The Apple MacBook Neo’s $599 starting price is a “shock” to the Windows PC industry, according to an Asus executive.
Hsu said he believes all the PC players—including Microsoft, Intel, and AMD—take the MacBook Neo threat seriously. “In fact, in the entire PC ecosystem, there have been a lot of discussions about how to compete with this product,” he added, given that rumors about the MacBook Neo have been making the rounds for at least a year.
Despite the competitive threat, Hsu argued that the MacBook Neo could have limited appeal. He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
Can I put Linux on it? Because otherwise refurb Thinkpad Carbons are cheaper and better.
I honestly dont care about the 8gb of ram, that is plenty for the target audience given MacOS’s pretty good memory management, and optimisation of the first party apps the majority of users will use. I would have liked to see the base price be $499, but that would probably have needed something to be cut down to outside of apples standards, like the display or chassis quality.
I’m a little disappointed by the limited USB, its just one usb 3.0 (not 3.1 as far as I know) and one 2.0, I know that’s a limitation of the platform, there arent really any spare PCIE lanes on a phone SOC. They could have put in a USB Hub chip to get two USB 3.0 ports with shared bandwidth, but I suspect that was difficult to do with reliable video and power throughput and someone decided saving a dollar was more important. That’s plenty for your average user, but a pair of usb 3.1 would have been preferred of course.
However… how many average PC users even use USB now? maybe just a thumb drive very rarely or to use an external display. I’m surprised it even has a headphone jack and an SD reader honestly.
I’d suspect the next gen model to use the newer iPhone chip that should bump the memory up to 12gb and I think has a usb 3.1 controller, so they could break that out better.
I dont hate it. it’s filling in what used to be the mid range of laptops that has kinda died in the last 10 years and is full of spec bumped versions of bottom tier plastic garbage with awful screens and short battery life, and a couple of underspecced cut down versions of nicer metal case laptops that are just not very good either.
As I always say:
…Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.
That’s all they use their computers for. They don’t want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid’s picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.
And that’s basically what the Neo is.
Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.
If I were a laptop maker I would have seen the writing on the wall ten years ago and invested in Linux support, but hey
I can’t speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it’s awful because of all that bloat. I’m guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.
in the Linux world, 8GB is fine
Yeahhhhh no
I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.
8GB of ram on Macs is fine for work and medium photo/video editing, as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
Macs don’t have copilot so that’s like 4GB saved right there
Many entry level MacBooks of the last decade have probably been 8 GB. I have a M1 MacBook Air and that is 8 GB. It is fine for me.
Not “probably”. They were. For the last decade, up until like last year. And they were awful, and a ripoff. At least they’re not trying to charge $1k+ for this one.
And the RAM upgrade prices have been a consistent Apple profit center for over 20 years now.
I’m running Mint on an 8BG laptop and I’m surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn’t even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.
Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.
on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.
7.9gb of ram use.
it’s not that bad really, I mean it’s a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.
I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it’s been absolutely fine.
If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.
Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs,
Oh…I guess I’m the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.
One day I closed one window and it said “Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?”
I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.
Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they’ve sat unused for awhile?
I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of…
When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you’re looking for when you have that many open?
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
Zen (firefox (gecko) derivative, No AI, focus on decluttered interface) has bloody excellent tab management these days, workspaces, folders, horizontal tab lists (like sideberry), essentials (tab icons pinned to the top), auto unload, all built in, and everything disappears when reading a page.
Get Sideberry for your sanity.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
I literally have over a thousand tabs open in one window.
8Gb ram. Mint. 10+ year old pc.
It’s basically iOS at that point.
MacOS is like 6 gb of ram doing nothing
This is attractive to me simply because finding a quality 13" laptop is very difficult. 15.6" is huge.
Lemmings that focus on the RAM spec are telling on themselves. 256gb storage is the real travesty here.
Is it, though?
If you like to actually do your computing locally, it sucks. If you’re using it for web browsing, the specs are great.
I do all my computing locally.
I doubt I have a system using more than 256GB on a system disk. There’s 14 running in the house.
For Windows if 8 gb of RAM is not enough that’s an own-goal. Because it is. Or it should be. Windows 11 is not so dramatically better than Windows Vista SP3 to require a 10x better computer to use comfortably. Actually, in many ways Windows 11 is a massive downgrade from what came before it.
I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target. That means we aren’t jumping the gun on saying “actually you need 12 gigs of RAM” as if that should be normal for a usable computer.
XP used to just have ram sitting there empty waiting for something. Then over vista and 8 and 10 they started more and more preloading because hey if the ram is empty it’s wasted. Like database servers, they always suck down all the RAM possible. Problem is windows doesn’t release it when the cache or whatever isn’t useful and something else wants it.
It’s been a while but I think macOS is considerably better at both parts of that equation.
There’s no reason that computers need to be so powerful other than MBAs saying “optimization is too expensive, just push the feature.”
MacOS is significantly better than windows when using their first party apps, but many third party apps are ram hogs and things get forced to swap more often.
Swap isn’t terrible though, a lot of current gen mac hardware has very fast SSDs and very low latency controllers so it’s pretty transparent in normal use.
