Discussion

MacBook Neo

Retr0id: I wonder if the bootloader will be locked down, I hope not.

alexb_: Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?

nerdjon: Uhh... you know when the Mac's were Intel they specifically made a tool for installing Windows on your Mac and shipped drivers for Windows.

surrTurr: 256gb on a macbook should be illegal in 2026

r0fl: "Education customers can purchase it for $499."That is insane pricing for a brand new apple product. They will sell so many of these!

pcurve: That's the magic threshold. Can't complain about the non-upgradable 8GB RAM at that price.

amelius: The 8GB RAM makes this barely usable, but it is understandable since Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their own Pro line.

baal80spam: > The 8GB RAM makes this barely usableC'mon, man.

fartfeatures: I've seen the stocks app take up 2GB of RAM before. Even Control Centre can be a RAM hog. If Apple were still slinging efficient software 8GB is one thing but their catalyst based crapware is far from efficient.

mrtksn: I'm not convinced at the insane price at all, you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.

lm28469: > you can buy an older model macbook Air and get the full experience at similar prices.Not many countries allow tax return and expenses on used computers

mrtksn: Apparently you can buy an M1 Air for 599$ brand new: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/13/macbook-air-with-m1-chi...

jp_nc: If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.

tw04: > The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.

ChrisMarshallNY: Looks like it's aimed squarely at students.Apple used to own the space. I don't think they do, anymore.They also had a lot of school IT stuff, like charging carts.

akmarinov: No Apple Intelligence, but my Macbook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM is plenty usable still

jasongill: It supports Apple Intelligence, all 8gb iPhones and iPads support Apple Intelligence and the promo materials for this Macbook Neo say it supports Apple Intelligence as well.

NoLinkToMe: Interesting that it's the same weight, less wide and less tall than the Air model, though it is a bit thicker.Seems like an amazing entry-level offer for kids and students. But to be honest for myself I also don't really much added value of an Air or Pro anymore.I think the memory of 8gb is the biggest limit for a device you want to use another 6-8 years, except for the most casual of users. Those who have multiple apps and tens of tabs open will enjoy an experience difference with 16gb Air/Pro. And the battery life is significantly (but not radically) better on the Air/Pro.Really great to see.

Waterluvian: Tiny, silly, no good, minor, tedious complaint: can you visibly tell which port is USB 3 vs. USB 2 or do you have to just remember?

jayd16: Looks like there isn't any indication in the photos.

stevenhubertron: My M2 8gb ram is plenty for the use case the Neo fills. This is such a bad take.

joshstrange: I'm kind of shocked that they don't have much higher battery life. I'll be really interested to see one of these in person, those colors look great. Why is it that the Pro devices always get the boring colors?If/when my M1 MBP dies (a long time I'd guess) I might consider one of these as a remote/couch laptop to connect back to my main machine.

rtkwe: Pro = Business/serious = Boring colors.

microtonal: It must be a shitty day for the Acers of the world. Locally an Acer with 8GB/256GB is about the same price with a much worse display, worse build quality, and no strong iPhone integration.This MacBook is going to be an absolute hit.

jghn: Anyone know how this would compare to an original M1 Air? Both in terms of performance and also capability. My primary use case for my air is web browsing and similar. But I do use other things at times. I know they're both arm processors, but are there things that ne can do an M1 that won't work on this?

lm28469: a18 scores better than m1 in single thread benchmark and about the same in multi threadhttps://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-16https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

itake: call me crazy, but ignoring size, weight, and color, wouldn't $500 be better spent buying an m1 or m2?

nobleach: 8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.

dylan604: A very old article, and if you follow any of their links, they are sold out. So it's not so apparent after all

crims0n: 8GB RAM, no apparent upgrade option. Regardless, these will be insanely popular. Apple has finally made a play for the budget laptop market.

