Apple introduces Macbook Neo - cheaper Macbooks starting at $599
2d 11h ago by piefed.ca/u/popcar2 in technology from www.apple.com
Apple today unveiled MacBook Neo, an all-new laptop that delivers the magic of the Mac at a breakthrough price.
Honestly I'm expecting this to take up most of the mid-range laptop market. 8gb RAM and only 256GB storage is lame, but the rest of it probably makes it really good value (especially with components getting more expensive recently).
Unless you're buying used or refurbished, most laptops I found at ~$600 or less kinda suck. Either it has terrible specs, or uses cheap plastic, or has a terrible screen, etc.
I don't like Apple, but hopefully this is a wake-up call for other vendors. Lower end laptops should stop being cheap garbage.
makes it really good value
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor.
Sure, but a tablet isn't a laptop.
You can’t really use an iPad as a laptop. The hardware exists and should work, but the software is awful.
It’s often several seconds to switch to Safari on my iPad Pro with M series chip. We’ve had app switching in computers for 40 years. Why can’t iPad do it?
Sure, but a tablet isn’t a laptop.
So form factor, not hardware internals should be the deciding factor in cost?
To a degree, yeah.
The laptop form factor is engineered with lid and palmrest assemblies, if you’re going to compare the two then you’ll want to add a nice keyboard to that iPad. Apple’s is $270.
Apple’s is $270.
Typical Apple tax, completely unrelated to the few dollars a keyboard costs to make for real.
You’re not entirely wrong, in that the Apple Tax is real.
Nonetheless, the quality of the Magic Keyboard is substantially higher than that of a keyboard you can get for “few dollars”
Ultimately, your assertion was:
An iPad Air costs the same but comes with a much better M4 processor. The main difference is a less crap operating system in macOS.
An iPad Air with a keyboard that matches the form factor and build quality of a MacBook Neo does not actually cost the same, it costs an additional $270.
The MacBook doesn't have a touchscreen. It cancels the keyboard cost out.
They don't even put touch ID on the entry model.
Ok but if you want to do actual work on it then these things absolutely do not cancel each other out because you have to spend $270 on a keyboard/trackpad regardless, and now have to use a clunky touchscreen on your 13 inch tablet half the time.
Yes, the M4 is much faster and it is probably only stupid product segmentation keeping it on the iPad. But the reality is, iOS/iPadOS puts OS-level limits on how much you can even take advantage of that hardware even if there is an iOS app for the thing you want to do
TLDR: If you really want a MacBook just get a refurbished M1/M2 MacBook and call it a day, bonus points for putting Asahi on it
you have to spend $270 on a keyboard/trackpad regardless
That's Apple tax, not manufacturing cost. MacBook replacement keyboards sell for 10 dollars on Aliexpress.
iOS/iPadOS puts OS-level limits on how much you can even take advantage of that hardware even if there is an iOS app for the thing you want to do
I'm comparing hardware to hardware, not artificial Apple software restrictions.
I'm comparing hardware to hardware, not artificial Apple software restrictions.
That's great but hardware doesn't exist in a vacuum. With an ecosystem as locked-down as an iPad's you can't just ignore the software. It's not like you'll ever be able to uninstall it because it's intentionally locked down, unlike a macbook which allows installing apps and even modifying the bootloader to boot into a different OS.
Edit: Forgot to mention the fact even for people that might not care about that, iOS will automatically kill any app that uses more than a certain amount of RAM (I think it was 4GB? I don't remember the exact number) so in a lot of scenarios you can't even take advantage of the hardware in an iPad because of the locked down software
you can't buy an iPad without a touchscreen. your argument feels like arguing that tariffs won't affect consumers because they're paid by the importers
What something should be priced at is what the market is willing to pay for it. People are definitely willing to pay more for a MacBook than an iPad. Also there are similar spec’ed Chromebooks on the market that cost around the same price and people buy them. The Neo is competing with Chromebook.
In addition to being more locked down, you'd also have to figure out/purchase peripherals like the keyboard and mouse yourself, right?
It’s an iPhone 16 with a MacBook shell
I mean if by shell you mean KVM then yes.
It’s a pretty good price for those peripherals plus the low end phone though
I wouldn’t consider it low end, early benchmarks put it in the range of M1 which surpasses Intels N-Series.
IMO it’s the perfect typewriter/frontline worker machine when personal computing is getting more expensive by the day
Yeah sorry I was thinking more of the other specs than the chip itself. As you say, a pretty good little A chip, I suspect the first real go to market one given M comparisons. Perfect as you say for heavy keyboard users.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook, and it’d still have one fewer USB port and no audio jack.
Except for them to be directly comparable you’d also have to get a keyboard cover for the iPad, making it more expensive than the MacBook
One has a keyboard (cheap components), the other has a touchscreen. The cost cancel each other out.
Better specs sure, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
It’s important to note, and is often overlooked, that macOS is especially good at memory management. That 8 GB will go much farther than it would on it another PC. Not to mention that the vast majority of people using these will be using it to browse the web and other very minor tasks. For the price, it’s pretty great.
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I'm genuinely amazed that it hasn't fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS' memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn't feasible.
Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
Thank you for sharing this result. I knew Asahi's memory management wasn't as robust (so I got a 24GB RAM M2 unit to overcome this).
For your macOS Ollama implementation are you able to leverage the NPU in the hardware (which I know is also unavailable so far in Asahi)?
I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.
Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it's still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.
Additionally Apple has a bunch of cloud storage deals. I think most people store all of their photos and videos in iCloud which for most people is the majority of their storage space. I bet this is right in the sweet spot for usability, which doesn't surprise me given Apple's laptop history
They were talking about memory not storage
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we're pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Eh. 8GB is unified memory, meaning it also needs to carry the graphics load. You’re making it sound like it is just working memory. MacOS is also more graphics heavy than PC, especially Linux based OS, so whatever efficiency you’ll get from the OS in terms of memory compression and management, you’ll also have to offer for the smooth expose, missing control and all the frosted glass translucent garbage they force on the users.