I think if you are on a website like this, this computer isn’t for you, but it is for a lot of people who use nothing but a web browser with one tab open 90% of the time.
Vista called it SuperFetch, and preloading pages into memory is not a bad technique. macOS and Linux do it, too, because it’s a simple technique for speeding up access to data that would otherwise have to be fetched from disk. You can see that Linux does it as you check the output of
freeand read out the buff/cache column. Freeing unused pages from memory is very fast, because you can just overwrite dirty pages.Yeah, conceptually it’s good, but the free up is important and seems to be a secondary concern. Perhaps it’s the third party devs.
Wasn’t super fetch what they called the high speed usb flash drives you could use as swap? That reminds me of a time I was optimistic about technology. Vista RC and Office 2007 on my MacBook Pro.
He pointed to the laptop’s 8GB of “unified memory,” or what amounts to its RAM, and how customers can’t upgrade it.
Given the price of RAM, you’d need to sell a kidney to upgrade it in a Windows laptop these days, so that’s not much of a difference, although 8MB is a little skimpy, I’ll give him that one.
[…] although 8MB is a little skimpy
Have we already downgraded to this???
/s, and sorry for being pedantic
My phone has more RAM than that. I can’t imagine running a computer with that little memory considering how poorly optimized software tends to be at this point.
I’m not sure what the overhead for Mac OS is, but that has to be basically rock bottom to be even considered functional unless you’re running one of the lighter Linux builds.
I got a free, going to be recycled, dell with 8gb of ram from work. I threw in an nvme and installed Linux. It’s not the lightest Linux install, but it is Arch, so definitely on the lighter side. I idle at under 1gb and under normal use don’t break 2. I do some coding which uses more but nothing super crazy. MacOS probably uses a little more ram, but it’s not Windows. I’d wager than the vast majority of people don’t come close to using all of that RAM, and power users are going to get hardware for the task, and this isn’t it.
Under 1GB on a modern build is pretty light. I run CachyOS and I’m pretty sure I idle at significantly more than that. Though I honestly haven’t checked, and don’t really want to close everything out to find out haha. I do know I’m currently using more than 8GB and not doing anything super heavy, but I do have multiple programs running. And multitasking is always going to be a killer for a system with low RAM limits. There is a reason my laptop has 32 and my desktop has 64.
I mean, at its heart, Mac OS is a heavily re-tooled fork of the BSD platform, so it’s not inconceivable that it’s light enough to run on 8G. I doubt it would run well on 8G, but it could do it.
My M1 MacBook Air idles at 1.03GB, my XPS 13 running Gnome on Vanilla OS idles at 2.4GB
GNOME on immutable distros = very bloated. Try antiX instead, as it uses a lighter DE.
I know it was lighter than windows the last time I used Mac, but that has been quite a few years now. Hopefully it is a decent machine. Computing just keeps getting more expensive, so having more budget options is definitely good as long as they are reasonably functional.
Just to play devil’s advocate: a smartphone is definitely a computer and has no trouble competing with older laptop CPUs in benchmarks. I see this as a difference without a distinction beyond form factor.
8GB is 💯 barely serviceable. I see this is a product for a casual user only, with excellent build quality. I don’t think it ages well when pushed.
I have a 2013 MBP that shipped with 8GB, the minimum amount they came with.
Of course it also is upgradable. Which I did, to 16GB. A decade ago.
My 2013 MBP is still at 8GB. With memory compression, I rarely run into issues unless I’m doing VMs/Docker or something really heavy.
or what amounts to its RAM
You can criticize the amount of RAM, but it’s still RAM. Clown.
They’re hinting at the fact that those 8GB are shared between the CPU and GPU. So it’s not dedicated, which you’d expect if someone said “RAM.”
RAM is RAM. If you take issue with it being unified say so, but it’s still RAM.
He sounds like he’s grasping.
The neo is going to eat his lunch, and he knows it.
If you take issue with it being unified say so, but it’s still RAM.
He did say so. 8GB unified when a Linux laptop has 8GB of ram and an Nvidia 5050 with 8 GB of VRAM is 16GB of Ram despite not being marketed as a 16 GB laptop.
It’s a netbook with Apple’s bells and whistles. IMO it should be $100 less, at least for the base model.
You forgot the $200 “I get to use an apple so I’m fancy” tax
“We can’t believe Apple aren’t fucking consumers harder! Apple?! have been fucking everyone so hard, for so long and people have just been bending over and taking it, and so we’re very shocked to see them decide not to go maximum fuck-you with this product”
I feel the specs are fine for the use case that the device is aimed at (media consumption, some office usage)… you know, the things that a huge chunk of the population use a device for… if that doesn’t suit, there are more powerful options.
I don’t think it is productive arguing that an ultra cheap/low end device isn’t powerful enough, or specced high enough for activities/use cases that it wasn’t designed for.
the newer A series chips have 12GB of ram, so that bodes well for the next generation of the neo.
8gb is plenty for your average non-technical user, and macos is pretty good at memory and process management and swap as long as you are using mostly first party apps, which the average non-tech savvy user will, likely just the default browser and maybe the built in office suite… that’s pretty much it.
its really a case of If you ask whether 8gb is enough… you probably arent the target for this machine.
