MacBook Neo
apple.com1324 points by dm 8 hours ago
1324 points by dm 8 hours ago
https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
List of differences from the MacBook Air:
* Only supports 8 GB of unified memory * No MagSafe * One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s * No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C. * “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air * Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color * No True Tone * 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage * No camera notch * Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air * Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods * Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air * The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones * No keyboard backlighting * Touch ID not included on base model * Trackpad does not support Force Touch * Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7 * No fast charging * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma... You forgot an important difference: the macbook neo has the A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip (4 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores) Also the A18 Pro chip has a 5-core GPU whereas the M5 chip has 8 or 10. Personally, the only dealbreaker in the list you posted is the amount of RAM.
macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open. I'd be swapping all the time on 8GB of RAM. > macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage." I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory. Indeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?" In macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files" I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here. In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping. When you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about. On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%. You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice. In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important) > I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new Wait what? How did you manage that? Yes, the person you are replying to has explained that. The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure. How do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean. I mean at that point (13 GB memory used), the "Swap used" is at several hundred megabytes. And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow. The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p There's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms. I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply. i think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue. the keywords here are "depending on the workload". edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not. > I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. Most cool. Is it an M1? Not the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP. Same. I've been programming in Go on an M1 for years and perf is spectacular. What are you slicing? What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer? I'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed. > A18 Pro chip (2 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores) whereas the macbook air has the M5 chip i don't see the m5 air on geekbench yet, but here are some related numbers for context (sorted by multi ascending): Put the M1 in your comparison - I think the A18 Pro compares favorably to it and it's a good baseline for people who bought in on Apple Silicon early and are still using it. Thats not how OS RAM usage works. I can’t find one definitive source. But on no modern operating system can you just blindly look at RAM usage by the OS and subtract that from the amount of physical RAM and say that is what is available for applications. Being limited to 8gb of ram is genuinely the only thing on that list I care about (no backlight and no fast charging are teetering on the edge of me caring, but they aren't worth multiple hundreds of dollars) - Apple silicone is so fast now that (at least for my purposes) the performance segmentation between price points is basically meaningless. Feels very negative! It costs 50% less than the air, in a time when everyone else’s prices are going up. The single core performance smokes a lot of high end intel chips. I don't think that was the intent. If anything, 90%+ of these features here feel nice-to-have, and I bet OP agrees (or is neutrally sharing the comp). > * No MagSafe For my kid who uses a Chromebook right now, Magsafe would've been improvement in how often the power cable pulls the it off the desk. But otherwise, this checks all the boxes, including applecare. In case you didn't already know or haven't considered it, you can find right-angle usb-c MagSafe adaptors that basically allow the charging cable to disconnect from the device like MagSafe. Most of these devices are a fire hazard. And in an environment where kids are needing magsafe, is probably the most dangerous for fire safety. *edit https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet... oh, probably not enough contact pressure. resistance is inversely proportional to contact pressure after all. And of course the screen:
13.0-inch vs 13.6 Weight is the same incidentally. I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now) I'll keep adding to the list: * Only one external display * No haptic trackpad I want to see the person buying the Neo and pairing it with a new Studio Display. A potential example that comes to mind would be you have a Studio Display in your house that you use for remote work with a beefy MacBook Pro, and then maybe a family member has a MacBook Neo that they’d like to plug into a monitor occasionally. Tbh if you have a studio display you are probably used to most things not working with it. I get that it's apple, but the lack of a HDMI or Displayport input on the monitor is insane. The only one of those choices I disagree with is no Touch ID in the base spec. Otherwise, good corners to cut to get to the cheap price point. Since it's just $100 to get 250 -> 500 GB and Touch ID, I think it's okay. It means people who need the cheapest computer can get it, and people who want to upgrade pay a small amount and