8GB is shit low. Email and browsing, ok. But as soon as you have 40 tabs open in chrome, it will be email or browsing. Garageband sure, again dont run anything else in the background. But I doubt you’ll even be able to edit a 1080p project in iMovie without stutter on battery power. The biggest issue is that you can’t upgrade it, so whatever software upgrades happen, 8GB is all you’ll ever get.
I seriously doubt many people using this will be doing much video editing with 40 tabs open. Your expectations are unrealistic for the type of user who will be buying these.
Ok at this point it’s been 5 years since the M1 and it’s crazy people are still acting like 8GB is unusable on them. My work Mac is 8GB. So is my wife’s. I run Xcode, iOS simulator, safari, VSCode and the corporate security software at the same time without issue.
Would I want that little for video games? Hell no.
It’s still fine for the typical user. As a developer, I find the base 256GB far more of an issue since it’s impossible for me to fit multiple versions of Xcode and simulators on it simultaneously.
This is a step backwards from M1 in terms of cores, core speed and bus speed. This is not going to feel like an m1 base even.
We’ll see when the reviews hit. It’d be pretty dumb for it to be worse than an M1 when older airs get discounted down to similar prices.
8GB RAM and 256GB SSD isn't great, but it's not surprising at this price point with the price of memory and storage right now. Anyone who has built a system recently can attest. If RAM/SSD pricing wasn't so god awful I could imagine double the capacity at this price point.
Honestly, it might be a wakeup call for laptop vendors, or it might just put a lot of them out of business. This is not a good economy for them to suddenly have to compete with Apple on value...
They should have done so from the beginning. If they vanish because they waited too long to compete, so be it.
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
That is so true, and can't be underestimated. The budget laptop market absolutely blows these days. I got a 1300x768 screen, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB storage (albeit HDD), and ~2 GHz CPU in 2016, for $500. That was at Best Buy, who tried to sell $100 HDMI cables at the time, and wasn't even a great deal, though I was fine with it.
Now the budget market is...pretty much the same. Slightly better 1080p screen, same RAM, 1/4th the storage (but usually an SSD), a significantly better CPU that has most of that CPU progress kneecapped by Windows 11. It's GRIM out there.
Agree. Probably best notebook for students and also for smaller companies, if you’re not relying on high end hardware.
I got a laptop from 2017 off eBay for $50 with those same specs. Installed Linux on it and it was good to go. 600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You got a 2017 laptop with an A18 Pro chip? Wow that’s incredible!
No, 8gb of RAM (obviously older DDR but still) and 256gb or storage.
Of course the CPU and other older components will be less powerful, but like... What do we use computers for now that we didn't in 2017? AI? Oh nooooo, what will I ever do without local AI... It all works the same, at a pretty decent speed running Bazzite (cause I wanted to see how it ran games. It topped out at Skyrim Special Edition running at 15fps, did good at fallout New Vegas though).
I got a bargain, but say you can only get it now for double what I paid. That's 1/6 the price. Why pay 600% more for a computer that's not even that much better?
this MacBook is going to have 10x the battery life of your used laptop, and weigh less.
plus, it's brand new so it has a warranty and doesn't require people to spend time searching for a good deal.
this is an excellent product launch at a good price and it is gonna sell like hotcakes
Mine has a replaceable battery, in theory I can buy whatever quality level of battery I want :3
Again, 1200% the price.
You got a machined-aluminium laptop with a battery lasting a full day and a hidpi screen, for fifty bucks?
Do those things warrant 6x the price? Or, in reality, 12x the price? Let's be real here, the exact hardware specs down to material aside, is it?
Just to be clear in regard to your original comment:
600 is absolutely outrageous in a world where used hardware exists.
You expect manufacturers to sell laptops for fifty bucks?
I expect people to be able to obtain a laptop for 50 or 100 bucks, which they apparently can. Manufacturers should have to reckon with that fairly, or lose business.
I want to destroy new device culture.
Not usually an Apple guy, but it's hard to overstate how smart it is to focus on affordability right now. I feel like having a ~$500 device in the current market is so important. (Especially if it respects your privacy.)
This is the opposite of "own nothing and be happy" and I suspect these things are gonna sell like hotcakes.
Now we just need to get Linux going on them. 🫡
I know you didn't mean it like that, but at $599 it is not a "$500 device". It is a $600 device. Which maybe isn't much worse but still quite a price difference.
It’s $499 for students.
Also microcenter usually sells apple products at the student price to non students too
Hell, Apple themselves usually sell Apple products at the student price to non-students, as long as you nod and wink when you click the Checkout button.
Asahi Linux on MacBook Neo? A man can dream...
Affordability and battery life. I am team linux and android normally, but you really cannot beat a MacBook as an SSH terminal or remote development terminal because they are reliable and the battery lasts all day.
Eh, you can just buy $200 ThinkPad and it'll be fine :)
Macs do not respect your privacy. In comparison to windows it's better but they still log and send every application you open to Apple.
That claim seems like it’d be trivial to fact check, and indeed does seem to be false.
I am not ever trusting a proprietary OS, specially when it has been actively advertised as "caring about your privacy"
It is the advertising of any market differentiator or specifically when it's for security.
indeed does seem to be false.
That's from 5 years ago. Let's look what Apple themselves say about that topic:
Personal Data Apple Collects from You
Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
this is HIGHLY misleading. The page you linked is for Apple's global/web properties (hence "within our services"); device-level settings govern app and OS telemetry separately. You can opt out of telemetry on apple devices you own.
