tons of fiddling. It’s basically the same thing as macOS when it comes down to non-technical users. They open up the windows store or Mac app
Store click a button and get their apps and they’re on their way.
It’s just a biased take that is 100% subjective.
I think this narrative comes from the Windows XP user experience from 30 years ago that no longer exists.
Yeah, the RAM fucking matters because Google Chrome has 90% browser marketshare, because Spotify is the market leader, not Apple Music, because more people use Microsoft Outlook than Apple Mail, more people use Slack than…well, Apple doesn’t have a workplace chat program. These are big memory-sucking apps.
8GB of RAM is great for Apple native optimized apps but regular users run many more things than that.
Linux is too complicated for a normal person to use productively, and it doesn't have the productivity software needed by non-hackers.
Windows: Yes, the user experience is that bad. My observations of Windows users is that it's hard for them to get things done effectively because of the faults of the system. Talking about non-hacker people, who might be very proficient in photo editing or spreadsheets or word processing.
Just booting a Windows machine is a chore. These have the same specs or better specs than Macs, but how come you can instantly use a Mac by opening the lid, and Windows PCs take their merry minutes to be ready?
I won't even mention malware and such.
For a normal, non-technical person, there isn't any problem in using stock Mac Mail, Safari, and native productivity tools. And honestly, those memory hogs you mention aren't a problem either on Apple silicon. It's still faster to use than on a PC with double the RAM.
Can you go into more specific details about these observations you made? Which people were they?
Do you have any benchmarks that show this “faster than a PC with double the RAM” claim?
Because when I saw real world tests on the Neo versus the Acer Aspire AI 14, the Acer machine was faster at video playback in Adobe Premiere (as an example) due to the lack of memory pressure.
I can tell you at work we have a mixed environment and the Windows users and Mac users don’t seem to have any difference in difficulty doing things like showing their work in presentations. Our company metrics show zero difference in employee productivity based on what operating system they use (I’m a manager and can see these things).
Well, just about everyone I know who uses Windows machines. The most common problem is that the laptop starts downloading and installing Windows updates as soon as it boots up. This hogs all of the CPU and all of the internet bandwidth. And there's no way for non-technical users to understand what's going on. They just say "Well, my computer is slow because it's old. Better go and buy a new one soon, what has the most RAM per dollar spent?" Because their techie friends told them that this is the only thing which matters on a computer.
Or there's a ton of pop-ups of every kind when they're using the machine. Most people just click the biggest button on any popup appearing, without even looking at what it says.
And these are people who work professionally with their computers, but they're not sysadmins or operating system experts.
I don't doubt what you say about Adobe Premiere playback speed. That might be an exception where more RAM does actually matter. But that's hardly a reason to dismiss the 8GB Macbooks. They are great for most users and most professional users.
My last Windows laptop was a 2-in-1 Yoga. It was the reason I switched to Macs.
Sure, the specs were good... on paper. But all of the little firmware bugs really destroyed the experience. Mine had both throttling and display output issues, which really suck for a development machine. Also Windows kind of sucks in general these days -- and when I installed Linux on the thing, then I got the classic lackluster power management issue where it would slowly discharge in my backpack. So there goes the battery life advantages.
Apple benefits from great vertical integration so their damn firmware usually works, and if there are issues, they tend to fix them, where as Lenovo and most PC integrators seem to be happy just abandoning products from last quarter and releasing fifteen new models instead. And it's posix and doesn't put ads in my start menu, right out of the box.
Even a simple quiet and mostly-off fan would have been a $5 addition to the system that would have boosted performance by ~10%. But Apple wanted to make an iPad computer.
Apple advertises their subscription services directly in the system settings when you buy the system (they give you a trial that is shown as a system settings notification and when you refer it they do the thing where you have to cancel on the last day or else forfeit the remaining trial term before it’s over; accidental subscription dark pattern where you can’t turn off auto-renew without forfeiting remaining time) and also advertises apple subs via toast notifications.
As far as device firmware, I dunno, I felt like my Intel MacBook Pro 16” had pretty shit firmware that ended up abandoned because Apple went straight to M1 and the whole T2 thing where they tried to customize Intel’s stack never really worked all that well. Apple almost certainly half-assed that machine knowing their next platform was on the way.
Like the whole “instant open lid wake from sleep” that was great in the past but turned into crazy lag on those late Intel machines.
Oh yeah and I just got my last settlement check for my 2016 butterfly keyboard. That machine was a lovely ownership experience.
So this idea that only PC laptops have firmware issues and bad long term support…idk man, I just don’t fully buy that. I’m sure Apple is mostly better but I’ve had enough bad experiences that I don’t consider them to be anything wildly special.
Tomato, tomato. I would consider removing a basic feature like a small and quiet fan as “throttling when it wasn’t even hot.”
Sorry in advance to continue ranting about this, but the consumer-hostile bit is it’s used as a price segmentation strategy. Consumers don’t care if their laptop has a modest quiet cooling fan, but Apple acts like customers hate them. The cooling fan inside the Nintendo Switch has alienated zero potential customers, is basically inaudible, and it’s still an extremely portable device.
The only reason the MacBook Air M5 is slower than the MacBook Pro M5 is the lack of cooling. It’s done on purpose. It’s not “save costs and offer a cheaper product,” it’s “purposefully remove a ‘free’ benefit to push you up the product lineup.”
Similarly, it would have cost Apple almost nothing to bump the Neo to 12GB of memory but they’re going to hold back that upgrade so that first gen buyers buy their next system sooner.
I think I got the settlement email because I took my system in to Apple to get the keyboard fixed and the lawyers for the class action had my contact info as a result.
My phone costs twice as much and I replace it every 2-3 years.
You know what people who outgrow their applebooks are going to do? Buy a macbook air or pro. They aren't going to buy a windows machine. Some might buy a linux machine.
So many people are going to get burned by the hypnotism of these Neos. They're going to be gateways into being traded in within 2-3 years to get something with more RAM and storage when their owners find out how much they struggle with basic tasks due to insufficient RAM and storage.
If you actually go on Best Buy or Micro Center websites and look at street prices you'll realize that the Neo isn't actually that disruptive.
The trackpad is mid. I've tried it. It's mid enough that basically any PC can compete with the trackpad experience. There are multiple $500-800 PCs that are easy recommendations as alternatives, all with 16GB of RAM, all with modular storage.
The battery in the Neo is so small that even with the extremely efficient iPhone processor inside, basic Windows laptops can beat the Neo in battery life. Grab a Yoga 7 and you've got double the RAM, 2-in-1 convertible touch screen, and better battery life. Oh yeah, and you get a better OLED panel, too.