get all the upgrades in a package without jumping up to the MacBook Air, etc. for much more. I would say "No keyboard backlighting" is a true show-stopper for a huge portion of the target audience (students). Learned touch typing just fine on a non-backlit keyboard. What would you feel would be the issue? I think different people will have one feature they feel should have been kept (other than the ram which is universal). For me not so much the Touch ID but the backlit keyboard. Agree on the Touch ID. Love that feature for passwords etc. Not terribly happy about the USB 2.0 port as well It's pretty cool to see this machine come out. The Macbook Air is still my sweet spot though, I use a Thunderbolt audio interface, and need more RAM. Great for a student or casual user though for sure. "1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage" That's a huge PLUS. This asinine "feature" ruins our family Zoom calls EVERY WEEK. There doesn't appear to be a system-wide way to disable this junk on iOS. Because Windows sucks so monumentally, my parents insist on trying to do everything on their phones and tablets. I'm thinking the Neo is perfect for them, and hearing that it'll solve this infuriating problem just makes it more appealing. A USB 2 port is embarrassing for a computer at any price in 2026. But at least you can apparently use that one for powering the computer, leaving the good one free for other uses. Fantastic post, thank you. Answered pretty much every question i had. This is why I love hacker news. — ...We believe that the customers will like it despite all that. We plan to market it as MacBook Nerfed. — But you can't use "Nerfed", we'll run into a trademark dispute. — Ah, well, you're right! Hey Claude, what generic lofty-sounding words start with "Ne"? Do you know if the A series processor supports virtualization? The A-series has supported virtualization since long before the M-series existed. iOS disables it in early boot, though. On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM? The hardware support was there for a while. Given that this runs macOS, i would guess (no insider knowledge) that it would work just fine and not be disabled like it is in iOS (by policy, not by technical reasons) Price difference? * $500 = base model (250 GB SSD) (education) * $600 = 500 GB + Touch ID (education) * $1,000 = MacBook Air (500 GB SSD) (education) > The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny This made me laugh. Thanks for the breakdown! (= > No keyboard backlighting When was the last time Apple had a laptop without keyboard lighting? > The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny That’s been the case for 5+ years :) I think they mean not reflective like current models, not that it isn't illuminated like the MacBooks of yore I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it matte, but just a different matte from the rest of the case? I kind of want to see it in person. It looks very tasteful. > No camera notch I'd consider this an upgrade. Does this mean we get screen real estate back from an abnormally-thick menu bar? The notch is one of the most bizarre 'innovations' to ever come out of Apple. Like designing a car you steer using your genitals to free up extra dash space then gaslighting everyone into thinking this is somehow better. > * “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air for pretty much half the price, though. i mean, it's still early to judge (there is no review yet) but if it performs decently it's a death sentence for all the trashy 600$ laptop. as somebody that has used both windows (at work), mac os (at work) and linux (at work and at home) the macbook neo could be an absolute steal of a laptop. > * The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny oh yeah, first world problems /s like Neo from the Martix, it has only one interface port of real use. Like Neo from the matrix, the other port is still useful for mice, printers, DACs, arduino projects, and little USB powered fans. "No keyboard backlighting" is a show-stopper. Nuts. It just looks slightly nicer. Touch typists don’t look at the keyboard anyways. And if you care enough about looks, you’ll want RGB lighting. > Powered by A18 Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18 So this is basically running on a phone CPU I got excited for a moment thinking it might have an M4 or M5 chip, that would've made it interesting to tinker around with Asahi Linux. But now it mostly just reminds me of a netbook. Its cool for people on a budget though, good to see Apple not just being this overpriced premium brand that it once was. The A18 Pro performs about on par with an M4 in terms of single threaded performance, and a little better than M1 in terms of multi threaded performance. The MacBook Neo has one of the fastest processors on the market for single threaded tasks, which is what has the most impact on how "fast" a processor feels for day to day usage. Netbooks had processors that were glacially slow. I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad. People thinking I mentioned my (somewhat) disappointment about the CPU because it is also used in Phones, but actually what I meant is that I would be interested in doing some reverse engineering work to contribute to the Asahi Linux project for the M-chips if this was a cheap option to attain one. But I don't really see doing that for the A18, personally; even though I don't doubt its a good chip! > I actually used a netbook when I was in school, it wasn't all that bad. The reputation problem was kind of baked in. Vista launched the same year netbooks did, and even though Vista was a disaster, "runs the latest Windows" is the smell test normal people use for whether something is a real computer. Netbooks didn't pass. The storage situation made Windows users miserable anyway. The SSD models had 4-8GiB of flash, and XP alone ate well over half before you'd done anything. So people bought the HDD variant instead, more space, sure, but spinning at 4,200rpm, which wasn't even the slow-but-acceptable 5,400 of a normal laptop drive. Then pile the standard bloatware on top of that. Bear in mind, people chose the HDD version because it ran Vista: the thing that made it a "real" computer. The SSD variant, the one that actually worked, got ignored for exactly