Which apps are launched from their website?
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)
If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.
For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face
If your mom is going to install facebook, X and instagram to post all personal details and photos away along with all the permissions app requests. I don't think it matters?
Are you talking about security? What else is Android secretly supplying these apps?
Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.
"Let's just giveaway more leeway for corporations, so we can get more accustomed to losing our rights, until we have to jump off the cliff for the lesser evil"
Apple fanboys were proud they had no ads, Apple put on ads. They said they fight the government, they work with authoritarian governments around the world. They said they care about user privacy, they were funneling notifications to directly to the US government.
Yea, keep defending these knucklefucks, they're totally not trying to manufacture consent for global surveillance while you're given the illusion of "lesser evil" and losing ownership of devices you bought.
Downvote away, cult.
Look - I can’t prevent my mom from being on facebook and playing candy crush. Nothing I say or do will make that happen. I can improve the situation by:
- Introducing alternatives and hope they spread (Chat with your mom on Signal)
- Reducing data harvesting during ”passive” behaviour (e.g. reduced permissions for apps. Graphene is probably the best here, but good luck getting your mom on that)
- Reducing data harvesting by the phone vendor (Samsung, Google, Apple). This is primarily done by buying an iPhone, simply due to incentives. (Again, good luck getting your mom on Graphene).
If I go too hard on my mom, she’ll just buy herself a cheap chinese android without telling me. Is that better?
It doesn't seem much worse to me. As long as she doesn't have too many ad-ridden spyware apps.
Only if you decide to send that telemetry, which is prompted to you clearly and unambiguously.
Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.
Reasonably priced Mac.
Phone CPU. Similar priced iPads come with a much better CPU.
Counterpoint: Phone CPUs can rival yesterday’s desktops.
Yes, but it's still worth pointing out that the compromises run deeper than alternatives, including Apple's own iPad Air.
Absolutely agree than phone socs can drive a viable experience, but it's just still pricier even using iPad Air as a comparison.
I’ve been running an M1 for years now. So tired of the argument that Mac is underpowered. No, it’s not a video editing/compiling/gaming powerhouse, but it more than makes up for it with an 8+ hour battery life, best-in-class display, and silent running, going on 5 years now.
It still handles everything I throw at it just fine. If I need to bust out the compute power, Mac just isn’t the right rig for it. But that doesn’t make them useless.
It has comparable performance to laptop CPUs in its price bracket while being significantly more power efficient.
A18 Pro? Intel? Neither CPU is used in the MacBook Neo nor the 599 iPad.
A18 Pro? Intel? Neither CPU is used in the MacBook Neo nor the 599 iPad.
Did you read the post?
They seem to just really hate Apple.
Did you read the post?
You replied to my post and I compared Apple hardware to Apple hardware.
But only run iPadOS, so they're a glorified paperweight.
Regardless, I'm never buying another mac unless I can run asahi linux on it. Apple has progressively destroyed MacOS for the last 15 years, and will continue to do so. Most of Apples software design decisions are anti-consumer and monopolistic, and should be straight up illegal. Apple owns your device; not you.
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
Similar iPads also come with a lot less ports, no physical keyboard, no aluminum clamshell protection, and a shittier OS.
If you honestly think these justify the crap CPU, you're absolutely out of touch with reality.
Please enlighten me then, if you don't mind. Are there some good benchmarks out there that show the Inadequacies of the A18 chip?
Please enlighten me then, if you don’t mind. Are there some good benchmarks out there that show the Inadequacies of the A18 chip?
I found several after only 30 seconds of googling, including Apple fans' favorite benchmark: Geekbench multicore where the A18 is about 40% slower.
Isn't it about 40% cheaper than the M4 CPU macbook ?
Isn’t it about 40% cheaper than the M4 CPU macbook ?
It's 100% the same price as another portable M4 computer sold by Apple
How much does each USB port cost per device?
How much does each USB port cost per device?
A 5-pack of USB C ports costs about one dollar on Aliexpress.
How about a keyboard that is similar to the Neo keyboard?
How about a keyboard that is similar to the Neo keyboard?
10 dollars and that's retail, not manufacturing cost.
How much for a 13" display to match the real estate of the Neo display? (Same specs too, dont cheap out)
How much for a 13" display to match the real estate of the Neo display?
Look up the costs of 11" and 13" HiDPI displays and subtract the costs yourself. I'm sure you can do it. I bought an excellent 14" external HiDPI USB C monitor for 40 Euro recently.
How about a travel bag to hold all this extra equipment?
How about a travel bag to hold all this extra equipment?
Completely irrelevant to the topic that Apple the cost of the Neo is not reasonable.
Relevant because Neo has it built in.
How about the price of an iPad case?
Relevant because Neo has it built in.
The difference in manufacturing cost compared to the iPad Air is pocket change, way less than a M4 CPU would cost. It's just Apple ripping off its customers as usual.
Enjoy lugging around all that equipment 🙂
Probably means their normal go-to market has plateaued. In this price range they can still sell and profit.
If it wouldn’t carry just 8 GB of RAM, it would be a great deal. Sadly, it’s not even upgradable, so its usefulness is rather limited.
It would be. Even my pixel have 16gigs of ram, lol.
Testing was conducted by Apple in January and February 2026 using preproduction MacBook Neo systems with Apple A18 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 8GB of unified memory, and 256GB SSD.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Seriously? I have recently been working on my personal programming projects on my ThinkPad from 2014. That thing also has 8 GB RAM. It's slow, but that's only because the dedicated video card is no longer supported by NVIDIA. I was totally able to run PyCharm, my program (which was hungry for ram), and Firefox with quite some tabs open without any issues. And most people will be doing more basic stuff on this than what I was doing. Browsing around, editing some documents, viewing some photos. I'm not sure how heavy MacOS is, but I'll assume it's more like Linux than Windows. You can do a lot with 8GB if your OS isn't gobbling up resources to spy on you, show you ads, or run some useless AI shit you didn't ask for.