NoLinkToMe: Tbh the M1 sold at Walmart for $699 and BestBuy at $650 before. M1 is about equivalent in benchmarks to the A18. Both 8GB of RAM and similar storage. Only the M1 had a bit better battery life, magsafe and such.The budget market consists of a lot of scrappy users that are willing to go out of their way and able to find good deals. And I think Apple has in some ways catered to that market by providing excellent mid-priced laptops like the M1 at $999 price points, which end up in new-in-box deals at places like Walmart/BestBuy at $650 price points, as well as similar refurbished and even lower second hand price points.I bought a new MBA M2 a few months ago at a similarly low price point as this Neo. Apple has been providing fantastic value at budget for a while now through indirect sales channels on older models, though I agree this is another step-up with affordable new direct models.

999900000999: This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.This is for people who want the cheapest MacBook possible, with the edu discount it's only 499$.You drop it being silly, cool that's only 500$.

dgxyz: 8Gb. Fuck off no chance.Not in a world of everyone shipping fat browsers with everything.Edit: everything my kids use in their educational side is browser based or thick web apps. This is going to suck.We shouldn't be here and 8Gb should be absolutely fine, but that is not the case.

jp_nc: FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.

drnick1: > 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world.Yes, according to the Apple marketing pamphlet.

mattfrommars: What on earth, at least they could have provided 16gb as base RAM. 8gb RAM in 2026 - what on earth were they thinking.

ilumanty: Absolutely ridiculous that they still offer this while macOS + Apple Intelligence already take ~30 GB

tw04: Fortunately the stocks app won't be running on a kid's school laptop.Control Center is currently using a whopping 128MB of memory on my system that's been online for 60 days.

kokada: I think this has no virtualisation instructions right? Since AFAIK, those are restricted to the Mx series.Of course the 8GB of RAM is also limiting for running any kind of VM, but this notebooks are almost exactly what I was looking for, except for the 8GB of memory.

nateb2022: They were referring to their M1 not being able to support Apple Intelligence.

augusto-moura: Hard to know relative performance before we get benchmarks. Aside from that anything that runs on M1 should run on this in the same way. In fact, the processor on Neo should support slightly more modern software since it implements ARMv9 [1] agains M1 ARMv8 [2][1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A18[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

nateb2022: The A18 Pro has been around since September 2024, we have plenty of benchmarks.

augusto-moura: Not on laptops no, we should expect much better numbers on a full fledged laptop

alpn: In case anyone else is wondering -Neo: Height: 0.50 inch (1.27 cm) Width: 11.71 inches (29.75 cm) Depth: 8.12 inches (20.64 cm) Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg) Air: Height: 0.44 inch (1.13 cm) Width: 11.97 inches (30.41 cm) Depth: 8.46 inches (21.5 cm) Weight: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)

post-it: I use a MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory and it's fine. If I've got a browser and VSCode and Blender and PrusaSlicer and Claude and XCode all open it gets a little slow, but Mac is very good at memory management these days.Someone using just a browser and Word would have absolutely no problem.

justonceokay: I’ve used a computer with 4 gigs for the last 15 years and it still does emails, recipes, and YouTube. I.e. 100% of my computer needs.

shrewdcomputer: Thank you, from my cursory look of their comparison page, this is the information that was missing. But maybe that was a deliberate choice on Apple's part.

NoLinkToMe: Nah it's on there.

storus: If they allowed 12GB RAM like with the latest iPhone Pros, that would be a nice machine for travel where I wouldn't care if somebody steals it or not.

paxys: > Built for Apple Intelligence.With 8GB RAM?After Tahoe and Apple Intelligence what's going to be left for actual applications to use?

iAMkenough: Same as the iPhone 16, when they started using that marketing phrase.

