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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Yeah 8gb of ram is unusable for most things.
Most notably web browsing which one would think this thing is mostly for.
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.
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
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.
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.
That claim seems like it’d be trivial to fact check, and indeed does seem to be false.
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
I am not ever trusting a proprietary OS, specially when it has been actively advertised as “caring about your privacy”
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^^
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.
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.
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.
Always buy refurbished laptops, including MacBooks.
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.
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.
Better specs sure, but I would sooner cut my wrists than to try to work on an iOS device
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
They were also talking about using it to browse the web and for very minor tasks, which is relevant.
Right, but storage and memory are clearly the bottlenecks on this computer and we’re pointing out how Apple is alleviating those bottlenecks
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.
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?
the yellow one looks like a surface to me
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!
Reasonably priced Mac. What a crazy timeline.
Reasonably priced Mac.
Phone CPU. Similar priced iPads come with a much better CPU.
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?
Did you read the post?
You replied to my post and I compared Apple hardware to Apple hardware.
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.
Counterpoint: Phone CPUs can rival yesterday’s desktops.
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
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.
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
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.