I agree that it's not a lot, but this laptop is not meant for people who need to do more than what I mentioned, putting much more RAM in there would just creep up the price without really offering anything.
Note that I'm not an Apple fan or anything, I've never even used anything from Apple.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Most notably web browsing which one would think this thing is mostly for.
What is wrong with your computers that 8GB is unusable for a browser?
Probably Windows.
Tab hoarding I would guess.
Nah chrome (worst case scenario) with about 80 tabs total on a M1 Air w/8gb is okay, I see it often doing IT support. This should be a bit better. A18pro is pretty efficient.
$899 was education price, $1099 is retail.
Don’t need to lie to make a point.
Or maybe it will come with some subscription model to get you more power, from the cloud of course.
Considering Windows has become a complete dumpster fire recently, this $600 laptop could be a really appealing option for some if they're mostly browsing the web.
It'd make for a great student laptop, reminds me of the old polycarbonate MacBooks actually. They did cut corners a lot, but retained all the niceties you'd expect from a MacBook.
And they finally added some colour; could've have gone with more vibrant colours IMO but it's better than nothing.
I gotta say, I do like fuzzy wombats as well^^
This is basically Apple's version of a Chromebook. It's an iPhone in the shape of a laptop.
But it runs full macOS.
So at this price point, there’s basically no reason to ever buy a Windows PC at all.
Sure there is, so you can put Linux on it!
Thanks to the amazing people over at Asahi Linux, you can on MacBooks too!
On some Mac books. With limitations.
It's an amazing project, but outsiders might overestimate it's status if you say it that way.
This one will not even boot in a long time.
There's no reason for the average person to ever buy another windows device
Average people still game. And Linux is improving rapidly. Apple isn't.
That doesnt mean the average person can just use Linux, you cant even buy a laptop with Linux from a standard store that people typically look for laptops in (like Amazon or best buy). If you have to convince people to go to a separate website, manually enter their card details, and pay a shipping fee of $116 along with import fees (yes this is a bit more specific to Tuxedo but my point stands). Regardless of which Linux brand you buy it typically takes 3-5 weeks for shipping. Meanwhile across the board the base price of Linux laptops are always higher than Windows devices (some OEMs like Lenovo hide this by giving a $100 discount but when you consider that Linux is generally only an option for custom orders the total cost is still higher than a non custom standard windows laptop).
Which is why you buy a Windows machine, then put Linux on it. You said there's no reason to buy a Windows machine. Even if you abandon Windows forever, there's still a reason to buy it. There are use cases that Apple silicon is not good for, like gaming. And having competition is good.
Kind of a weird example to say that people won't online shop too. That's far more common for all types of people than walking into a store is these days.
Yeah people do shop online that's what I said, on Amazon and best buy not niche laptop sellers. Also you severely overestimate the average persons interest in Linux, if Linux is not included the average person won't install it.
There are quite a few listings for Linux computers on amazon now, granted most of them are in the premium range, >here is one in the mid range of prices with comparable specs to the new macbook
The amount is so insignificant that when filtering by OS it doesn't even show up
That's just because amazon doesn't tag it correctly, there were easily 5 models when you just had Linux as a search term. And I also disagree that variety is necessary for laptop listings to be considered viable, it's not like non technical people are even looking at specs anyway.
Non technical people also aren't going out of their way to purchase Linux devices
This is the “let’s get the budget computer crowd using iCloud services” solution.
They can afford to sell at a loss if needed, because the onboard storage is just low enough to make NOT subscribing to cloud services painful after 6-8 months.
Exactly. Most of Apples software design decisions since the iPhone are anti-consumer and monopolistic, and should be straight up illegal.
Apple owns your device; not you.
a sane light in the replies
finally someone gets it
Wait, but legally I own the laptop, right?
ICYMI, the Neo is an even better deal at $499 with education pricing.
This right here. Everyone in this thread is looking for MBP use cases or a Linux PC or a second daily driver from a device that is CLEARLY designed to take foothold in the classroom. The $499 price point goes even lower for volume EDU sales. The company is not going to explicitly position this as a classroom device - it’s inherent through its spec limitations and even its packaging.
Now it’s a matter of how delicately they promote it with third party learning management tools, Google Classroom, Canvas, etc, or MDMs.
MDM on MacOS still kinda sucks compared to Linux or Windows. I mean, it's fine. But they genuinely have work to do there
Apple has been violating people's wallets for how long and they finally decide now is the time to make affordable macs?
Complaining aside, this is a darn good move. The timing is great, so they are likely to be very popular too, which is good for the future of the market. I hope.
They have had an ‘affordable’ Mac for a lot of their history. The Mac mini was a downright value for a while. They have had near $1000 laptops for most of my memory.
just typical /r/technology apple hating.
It’s a big circle jerk. One day we suddenly hate Netflix. The next day Apple has always been terrible. Nobody cares about the complaints that are doing actual harm.
Sorry but near $1000 and near $600 are not even remotely comparable.
I got an HP EliteBook 840 G3 in 2017 for $565 with 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB storage. That was NEVER possible with any Apple laptop. Until now.
Or actually, it still isn't now! The RAM and storage on this are absolutely abysmal for a 2026 laptop. PCs have already vastly eclipsed this bullshit.
As an Apple devotee that pays your annual tithe to your exclusive, elitist blue bubble cult, you're welcome to crow about their smooth interface and nicer terminal and better privacy, but you will never, ever, ever beat PCs on price. Ever.