NoLinkToMe: > This isn't for anyone to use for 6 to 8 years.Why not? I would.

vessenes: Not sure I understand your complaint - 8GB is a goodish amount of RAM for a Chromebook, the de facto lead for educational stuff. I would take this over any Chromebook, ever, in a heartbeat.

dgxyz: Well ChromeOS is basically a monolithic browser based OS. These will likely have apps deployed which contain one copy of Chrome each. By the time you get three vendors' worth of stuff on it then you're running three isolated browser stacks and eating up RAM. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone for example.As for Chromebooks, they are fucking awful for education. The abject disaster that is Google Classroom needs to just go away. NOTHING works properly, has any inkling of any reasonable design or engineering or is intuitive. I've seen so many students struggling with them.

snowwrestler: How are you tracking RAM usage? MacOS will report that it is using as much RAM as it possibly can, but this does not mean a machine with less RAM will struggle. My M1 MacBook Air with 8GB easily runs the full set of MS365 apps, Slack, and dozens of browser windows.

jtbayly: What part(s) of the "full experience" are missing in this machine?

mrtksn: Smaller screen with less colors(sRGB instead of P3), shorter battery life(16 instead of 18), USB-3 and USB-2 Type-C ports instead of thunderbolt.

no_op: It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phone, but for which you want a larger screen and/or a keyboard. Web browsing, writing a paper for school, household budget spreadsheets. 8 GB is still basically fine for this.

jsheard: > It's got a phone SoC. The use case for this thing is stuff you could do on a phoneI think the key difference is that iOS is designed around extremely aggressive memory management where any background process can be killed at any time to make way for the foreground app. AFAIK macOS isn't set up for that.

dagmx: Why not? They’re the same core OS.

zitterbewegung: It's interesting that to get to the price point of $499 (edu) or $599 that what Apple did was- No touchID on the base model- 8GB of RAM- USB 3 and the second port is USB 2- No MagSafe.But, you can still get a 512 gb of SSD and it adds the TouchID sensor back. For education the upgrade may actually make sense.

ulfw: The RAM and USB limitation likely has little to do with price point and all to do with the limitations of the A18pro SoC. It's really not a chip designed to be put into PCs

zitterbewegung: You are totally right. Also, I think it's basically to avoid only one port to charge and use for connectivity.

engcoach: The RAM usage you are describing is likely not actual resident memory use. Check RPRVT via top on macOS for a more generally useful metric of actual impact per process.

DaSHacka: The majority of people have a use case more demanding than having one open Hacker News tab and doing everything in the terminal with vi and minimal shell scripts.I'm definitely pretty squarely on the other end of the spectrum, but even the 32GB of RAM in my ThinkPad feels insufficient when I properly multitask with modern, bloated electron applications that eat multiple gigabytes each.

kaleidawave: Feeling glad I got a 2nd hand air M1 (16gb+512gb) for ~400 GBP last October, rather than waiting out for this.No idea how the processors compare, but that RAM isn't a good sign

SirMaster: Feels like a refurb M1 Air is a much better deal.8/256, TouchID, Magsafe, USB3 all for $300-350 currently.Or step up to a refurb M4 Air with 16/256 and all the bells and whistles for $759. The New M4 Air with 16/256 were $749 for 2 months over Nov/Dev everywhere.

FishAngular12: Where can you buy these reliably?

collabs: I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 with 1920x1200 display, a QHD webcam, 16 GB memory, 1 TB storage, and AMD 8845HS processor for a little over USD 520 from amazon.com at the end of 2025.The biggest drawback I guess is it has a fan and well, the fact that it is an Acer. This MacBook will definitely beat the aspire series for now but who knows maybe the competition will make the OEMs improve their product.I wanted to list my experience because there will be sales on these other notebook PC that Apple likely won't have.

moolcool: I would personally take a MacBook Neo over literally any laptop Acer makes, anywhere in their lineup, any day of the week.

mattfrommars: More affordable Mac, there is nothing wrong with it.But the only issue in school is the rick kid's parent will get them Macbook Pro or even Macbook Air, and the poor kids will get Macbook Neo... I'm sure the kid will not feel great about having Neo while her friend have Pro version.