that reason. Run Linux on the SSD variants though, and the thing was actually great. I think I'd put a phone CPU running netbook-like costing $599 still in the "overpriced premium brand" bucket myself. (Not sure if that's really an apt description though, but then I was out as soon as I read they're neutering one of the usb-c speeds.) So long as you can use the slow port for charging, I think it’s an entirely tolerable trade-off. Remember, this is a machine for people with low technical requirements. It’s not a machine for someone who needs lots of high speed ports. Of course it’s an iPhone chip, which is why it’s got just 8 gigs of RAM. I think it’s the same exact SoC that went into the 16 Pro Max. There were some M-series chips with 8 gigs, iirc. There was a whole debate going on about that on the net when they were released. Not the M5 though, as it seems. This suggests someone may be able to install MacOS on an iPhone with some modification. It's not the first Mac that has an iPhone/iPad chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Transition_Kit And yes, absolutely. All you need is a bootchain exploit. However unlike in the old jailbreaking days when people found and publicized them for fun, these days they are worth millions. Apple will pay you $500k for sandbox escape into the kernel. If you nail the bootchain, it'll be in the millions. From Apple. And god knows how much such a thing would go for in the black market. The A18Pro is a very powerful CPU, besting even the M1 in single-core performance (about even in multicore). Saying its just a "phone CPU" is disingenuous. I do wish they used the A19 Pro which has better hardware based memory security. The biggest drawback is no Thunderbolt. The biggest sell for Macs right now is the ability to daisy chain them with the new RDMA update. A used M1 Mac Mini is more valuable than this. That's an extremely niche use case and not even a remotely selling point for probably 99% of buyers, much less the "biggest" one. This is a major challenge to Microsoft. A 13-inch Surface Laptop costs $899 [1], that's 50% more than an equivalent MacBook! And even at that higher price the Surface Laptop doesn't have a good screen: it uses 150% scaling (as opposed to the ideal 200%) which means you have subtle display artifacts. Other than Microsoft nobody even makes decent laptops in the Windows world. I am typing this on an Lenovo Yoga, it has decent screen and keyboard, but the touchpad is horrible. Samsung makes good laptops but my keyboard gave out after just 2 years. Most other laptop makers have horrible industrial design. Dell XPS 17 was pretty good, but now they have weird keyboard. The best laptop is now significantly cheaper than the horrible ones. Incredible achievement by Apple, and a major challenge to Windows laptop makers. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/configure/surface-lapt... I was recently in the lookout for a new laptop. I wanted something BEEFFY! Specs wise but 13 inch at most. I literally couldn't find anything on the PC side. I wanted an x86 because I prefer Linux Mint as my OS (didn't care about windows) , but it was impossible to find a good laptop with good GPU , more than 64gb ram and decent build materials (ive got a thinpad and the platic build is just terrible. The screen bends when pulling it to open the laptop). So, if settled for a 128gb ram M4 max Macbookpro. It has been pretty solid so far. I'm a power user, so the RAM is used quite a lot (one of the reasons I wanted x86/Linux was to avoid virtualization overhead in docker/podman). Macs are way more expensive than other laptops, but their level of tech sophistication is miles ahead of anyone. Now, if only Asahi was more complete. I am a longtime Windows user and it brings me absolutely no joy to report that the M4 I am forced to use for work runs the Rust compiler a good bit faster than the big fancy gaming PC I just got with a 9800X3D. Rust literally compiles ~4x faster on WSL than on the Windows command line, on the same hardware, so try that and see. Also set up the mold or wild linker as well as sccache, although sccache is OS agnostic so you can use it on macOS too. Make sure your code is on the WSL side not on /mnt/c which is the Windows side though, that will kill compilation speed. That has not been my experience at all; I get pretty much the same times on the same machine on Linux and Windows. Something weird has happening to that person. Someone mentioned Defender, and that could certainly be it, as I have it totally disabled (forcibly, by deleting the executable). At least 10 years ago, some IBM tools I was forced to use worked faster in a linux VM on Windows (through VirtualBox) than on Windows. I'd wager that's more likely due to Windows than the hardware. Like sure the hardware does play a part in that but its not the whole story or even most of it. My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware. Afaik a lot of it is ntfs. It’s just so slow with lots of small files. Compare unzipping moderately large source repos on windows vs. POSIX, it’s day and night. No, it’s not NTFS, it’s the file system filter architecture of the NT kernel. I had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years. Just deleting 40,000 files from the node_modules of a modest Javascript project can thoroughly hammer NTFS. I think part of that is Explorer, rather than NTFS. Try doing it from the console instead. rd /q /s <dir>.
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https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks | device | cpu | single core score | multi core score |
|:----------------------------|:------------------------------------------------|------------------:|-----------------:|
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | Apple A18 Pro | 3428 | 8531 |
| iPhone 16 Pro | Apple A18 Pro | 3445 | 8624 |
| MacBook Air (15-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3708 | 14698 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Air (13-inch, 2025) | Apple M4 @ 4.4 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 3696 | 14729 |
| MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2025) | Apple M5 @ 4.6 GHz (10 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores) | 4228 | 17464 |
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