Apple is a monopoly. Monopolistic exploitation that maximizes profit by keeping prices high and sales low is literally introductory level macroeconomics. They have never made their products good value for money, and they never will.
Good news: thanks to the AI Bros, PCs will probably have 8gb of ram and 256gb of nand too .. isn't progress grand?
I don’t get the complaining about the amount of ram, this is intended for students and other people with less demanding workflows. If it doesn’t fit your specific workflow, it’s fine, it’s just not for you, it’s just like people hating on Chromebooks because you can’t play ray traced cyberpunk on it or edit 4K video without stuttering.
There’s also the fact that macOS memory management is simplified due to having a singular memory pool between all processors, as well as the aggressive memory compression.
And those of you saying “8gb isn’t even enough for web browsing”, how? I’m using a decade old ex-school laptop on a daily basis, with 4gb of soldered DDR4 and a celeron n4100, I have I’d say around 30 tabs open at once and switch probably a couple hundred times in a period of around 5 hours, fully sustaining an interior design course with only a few very rare stutters.
There’s also the fact I’ve heard from many base model MacBook Air m1 users that it barely ever hitches, one of those is my sister, her workflow is heavy image editing, video editing and other design work, she has not had a single issue with it, and that’s with the bloated adobe suite.
And people misunderstand the reasons Apple solders their memory, sure it’s firstly to lock the consumer into a specific tier, but it’s also so their unified memory architecture can work as flawlessly as possible. You can’t add SODIMMs or LPCAMM modules to a MacBook, just like how you cant either with a strix halo APU just like Framework demonstrated, inconsistent signal integrity causes enough issues that it isn’t commercially viable.
Sure, I’d love Apple to make modular memory a thing for their Macs, but quite frankly, I doubt they can even achieve it without any compromises. There’s also the fact that I’d love if Apple could’ve put 16gb of unified memory into the MacBook neo with no raise in price, but realistically, the chipset design they chose, the a18 pro, only supports up to 8gb, and quite frankly they would never achieve a better price today while also designing it to handle a dozen memory tiers, as either they’d need to choose an M series chipset or design a dozen different types of A series packages with some future chipset that doesn’t exist right now, defeating the purpose of having a low price. The low price isn’t just due to the external design choices, it’s also because they chose to only build a single package, an 8gb a18 pro, which would reduce costs overall for the model as manufacturing can just scale, not increase in complexity.
I don’t mind if you downvote, it’s just a bunch of gripes I have with the overall reaction about this frankly pretty awesome new product offering, even if I don’t really like Apple a whole lot.
The low price
Dude, there isn't anything low about that price. That's the point, with 600 dollars you can get a very decent computer from pretty much any other brand with at least the double of ram.
You see, you can get an used thinkpad for less than half the price and still have twice the ram.
It's just a scam product for people who know nothing about computers and will pay for this trash because they simply think "apple a good brand, right?".
the reason I said the price was low is simply because IT IS for what you're getting, especially where I live. This Macbook Neo starts at $900 AUD, and after checking local retailers like Officeworks, JB HI-FI and Centrecom, and from what I've found, the laptops at that same or similar price tag are usually worse performing, plastic built laptops with worse displays. Sure, some come with 16gb of shared SODIMM memory, but a majority come with 8gb. Around a third of them are Chromebooks, the rest are windows laptops. Most come with core i3 or i5 or Ryzen 3, 5 or 7.
For the Macbook Neo, which you can preorder from these retailers for around that 900 bucks, you get a rigid aluminium build, a solid high PPI screen, 8gb of unified LPDDR5X memory, a better SoC than the competition, guaranteed OS support for around 7 years, strict OS memory compression and management, and some pleasant colours compared to the drab grey and uncreative black colours.
RAM is never the only factor when choosing to buy a laptop, its all the other factors as well, those of which people miss and happen to get a laptop where the hinge breaks a year after, or the shared memory puts limits on their workflow and forces the CPU to work more copying data between two pools, or the display has shitty viewing angles that make it hard to look at, or an short accidental drop renders the machine inoperable, or even overuse of the ports cause them to fail, but they're soldered on and render that function of the device useless.
There are so many reasons to bag Apple, but you gotta hand it to them, they know how to standardise and have demonstrated that their devices are designed to weather being used well. And sure, you can definitely buy something a lot cheaper with a hell of a lot more ports, but its likely these ports in the Neo will be modular, since all ports are modular in the Airs, Pros, Mac Minis and Mac Studios.
Yeah this device is not for me, but I'm glad it exists as it means software/OS will have to support 8gb ram for years to come, and my 16gb MacBook will benefit.
but I’m glad it exists as it means software/OS will have to support 8gb ram for years to come
Electron/JS/TS would like to have a word with you
Honestly same, I've got a 16gb Macbook Air m2 I bought new a few months ago, and frankly, even if m4 is the first tier to fully kick out 8gb, I'm glad that the Neo means this focus on lower resource use will continue.
What I do suspect though is once all the Neo stock is depleted, they'll either discontinue the whole line or make a new one with some stockpiled a19 chips, but I'm not sure which one... I guess we'll have to wait and see!
It’s the same price and similar specs to current Chromebook models, which is what I think they are trying to compete against.
But why would anyone want to buy a chromebook? When they can buy a real computer for the same price?
If battery life is such an issue, just buy a powerbank.
Hardware is Chromebook priced. OS,is (AFAIK) full macOS, AKA a posix compliant Unix machine with a pretty nice GUI. Nice enough that several Linux WMs try to duplicate it.
Lol our store is doing billing customer management in google chrome on Debian With KDE Plasma on 8GB DDR3 pentium something. It was running Windows 7 6 months ago with 4gb ram for the same purpose. I then put a Sata SSD, increased the RAM to 8 and installed Debian. The laptops then would have costed like 300 USD and the upgrades costed like 30usd each laptpp for 4 laptops.