10729287: It will be a nice step to the "Blue bubble" lifegoal for them.

jimmydddd: My son went to college with his Mac. But a bunch of the courses required running Windows software. So we had to get him a PC as well.

JKCalhoun: Everything, as I understand it, is moving to the Web. Google Docs, Canvas…

turtlebits: I used a base M1 air for my primary personal laptop for 5 years. It was fine with VS code and any development work sans running containers.

hypfer: Uhm but you do realize that $500 is actually a lot of money for people that aren't living in SF and hop between startups every second tuesday, right?There is no "only". It's $500.

999900000999: Keep in mind this is the same website where someone casually mentioned buying a $5,000 Lecia for their kid.Would you rather junior drop a $500 laptop while they're not paying attention, which is what kids do, or drop a $2,000 laptop?The second hand market on this is also going to be great. Maybe Junior upgrades to an M5 air when he starts college, he's going to sell his Neo for 300$ which is very accessible for most.My first laptop was 350$, brought after working for 6.75$ an hour. It was objectively a piece of junk, but hey I got to do computer and it lasted about 3 years before randomly failing for one reason or another.

netcan: Interesting.It's been a while since we've had excitement at the "cheap and cheerful" end of the spectrum.Anyone remember the initial Eee PC... and the problems it created for MSFT during the Vista transition?

10729287: That mini pc trend was really something ! Thanks for the blast from the past.

ultropolis: I hope that Steve Jobs gets up and slaps whoever thought scaling the "Hello Neo" font to 150% width was ok, fires them, and then gets back in his grave grumbling that he would never have let this happen.I have a degree in design, I paid good money to have bad type piss me off.

10729287: Hip kids love seeing fonts being abused like this, and they are the clients Apple is looking for with this new product. Sorry but this is good marketing.

ChrisArchitect: More discussion on release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/say-hello-to-macbook-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247645)

ndiddy: I think the lack of RAM kind of kills this product for general use. 8 GB of RAM with no option to get more is ridiculous in 2026. I bet they'll be very popular with whatever school districts have stuck with Apple rather than switching to Chromebooks though.

WarcrimeActual: I think that you're drastically understating how great this is for actual general use. The problem is we have an extremely inflated idea of what general use is. People that frequent places like HN think it's light to moderate coding and a few different dev environments. That's not general use. That's power user stuff to the majority of users. Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.

ndiddy: > Browsers, very light photo editing, and email/school/office work is general use and this will do that for the next 10 years.I'm currently running pretty much that exact use case on my M1 MBA (Firefox with 10 tabs open, Pixelmator Pro, Apple Mail, Apple Music playing a local playlist) and I'm at 12.5 GB of RAM used. This is also on Sequoia, from what I hear Tahoe uses more resources. I'm sure that Mac OS can do fancy things with memory compression, swapping, etc when memory pressure is higher, but if you're an individual you might as well buy a refurb M2 or M3 MBA with 16 GB of RAM for the same price as this and not have to worry about it.That's why I said this seems more targeted towards schools. They want a fleet of brand new cheap laptops with a support contract, they don't want to bother with buying individual used laptops off of ebay.

SirMaster: VIPOUTLET which is Walmart liquidation, they have been going here solid for months, price went up slightly but its 340-350 for reburb or open box with coupon code.https://www.ebay.com/itm/136699644252https://www.ebay.com/itm/136452780686?

dgxyz: I look at memory pressure. I am running close to the yellow line on a 24Gb machine. If I close the apps, it craters. If I put more workload on it (I have a couple of things that will eat 4-5gb of RAM) it'll start crawling.They should all be native apps.

swader999: Seems like landfill fodder with the memory at 8gb.

ohhnoodont: There are plenty of 8GB M1 Airs that many people will likely still be using 10 years from now. For 90%+ of users a laptop is just a web browser machine.