The failure rates of these will be the determining factor. The components inside are cheap, all soldered on, and will not be repairable at all (waiting on the iFixIt score).
Its pretty much just their phone platform with a big screen and keyboard, so maybe it’ll be okay. It’s not built like a phone though, so I’m expecting some interesting testing outcomes. It’s either going to be cheap enough that they have a new planned obsolescence hit on their hands, or people are going to be pissed at it sucking so hard.
According to an early reviewer, the Neo is surprisingly good in terms of hardware quality, and it actually handles typical usage just fine, possibly because of the Silicon ecosystem that Apple spent so long refining. That looks promising, but I share much of your skepticism for the reasons you give.
I’m also waiting for the full iFixit review, but teardowns from other channels are now being shared and so far it looks like it’s very solidly built and repair-friendly. None of the typical ‘cover everything in excessive glue and tape’ anti-repair shenanigans we’ve come to expect from Apple.
Repair friendly means CHEAP components repair, which Apple just does not do.
As an example, in a machine like this if your WiFi module tanks…that’s a full logic board replacement. Might as well buy a new one.
According to this, Apple is basically making an insurance vertical as part of their business, and they are pricing repairs to be exactly 1/3 the retail cost of the machine for pretty much everything except screens.
This is pretty scam my when you consider their past of quoting customers for repairs that are above and beyond the scope of the actual hardware failures, and what maximizes profits for their AppleCare and RMA process. There are dozens of breakdowns in this, so I won’t write a novel, but it’s very obvious they’ve baked in the costs to make it more cost-effective to just keep buying new units as a replacement in the face of simple hardware failures.
Wow. Modern laptop “repairability” is pretty rough in general, but that does actually seem better than I expected.
I mean modern smartphone SOC compute power is insane. That wont be a bottleneck for a long time. If i had to make a guess they dont even have to go the hardware failure route for planned obsolescence. That measily 8GB of shared ram for both CPU and GPU will take care of that. Just add a bit more shiny UI bloat with every update and this thing will get slow af at some point in the future. Takes care of all the entry level M1 Airs too…
Mobile chip power is insane AT THAT SCALE though. That’s the key differentiation here. So if you’re running a larger format display with a higher resolution, cut that by quite a bit. Also cut it if you’re running desktop apps that aren’t optimized for mobile, and if this is intended to run MacOS instead of iOS, the mobile optimistic memory scheduling is out the window. I’ll have to see it to say for sure, but I’m guessing the performance for average desktop apps is going to be pretty, but that’s kind of the price point.
This is Apple’s scoop up of the ChromeOS segment.
So if you’re running a larger format display with a higher resolution, cut that by quite a bit.
Funny thing is that the Macbook Neo needs to drive less pixels:
Iphone 16 Pro: 2868 x 1320
Macbook Neo: 2408 x 1506
Also only at 60hz and not 120hz. While having magnitudes more thermal mass to cool with the prolonged high performance bursts. I dont have any worries about its performance in its intented market segment. And yes, its running MacOS which still runs pretty well with a Macbook Air M1-M3 with 8GB of RAM.
Resolution alone isn’t the only factor. It’s a larger display, requiring more power, which is either a PC/PD issue, or a battery issue. The point is that the power draw has to come from somewhere, and nothing this is the same platform as an iPhone (essentially), there’s going to be a trade-off somewhere.
As you noted they’ve reduced the refresh rate, which makes a big impact, but I don’t think it stops there.
The original platform has apps that are optimized for that platform, and now you’re throwing a different OS at it which has more expansive use of resources: CPU, memory, GPU, and power.
We’ll have to see how they have made paths through MacOS to account the platform specifically, but I’m betting there are several drawbacks. This was the main complaint of how they dealt with those insanely expensive Mac Pro with M-class chips when they first came out, but in the inverse. High power draw, heat issues…etc.
My guy,
i said mobile compute power is insane. You had a somewhat sensible take why it may not transfer to a laptop. I gave you hard facts why your concerns arent applicable. Instead of just admitting you misjudged the resolution differences you mansplain to me some irrelevant things. Yeah, the power draw is going to be different. Its a laptop, no shit. It also has tons of more space for a battery.
You are just talking out of your ass. Instead of looking up the wikipedia page for 2 minutes.
/Its also a released product. Reviews and benchmarks are readily available… Like what. Just look it up.
Every failure I’ve gotten from an Apple product is the inevitable demise of the battery either through degradation to the point of uselessness or expanding and causing something else to come undone. So the components just need to keep outlasting those events.
Always the keyboard for me, for some reason. Almost never battery problems.
Your experience is not singular. Looks like we’ve got some haters here.
My, how far we’ve fallen where a $600 potato with 8GB of RAM is considered a great deal.
Here’s a $720 laptop with 16GB of DDR5 and a RTX 4060 (out of stock of course):
This from the company that started the netbook trend with the $400 eeePC in 2007…
I’m going to wager this is mostly an attempt to get more people into the Apple ecosystem. The more integrated the user is, the harder it is for them to get out.