You really don’t need a soldered Half eaten and overpriced Apple laptop to do what you’re saying. Even an old laptop does it with few tweaks for fraction of the cost while keeping all the good stuff from those laptops like shit ton of ports. The only advantage of this mac is that its battery drain is quite low being ARM.
that's pretty awesome that your store repurposed old tech with a solid reason to do so, and frankly people constantly bag old tech for being old, even though most of the time it can still fulfill most of what they need, and I'm saying that as I type this on the aforementioned 10 year old laptop, a laptop of which I bought off a friend for $10 AUD because he got a new one because it felt shit using this one, mainly since it was on an old windows 10 install with a ton of bloat.
What my point was in the previous comment was not that you should avoid modularity, other brands or used tech, rather I was stating that people in these threads are constantly overblowing the point of 8gb of unified memory being the only tier, since most of us game, design, self host or do other things which can be quite demanding, but web browsing, document editing and the many other use cases for this Macbook Neo would barely phase it, just like how the machine I'm typing this on right now is cool to the touch and hasn't stuttered at all since boot around 2 hours ago.
and shit, If I needed a laptop right now and had to buy new, if there was an option a little more expensive for something with slightly worse build quality and performance, so I can have modularity, I'd snap that up, but these days its damn difficult to beat apple in the new tech market. The Mac Mini was probably the first stupidly affordable Apple machine, then the MacBook Air (which now sorta lost its edge since apple just price gated it by making 512gb storage minimum,) and now this Macbook Neo, all happening through a RAM shortage where consumers are benefiting from Apple's excessively long hardware contracts, mainly for the LPDDR5X chips.
8GB RAM? No.
You are not the target audience
If you know what ‘8GB RAM’ means you’renot the target audience for this machine.
You known what, good job Apple. You've been winning me over lately. I'm not sure I'd exactly recommend this route to people, the 8 GB RAM is rough even with macOS being more efficient with it. But in the RAM-pocalypse we'll take what we can get, and the rest is fire for budget range.
I would be kinda impressed that Apple is finally offering something that's good value, but 8GB of RAM? ehhhhhh. It's probably still a decent-ish deal, I don't really know how good a phone SoC would handle anything more than light tasks, though.
On the ram front, I’ve heard it’s just a limitation of the a18 pro chipset, not Apple being stingy, as that chipset can only support up to 8gb of ram total.
Also, apparently the a18 pro is similar to the m1 in terms of performance, which the base m1 beat out the core i9 9880H, which was the processor of the most powerful MacBook Pro pre-Apple silicon, so the a18 pro would likely be able to do a lot more than light browsing and document editing, although the limiting factor is unfortunately the 8gb of ram that just can’t be expanded.
The A18 Pro seems to be better than the M1 only at single core performance.
Speaking of cores; the A18 Pro variant in the Neo seems to have 1 GPU core less than in the iPhone 16 Pro. Kinda weird.
I haven’t read up a huge lot on the benchmarks of it, but from what I’ve heard I think that’s right.
It will just hammer that swap file until you get it under a couple dozen chrome tabs!
How soon until Asahi will run on it
How soon until Asahi will run on it
Years. Asahi fully relies on reverse engineering by the community and those community members tend to get hired by the competition. Get a device where the platform designer supports Linux development upstream if your priority is Linux.
Could you give examples? My hope is to get a laptop at commodity mass produced prices, but where everything works flawlessly with Linux.
I've heard that old thinkpads are the way to go, but I don't really understand which models to look at specifically.
This was my first question. This laptop looks like a really strange bird from the hardware point of view. It runs OSX (Tahoe), but uses an iPhone/iPad CPU (not an M1 or M2 CPUs that Asahi runs on today).
you can run "normal" (non Asahi) Linux on those, since they have a normal cpu
$600 MacBook in 2026 is absolutely insane to me. Around 2007/08 when I started using MacBooks as a student the entry level ones used to be 1200€.
Consider that this is an iPhone 16 in a MacBook shell, though. This gives you performance comparable a 5 years old used MacBook M1. It's usable, but it's designed to act as a gateway drug, you'll immediately hit storage and memory limits and want to buy a more expensive one.
8gb of RAM in 2026 where most modern apps are made in electron and a basic text editor takes half gig to show a blank page is less than ideal
To be honest it is not as big of deal. I have a MacBook M1 with 8 GB of memory and my swap is regularly 20 GB but I don’t have any problems when actually working with the system. It’s handling the low memory situation very gracefully.
For browsing, office and some media it’s totally fine.
This thing can run iPad apps right? So at least that is an option when the desktop version is shite. This laptop is aimed at college and high school kids who just need a browser and take notes. It’s probably fine for that. I mean I’m using an iPhone 14 for the last 4 years and it works just fine. It’s a Chromebook alternative it’s not for power users.
Just look at how many crappy Chromebooks get sold to schools. The Neo is the perfect replacement for that market.
This is meant to tackle the chromebook market.
I just wished Apple would revert that shitty Liquid Ass UI. It made the operating system unusable.
I have a 2015 13" Macbook Air with 4gb ram, and a new battery running, Mint with i3 wm and except for a few very unoptimised webpages I don't experience any significant lagg when browsing. streaming 1920x1080 video without issues(the screen resolution is 1440x900 so no need for more) sure I only use it for writing on the go and minor surfing, anything heavier like video editing or Blender I do on my main desktop or my lenovo legion. This whole - anything less than 16gb ram is garbage in current year. Does not take into account that a lot of consumers and middle managers actually don't do anything heavy on their computers.
The MacBook 5C.