jghn: I have one from the original rollout. I keep thinking about upgrading, but then I realize I'm just doing that because I want to buy something new, not because I need anything more powerful.

graycrow: The Acers of the world can sleep well. The price of Neo in my country is about $810. Two months ago I purchased a brand new Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5 with an AMD 7533HS CPU, 14" OLED display, 32 GB DDR5 and 1 TB SSD for about $860. And it also has an unibody metal case. This Lenovo offers much better value for almost the same price, and you can install Linux on it.

evanjrowley: Never has there been a sexier $499 Unix laptop.

exitb: Is it a better deal? A18 Pro seems to be somewhat more capable than an M1.

mrtksn: Maybe but It has worse screen, worse battery and worse connectivity.

exitb: Noted, but I’d still pick the better CPU.

vintagedave: I can't help feeling this is the size/weight that the Air should be targeting.I have an Air (M2) and I use it where I once owned a Pro. No fans sold it to me -- that's a quality feature, tired of them getting dirty over time. But I have the 15" model and essentially use it as a pro laptop.This? This is an Air.But the Air has become the Pro, the Pro has become the one you get for ports and super power and I don't know if many people even need it, and now 'Air' has lost its meaning (light, entry-level, portable) so they need a new name. So they name it, literally, neo: New.Steve Jobs would weep. What happens in five years when it's not new any more?

bilbo0s: Yeah.I'd be curious to know what school HN User jimmydddd's son goes to that it uses windows only software instead of the web?It just seems like something out of time. Like an engineering school that only teaches those building techniques that are predicated on load bearing masonry. Oh and by the way, here are the 5 drafting classes you need to take.

markn951: [delayed]

philistine: Can the Macbook Neo run Rosetta 2?

ciupicri: What's so special about this Mac memory management? It uses the SSD better and makes swapping faster? It predicts what I'm gonna use or stop using and it swaps in/out accordingly?

post-it: I'm not sure. I think it does swap more aggressively. I think the disk is also just really fast and has a higher speed connection to memory.Qualitatively I'm running way more things in the background than I could on Linux and Windows machines with double the RAM, with far fewer hiccups.I haven't tried a modern Surface or other high-end Windows laptop so maybe their swapping is comparable, but given the shocked reactions of non-Mac users at 8 GB of memory, I don't think so.

panzagl: There are schools where close to 100% of the kids are qualified low income.

tw04: And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.

panzagl: Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.

bigC5560: I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.

quesera: This product will be available in unlimited volumes until they replace it or discontinue it, with no quirks of used/older models.For an active market-watching technology buyer, sure, think about it.For 99.5% of the addressable market, click-click-ship-done. No thought required.

robinhood: Have you seen classes in universities? In schools? My daughter is in secondary school - they all have mandatory iPads.

DaSHacka: My old Highschool, as well as many other schools I've seen since, mandate Chromebooks.I think it tends to be the more well-off schools with the iPads, the chromebooks are definitely a lot cheaper over the long run for the district.

bigC5560: This. I went to a broke, small school and we were assigned Chromebooks. When I was younger some teachers had a few iPads, but they were old and mostly used for games when we got our assignments done. We didn't do work on them the way we did the Chromebooks in middle/high school.

tw04: Huh? That's double what most chromebooks have in the education space. A fast SSD is far, far more important than the memory in this space. In elementary/middle school kids typically operate almost exclusively in the browser.

browningstreet: ChromeOS and macos aren't close to the same.

hackerbrother: Would definitely consider for my next laptop. What’s the best solution for “Mac Subsystem for Linux”?

NexRebular: https://www.macports.org

adrianmsmith: Macbook Nano will probably be supported with security updates for a lot longer.Apple try to provide updates for a certain number of years after the model was originally released. The M1 Air was released many years ago now.

sevenseacat: oh man, I loved my little 10" netbook back in the day.

xattt: Yeah, but K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

nycdatasci: Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47247645

dang: Comments moved thither. Thanks!