The Neo yellow color is awful. The 5C colors were fun because the plastic material made them look good.
It's pretty. But I recently bought a Lenovo IdeaPad at Costco for less, with 16GB ram and 1TB SDD and am running Linux Mint on it, which I'm getting way more out of than any other Mac I've owned.
Without a doubt the Mac's screen is better than mine. But I feel like, all things considered, what I have can do more (and probably for longer). I'm happy to see something like this come along and take the wind out of Microslop's sails (and sales). At the same time, I feel like one is able to get far more value out of a less-costly machine. If one were going to switch OSes anyway, why not Linux? I guess they're banking on people already owning iPhones and therefore making this a more seamless transition or whatever...
Anyone who knows what Linux actually is, isn't buying these.
Fair
How is Linux support on your idea pad? Does everything work as expected?
Haven't had any real issues. The only thing that is truly bizarre to me is that the monitor will not render the purple color used on Mastodon (it turns it cobalt blue). I knew that the IdeaPad has a not-so-great monitor, but I added Vibrant Linux and managed to make things look pretty good--except for that damn Mastodon logo lol. I've tried numerous things to get it to render correctly (and what makes it even weirder is that I can compare images on the page to another machine and they look the same, it's just the logos and other text that won't go purple... looks like I'm on Bluesky).
But I've had no driver issues or anything like that. Only time I've had anything break was due to my own incompetence in adding scripts to things.
Very nice! It might be hard to test now, but how would the mastodon logo look under Windows?
They really said 'Cheap' and $600 in the same sentence.
They sell 4 wheels for $700. People buy it.
Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit - Apple https://share.google/FCOp7IY3rKkfeIOth
"Adds improved mobility to your Mac Pro"
That's absolutely ridiculous. Easy to see how Apple got to where it is now if people actually pay this amount for this crap.
Easy to see how America got to where it is today too... Grifting is the only American culture.
A renewed interest in competing with Chromebooks?
Can’t complain. My kids need to use something beyond my 8 year old Surface.
If it had more memory I'd be on board. 8GB is fucking rough.
Honestly if it forces software to be leaner going down the line, I'm ok with memory crunches (it won't, but I'm just thinking out loud).
I have a 13 year old MBP with twice as much RAM. It came with the same amount.
Honestly this seems absolutely incredible for the vast majority of people, a good MacBook at a decent price point. Benchmarks haven't come out yet but I heard its as good if not better than the M1. For the vast majority of people that's good enough, and even with the worse battery the real world battery life is gonna be amazing.
Also for those complaining about Linux support the main competition is Windows laptops running Snapdragon X Elite which should have somewhat similar performance and also doesn't support Linux. Hell the snapdragon x2 probably won't support Linux either. These laptops cost two times as much as this and usually with significantly worse build quality.
Does it run Linux?
/s or not
Probably not, at least not yet. The Asahi Linux project for Linux on Macs seems to only support the first few M chips to varying degrees. It'd be amazing if they got it working though!
I'm not mad about this, especially with Google pushing Gemini so hard on all their devices. I pulled up the Chromebook site to see their current offerings, and the prominent advertisement for Gemini is pretty disgusting after fresh news of another death.
Question, what is the used market for Macs like?
I can't check the prices for the USA, but I really wonder if getting an used M1 Air wouldn't end up being better bang for your buck?
Probably, so I would guess the core audience to be businesses or schools who need a few hundred a year, but had no need for the computational power of more expensive models.
If this is the regular price, schools can probably get them for $550 or less on a bulk contract. They seem to give 10% discount on any large school purchase.
Just checked eBay. ~200-250 for used M1 Air 8gb RAM and ~300-350 for used M1 with 16gb RAM.
Yeah it def would be. The laptop has a pretty slim target markt
Why would anyone buy a new laptop when the second hand market is so available? It's all just novelty. I wouldn't touch this, all I can think about is what it'll look like in the second hand market in about 3 years.
Older ThinkPads are unbeatable, especially those that still have the CPU sockets in them, and can be upgraded. I put an i7-4702MQ into my L440, now it performs really well with Manjaro, at the cost of sometimes draining the CPU in 30-60 minutes under very high loads (battery might need some rebuilding).
I wouldn't touch this, all I can think about is what it'll look like in the second hand market in about 3 years.
That's pretty sad, tbh.
Why is it sad?
Maybe this person mistreates their laptop.
To be honest, I never learned how to treat devices carefully.
For the target audiences, people just buying a low cost laptop for browsing as well as students, it’s unlikely the common person wouldn’t go directly to Apple to get the newest product. There will definitely be some who opt to get older second hand tech instead, but the vast majority would rather get something they have assurance is brand new and in fully working condition.
Personally, if I needed a laptop, I’d weigh my options both in first party offerings as well as the second hand market, and I’d probably come to the conclusion to just buy two broken laptops and combine them, but it’s rare to find someone who’s willing to splice two computers together for university or high school they’re going to in a month or so, and even if it’s more common, it’s still rare to find someone willing to dive head first into the second hand market when they don’t know how to check for fake listings, horrible deals and genuine bargains, which is why most opt for buying directly from manufacturers or from consumer electronics stores.
Reputable second hand sellers guarantee that the device works properly before shipping. If I needed a laptop, I would get a low grade one on eBay for cheap. I would probably get a used Dell Precision 5570 Laptop with an i9/A2000.
you're right, and I'd personally pick from a one, but realisticaly, if someone only just needs a laptop and doesn't really know what to get, where to get it, why to get that specific one, etc, then I don't think they'd even know second hand sellers can be reputable in the first place.
My mother for instance, she bought an Acer Aspire Go for around $550 AUD from one of our large consumer electronics stores (not sure but I think it was Officeworks),so she can do all her important stuff on, think appointments, setting up debit cards, tracking orders, etc. She didn't want anything used or refurbished, since her view of such is that, if she bought one used or refurbished, it'll be barely held together, half broken, probably someone bit part of the corner off, and so on.
if I were her, I would've just gotten a cheap refurb Thinkpad, but seeming that its at least somewhat common for non-tech literate people to think it's scary to get into the second hand market, most would simply rather choose large consumer electronics store chains. Maybe this issue is just because of the tangibility, where you can walk into a store and physically hold the laptops and assess them, rather than the online only nature of the second hand market, unless there is a rare physical store for refurb and used tech.
Apple is not trying to sell this go people like you.
Used Macs carry a pretty big inflated premium for about 6 years while supported.
I have six or more 10+yr-old refurb Macs running all different distros of linux, testing for permacomputing viability then selling very cheap. They run mostly great, though the laptops all struggle with sleep and battery management compared with macOS. Some, the cameras or mics need a lot of terminal futzing around to get working adequately.
Get a lenovo 480 if you are shopping for a used laptop. A 2015 MacBook pro running Debian derivatives or Fedora is very pleasant if you're not picky about battery life. Zorin is pretty for that mac aesthetic.
I buy new because my service requires up to date production software, and output on time-is-money schedules. Business expenses amortize quickly, due to tax, equipment turnover is expected.
I think it would be good for the industry. Windows had a stronghold in this price bracket and a competition is never bad especially considering how MS is pushing AI into W11.
Powered by A18 Pro
Completing the MacBook Neo experience is macOS Tahoe
Woah, this is new! A version of Mac OSX running on a iPhone/iPad CPU.
Not new, the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit had an A12. And of course the M-series is based on the A-series, so in a way they've always been iPhone/iPad chips.
They're clearly going for the same thing on all devices at some point. There's a lot of money to be made locking shit down and keeping your users hostage.
So a glorified tablet?
If its the full macOS, I don't think we can say that. That's what makes this so interesting as it is a first of its kind.
Now, if it performs like a dog compared to an equivalent spec M3 or M4 Macbook Air, then we probably could call it a glorified tablet.
Performance wise it's an interesting one. I think from a price and energy standpoint it sits squarely against windows ultrabooks with a Snapdragon X, for example, a Galaxy Book 4 Edge.
Based purely on benchmarks, the A18 Pro is weaker than that, plus you have only 8GB of RAM.
However - I have a Surface Pro X with the original SQ1, with roughly 40% of the performance of these... And even at that level, the problem is Windows on ARM, not the performance. It only lets you down for things it's clearly not meant to do, like video editing.
Another alternative I see for that price is a windows laptop with an i5-1334U, which theoretically gives you a raw performance within 2% of the A18 Pro.
Given that at this price Linux compatibility is an absolute lottery, would I sacrifice half the RAM for having an OS that isn't Windows? Yeah there's not much to think. W11 will probably eat half the RAM on telemetry alone, and Apple's BS is easier to put up with than MicroSlop's...
I'm not sure we can use the "Windows x86 vs Windows ARM" analog for this new unit from Apple. MacOS Tahoe is a native ARM OS on both the high end and now this low end unit. With Windows its a completely different CPU architecture.
Apple has to know this is going to cannibalize its low end (8GB/256GB SSD) Macbook Air line. So will Apple discontinue the low config Air or is there some other differentiator that still makes the low config Air compelling?
It’s a Chromebook alternative.
Looks interesting. I’d love to get one for my parents that insist on having a laptop for the keyboard, but they’re so afraid of learning anything new that it isn’t worth the hassle.
RIP to the mid range Chromebook and windows laptop market.
funny joke
Why would anyone get a Chromebook for $600 over this
they wouldnt. they'd get a 200 dollar chromebook
Maybe in 2019. In 2026 8Gb of ram alone costs $150
sure a stick of ram, but this is not that. i can find chromebooks well under 300 dollars american, i dont know what to tell you.
But it's 8 gigs of RAM on a Mac so It will perform like a Chromebook with 4 gigs of RAM.
I think you’re mixing things up here. Mac’s are actually VERY performant, both objectively and relative to the on board ram.
There are many critiques that can be made of macOS. But saying it runs inefficiently is not one of them.
i absolutely hate apple and i endorse this message.
Utter bullshit disinformation. SoC, look it up.
Just bought a PC laptop for $399. It does everything I need a laptop to do.
Don't want to pay $200 more for street cred.
Street cred and spying on you
If the PC is running Windows, the spying is worse. Linux is a good choice, though.
As an IT person that's worked at schools for 20 years I can say this has no place here for us. Too underpowered for adobe products or composer products that our arts/graphics/music labs are interested in and too expensive to replace the Chromebooks that the students use. This is for the wealthy to give to their 4 year olds instead of a MacBook pro like they usually would have. Or a really good porn machine 😁
That's odd, because it is similar in performance to the M1 Air which is still pretty banging at basic introductory media production.
If you are running a proper production lab you aren't using $600 computers anyway, or you are economizing guerilla-film style. If you wanted to introduce 1080p NLE or basic DAW to incoming noobs, probably an okay device... but a lab should be using desktops anyway or your curriculum is badly broken. Definitely get minis if you're doing macs.
This basic laptop in a premium case with great battery life is for folks doing lots of admin or studying and running office, with Pixelmator or Affinity or other mid range production apps. It WILL run photoshop fine if you don't work on large files.
Something I'm still curious about: can these new ARM Apple devices run arbitrary software? Or do you have to install things via the App Store only?
Could Apple someday decide that you're not allowed to install whatever software you want and only install their approved software?
Same price as the cheapest iPhone I think. It tells you something.
the yellow one looks like a surface to me
this laptop running Asahi would be a great entry level machine